They discovered that the scientist had converted his living room into a monitoring station for extra-terrestrial life: Six powerful computers were running a program that analyzed radio signals from outer space.
If that's SETI @ Home (as I believe) then in addition to being a "monitoring station for extra-terrestrial life", my living room is also a cryptography lab (PrimeGrid) and a quantum computing and AI laboratory (AQUA@home).
I guessed it was most likely SETI as well, so hardly another brick in the wall of mental illness. Applying my (ex) journalist nous to the story, however, I think it was only included so they could run this quote in full (my italics) later in the story:
"In her mind, he was perfect," Cox said. "She's tapped out. He has lots of money. He doesn't know anybody. He lives behind closed doors. He's trying to communicate with ET. Who would miss him?"
An interesting feature of this story is that the victim's internet friend was the one who reported him missing. 20 years ago, a guy like this would have had no friends at all, and, as the murderer intended, nobody would have noticed that he was gone for a long time.
Maybe she would have even gotten away with it, especially if she had taken the main part of his money, which she did not have time to get, and fled the country.
They discovered that the scientist had converted his living room into a monitoring station for extra-terrestrial life: Six powerful computers were running a program that analyzed radio signals from outer space.
Not to make light of a tragic story, but I hope no police or news media ever have anything to say about my life.
The A Beautiful Mind guy is real, and he has a name. It's John Nash. You should start using it more often as, movie or no movie, he's a remarkable guy in his own right.
Agreed. SETI@home is exactly the sort of thing an engineer would run in the background on a cluster of computers. And a cluster of computers is exactly the sort of thing a guy would have if he were making millions through "investment algorithms".
I suppose he wouldn't have been much better off if he ran Folding@home instead. The article would probably have said something like "Six powerful computers were found analyzing the inner workings of mad cow disease."
We don't often learn something by killing, and it is barbaric. An ironic reflection of our own lust for blood. But, okay. Sure, it is satisfying since the "bitch has it coming."
Capital punishment is the easy way out for the criminal and the society that reared the criminal. If the criminal is truly guilty, they always get the last laugh. At least in my mind.
We, the taxpayers, front the money to satisfy our blood-lust. And we learn nothing in the end except, for a moment, we can feel the thrill of hooting and hollering over the carcass of an enemy.
I actually agree with you far more that my original statement shows. That being said I just can't see how keeping someone locked in a cage for the rest of their life is in any way preferable to just killing them.
They are unable to contribute to society while incarcerated, incarceration is not shown to actually help rehabilitate them, and incarceration costs everyone else a lot of money...
On the other hand: if capital punishment is used then it's pretty clear they'll never get the chance to re-offend. And in cases like this where the criminal has done something truly heinous I think that is the biggest plus possible.
If capital punishment is used, there's never a chance that someone spuriously found guilty might be able to be vindicated and get some semblance of their life back.
It's better that 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man hang.
Or at least that 10 guilty men stay in jail, no?
If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument.
And won't that be a wonderful world to live in by the way, once the government can accurately read our thoughts. :)
> If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument.
Prisons are dangerous places. Putting someone in one often results in their death. (It always does for "life without parole" sentences.)
So, if it's really the death of innocents that bothers you, you can't support imprisonment either.
In fact, if you're actually innocent, you probably want to get sentenced to death because that's the best way to get reasonable review. If you're innocent, you're more likely to die in the prison infirmary than you are in the death chamber.
Sorry for the late reply. Didn't notice your response.
Well yes, I don't really support prison either. But to me as bad as prison is, it's still the lesser of two evils. I feel that society needs to make up its mind whether prison is punishment or rehabilitation. Currently things seem quite grey on this point. Perhaps certain institutions could be defined more clearly either as rehabilitation institutions or punishment institutions, and criminals could be sent to one or the other based on their history or something.
In any case, putting myself in the position of being someone falsely accused of say, murder. Would I be happy to be going to jail with the possibility of being raped or killed myself? Fuck no. But would the idea of being on death row with the ostensible possibility of a "reasonable review" make me feel better? I guess that's one of those things that's hard to judge in the hypothetical, but from this vantage point, I'd have to say no.
If you're innocent, you're more likely to die in the prison infirmary than you are in the death chamber.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised but do you actually have citations for this?
But overall I guess I don't really get what your actual argument is here? Death sentence better than life sentence because prison is so dangerous? Is that it?
Prison is not by definition dangerous. There are plenty of societies that find a dangerous prison to be unacceptable. And then there are others that seem to take grim pleasure in the idea that someone in Prison might be harmed.
The prisons that you're willing to put people in are dangerous.
You argued "innocents may die". Do you really want to amend that to "it's bad if innocents will necessarily die but okay if they die in practice so long as I can convince myself that they needn't die in theory"?
Prisons are indeed dangerous, but it is a matter of degree. You seem to be asserting that there is little practical difference between a life sentence and a death sentence in terms of opportunities to right an unjust conviction. Can you support that with evidence?
Should continue executing people who might be innocent until we can suitable reform the prison system?
One of the reasons prisons aredangerous places is the that socity is complicit with rapists and other sociopaths, giving them tacit approval to brutalize other prisoners.
> You seem to be asserting that there is little practical difference between a life sentence and a death sentence in terms of opportunities to right an unjust conviction. Can you support that with evidence?
Actually, I asserted that there is a difference, namely that if you're sentenced to death, lots of money will be spent after conviction on your case, both govt money and pro-bono. (The former is statutory.) If you're get a sentence of life without parole, there's no govt money and typically no private money either.
Do you really want to argue that point?
Folks on death row are not subject to violence from other inmates, so their only real risk is execution.
As to why prisons are violent, it doesn't actually matter. You're willing to use them, knowing that they're deadly.
Killing someone, too, costs a lot of money. I can't remember the actual stats and I'm too bloody lazy to go look it up, but it was on the order of a couple of million. You can house a criminal for quite a long time before that money's spent.
Further, the current version of incarceration has been shown to not help rehabilitate, yes. I totally give you that. But the current version of incarceration was never designed to rehabilitate. It was designed to securely lock people away for a long time, and that's about it. In pursuit of that goal, we've turned our prisons into a very scary place that (IMHO) does more harm than good.
This isn't to say that every version of incarceration has to be evil in that same way. What if prisons were run with the specific incentive to rehabilitate people at all costs? This really hasn't been tried except in some very limited circumstances, though largely because it's political suicide. Sure, it may very well be the best thing long-term to spend a lot of time and money making criminals stop being criminal, but try explaining this to the father who saw his daughter raped by that animal while on national TV with him while you're running for president.
Killing them does not have to cost a lot of money. There are cheap ways if they choose to use them. There is pretty much no way to house an inmate in a modern prison for 30+ years cheaply, unless you provided no services, had no guards, etc.
I think the "what if they are innocent" angle is the strongest argument against capital punishment. Not cost.
I would love to see the single-use Rube Goldberg contraption that costs two million to kill someone. But nien, that is not what your parent meant by saying that it costs a lot to kill someone.
It is the process of appeals and prosecution that is expensive. Your last two sentences are ironic in that light.
If they didn't mean that killing someone costs a lot of money then they should not have said it. :)
I was simply pointing out that killing can be be done pretty quickly and cheaply -- as cheap and quick as we as a society want. The same goes for whether and how imprisonment is carried out. As with many things in life, there are dials. We can adjust these dials.
I understand your view. The situation makes me sad, and angry, all around. And I'm not talking about just this case.
I have adopted a "we are homo sapien" (note: not plural) outlook toward humanism. Ideally, for me, we can let these guys live while we slowly improve our civilized society to a point where the niche that conditions these criminals can absolutely no longer function.
They slowly die out and we have no blood on our hands. I think we're still primitive, though. I acknowledge that I am very lofty and this issue is very complicated. I would just really not like to have anything to do with death.
I get where you're coming from, and I would love to live in the utopia you're describing. But unfortunately I don't think that it is likely to happen any time soon...
I'm really racking my brain here thinking of a way to fix my sentence.
What I'm saying is that our human power and dignity does not come from the individual but the whole species. Like a colony of ants. A sort of species mind. It is the intelligence that exists in the cloud of connections between humans.
Not self aware intelligence, but an intelligence that expresses itself in culture and societies. I am basically saying that we are all of the same branch of that four dimensional tree called evolution. I believe that this oneness mindset is healthier.
If you ever wondered what an off topic comment looks like, there you have it :)
I definitely agree that it's more cruel. Also, the person being in prison doesn't guarantee that they're not going to commit any more crimes, it just guarantees that those crimes are going to be against either other inmates or prison staff.
Personally I think that in cases of super-long jail time they may as well just change it to a capital sentence.
Why should good people have keep watch over these kinds of criminals? Isn't that barbaric?
The time and the labor could be better spent elsewhere. Every guard we hire, every prison we build, is a hospital that couldn't be built, a teacher who couldn't be hired. I feel this is barbaric towards those in need who've done no wrong.
Interesting. I had always just assumed, obviously speciously, that executing somebody would be a lot cheaper than feeding, clothing, housing, and guarding them for 40+ years.
The source isn't unbiased, of course, but it's made me want to re-check my assumptions.
It's largely economics of scale. The linked post says that New York State is spending vast sums of money just to house twelve inmates on death row, so obviously it would be cheaper to throw those twelve inmates into the existing prison system for life.
On the other hand, if we were to execute a thousand prisoners per year then it would start to get a whole lot cheaper. For instance, I'd be in favour of executing the scrote that stole my bike.
I'm not really sure why people are downmodding this. While RevRal's opinion may fly in the face of the emotions everyone is likely experiencing after reading the article, he still makes a valid point and touches on a subject that I think speaks volumes about our society in general.
I never reared the criminal and have no knowledge of the crime whatsoever. Nor was I old enough to take care of someone. Nor did I encourage the kind of environment that help cause the criminal acts. Nor did I endorse the punishment of death.
It is easy to use "we" to name collective responsibility, but you must also remember that behind each "we" is a group of individuals.
Society does not act, move, and feel, have goals, beliefs, etc. It is a heterogeneous collection of individuals, each with their own belief system, predisposition, history, relationship, and other distinct characteristics.
Society can be more understood as a force, which its sum is greater than its parts. Yet, we also know that society cannot exists without individuals.
Ultimately, responsibility alway lies with the individual(s).
This is pretty wishy-washy. I think there's a convincing case to be made that all else being equal society would be better off without certain people.
The problem is that the human system that can rid us of those people will necessarily be flawed, and as other have pointed out, you can't un-kill innocents.
I tend to go back and forth on this issue, but I would pose the question that if we made it mandatory that everyone had to serve out capital punishment duty (i.e. you get called to pull the trigger, inject the syringe, or whatever and if you refuse you risk punishment by death yourself) as we do for jury duty then would you be willing to do your civic duty? If you are, what does that say about us as a society? Do we go back to the good old days of public hangings and stonings? If not, then what is so different about paying tax dollars to support the killing of someone?
That's an interesting perspective actually. I'm not sure that I could do that duty in cold blood... If I was affected by the crime personally in some way then obviously it would likely be a different story.
Perhaps we could have a 'jury of executioners'? 12 potential executioners get called at random, the majority of them have to agree that the death sentence is applicable, all while knowing that one of them would be called upon to do the deed at the end...
If we are executing enough people that capital punishment duty is actually a meaningful way to acquaint people with the gravity of taking another person's life in the name of justice, then our society is already repugnantly sick and violent. I think we are some distance from that, and I'd rather not move closer.
Furthermore, I think the risk of such an experiment is that we desensitize the population to the taking of human life.
> When a person shows that much contempt for the life and well-being of another human being, they really don't deserve to continue living..
I agree.
> Personally I think cases like this are a great example of when capital punishment is acceptable.
I disagree. Because we can never have a good enough standard of proof, and since the state is us, when we execute someone innocent, (which has happened, and will happen again), it makes us all murderers who have no right to live.
When someone does something this vile, we (the people, by the courts) determine that they shall no longer have a right to their life. Whether that be by ending it via capital punishment or by keeping them incarcerated forever, they essentially no longer have a right to their life.
If a court determines that someone will no longer have a right to their life and their remaining lifespan is, for example, 40 years, we will spend somewhere on the order of $2,000,000 to keep them incarcerated for their lifetime.
Of course, that assumes the value of the dollar is constant (it isn't) and that the price of keeping this murderer in a maximum security prison is the same as the average cost of keeping someone incarcerated. (it isn't)
When we are locking the door and throwing away the key, why not save the $2,000,000 keeping someone alive who we've deemed has no right to life anyway?
If a new method of testing evidence appears and the alleged criminal is cleared of charges, you can let them out of the prison. You can't un-kill them.
edit: I heard of countless cases of young black men being incarcerated for murder in Texas in the 60's with police going quite out of their way to obstruct the justice process.
And if a new method of testing evidence appears and the alleged criminal is cleared of charges 20 years later, you can't give them those 20 years back. I don't see how capital punishment differs from incarceration as more than a matter of degree.
Pragmatically, I think capital punishment is a good thing to have since it causes us to give the criminal justice system an extra degree of scrutiny. I'd rather be falsely convicted of a capital crime than a life in prison crime. I lose my life either way, but more people are motivated to exonerate me if I'm facing the death penalty than for life in prison.
Suppose you were wrongly imprisoned for 20 years, but later freed. You could reasonably argue that you would rather have been killed (but would you?). You cannot reasonably argue that I, or your friend, or your mother would prefer to be executed rather than to live in prison for 20 years.
Second, what does the extra scrutiny matter if we still execute innocent people? If there were no capital punishment, we by definition would not execute any innocent people.
Your no-right-to-life argument is predicated on your own stated, but not proven, value judgement, but it's murderous to force this on others.
I'm not arguing that a mistaken execution is equal to a mistaken 20 years in prison. For a person with 40 years left to live, I'm arguing that 20 years in prison is half as bad as killing them (ignoring the fact that early years are probably higher value than later ones).
Extra scrutiny matters because the goal is not minimizing execution of the innocent, but minimizing punishment of the innocent. I don't see how wrongly making a person live out their life in jail is significantly worse than killing them. Extra scrutiny matters because it would reduce our error rate. I'd prefer one mistaken execution to two mistaken life imprisonments.
Note that this latter point is strictly a utilitarian one, not a moral one. In a world without assorted lawyers/activists/etc working to prevent wrongful executions, the argument would not apply.
And they still have another 20 to live. And they get millions of dollars in restitution. So, an innocent man is executed - possibly the worst injustice imaginable. Who get's to tell his children, his parents?
That's an interesting second point, a bit of a gamble though.
I didn't say my system was without flaws, it's just my way of thinking.
And it is relatively rare that an innocent man is convicted and sentenced to death. We can have a system that forces all of us (as taxpayers) to pay a HUGE amount of money keeping all of the vile criminals alive for a chance that they're in the <1% innocent who were wrongly convicted. Does that make good financial sense though?
Also, I'm talking about the future, not the past. Sure there were many wrongful convictions in the past, but the same technology that is freeing those who were convicted wrongfully in the past is the same technology that will help prevent innocents from being put on death row in the future.
I agree that's definitely worth consideration. I am nowhere close to being an expert on these things but I would have thought that most of the big technological leaps in the justice system are probably behind us. Fingerprinting, DNA matching, fibre analysis, ballistics... All of these things are pretty well established now.
I agree that a lot of cases got turned on their head when DNA matching became available, but what technologies do you envision providing the same sort of disruption in the future?
It doesn't always have to pivot on technology -- there will always be overzealous DA's and corrupt judges. Once again, I'm not for or against capital punishment, nor have I done sufficient research to form an opinion, but I can just imagine the Kafkaesque hell an innocent man or woman can be put through to be put on death row.
Yeah, I can sympathize with that. I definitely would not want to be in that situation. I'm sure there's a workable compromise in there somewhere.
I definitely think that most countries need to think about the crimes that they imprison people for. Imprisonment is super expensive partly because it's used so often. If only serious criminals went to prison, the social impact of imprisoning someone would be much greater and the overall cost would be lower...
Even if we did develop a lie detector with high accuracy, how would we know?
There's good reason to believe that lie detectors might work much better in the laboratory, on test subjects telling inconsequential lies to experimenters and knowing they'll go home, than on real suspected criminals telling vitally important lies (or truths) for life-or-death stakes.
When you include the cost of appeals etc we spend more than that (on average) actually killing someone. In the old days of trial > hanging your argument was more reasonable, but we also killed more innocent people back then.
That's just an argument against our current court system. We allow virtually unending appeals, even with no new evidence or reason for believing that the earlier trials/appeals were somehow unfair. Some states have (or had) mandatory appeals for capital cases, even when the defendant plead guilty and didn't contest the death penalty.
Apart from wrongful convictions resulting execution, death penalties are also very expensive, as the costs of due process through all the appeals have to be paid.
It's very important to look at these kinds of issues from a systems perspective. Complex systems have unintended effects. You're not allowed to say "the code will just work after I hit compile". :)
For instance, how sure are you that the government is spending your tax money wisely? How sure are you that a company you invest in isn't engaging in some form of corruption.
When you raise the stakes to killing another human, and in peace-time, at that, you'd better be sure that mistakes are not just unlikely, but impossible. Of course, that's ... impossible.
Yes, but I do not want to live with the knowledge that people like that are allowed to exist in the world. Punishment be damned, eliminate them from the gene pool.
And if you really believed in human dignity, don't you believe that exerting that sort of punishment is not only cruel to the perp, but to the prison guards who have to handle them?
And what of the money we spend on prisons instead of our children? A .45 only costs a few cents.
The problem is wrongful conviction. The ability to repeal, in some small part, punishments due to wrongful conviction is worth far more than your personal need to know someone has been killed.
Punishment be damned, eliminate them from the gene pool.
.. otherwise known as eugenics. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing. In fact from the utterly callous perspective of evolution and the long term interest of larger society, this is the most clear and consistent position, IMO.
It's mostly nature, not nurture, and we've all known that for a very long time, although it's still too taboo to admit. So people such as the criminal in the story are bad mutations to be rejected, along with any children.
So that's what we'd do if we were really serious ...
If you create a system that can execute those who (arguably) deserve to die, you've also created a system that can, and will be used to execute innocent people.
So, how many innocent people is it alright to execute for the (presumed) satisfaction of executing a few monsters?
"She said Willa Blanc just showed up and said she had a large dog in the trash can, and paid her dad $1,000 to help them burn it," prosecutor Smith said. "They took all night to do it. This was even weirder than we were imagining."
Seriously...why would anyone believe a lie like that? This story makes me angry.
There’s a common stereotype that to be “crazy” is to be dangerous, but as stories like this indicate, the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators.
A relative of mine always used to say "just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me." Perhaps he was right.
Also, given the topic of his research, nuclear weapon design, it doesn't seem too unlikely that government agents would tamper with his vehicle. The article seems to sensationalize a lot about the man. Running SETI@home isn't exactly that strange of a thing to do. Isn't it built into the PS3.
A lot of engineers have similar mental health issues, so I'm sure we all know someone like this. It's hard to strike the right balance between respecting their privacy and looking out for them.
If that's SETI @ Home (as I believe) then in addition to being a "monitoring station for extra-terrestrial life", my living room is also a cryptography lab (PrimeGrid) and a quantum computing and AI laboratory (AQUA@home).
Who knew!