The guy should be on Death Row and the Judge should have refrained from any comment that would encourage violence against anyone.

Somehow I doubt this will inspire his reform.

Here in Vegas, we have recently had a string of beatings delivered by a group of black youths, both male and female. If this turns out to be racially motivated, what do you think the chances of the judge calling the attackers "racist thugs"?

How soon till the lawsuits are filed?

He is no longer the swaggering racist thug he was now he is surrounded by so many black faces in a closed environment. The fact he was branded a racist thug by a judge has made him a number one target for revenge attacks.

It may not be "law," but it sure looks like justice to me.

I find it appalling that so many people who are unwilling to punish or condemn people have no problem with letting other inmates doing their dirty work for them. Even, as a Calif. Atty. General did, to joke about it. Yet these are often the same people who decry any attempt at actual punishment by the state as "cruel and unusual" or a "human rights violation."

I guess it's not barbaric to have some thug carry out an ad hoc execution, but only when the state actually does it after a trial and sentencing.

Mr. Ortega, thanks for your thoughts. I think it's depends on how you view prison. I think many see prison not as a reform school, but as exile. The idea is if you can't follow the rules of civilization, you are removed from it, and you get to live in the lawless state of nature you have chosen for yourself. It is funny(in a black humor sense) to see people chose to live outside the laws of man, and get their butts handed to them.
For many on the Left, humanity is conditional. If you can't play by their rules, you're not human. Then, who cares what happens to something that is less then animal?

Our penal system for years was geared toward rehabilitating wrongdoers and then sending them back out into the world as people who had paid their debt to society and had a brand new chance at the American dream. This worked about as well as any other harebrained liberal notion and convicts came out of prison more violent and anti-social than when they went in.

Now not even lip service is given to rehab anymore and criminals are put in prison to protect society and punish wrongdoers. They should never be allowed to take justice into their own hands, no matter how just their cause.

The fact that order cannot be maintained in prison is a disgrace. With the surveillance available today, prisoners should never have occasion to attack each other.

Raoul, Robert, erp, all of you make valid points, and I can't argue with a word of it.

Let's just say that my symapthy meter is reading "off scale low" where Mr. Barton is concerned.

I don't have any sympathy for killers. In my opinion, "life imprisonment" is far more of a "cruel and unusual" punishment than execution precisely because of incidents like this. If you want to see the man dead, then the state should do it and be done with it. If you want him tortured for his crimes, then codify it back into law, instead of outsourcing it to his free-lancing fellow thugs. Don't pretend your hands are clean because it happened in a prison.

It demeans the rest of us when we have prisons like this, just as it demeans us to consider abortion a valid form of contraception, or that it's acceptible to euthanize people who've "outlived their usefulness to society." And I think all those attitudes are related to a cheapening of the value of human life.

(This isn't directed at anyone in particular here, but just a general rant...)

This is an awful issue, and one we may be called to account for by our children, at least for our ignoring the problem. The theory is that the simply denial of freedom is supposed to be punishment enough, but we don't really believe that and probably never did. In the old days, they lived with hunger, sickness and overwork, but we can't do that anymore, so we inflict terror and abuse on them instead. Otherwise we would actually get a little jealous--everything is provided and they don't have to worry about paying the hydro bill.

Maybe it is time to look again at penal colonies in the Arctic, on islands or wherever. In any event, this isn't our finest hour.

This is not good.

No one has any sympathy for the prisoner here. The sympathy must be for outraged justice. The law has spoken as to what this man's punisnhment was to have been. Standards exist for the quality of confinement.

To approve of punishment in excess of that provoided by law demeans justice and demeans us. We all often wish punishments were more severe: sometimes we say we hope a criminal might receive extra-judicial punishment. When it is actually happening, however, respect for the law and for our own civilization demands that it be halted.

Bunk. The guy needs killing.

OJ
You mean that you would not sympathize with the 30 Blacks in the prison, if the 120 white retaliated.

There's no such thing as retaliation for justice.

So then you would sympathize with them.

And if one of them had killed a white boy and been sent to prison you think justice is served if whites in prison should take violent action against him.

It would be better if the state meted out justice, but where it doesn't, then, yes, killing race killers is a-okay.

Theodore Bilbo couldn't have said it better.

Seriously, I don't think you (or I) would rationally defend any such thing. I agree though with your general sentiments

Bilbo needed killing.

But H-Man, what do you want us to do? Separate all the prisoners(I'm pretty sure the courts have ruled that C&U)? Drug them to the gills(Same problem)? Lobotomies? What do you do with a group of people who have not played by the rules?

I like Peter's idea of putting them on a island and letting them fend for themselves. No weight rooms, no TV, no cell phones. Let them show how tough they are in the wilderness.

Be a lot cheaper too.