US Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: If found guilty - what should be his sentence

beancounter said:
So, another Boston Marathon is comming up and the Boston bomber hasn't had his day in court.

Federal prosecuters are going for the death penalty, but I don't think that's the best punishment.

IMO, he should get life in prison in solitary confinment. Why? because he wants to die and get his 40 virgins and all. Solitary confinment will be slow torture for him as he won't be able to infect the other prisoners with his toxic memes.

He'll become nameless and annonymous, and unable to achieve full martyrdom.
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I have to take issue with your reasoning. The main reason for punishment/imprisonment shouldn't be to inflict suffering, it should be to make society in general safer and to rehabilitate (I wish). With someone like this I have no problem with a life sentence, but not one involving torture such as solitary confinement.
 
I don't hate him. I don't believe in good and evil, only cause and effect. I recognize that humans are nothing more than vehicles for biochemical reactions, and that neither fate nor free will are entirely accurate in regards to explaining how we end up where we are. Whatever it was that lead him to do what he did, whether it was religious fanaticism or simply youthful ignorance, the needs of society outweigh his needs. Punishment isn't fair, I get that. Neither is releasing someone with problems like his back into society. The root of those problems is irrelevant. Even if he could theoretically be rehabilitated, that wouldn't be fair to those whose lives were damaged by him. I value the need to be fair to them more than I value the need to be fair to him, and since it's not always possible to please all parties involved, I choose them over him. Society doesn't need him enough to go out of its way to give him a chance to live a productive and/or comfortable life.

Regardless of my unpopular stance in violence in general, I do not support the death penalty as an institution (for practical cause/effect based reasons, not because I feel sorry for murderers who are executed).

They should send him to Mars with a few other misguided individuals to get started on the building of the infrastructure we'll need one day, and send food and supplies based on how much work is completed. That way he can be productive away from the rest of society, or he can choose not to be productive and starve (like the rest of us).

On a side note, I'm approaching 40 and I'm sure not getting better. If anything I'm getting more bitter :p Definitely more cynical. If I had a twin who was a misguided religious fanatic murder, and I knew that his mind worked the same as mine, I'd probably suggest locking his *** up permanently.
 
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Clueless Git said:
Me too, but we're into "if a butterfly flaps it's wings in the Andes ..." territory there.
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Perhaps, but I feel it's still important to note because, in my mind, good and evil implies something non physical or abstract. This is not the case. Every thought and every impulse we have is the result of physical processes within our bodies that can, as with any machine, be understood and potentially controlled or, at the very least, predicted.
 
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