Missouri teen girl gets 'life' for killing 9yr girl to 'find out what it felt like'...

Originally posted by Xcathdra
reply to post by silo13

 

I dont think medicine had anything to do with this. That seemed very apparent based on the recovered pages from her diary that she had tried to destroy after the fact.

If you had ever suffered from mental illness you would realize that doesn't automatically mean she is 'normal just evil'. Fearing the consequences doesn't mean the original action did not stem from her illness in some way.

reply to post by lampsalot


She is not eligible for the death penalty...
Im not even sure where that came up..

reply to post by groingrinder


Perhaps you might see the correlation between murders and an already sick mind....That might be it. The mental disorder that has them on the drugs in the first place.

Originally posted by Xcathdra
reply to post by lampsalot

 

She is not eligible for the death penalty...
Im not even sure where that came up..

Well I just mean I'm sure a lot of people think she should die for what she did.

reply to post by lampsalot


If her mental competence was a valid factor, she would never have been certified as an adult or subject to the adult criminal justice system.

Again its personal accountability... She made the choice, she wrote about the killing, she found it thrilling, she dug the grave before hand, she then attempted to remove evidence out of her diary that detailed the crime.

She knew what she was doing the entire time and trying to excuse the behavior while blaming anyone / anything else is just sad.

Originally posted by peck420

Originally posted by Glass
Therefore the feelings she described were not those of a "natural reaction". You choose to see her as evil because of her actions, but her actions were preceded by a thought; a thought which would not have been produced naturally in her mind.

You are psychic?

Nope, but I like to think that I can see a little deeper than the average person, sometimes.

You, as well as me, have no idea what her 'natural reaction' or 'natural thoughts' would have been. Drugs or otherwise.

Fair enough.

There are most definitely people in this world that enjoy killing. There has been since long before pharmaceutical companies ever existed. This girl may have been one of them. She may not have been. We will never know with any certainty.

This is the part that gets me

So you think, because we can never know with 100% pinpoint accuracy whether or not she would have psychotic tendencies without mind-altering prescription drugs, that we should just throw our hands up in frustration and dump this girl's body in the trash, rather than study her, talk to her, and find out what might have caused her issues?

I admit I made a bit of a leap in saying "would not have been produced naturally in her mind". I should have stuck to basics: her thoughts were not natural at the time.

Originally posted by Xcathdra
reply to post by lampsalot

 

If her mental competence was a valid factor, she would never have been certified as an adult or subject to the adult criminal justice system.

Again its personal accountability... She made the choice, she wrote about the killing, she found it thrilling, she dug the grave before hand, she then attempted to remove evidence out of her diary that detailed the crime.

She knew what she was doing the entire time and trying to excuse the behavior while blaming anyone / anything else is just sad.

See that's where I disagree. I'm a determinist, so I reject the notion of free will, that is why I don't really agree with the concept in American justice that premeditation = sanity. Jared Loughner premeditated but just reading the posts he made on this message board it's obvious that he is insane and that was the cause of what he did.

It's just my opinion though. I could be wrong.

reply to post by lampsalot


Which is why he has had several psychiatric screening sessions to determine mental culpability to determine if he is mentally fit to stand trial for the actions and if he understood and appreciated the consequences of those actions.

In this particular case, there is nothing that was presented that would suggest the girl was mentally incompetent to the extent of not knowing the results of her action.

I;m not familiar with your position so please excuse my ignorance. Is it your position that a person who commits and action is not responsible for that action, regardless of what it is or the outcome?

Originally posted by Xcathdra
reply to post by lampsalot

 

Which is why he has had several psychiatric screening sessions to determine mental culpability to determine if he is mentally fit to stand trial for the actions and if he understood and appreciated the consequences of those actions.

In this particular case, there is nothing that was presented that would suggest the girl was mentally incompetent to the extent of not knowing the results of her action.

I;m not familiar with your position so please excuse my ignorance. Is it your position that a person who commits and action is not responsible for that action, regardless of what it is or the outcome?

edit on 8-2-2012 by Xcathdra because: (no reason given)

edit on 8-2-2012 by Xcathdra because: (no reason given)

There's a difference imo because knowing the results on a logical level and comprehending them on an emotional level.

In a sense yes, I actually reject the entire concept of responsibility from a philosophical perspective. I think our goal should be goodwill towards everyone and not goodwill to the good and badwill to the bad, and that is based on my belief that responsibility is an illusion.

All I can say is "wow." That young girl obviously had some mental issues, I couldn't imagine taking another human beings life in cold blood. I hope she wakes up screaming from the nightmares she will have for the rest of her life.

Originally posted by KwisatzHaderach
All I can say is "wow." That young girl obviously had some mental issues, I couldn't imagine taking another human beings life in cold blood. I hope she wakes up screaming from the nightmares she will have for the rest of her life.

just to add to the nightmare life she already had.

Think. it helps.

Originally posted by Glass
So you think, because we can never know with 100% pinpoint accuracy whether or not she would have psychotic tendencies without mind-altering prescription drugs, that we should just throw our hands up in frustration and dump this girl's body in the trash, rather than study her, talk to her, and find out what might have caused her issues?

Absolutely not! I think that is the only thing we CAN do with her.

But, we must also be willing to accept the possibility that she is natural and her actions were caused by her natural state.

Originally posted by KwisatzHaderach
All I can say is "wow." That young girl obviously had some mental issues, I couldn't imagine taking another human beings life in cold blood. I hope she wakes up screaming from the nightmares she will have for the rest of her life.

All I can say to you is "WOW YOUR NAME IS AWESOME I LOVE DUNE!!!!!"

Well, that and "I would have thought the Kwisatz Haderach would have been more understanding, being able to see the past and future with perfect clarity..."

reply to post by peck420


Ah, well I can say I understand and agree with you.

Sorry for my flippant response, I thought you were attacking my whole argument through my logic, not just my faulty logic itself.

reply to post by silo13


I wouldn't doubt that Prozac made it ... easier.. for this girl to kill a child. There is a lot of evidence of antidepressents causing normal people to do abnormal things. Regardless however.. she killed a little girl for the sake of seeing what it'd feel like. That'd F'd up on so many levels. I'd say she is certainly insane (in fact, I'm astonished her defense didn't go the insanity route??) but I for one don't view insanity, drug induced or otherwise, to be a special get out of jail free card. Take a life, serve for life.

Originally posted by Glass

Originally posted by n00bUK
This is yet another example of why there needs to be an alternative to prison.

I have nothing else to say other than I think story's like this should touch everybody's soul and make them realize that the system we have now has major faults. Prison wont change this girl, it will institutionalize her and give her a very distort her view on reality at a young age. There is ways of helping this girl, prison not been one of them.

My thoughts go out with the family, on both sides.

Society needs to look at what is triggering this type of behavior and instead of imprisoning them - deal with the problem, not put it on ice

There is an alternative to prison; life in a psychiatric institution. In my opinion she should be institutionalized, but not in prison. She needs proper psychiatric care. Plus, psychologists could use her as a case study to help learn what happened to drive her to killing an innocent child, which could help prevent others from following in her footsteps.

Prison will change this girl. Being surrounded by other killers and psychopaths for 25+ years will set her on the path to becoming a professional killer. A lot of gangs do their recruiting in prisons. In 25 years time she will have met hundreds of contacts who could get her working for the toughest crimelords in the country.

Imagine it, you're 40 years old, fresh out of prison. Your whole life has passed you by, and the one memory you have of your childhood is the exhilaration of commiting cold blooded murder. What do you think you want to do for the rest of your life?

Yeah, she will go right back and do it again. Oh the other hand, I sure as hell would not want to be in the same psychiatric institution with her. If she'll strangle on the outside she could do it in a mental facility, too.

I believe doing an intense family case history and interviewing her in jail would accomplish the "learning benefits" as her being institutionalized in a psychiatric facility. She should have been given no chance of parole.

I think "justice" would be if this girl was given to the little girl's family. As a SLAVE. They own her. They can kill her if they want, or just make her do slave work the rest of her life, with a side dish of torture every night.

But they'll never approve that. The govt wouldn't make any money that way.

reply to post by silo13


She deserves it.


Perhaps the worse crime is that she may never understand why she's in prison.



For such people, I cannot think of anything else but cold hard abusive labor. It is possible to teach common sense to a psychopath. Just very hard, and only through pain. Pain is the only thing that gets into their heads.

I didn't read all of the posts, but it seems like alot of you don't mind having another teen sentence to life in prison..It's wrong, sure she killed a young girl, but there's a reason for it, no teen just goes out and slays a Innocent child. She needs help not Incarceration .

In the old days, people like this would be hanged. In the town square, in front of everyone.

Knowing this would happen if they were caught, has never stopped psychos and criminals from committing crimes. It just gets rid of them. Why should everyone else have to pay to support them for the rest of their lives?

And now it's even worse. Anyone in jail is costing around 50 grand a year of your tax dollars. This is what the prison corporations charge the govt. Paid for with YOUR money.

Of course, they don't SPEND anywhere near that on each con, more like 10. They ain't exactly feeding em filet mignon. And YOUR money already paid for the buildings to be built in the first place. 40 grand profit per head. Plus they then put them to work, making stuff for one penny an hour, which the corp. then sells at normal prices. Basically pure profit on top of profit.

No way they'd want to hang anyone. And of course, ninety percent of the people in jail don't deserve to even be there, let alone hanging.