People who should be killed this week
We at PWSBKTW are on the verge of going insane.
Haq stormed the Jewish center in July 2006, fatally shooting one woman and wounding five others. His attorneys acknowledge he did it, but say he was insane at the time and should be committed to a mental hospital for the rest of his life. […] Haq’s first trial ended with jurors deadlocked over the question of his sanity.
Wikipedia provides plenty of reasons to believe that Haq was generally nutty. His behavior was sometimes bizarre, and included exposing his penis to a woman in a mall. One of his friends said that Haq was taking medicine for being bi-polar. It sounds like a tragic case of mental illness. But Haq was not its primary victim. Others were:
On July 28, 2006, Haq is alleged to have gained access to the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building by holding a 13-year-old girl hostage with a gun to her back and ordering her to dial the intercom and request to be buzzed into the building. After entering, he allegedly began shooting. Pamela Waechter was killed. Layla Bush was critically wounded. Dayna Klein, Cheryl Stumbo, Carol Goldman, and Christina Rexroad were wounded.
At the time of the shooting, it was reported by witnesses that Haq stated, “I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel.” During the incident, Haq also talked to 911 operators, saying, “These are Jews and I’m tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.” He also demanded that the United States withdraw its military forces from Iraq. Eventually, however, he calmed down and told the operator he would surrender. He then walked out of the building with his hands on his head and was arrested by the police outside.
This was clearly not only an act of murder and attempted murder, but of terrorism. Haq had a political motive, using violence to try to influence policy — he demanded that the US withdraw forces from Iraq. He specifically targeted Jews and shot a bunch of unarmed women. Yes, it was an insane sort of terrorism — a rational person would not believe that these actions would cause the US to shift policy in Iraq.
There are many things we at PWSBKTW don’t think a rational person would do. These include crashing planes into buildings; raping and murdering women and keeping a collection of corpses in the house; buying a Britney Spears CD. All of these are still crimes even if only crazy people would do them. There’s no accounting for the reasons people do what they do, try as we might to separate the sane from the insane, the malicious from the merely disturbed, the evil from the people who do evil.
Yet here we are, three years after the crimes, still without even a conviction. While the lawyers build up their billable hours debating the finer points of the legal meaning of sanity and confusing the jury by focusing on something other than the actions of the murderer, we at PWSBKTW will simply note that Haq knew what he was doing and that it was wrong, and acted with forethought and malice when he committed murder and terrorism. And even if he was as crazy as this guy/girl/other, Naveed Haq should be killed this week.
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I don’t think that “insanity” should be a defense in a murder case.
If they’re crazy enough to murder someone today, why would we think they wouldn’t be crazy enough to murder someone else later?
When Ol’ Yeller started frothing at the mouth, Travis put him down.
Mike, you’ve identified the heart of the issue when insanity is used as a defense in murder cases. If the result were to lock up the insane murderer forever so he could never kill again, I don’t suppose there would be much argument if he were locked up somewhere different from non-insane murderers.
It should not be “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but “guilty by reason of insanity.” If the insane part leads some to argue that the murderer doesn’t bear the same moral responsibility for his actions as a sane murderer does, and should be punished differently, or not punished, or housed away from the regular criminal population, I don’t think there would be much outcry as long as the result were still a lifetime with no possibility of being released and killing again.
But the very nature of the insanity defense calls for a not guilty verdict (by reason of insanity) and sentencing to a hospital, which implies a treatment and hope of one day a clean bill of mental health and freedom. Reasonable people believe, and the record shows, that mental health experts are not perfect at determining who will kill again and who will not, who is cured and who is not, who will take their medication once free and who will not. Anything less than perfect assessments in the freeing of insane murderers is risking innocent lives — a certain number of those released will turn out to have not been cured and will kill again. And I assume that the experts are not just not perfect, but far from it.
(We could make the same argument about the release of non-insane rapists and murderers — doing so results in the rape and murder of people who would otherwise not be raped or murdered, because some number of those released reoffend.)
On top of that, even while still in custody, patients are treated differently from criminals. Sometimes they are taken to state fairs and then escape.