Another way of looking at is that 22 years ago he did a terrible thing that he thought he would never do and has regretted ever since. This does not absolve him of shit, but:
We then collectively, as a society, took 22 years to murder him back.
Are we going to claim we did it as a mistake? Is ours a crime of passion? What excuse do we have for our violence? "He did it first"?
So I find it hard to reconcile that we are living in modern, democratic, freedom-loving countries, and the best we could come up with in response to murder was more murder.
When we kill inmates, we torture them for decades with the knowledge that they will be murdered for their crimes and it will hurt. We deprive them of all freedom in the meantime. Decades of knowing that society as a whole hates you so much that they locked you away out of sight and want your blood. We then surround them with the most violent people we have in society, and offer them little protection from each other.
And then finally, one day, if they survive the ordeal, we kill them and call it justice. That's what I have a hard time reconciling.
This is such a foolish way of looking at public order. The point is not whether murder is wrong or whether punishing is wrong, because after all we are not children arguing about right and wrong. Rather, we need a public that is free of murderers and so when people engage in antisocial behavior we remove them from the public. We don't remove someone for X years because we think they "deserve" to be removed for X years -- we remove them for X years because that's how it takes them to age out of being prone to commit acts of more violence.
It is about keeping society going. The moment you start getting into debates about right and wrong, you prove that you have no interest in keeping society going and are instead focused on making yourself feel good by making various philosophical pronouncements which are ultimately quite arbitrary. But what is not arbitrary is whether people can walk the streets safely at night or not. Do we live in a peaceful society or do we live in a society in which the wealthy barricade themselves in and hire private security while the poor are left to fend for themselves? That's what matters, and it's all that matters, because public justice is not an ethics class, it's a class about how to create safe streets so that society can continue to function in peace.
The moment you stop caring about how to create a peaceful society, what you get is a violent society that eventually disintegrates into warring clans and someone will rise to the top who can promise order, and he will not care a bit about your philosophical debates. And the people will support him, because not worrying about being attacked as you walk about the city is a required part of having cities in the first place. And we want cities, we want high density living in which strangers can interact with each other without violence -- we want civilization. Therefore we adopt policies that defend that civilization independent of any musings about who has the right to take a life or imprison someone and what that means for someone's soul, etc. It is only those people who take it for granted that they are living in a peaceful society, who are able to engage in these musings about what is right and wrong. But God help the society that takes them seriously or listens to their advice.
You're right, they've suffered a terrible injustice. They are the real victims. We should probably free all violent criminals at once. What could go wrong?
We then collectively, as a society, took 22 years to murder him back.
Are we going to claim we did it as a mistake? Is ours a crime of passion? What excuse do we have for our violence? "He did it first"?
So I find it hard to reconcile that we are living in modern, democratic, freedom-loving countries, and the best we could come up with in response to murder was more murder.
When we kill inmates, we torture them for decades with the knowledge that they will be murdered for their crimes and it will hurt. We deprive them of all freedom in the meantime. Decades of knowing that society as a whole hates you so much that they locked you away out of sight and want your blood. We then surround them with the most violent people we have in society, and offer them little protection from each other.
And then finally, one day, if they survive the ordeal, we kill them and call it justice. That's what I have a hard time reconciling.