'On Thursday, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty said the murder
charges were based on evidence from Michelle Knight that Mr Castro had
impregnated her, then physically abused and starved her in order to
induce five miscarriages while she was being held captive in his house
in Cleveland.'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22475771 (via UltraMorgnus)
Complex case, or beacon of moral clarity? Maneuverings to establish precedent to punish those who induce abortions as murderers, or not?
IMO, these men's heinous crimes should make
them liable for the death penalty regardless of whether a murder, per
se, occurred [the Democratic prosecutor is attempting to charge Ariel
Castro with murder for five forced miscarriages]. I do agree
with one Ethan Bremner that forcing a woman to miscarry should be a
crime substantially beyond simple assault, though it should not qualify
as murder--Roe vs Wade was correct, philosophically and ethically, IMO,
in locating the crix of the abortion debate in whether an embryo or
fetus is a 'person': a fetus isn't developed enough before birth to have
the capacity for anything we'd recognize as cognition, emotion,
personhood, or a soul, medical science shows--notwithstanding propaganda
culled selectively from ultrasound videos by dishonest right-wing
propagandists (and more sincere folk who pass on such info) which
appears to suggest the opposite. Anyway, though I'd note that we're very
strongly evolutionarily driven, psychologically, to interpret a fetus
as a person, and that Roe vs Wade's -legal- (as opposed to ethical)
arguments seem to me quite thin (though the right to privacy the case
used to protect women's rights to choice in the first two trimesters
with that ruling was drawn from the establishment clause of the 14th
amendment, not the 'penumbra' of several sections of the bill of rights,
contrary to what the right has claimed [the 14th amendment is a
stronger argument] ), Justice Blackmun was correct ethically in his
ruling, and it is indeed the ETHICS of this issue that, IMO, should
guide our consideration of the appropriate punishment for Ariel Castro
and his accomplices--not a set of laws 226 years old which are nearly
impossible to amend and which did not provide for many future
controversies, and which, by the way, originally restricted full
citizenship to white mean of wealth (specifically, those who owned
substantial amounts of property), and counted blacks as 60% of a human
being for demographic purposes (so the slave-states would have more
representation in Congress, though of course only rich white planters
and their friends could elect that representation).
I digress.
If Mr. Castro is guilty of what he's accused of, try him, ascertain his
guilt in a speedy trial, and execute the bastard, fake murders or no.
Keeping (and abusing) kidnapped female sex slaves for ten years is quite
enough to warrant that; murder is not the only horrific crime commensurate with punishment through execution. Most societies have understood this throughout history; it's only as the modern, western elites have become insulated from the darker realities of life--the millions of (relative) innocents dying of hunger and repression every year, that anti-capital punishment views have become at all widespread (majorities of the populace in nearly all of Europe still favor its return). It's obviously unjust that Milosevic was allowed by the Europeans to slaughter hundreds of thousands before he eventually lived out his life in a cushy cell in the hague until the end of an interminably long trial. That did nothing at all of value except allow the calculating, xenophobic dictator-murderer to die a natural death, thus evading any legal punishment for his crimes against the human race.
Let Ariel Castro be dispatched fairly and efficiently, with the maximum sentence the law allows (no, this does not include murder charges), if the charges are proven, and let states alter their laws hereafter to allow the execution of others who commit such heinous crimes.
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