Comments on: “America, You Lost!”

By: yclipse

yclipse — Fri, 05 May 2006 01:06:26 +0000

For a fanatic who wanted martyrdom, denying it to him may be the best punishment.

By: Ken Arromdee

Ken Arromdee — Thu, 04 May 2006 18:05:34 +0000

Perhaps Podhoretz simply doesn’t think it’s a justifiable reason for a juror to make this choice because they think that instead of getting a quick way out by a nice cosy lethal injection, Moussaoui should instead endure the rough justice that I imagine will be meted out out to him by the prison population daily for the rest of his life, while guards turn an appreciatively blind eye to the prisoners’ activities. I think it is naive for anyone to think that Moussaoui has gotten off easily.

He’s going to a Supermax. No other prisoners to meet with.

And if he does get transfered to a prison where he can interact with other prisoners, he’s probably going to be on the top. There’s lots of Islamic extremism in prisons today, for one thing. The other prisoners might consider him a hero. Likewise, the prisoners who get raped are the weak ones, not the ones who deserve it.

Since he isn’t being executed, we also have to worry about other groups taking hostages in order to force the US to release him.

By: Paul Gowder

Paul Gowder — Thu, 04 May 2006 17:33:49 +0000

I think the real idiocy is taking anything Podhoertz says seriously.

By: David S. Cohen

David S. Cohen — Thu, 04 May 2006 17:14:05 +0000

I actually thought the jurors sounded quite intelligent in their parsing of the mitigating factors.

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 04 May 2006 04:08:15 +0000

Or perhaps, more charitably, the jury didn’t feel like making a martyr out of him? Such sentimentality, I think, is misplaced, but it might be understandable.

By: John Armstrong

John Armstrong — Thu, 04 May 2006 02:04:49 +0000

Three moral idiots out of the jury. Didn’t the prosecutors have some sort of influence on jury selection? What sort of idiot is it who allows a moral idiot onto a jury?

By: Bruce

Bruce — Thu, 04 May 2006 01:57:57 +0000

I’ve got to wonder why we should bother going through the motions of reading “The Corner.”

Podhoretz seems to have missed that the guilt phase is over. This was the penalty phase. The question wasn’t whether there was a “mitigating circumstance regarding Moussaoui’s actual guilt” (a/k/a reasonable doubt?), it was whether he deserved the death penalty for the crime he was found guilty of.