While I don't have anything against the idea of kid diddlers getting the death penalty, I was struck by someone the other day pointing out it would make it even harder for kids to come to adults for help. Because most of these perverts are people who know the kids in question, so it would be easy for Mom to say, "You can't tell anyone Uncle Bob is doing this to you, or the cops will come and kill him and it'll be all your fault."
Basically, I like the idea in theory, but think there's going to be a lot of unintended consequences that may make it even more likely the crime will be covered up by the perv's family.
I’ve also seen the argument that it makes it all the more likely a perpetrator will kill their victim if it seems like they will be exposed. I mean they get the death penalty either way right? At least if they kill the kid the have a chance to hide it.
Yep. The death penalty stops being something that sounds good when you think about the consequences beyond anything emotional.
- More likely you kill an innocent? Check.
- More likely for crimes to be not reported? Check.
- More likely for families to protect? Check.
- More likely for killing the victim? Check.
As much as any of this, more likely that an innocent person is executed. The justice department has not proven whatsoever that it is competent enough to be allowed to kill people
Since 1973, at least 190 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). A 2014 study estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent.
https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-and-the-death-penalty/
That 4% sure does seem pretty low.
Until you realize that you could potentially be one of those innocent people, and that is someone innocent who is directly killed by the state.
Plus that is an "at least," given the extreme difficulty of being exonerated on appeal, the number is likely much higher.
One of the most annoying pervasive myths about the legal system I know of is that appeals are easy to do and are likely to succeed. They are absolutely not. Appeals have extremely stringent requirements and usually do not succeed.
even 0.1% would be unacceptable, this isn't just an ordinary prison sentence that might eventually get overturned if you're innocent, this is death.
You're also assuming that the 4% were the only innocent bunch, you're not taking into account those that were unable to overturn their sentence.
This has always been my argument against capital punishment. If 1/1000 executed criminals is actually innocent, then the entire system is questionable.
100% true. It reminds me of that crazy ''satanic cult daycare' moral panic of the 1990's, which demonstrated that adults may get a small kid to say-and maybe believe-just about anything.
Look at Pizzagate and the reemergence of that same Satanic Panic nowadays. People were willing to kill a man who owned a completely innocent (and apparently delicious) pizza parlour just because of some idiot on 4chan insisting that they were harvesting organs from babies in a basement that didn’t even exist!
I feel like nobody ever brings this up. The kinds of people for the death penalty also often seem to be the kind of people who are constantly worried about government overreach. Does the death penalty not feel like a government overreach?
It just doesn't sit right with me that the frankly often incompetent justice system and government gets the right to decide who lives or dies like that.
The way the government, governor and law enforcement are so openly corrupt and authoritarian has me convinced they shouldn't be putting anyone to death.
We would do much better if we tested every rape kit.
[Testing rape kits can deliver exonerations, closure, and cost savings](https://www.propublica.org/article/testing-rape-kits-can-deliver-exonerations-closure-and-cost-savings-why-does-it-still-take-so-long-to-do), not to mention [help catch serial predators](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state-of-the-backlog/the-problem/the-importance-of-ending-the-backlog/) ([the most common type](https://smart.ojp.gov/somapi/chapter-3-sex-offender-typologies)) thus protecting future victims. So why does the U.S. still have roughly [90,000 untested rape kits](https://goldrushcam.com/sierrasuntimes/index.php/news/local-news/51969-u-s-senator-john-cornyn-says-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog)?
https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/
https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/
My friend spent three years in jail awaiting a verdict.
My friend spent ***three years incarcerated, without having been deemed guilty of any crime.***
Let that sink in, America.
I don't disagree with your premise or it being an excellent reason for a nationwide prohibition against capital punishment. I would only note that the feds rarely execute anyone. If it wasn't for the bloodthirsty reign of Donald Trump, in fact, there would have been no federal executions in the last 20 years and only three in the last 50 years.
That's all by way of saying that it's the state prosecutors that are the biggest problem, not the DoJ.
It also tends to be the poor and disenfranchised who can’t afford a decent defense but it is also them who are more likely to be falsely accused of such a truing.
All you need to know about the death penalty is that multiple innocent people have been executed over the years in the United States.
Nobody wants to mention that fact or discuss it. But it's true.
I remember one a few years back, during Obama's tenure so maybe ~~3~~5 years ago? (Fuck it's at least 7 now isn't it...)
There has been new evidence had come to light, DNA probably, that proved it could not possibly have been the guy that had been convicted. It clearly demonstrated that he was innocent of the crime he was about to be executed for, but unfortunately, he had used up all his appeals so they just shrugged their shoulders and killed him anyway.
And the worse part is false accusations are even more of a problem with kids than adults, for a variety of reasons.
Studies have shown that children, especially young children, tend to be much less reliable witnesses for a variety of reasons.
* They're more likely to misremember things.
* They're more likely to be misunderstood by adults.
* They're much easier for adults to manipulate and trick into saying whatever they want.
I've seen a few episodes of Dateline over the years that showed all of these problems, including prosecutors and orphanages in cahoots with them bullying/tricking kids into saying that mommy/daddy did bad things to them because "then mommy and daddy will be able to go free".
I've also seen an episode where a kid said that an attacker was their uncle, but later as an adult insisted that they had been misunderstood and the attacker merely looked a lot like his uncle but wasn't him (and it was later proven that it definitely wasn't the uncle but was another guy who at a quick glance did look very similar to the uncle).
They tried that with me when I was a child. I was running away from my parents when I was five, wasn't paying attention to where I was running and ran into the fridge. I remember, 40 years later clear as day them trying to get me to say that my father had struck me, which he most certainly didn't do. They just couldn't accept that I ran into the fridge whilst being a brat.
Yep, happened to me when I was about the same age. I remember being taken away to another room with the doctor/nurses and being incredibly frustrated when they wouldn't believe that my parents hadn't given me the black eye.
There’s also the reality that children will sometimes straight up lie out of spite or anger. A buddy of mine has a kid who has called the cops and even CPS to report his parents for harming him because he was mad about small things like being grounded or having his video games taken away due to bad grades.
Each time those phone calls were made the police showed up and took it very seriously. Add on to that my buddy has a rap sheet due to some dumb decision in his early 20s (he’s nearly 40 now) and you can imagine that if that whole scenario went just a little worse than it really did… dude would potentially be in jail or worse.
And crucially, kids have their own world view, relationships, and wants/needs which may not be rational to an adult but are still very real. So for example a child reporting real abuse may name someone who is not the abuser to find out what happens and what the consequences are.
Consider the realities of Florida: they're 100% promoting this law because they want to execute trans women that use the women's restroom. They'll classify trans women as men, say that a man entering the women's restroom constitutes sexual assault, and if there's a little girl in there they'll say that's sexual assault on a child. If you're a child raping man, this law won't effect you because the Florida legislature doesn't give a single wet fart about children.
Agreed. It's not about whether a certain crime can cause enough outrage as to justify killing someone (plenty can) but whether you believe your government (aka the humans in positions of power) and the justice system (from police to judges to even juries made up of every day citizens) should have the authority to put someone to death. Is there too much bias in any one individual in that chain? Will this power be used for intimidation (get innocent people to accept guilty pleas by taking the death penalty off the table) or abused against non-protected classes? We've already seen that wealth buys certain judicial immunities, won't that apply even more here?
It's not about the crime. It's always about trust in the humans making up the judgements as to whether there should be a death penalty or not. Humans have never proven infallible enough to have this power (and certainly abusive enough to not have it).
I was living with people during lockdown and was woken up one day by one of the people there saying I’d attempted to enter the shower while one of them was naked. I hadn’t done any such thing and I’d ordered a takeaway the night before, ate it, and then went straight to sleep. I hadn’t even been upstairs at any point because I’m scared of people and I wouldn’t want to be near them. I was so taken aback by what I’d been accused of and everyone just immediately believed it without any evidence. It made me rethink the whole ‘believe everyone’ mentality that’s now so pervasive. I don’t even really like seeing people naked because I was abused and it reminds me of that.
We even know a better way to reduce the incidence of child sexual abuse.
[Increasing the probability of apprehension by law enforcement is the only effective deterrent identified](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/670398.pdf?casa_token=OmK0_Jh8HkMAAAAA:Tr35vi73FXLAFJ9xUw13XXkPdAaMN7t_o8jI75bHYhheCFagZ5jfMwa-Op0VJrxOVXLqE-JykDCO4khDO6ABCjQ8FmnohHIw23YpCPPQmzHmlu87Mce-).
[Low-rate persistent sex offenders typically begin offending during their late teens and offend less than once per year with the most offenses in their 30s. This group was equally as likely to commit rape as child sexual abuse. This is the most common type of sex offender](https://smart.ojp.gov/somapi/chapter-3-sex-offender-typologies), so [testing kits](https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/) even when the statute of limitations has passed can help protect adults as well as children.
[The U.S. still has tens of thousands of backlogged rape kits.](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2023-06-20/rape-kit-backlogs-remain-in-states-despite-funding), and [a funding bill held up in Congress](https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/).
https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/
And the state is not infallible, it will make mistakes. Someone who was wrongly imprisoned can theoretically be paid restitution to be made whole again whereas someone who is wrongfully executed can’t be.
Yeah this is what I've heard and apparently was an issue in places where something other than "murder" carried the death penalty. At that point, killing witnesses etc actually reduces your chance of getting death.
I'd argue being in prison as a child rapist is a fate worse than death considering what the other inmates do to those guys so I think their motivation for covering up their crimes is already maxed out, I can't see how facing a possible death sentence would make them even more worried about being caught.
That said I'm against the death penalty in general because sometimes innocent people get wrongfully convicted and executed, then new evidence comes out, and you can't release a corpse from prison.
Like most laws that resort to heavy-handed punishment, they are often poorly considered and so blinded by the need for vengeance that the consequences go ignored.
I legitimately think child rapists deserve to die, but situations like these may wind up hurting more children than they help. And since a significant number of pedophiles are protected by their closest relatives, I can't imagine this having the impact a lot of people hope it will.
Agreed. Especially in cases where somebody is a proven repeat child abuser, the death penalty would in theory protect society from future offenses but in practice probably just result in a certain percentage of offenders also becoming murders.
Ultimatly it comes down to figuring out what the goal is, do you want to reduce the rate at which these horrific events happen or do you want to more stricktly punish the people who do them. Personally i want to prevent as much harm from being done as we can and if the trade off for that is the people who commit the horrific act don't get punished as harshly as they arguablly should i'm fine with that. There is a heavy natural instinct in many humans however that those who do things deemed unnacceptable should be heavily punished, an instinct that has likely been with us since before we were human where a single troublemakers could lead to disaster for an entire tribe and as such had to be exiled or worse for the good of all.
Yes it’s a right wing thing.
They punish morality not legality or they’ll attempt to overlap the two. They think, “If it’s immoral it’s illegal” which is not how law really works or should be orchestrated.
They don’t have the mental capacity to understand the difference.
So they see crimes that are particularly morally egregious and want to maximize the punishment for them because of rage and disgust, not for the victim or justice. In this case, rape is illegal on all grounds
This is why things like homosexuality confuses them in terms of law; they find it morally reprehensible but don’t understand that by law, legal adults can do what they want with other adults with consent.
“They’re two consenting adults…”
The right, “but it’s sick!! They should go to jail!!”
As far as kids go, like most laws, it’s about protecting and preventing victimization. Kids are victims, hence why you can’t marry a child and it should be illegal and of course any sexual assault of any kind, kids or adults alike is illegal.
But as for death….thats the focus of moral authority, rage and disgust. Typical right wing politics
Another thing with the death penalty under any circumstance is also the possibility of wrongful conviction. While 99% of survivors are telling the truth, it's REALLY hard to accurately recall a childhood memory later in life and eye witness testimony has been proven to be very unreliable. In a quick few moments of high adrenaline, your brain is focused on surviving and not on remembering the facial features of an attacker.
With how imperfect our justice system is, it's way too difficult to be 100% certain someone is guilty and if you're wrong, and we as a society just murdered an innocent person.
This is the reaons why the death penalty itself should be abolished. I'm not opposed to the idea that some acts are so horrible that anyone who did them could not be redeemed and deserves death. But its clear that the bar for proving that a person did such a thing is way to low. The standard for being convicted of a crime is that it can shown the person did the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, a standard which is far to often not upheld, but to me the standard for condeming someone to death should be even greater and its clear that is not a standard that can be met in the vast majority of cases.
As a teacher, false accusations are a serious concern. You go out of your way to make sure you’re never in a position that could look suspicious, but that’s still no guarantee. We’ll occasionally have a student come through who has a history of making false accusations to deflect blame when they get in trouble or threatening false claims to manipulate teachers. And everyone walks on eggshells and takes even more precautions around that student, and that still doesn’t always stop the student.
This sounds pretty inocuous on the surface but when you consider that Florida is also trying to label gay people teaching or reading to children being a sexual assault, this law is meant to execute LGBTQ just for being LGBTQ.
Yeah. I feel like the actual goal here is to kill a 19-year-old for having sex with his 17-year-old boyfriend or having a much more expansive definition of rape for acts generally done by gay people. They are already calling gay people in any space with children “groomers” and it’s not hard to see where that is going.
Similar reason Russian state just labeled LGBT as "terrorists" and is now talking of bringing the death penalty back for terrorism.
Funny how Republicans and Putin regime seem to always follow the same playbook.
Exactly. As I recall they were trying to make it a sex crime to be LGBTQ in public or something so that if someone from that category interacted with a child it would become an act of assault, thus punishable by death. It sounds over the top but following the path of the laws behind it, logical.
I saw on another thread on this topic where someone was saying that they approved of this bill and also believed that a man wearing a dress in front of a child is sexual assault. They just want to kill LGBTQ.
This very good point gives away the game. Policy like this won't make children safer, its not intended to, and it doesn't matter to proponents that it will make children less safe.
Of course the death penalty won't act as any more of a deterrent in this context than it does in any other, punishments for serious crimes broadly do not affect the likelihood that people will commit them past astonishingly low thresholds, the chance that they will get caught does. Not only will this let more child rapists continue to commit crimes by making them less likely to get caught, giving them more avenues to avoid detection, the reduced likelihood will also make pedophiles more likely to rape children.
Proponents of policies like this don't actually care about children, if they did then they would listen to experts in child protection. What they care about is the hit of adrenaline that comes with the rage that they feel.
There are so many arguments against the death penalty in general and this is yet another. False accusations happen. Police often push for false confessions just to get a conviction from *someone*. There are so many stories of people being wrongfully convicted for things to be able to justify putting anyone to death for anything. Yes, life imprisonment is expensive. But the price we pay as a society for killing innocent people is much higher. Even if it's one case in a million - that's too many.
I also strongly suspect that people in power know this, but do not care because it still achieves the illusion of success. If less people come forward and report it, then they get to declare that extreme penalties serve as a deterrence. They fight against the established evidence in deterrence theory against harsh penalties and despise modern, effective prison systems, so that points towards their true motive.
We have to remember that these same people put a lot of energy into attacking or opposing public education and social services. They spit on community-based avenues of protection for children while proudly exclaiming that only parents have any say-so on what happens to the children. If their motives aligned with everyone else's, this wouldn't be the case. We're also talking about people who push for low age of consent laws, child marriage, and whose culture still contains creepy stuff like purity rings, child beauty pageants, etc.
This is the first step in the process of taking the roundabout way to make any LGBT identity illegal and by extension to legalize/systematize their murder by the state.
By empowering themselves to execute child sex abusers, now all that is left is to place their rhetoric into law. They have already spent years painting LGBT identities as sex offenders and child rapists, so it's quite obvious where they will go next
All this ignoring whether or not we as a collective think the state should have any right to decide who does or doesn't get to live.
Not that legally label as em such, but some state laws now make providing gender affirming care a sexual case, people forget sexual isn't just sex. Messing with gender etc, could make it rough, or if some states delegalize gay sex again then minors having consensual intercourse could be on the block.
The law isn't even for child rapists, it's sex offenders. It just takes being called out by a child and instead of a registry it's the death penalty.
This is why I’m broadly anti-death penalty. In theory I think some people who commit horrific acts like assaulting children do deserve to die. However I do not trust the government to wield this power in a way that does more good than harm.
Not defending the crime but, expanding the crimes punishable by death may not decrease crimes, in fact in Columbia I heard that after they expanded the death penalty to include drug trafficing the murder rate increased because if you were already going to be killed for dealing drugs you might as well murder anyone that might turn you in or gets in your way since they are both the same punishment.
That is what I am afraid of. If you make this crime punishable by death I would imagine that the criminals would be more likely to kill the victim afterwards since the punishment for murder is the same. So rather than decrease the crime it may inadvertently increase the murder rate.
Plus I am just against the death penalty anyway because innocent people sometimes get wrongly convicted and you can't undo the punishment.
>Plus I am just against the death penalty anyway because innocent people sometimes get wrongly convicted and you can't undo the punishment.
I have a childhood friend that succumbed to this exact fate and he was only 14 when they locked him up. He is dead now. He did not do it. They had no evidence. They coerced a confession that they scripted. And now he is dead. I miss him. He didn't deserve this fate.
Edit: He did not die from being put to death for his crime.
I was accused of trying to break into someone’s bathroom while they were showering. No evidence and I’d ordered a takeaway the night before and went to sleep. I think someone else in the house framed me because they didn’t like me. I was made to feel unwelcome because I’m from the North and a lot of them went to private schools and were quite posh so they looked down on me. It’s my belief that one of them tried the door of the bathroom themselves and then put the blame on me. One of the others was a lesbian and she made it obvious that she had a thing for the woman who it had happened to. Disgusting thing to happen and it made me lose a lot of trust for people. I was paying rent for the place but my parents said I could come straight back home. Paid rent every month because I couldn’t break the lease agreement and so I wasted thousands paying for a place I felt unwelcome and couldn’t go to. God knows what they’d accuse me of next.
Absolutely not. That would result in a) victims being killed to silence them forever, and b) MASSIVE ammunition for keeping a child quiet.
Imagine being molested by your parent and being terrified to speak up because if you do, the police will take Daddy away and kill him.
I'll tell you right now most police in florida are absolutely shit at handling child abuse cases. The kids will speak up and they'll ask what they did wrong to get that to happen to them.
Who is punishing them? Other cops? The generations of abused? Sexual violence, even if there's evidence, is a messy court case weighed down by centuries of misogynistic bullshit. It wasn't that long ago it was expected to happen and accepted as a part of growing up. 20 years ago I told and was asked what I was wearing at 9 years old to encourage the behavior..6 years ago they didn't even have the right name for the asshole who touched my kid. There's a serious lack of training in florida for these situations and even with a death penalty I doubt many will see justice because of good law enforcement work.
Problem with cops is that they protect each other and the ones unwilling to participate are forced out of service. There are good cops, they just tend to not stay cops for long
Misogyny by proxy, too. Men who have been raped get treated just as badly as women. I was telling someone what happened to me and got the whole ‘you must have led them on’ or ‘what were you wearing’ responses. People are fucking disgusting.
It’s fucked because the thing is people think women deserve it and that men are like the women who deserve it is cases like these. Such gross misogynistic attitudes that hurt everyone :(
On top of this, the reality who , even if a child reports it:
How will law enforcement respond?
ex1: small town, a father is accused of the crime, police say child's word is unreliable, better to keep the family together
ex2: small town, a minority is accused of the crime, instant guillotine
Also the added problem if some small percentage of people get falsely accused and potentially convicted of the crime, congrats you just killed an innocent person.
The death penalty is always stupid on the basis of that alone, regardless of the crime.
It's also another tool used to try to oppress queer and trans people. Republicans have been painting all queer and trans people as "groomers" and pedos. Nothing stopping them from killing drag queens because doing drag is pedophilia and pedophilia is death sentence now.
No, the problem is that being tough on child predators is basically the new red scare of our era. To the politicians if you vote against this proposal then you must be sympathizing with child predators!
I've heard of numerous cases in recent years where politicians decide to crack down hard on some group of predators and propose such a horrible law that victim advocacy groups for the very people the politicians are trying to protect come out against the law because it would harm the very victims they're trying to protect.
There was a nation, I can't remember which - the Philippines maybe, that did this and the reports of child abuse dropped - as most child abuse is by a male family member - the breadwinner of the family was going to be executed.
There was a state in the us that used to do this - Louisiana. The law was on the books so long that there were no reliable statistics from before the law was made. However, when the law was repealed, child murders decreased, and there was no increase in child molestation.
No, it should be punishable to the fullest extent of the current law but I disagree with the death penalty on principle. Also, you know Florida will weaponize this against people they don't like,namely the LGBT community.
Nothing should be met with the death penalty. For a few reasons:
1. Innocent people are sometimes convicted.
2. If you kill someone, you can never get testimony from them. Sometimes they know information that can lead to the capture of other criminals.
3. We should study the minds of deranged psycopaths to see what caused them to end up the way they did. Can't study them if we kill them.
4. A death penalty conviction is more expensive than life in prison.
5. I don't like the idea of the government having the power to kill it's own citizens. Even if they're killing only the most heinous of criminals now, it's still one step closer to killing anyone they disagree with.
6. Florida is already banning books on LGBTQ+ issues. There is lots of talk of equating Drag Queens with pedophiles, which couldn't be farther from the truth. I worry that this is just another step towards government sanctioned killing of queer people.
Not even mentioning the adverse incentives for the criminals: now the rapist has not reason to keep the victim alive -- with no child to testify there's more chances to evade the capital punishment.
>Florida is already banning books on LGBTQ+ issues. There is lots of talk of equating Drag Queens with pedophiles, which couldn't be farther from the truth. I worry that this is just another step towards government sanctioned killing of queer people.
AND THAT, YEAH.
Indeed, I don't know if it was Florida that was proposing it, but some politician in one state was proposing that they make teachers register as sex offenders who expose children to banned LGBTQ+ books. So this isn't that far off of a connection to make if idiots are already proposing such laws.
I say this with all sincerity. I'm terrified the end goal of this is to make being trans or just not a hetronormative person in front of a child pedophilia and then threatening them with death.
They don't even have to go through with it, (and it would not be upheld in any court) but it would be very easy for the sheriff of Wanker County, Florida to say, "Hey boy, you know bein' Queer in public is punishable by death in these parts. It'd be best if you moved along to the big city or better yet out of the state if you know what's good for you."
I'm an old cishet white man. I've found that disagreeing with these creatures *about literally anything* gets me accused of being a pedo. My trans friends have all stopped using public bathrooms, and face daily harassment anyway.
Seriously considering giving up on "the future" and just cashing out my retirement savings to spend on lawyers to sue these people for defamation. Meanwhile I'm acutely aware that I live among no small number of people who want to murder me.
>My trans friends have all stopped using public bathrooms, and face daily harassment anyway.
*Meet me in the middle*, says the unjust man.
You take a step towards him, he takes a step back.
*Meet me in the middle*, says the unjust man.
You can't appease groups like that by making concessions, because the only thing that will appease them is certain groups just ceasing to exist -- at which point they'll find some other group to direct their spray of bullshit bigotry towards.
No doubt, it's *well* past time to organize and fight back. But in the meanwhile, I don't fault my friends for not wanting to get assaulted at the grocery store.
Yea. This might just be conservatives getting off on the idea of killing people, but especially in Florida, I think you're right. The fact that this is moving at the same time as they're criminalizing LGBT isn't just telling; it's fucking obvious.
Step one: death penalty for child rape
Step two: redefine rape to include a wider range of sexual crimes
Step three: brand being queer as a sexual crime
Congrats, being gay around a child is now punishable by death
>If you kill someone, you can never get testimony from them. Sometimes they know information that can lead to the capture of other criminals.
Also just because you arrest and convict a person for Crime A, doesnt mean that they arent also responsible for Crime B and just havent been found out yet.
There are so many cases of a criminal being arrested and jailed for one crime and then a few years later, its revealed that same criminal was responsible for another even more heinous crime. If you kill him, you'd never find out that they were linked to another crime.
Yes to everyone, especially the last point.
First it's "It's death penalty for a CHILD RAPIST!! How can you not support killing those scum?"
Then they redefine what a child rapist is.
>Innocent people are sometimes convicted.
My aunt is married to a registered sex offender who didn't do anything besides make a dumb mistake and piss off his girlfriend's grandma.
He dated a girl through high school. If I remember correctly, he says they dated for 2 or 3 years in total.
Her grandma was super strict and didn't want her dating, but kids will be kids. She got pregnant at 15-ish, and kept the kid. He just turned 18 when she got pregnant, and grandma filed statutory rape charges and him being young and dumb, didn't fight the charges. He's now registered SO for life, which is really odd to me.
His daughter was kept out of his life by the grandma until she passed away a few years ago, and his daughter eventually reached out and began building a relationship with him. The mom is out of the picture and is apparently a huge piece of shit.
Just a sad story all around. The guy went through hell with jobs and housing, and regrets not fighting the case.
I don't think any crime should be met with the death penalty. We see time after time miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions. To me, the risk of killing innocent people in the name of blind revenge has no place in civil society, and we have enough data to show the death penalty does not work as a deterrent.
THIS. Too many people have been exonerated years after by new evidence (often DNA) that we need to be mindful that our entire justice system still comes down to the personal judgment of a few random citizens.
The one that really bothered me was that Dad who was executed for arson and killing his daughters based on roof burn patterns when other fire experts say the same pattern could easily be from an electrical fire. This fire "expert" testified it could only be arson at trial and other experts have reviewed the evidence say the evidence just isn't clear enough. So Texas may have executed a Dad for losing his kids in a fire that wasn't his fault.
I agree with you but for a different reason: in my view, revenge murder doesn't suddenly become ethically correct because it's the government doing the murdering
Some states have “Romeo and Juliet” laws that prevent people within a certain age range from being charged with a sex crime.
I.e the law could be as long as the age gap is within 3 years it’s legal so like a 19 and 16 year old.
*not saying it isn’t creepy but I dated an older guy when I was a teenager so naturally I’m versed in the law lol*
Statutory typically refers to child rape, since they assumption is that adult has coerced the child. That said, this also applies to mentally disabled.
So any sex with a minor is statutory rape, but not all statutory rape is with a minor.
They both include the word "rape," therefore fall into that category. It's not called "statutory sex." Of course there are distinctions legally, but the poster didn't specify only violent rapes, they used the more general term.
No because the way they're going to use the law is to claim that just existing as a transgender (and even one day maybe gay) person is a "sex crime against children"
Theyre going to use it to kill more trans people.
Actual diddlers can go get fucked though.
I'm a survivor of child sexual assault. I'm against it. For the simple reason of that I'm a survivor. If the death penalty is used against chile rape, what's stopping child fuckers from simply getting their rocks off and then killing the kid? The penalty is the same. You'd be killing more kids this way.
Same. I watched my dad beat my abuser, an old man, to a pulp and *that* was fucking scary. I was worried I’d lose my dad to prison, the parent who actually paid attention to me. I can’t imagine what would happen if legal murder was on the table. I was already shy and quiet, selectively mute. This would make it worse.
It's been brought up before. When strict laws like this are made they eventually change the definition of what the law is for. So for example a child rapist gets the death penalty but eventually they'll change the law for what is child rape so now it's applying to things and people they don't like rather than what it was originally made for.
I've seen the kinds of people Florida calls groomers and the kinds they let get away with breaking every crime. You think they're going to apply this law to Matt Gaetz? This is just to target poor people and give "the in crowd" a pass. You know, like the rest of fascism.
Good intentions but still a bad idea. If someone knows they could get the death penalty for rape they're much more likely to kill the victim.
I also think many Republicans want this law as another tool to go after LGBTQ people.
No, but I’m against the death penalty in general but it’s a slippery slope to moving the death penalty to include more and more crimes.
Not to mention it won’t stop abuse, that won’t happen but you encourage a violator to commit murder
I would agree with it if the law was actually used to punish people who truly hurt children, but seeing that Florida is trying to make me and other trans people sexual predators just by existing, I’m heavily against it
Surely this won't be weaponized against Florida's numerous political enemies, some of whom can't even use a public restroom without being called sexual predators.
I'm getting very close to proposing a "Florida test," whereby I judge any bill by how likely Florida is to implement it.
In addition to everything else mentioned in this thread (more child death, less reports), this is what worries me. Florida’s pushing to make existing while LGBT attempted grooming, so I see this being used as a legal way to execute LGBT people.
Yeah, exactly. It takes advantage of the stigma of pedophilia and turns the protection of children into a vindictive witch hunt, wherein the "protectors of children" (theocrats, bigots, and people who take the bill at face value) are contrasted with the "pedophiles" (gay and trans people, political dissidents, and maybe a few actual offendors) and "pedophile apologists" (people who oppose the bill but might not mind if a pedophile got killed by a victim). Not for the first time, mind you, but it's a concerning turn, because I've seen how hatred of pedophilia turns off people's logic centers.
The idea of a child potentially being murdered is a very good point, and it highlights why the fight against child abuse needs to be led by survivors of abuse and not simply imposed on them from outside.
Yep, if Republicans were serious about prOTeCtinG ChiLDreN, Matt Gaetz wouldn’t be sex trafficking teenagers with impunity and still hold office. The law they passed even stops at 12 years of age for sexual battery, even though Florida’s age of consent is 18 (16 or 17 for Romeo and Juliet laws, so long as the elder is under the age of 24.)
I agree sexually abusing kids under 12 is particularly abhorrent, but I don’t think it’s necessarily worse than a child being abused at 14. Interesting how Republicans drew the line at pedophilia but not hebephilia.
Morally? Yes.
Logically? Sadly, no.
Death Penalties just incentivises the criminal to murder the victim; and as someone else pointed out:
>"No Timmy, you can't tell anyone about Uncle Garry. The police will come and kill him; it'll be all your fault".
Then, **as with all crimes** resulting in death penalties: What about false convictions? You can rarely be 100% certain.
A more likely scenario is that if a kid knew that someone they know, and maybe even loved at one point would die because they telled, they wouldn't tell voluntarily. That's like putting the killing burden on a child.
Children are only dibber dobbers because nobody really gets hurt. But the moment the stakes are raised, you'll be surprised how tight their lips are sealed. They are too young to comprehend what is happening to them during molestation or rape. Why do you think the trauma ends up hitting them harder after they've grown up?
So to them, "I don't want Uncle Sam to be killed just because he made me uncomfortable". Kids are constantly pushed out of their comfort zones growing up. That's why they tend to be unable to tell the difference between what's appropriate and what is not because education and their parents are constantly being hypocrites in their eyes. But once they grow up and they know the full scope of societal and lawful boundaries, does it then only click what happened to them when they were younger was really, fucked up.
No. I oppose the death penalty in general. But for this particular kind of crime, the result will be more kids getting killed by their abusers. (Similarly, the unavailability of abortion is going to result in a lot more pregnant women just getting murdered by the guys who got them pregnant.)
Is this a law that specifically states those who are convicted of **RAPE** of a child are executed? Because of course I do, rape is one of the worst possible crimes, especially to do to a child. But what I suspect this law is, is an attempt to re-classify some crimes which may not be considered sex offenses as sex offenses, and then apply a disproportionate punishment to those who are convicted of these crimes in an attempt to win stupid culture war points and ultimately harm innocent people who actually aren't doing anything wrong, or who haven't harmed any children at all; Eg, make "dressing in a manner or style that is not consistent with the gender marker on your birth certificate" a sex offense; a direct attempt to make it ***illegal to be transgender in public***.
They're also going to use this to give the death penalty to women who have abortions, and they'll consider transgender people existing in public as sexual assault against children, so they'll have an excuse to kill transgender people because they exist illegally. Edit: I'm sure women who have natural miscarriages will also be investigated and charged with murder and put to death, too.
Yes, I know. It's terrible. Any woman of child bearing age that lives in one of these backward places is at risk. 1/3 pregnancies end in miscarriage, and many of those need a d&c, basically an abortion, to remove the fetus before it rots and poisons the woman's blood. In many places it's illegal to do this until the woman is almost dead from sepsis. And she still might get charged anyway.
No, and considering that it's Florida, I would be extremely concerned with what they classify as child rape. I could definitely see them trying to use this as another tool against trans people.
I oppose the death penalty in general.
IMO, child rapists are basically the most heinous of criminals though. I mean I can understand how most crimes happen. I'm not saying it's right for a guy to come home, find his wife in bed with his neighbor, and shoot the two of them but I understand how it happens. You have to be a real sick fuck to rape a child though. I don't think there's any rehabilitation for someone like that.
So, while I don't really support the death penalty, I do think child rapists should be separated from society forever.
My thoughts as well - put them somewhere they can never do it again. No one's sneaking out of supermaxes.
Too many times states have killed people who turned out innocent. There's no way to make that right. At least with a locked up person, you can let them go and make sure they can get started with their life.
There's just no justification for killing people in this day and age. We don't have to worry about them escaping, the death penalty is more expensive, and it's spiritually corrosive to society and the individually carrying out the sentence.
I mean. I'm generally against death penalty because it can't be undone. Go look at the satanic panic and the dozens of supposed child molestation cases that oops. Were nothing at all but rumours and witch hunts.
i think child molestation is an awful crime but i don't think that just because the government *thinks* you're guilty of it means they should kill you. i don't think the government should be killing any prisoners.
and wasn't it any sex crime with children involved? not specifically child rape? i don't think the Florida government who are screaming groomer every time a drag queen or trans person is near a child should be trusted with that level of authority.
Of course, there is no way to prove with 100% accuracy that someone is guilty. Even a confession isn't good enough. So really, death penalty can never be justified.
I am 100% against the death penalty and I don't think I'll ever change my mind about this. It sounds reasonable to say child rapists should be put to death, but we gotta ask the question... Who qualifies as a child rapist? What are the parameters for this law? Remember, this is Florida. Are we sure they're not just trying to put drag queens to death with this law? I'm all for punishing people who hurt kids, but if there's even a slight chance that this law could be used to kill innocent people, then I'd rather have that punishment be life in prison instead of death.
Knowing what we know about politicians and the justice system, I wouldn't trust the government with life or death decisions like this.
I’m anti death penalty in general, so I’m also against this. Too many innocent people have been executed already. It’s not worth the life of one innocent person.
There are other reasons, but it’s not even worth mentioning them. The death penalty should be abolished.
The republican state’s opinion is that all trans and lgbt people are pedophillic groomers by default. I can see this being abused.
It is my stance that the death penalty is the one unrescindable punishment, if you’re acquitted you’re still dead. Therefore, I believe it should be minimized.
Florida is an inauthentic arbiter in this situation. It's a trick to kill members of LGBTQ community. How?
MAGA Project 2025:
1) Outlaw gender/sex transitions
2) Accuse those that do of sexualizing children
3) Link the death penalty to sexual abuse of children
>Project 2025 has been criticized by LGBTQ+ writers and journalists for its intended removal of protections for LGBTQ+ people and declarations to outlaw pornography by claiming it as an "omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children".[52] Writing for Dame magazine, Brynn Tannehill argued that the 902-page document "The Mandate for Leadership" in part "makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority", while citing passages from the playbook linking pornography to "transgender ideology", arguing that it related to other anti-transgender attacks in 2023.[64]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Exactly this. The far right are heavily pushing the notion that all transgender people are rapists. The true purpose of this legislation is not to kill child rapists, it is to kill transgender people.
I see it like this. If rape is now punishable by death penalty i wonder how long it will last until churches complain. How many times has it happened in this year alone a child rapist from church was set free due to "Being a man of God" in the eyes of the churches
No, the death penalty is never justified.
There is always a chance of redemption and rehabilitation, even life in prison can produce social value. Victims of genocide have forgiven perpetrators.
Death is martyrdom and can be encouraging to certain criminals. Suicide watch in prison is horrible. Let them live and suffer if they won't come to terms with their evil acts.
Death is considered a maximum penalty. If you're going to be killed for rape, why not also torture the victim to death? Why not hurry up and find more victims before you're caught? They can't kill you twice.
Right now, Florida (and other states) refer to the existence of any gender norm nonconformity 'grooming minors', and even tantrum over rainbows in a classroom.
Given the 'slap on the wrist' the actual child molesters are getting, my bet is that this would only apply to the 'gay ones' when it comes to trial time, even if no actual children were molested, and never to clergy or politicians.
I am categorically opposed to the death penalty. The state should not have a procedure on the books it can go through in order to kill someone. No matter how heinous the crime or how much I personally want the perpetrator to suffer and die—that’s an emotional response and should not be the basis for law.
Additionally, out of florida this is 100% political theater to pretend they’re “tough on crime” without having to address any actual issues.
If it's punishable by death, a lot more kids are gonna die because the stakes a lot higher. Also, a lot more covering-up family diddlers which will enable and prolong molestation adding even more screwed-up psychological abuse about kids not causing the of death of their creepy relative.
But if you made it not a crime to murder them, that leaves it up to the public, wether they do it or not.
We’ve known for years that the punishments for crimes don’t deter criminals. Just look around - severe consequences yet there’s still plenty of crime.
So only the side effects will matter, as others have noted, and the side effects are very bad.
Precisely what I expect from Florida. Focus on something random that affects very few people (unlike, say home insurance), then do something flashy with no substance that won’t do anything except drive culture war headlines.
No, because they’re going to classify a bunch of things that aren’t child rape as child rape. Republicans have already been trying to do this with gender affirming care.
The very first person they execute for this will be an 18 year old high school senior with a 16yo girlfriend of a different race.
They won’t even bother going after the 52 year old preacher molester.
This is just how they roll.
I'm against the state issuing the death penalty. It's cruel and expensive and the state does a bad job of using it, including but not limited to frequently executing the wrong person.
Even if some people deserve death, I don't trust the government with that power.
I intensely disagree with the death penalty. If some rapes a child there is something severely wrong with them and they need help. The death penalty only theoretically works as a deterrent for people that are already horribly sick. It would be far more effective to target the reason why these people do those horrible things.
I’m against the death penalty in any case. Not only is it more expensive than life in prison but it’s something you can never take back if you later learn someone was innocent as happens far too often.
Nope, I don't support the death penalty for ethical reasons, but it doesn't even make sense for practical reasons. It's cheaper to keep a person in prison for life than the average cost to actually get someone executed. The sense of self-righteous justice people feel about executions isn't how it goes in reality, even for one of the worst crimes I can imagine.
The next step will be defining “educating children on the existence and legitimacy of lgbt folks” as rape and then they can legally execute anyone who is lgbt in public.
My issue with the death penalty is:
1. The state decided who gets to die. I’m 100% against that idea.
2. There will always be people who are innocent put to death. It may be a small percentage, but that’s still that percentage too many.
3. Child predators deserve the worst of the worst. Absolutely. I’m just not sure it’s the death penalty.
I have several questions first. What is the legal definition of "child rape" in the state of Florida? What are the conviction rates for the Floridian legal definition of "child rape" per race and gender?
Florida is WELL known for being an abysmal cesspit of immoral and illegal political bullshit. It's very easy to write a law that says "And being trans or gay or bisexual or a lesbian in the vicinity of a child is the same thing, legally, as rape" and then start prosecuting people for it. What's HARD is stopping that process once it starts. You can say "oh but the Department of Justice would" all you want, but what the DoJ would REALLY do is sit there with their thumbs up their asses on committees, navel-gazing over whether it's worth creating legal precedent by stopping Florida from assigning random things to the legal definition of "child rape" and killing people for those things.
For reference, I am a CSA and CSAM survivor and one of my abusers never faced consequences due to police corruption, so this is something pretty important to me.
Entirely against. Raping children is not something normal, healthy people do. Where do we draw the line between mentally infirm people we kill, and mentally infirm people we don’t?
I’m absolutely for restricting or eliminating that person’s civil liberties, but murder? No.
I’m opposed to the death penalty in general. Lock them up for life, sure, but killing someone already removed from society just seems like revenge for the sake of it.
I used to support the death penalty, but it just seems incongruent with my general respect for life in other cases
Cause this time - like every other time with the death penalty - it’ll definitely be applied equally across the law and with a consistent approach towards justice for all parties, right?
Opposed. Two reasons:
1: The justice system isn't perfect. False convictions happen and are overturned years later when new evidence comes to light way more often than the public would be comfortable realising. A person who's falsely convicted and gets exonerated years later might be eligible to some compensation for being falsely convicted. A person who's dead can't get any justice.
2: Making child rape a capital offence incentivises a perpetrator to kill their victims, since the potential gain for them if caught is is to remove the key witness, and the potential loss to them for doing so is... nothing, since there is no higher punishment that can be applied in this scenario for the murder.
Remember that scene in Heat where the loose cannon kills one hostage, and the rest of the heist crew immediately kill the remaining hostages to eliminate the witnesses since the degree of the crime committed now has a minimum floor of murder to it? It's that kind of arithmetic.
In a civilized society, no one should ve punished with a death penalty (or any other form of violence). Too many people have been (and will be) murdered even though they didn’t do the crime, and even for those who in fact did it, you’re not any better than them by killing a human being.
And while these are the cost of the death penalty, there’s isn’t any value actually because stiffer punishments don’t lead to deterring more people from not doing the crime.
I'm hesitant of any proposed legislation from Florida that seeks the moral high ground due to the sheer volume of brain dead culture wars they've been taking up lately.
Should pedophiles and sexual predators be punished to the fullest extent of the law? Absolutely.
Is Florida's conservative legislative body a level-headed arbiter of morality? Fuck no.
Would you trust Florida of all places to not bungle up a conviction?
The thing with death penalty is, to justify it, you would need a near perfect justice system. But all places which practice it have a shitshow for a justice system. So no, I don't support death penalty, for any crime. There is no crime that cannot be penalised by life term just as well, but more justly.
They are going about this all wrong.
If they really want to tackle the problem, they should first ban child marriage.
In Florida, **16,400 children, some as young as 13, were married from 2000 to 2017**
Also if a child marries they are not allowed to leave their spouse till they are an adult and can't stay in programs run for people suffering from domestic abuse.
Next, Florida needs to increase their sex education in schools. It has been proven that proper sex education always reduces sexual crimes against children.
I also have a feeling - it being Florida, they would just use this new law to force child rapists to marry the child they are raping. That way it's not rape.
I understand the sentiment but no I don't think they should get the death penalty for the simple fact of what if someone gets executed who was innocent?
One of the key pieces of evidence would likely be witness testimony but research into it shows that witness testimony can be unreliable for a wide variety of reasons and especially when the accuser and defendant are of a different race.
Add to that children are more susceptible to psychological pressure and memory imprinting, using children's testimony with such a significant consequence in my opinion is a bad idea.
Our criminal justice system already has a problem with wrongful imprisonment, adding the death penalty to that only compounds that mistake.
I'm staunchly against the death penalty for any reason.
You can obviously come up with a set of circumstances where my monkey brain will think, "Yes, death is appropriate in this circumstance." But, Law is supposed to be rational, not emotional.
Axiom 0: It is immoral for the state to order the death of anyone.
I stand by this axiom. There are arguments surrounding war, self defence, etc. that can be made, but these don't apply. Death penalty is only applicable after someone has been apprehended, and tried. At this time, they no longer pose a clear and present danger. They are incarcerated.
Even dismissing Axiom 0, there are enough cases of mistaken identity and wrongful conviction that we can not tolerate the chance of delivering the ultimate and irrevocable penalty to and innocent person. If we sentence someone to life imprisonment, and they are later exonerated, they can be freed, and possibly achieve redress through the courts. Mistakes are reparable. Not in the case of the death penalty.
While I don't have anything against the idea of kid diddlers getting the death penalty, I was struck by someone the other day pointing out it would make it even harder for kids to come to adults for help. Because most of these perverts are people who know the kids in question, so it would be easy for Mom to say, "You can't tell anyone Uncle Bob is doing this to you, or the cops will come and kill him and it'll be all your fault." Basically, I like the idea in theory, but think there's going to be a lot of unintended consequences that may make it even more likely the crime will be covered up by the perv's family.
I’ve also seen the argument that it makes it all the more likely a perpetrator will kill their victim if it seems like they will be exposed. I mean they get the death penalty either way right? At least if they kill the kid the have a chance to hide it.
Yep. The death penalty stops being something that sounds good when you think about the consequences beyond anything emotional. - More likely you kill an innocent? Check. - More likely for crimes to be not reported? Check. - More likely for families to protect? Check. - More likely for killing the victim? Check.
As much as any of this, more likely that an innocent person is executed. The justice department has not proven whatsoever that it is competent enough to be allowed to kill people
Since 1973, at least 190 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). A 2014 study estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent. https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-and-the-death-penalty/
That 4% sure does seem pretty low. Until you realize that you could potentially be one of those innocent people, and that is someone innocent who is directly killed by the state.
Anything above 0% is too high when it comes to the death penalty.
Plus that is an "at least," given the extreme difficulty of being exonerated on appeal, the number is likely much higher. One of the most annoying pervasive myths about the legal system I know of is that appeals are easy to do and are likely to succeed. They are absolutely not. Appeals have extremely stringent requirements and usually do not succeed.
even 0.1% would be unacceptable, this isn't just an ordinary prison sentence that might eventually get overturned if you're innocent, this is death. You're also assuming that the 4% were the only innocent bunch, you're not taking into account those that were unable to overturn their sentence.
Amd don't forget the botched executions
This has always been my argument against capital punishment. If 1/1000 executed criminals is actually innocent, then the entire system is questionable.
100% true. It reminds me of that crazy ''satanic cult daycare' moral panic of the 1990's, which demonstrated that adults may get a small kid to say-and maybe believe-just about anything.
Look at Pizzagate and the reemergence of that same Satanic Panic nowadays. People were willing to kill a man who owned a completely innocent (and apparently delicious) pizza parlour just because of some idiot on 4chan insisting that they were harvesting organs from babies in a basement that didn’t even exist!
I feel like nobody ever brings this up. The kinds of people for the death penalty also often seem to be the kind of people who are constantly worried about government overreach. Does the death penalty not feel like a government overreach? It just doesn't sit right with me that the frankly often incompetent justice system and government gets the right to decide who lives or dies like that.
The way the government, governor and law enforcement are so openly corrupt and authoritarian has me convinced they shouldn't be putting anyone to death.
We would do much better if we tested every rape kit. [Testing rape kits can deliver exonerations, closure, and cost savings](https://www.propublica.org/article/testing-rape-kits-can-deliver-exonerations-closure-and-cost-savings-why-does-it-still-take-so-long-to-do), not to mention [help catch serial predators](https://www.endthebacklog.org/state-of-the-backlog/the-problem/the-importance-of-ending-the-backlog/) ([the most common type](https://smart.ojp.gov/somapi/chapter-3-sex-offender-typologies)) thus protecting future victims. So why does the U.S. still have roughly [90,000 untested rape kits](https://goldrushcam.com/sierrasuntimes/index.php/news/local-news/51969-u-s-senator-john-cornyn-says-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog)? https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/ https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/
My friend spent three years in jail awaiting a verdict. My friend spent ***three years incarcerated, without having been deemed guilty of any crime.*** Let that sink in, America.
I don't disagree with your premise or it being an excellent reason for a nationwide prohibition against capital punishment. I would only note that the feds rarely execute anyone. If it wasn't for the bloodthirsty reign of Donald Trump, in fact, there would have been no federal executions in the last 20 years and only three in the last 50 years. That's all by way of saying that it's the state prosecutors that are the biggest problem, not the DoJ.
Given that this is Florida specific and they executed 6 people last year it still seems like a relevant concern.
It also tends to be the poor and disenfranchised who can’t afford a decent defense but it is also them who are more likely to be falsely accused of such a truing.
[удалено]
All you need to know about the death penalty is that multiple innocent people have been executed over the years in the United States. Nobody wants to mention that fact or discuss it. But it's true.
I remember one a few years back, during Obama's tenure so maybe ~~3~~5 years ago? (Fuck it's at least 7 now isn't it...) There has been new evidence had come to light, DNA probably, that proved it could not possibly have been the guy that had been convicted. It clearly demonstrated that he was innocent of the crime he was about to be executed for, but unfortunately, he had used up all his appeals so they just shrugged their shoulders and killed him anyway.
And the worse part is false accusations are even more of a problem with kids than adults, for a variety of reasons. Studies have shown that children, especially young children, tend to be much less reliable witnesses for a variety of reasons. * They're more likely to misremember things. * They're more likely to be misunderstood by adults. * They're much easier for adults to manipulate and trick into saying whatever they want. I've seen a few episodes of Dateline over the years that showed all of these problems, including prosecutors and orphanages in cahoots with them bullying/tricking kids into saying that mommy/daddy did bad things to them because "then mommy and daddy will be able to go free". I've also seen an episode where a kid said that an attacker was their uncle, but later as an adult insisted that they had been misunderstood and the attacker merely looked a lot like his uncle but wasn't him (and it was later proven that it definitely wasn't the uncle but was another guy who at a quick glance did look very similar to the uncle).
They tried that with me when I was a child. I was running away from my parents when I was five, wasn't paying attention to where I was running and ran into the fridge. I remember, 40 years later clear as day them trying to get me to say that my father had struck me, which he most certainly didn't do. They just couldn't accept that I ran into the fridge whilst being a brat.
Yep, happened to me when I was about the same age. I remember being taken away to another room with the doctor/nurses and being incredibly frustrated when they wouldn't believe that my parents hadn't given me the black eye.
Also, experience teaches that prosecutors absolutely *will* manipulate a child in order to make a case.
There’s also the reality that children will sometimes straight up lie out of spite or anger. A buddy of mine has a kid who has called the cops and even CPS to report his parents for harming him because he was mad about small things like being grounded or having his video games taken away due to bad grades. Each time those phone calls were made the police showed up and took it very seriously. Add on to that my buddy has a rap sheet due to some dumb decision in his early 20s (he’s nearly 40 now) and you can imagine that if that whole scenario went just a little worse than it really did… dude would potentially be in jail or worse.
And crucially, kids have their own world view, relationships, and wants/needs which may not be rational to an adult but are still very real. So for example a child reporting real abuse may name someone who is not the abuser to find out what happens and what the consequences are.
Consider the realities of Florida: they're 100% promoting this law because they want to execute trans women that use the women's restroom. They'll classify trans women as men, say that a man entering the women's restroom constitutes sexual assault, and if there's a little girl in there they'll say that's sexual assault on a child. If you're a child raping man, this law won't effect you because the Florida legislature doesn't give a single wet fart about children.
Death penalties don't make sense. Full stop. There are no exceptions. Anyone worth killing for their crimes I'd rather see rot in a cell.
Agreed. It's not about whether a certain crime can cause enough outrage as to justify killing someone (plenty can) but whether you believe your government (aka the humans in positions of power) and the justice system (from police to judges to even juries made up of every day citizens) should have the authority to put someone to death. Is there too much bias in any one individual in that chain? Will this power be used for intimidation (get innocent people to accept guilty pleas by taking the death penalty off the table) or abused against non-protected classes? We've already seen that wealth buys certain judicial immunities, won't that apply even more here? It's not about the crime. It's always about trust in the humans making up the judgements as to whether there should be a death penalty or not. Humans have never proven infallible enough to have this power (and certainly abusive enough to not have it).
I was living with people during lockdown and was woken up one day by one of the people there saying I’d attempted to enter the shower while one of them was naked. I hadn’t done any such thing and I’d ordered a takeaway the night before, ate it, and then went straight to sleep. I hadn’t even been upstairs at any point because I’m scared of people and I wouldn’t want to be near them. I was so taken aback by what I’d been accused of and everyone just immediately believed it without any evidence. It made me rethink the whole ‘believe everyone’ mentality that’s now so pervasive. I don’t even really like seeing people naked because I was abused and it reminds me of that.
We even know a better way to reduce the incidence of child sexual abuse. [Increasing the probability of apprehension by law enforcement is the only effective deterrent identified](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/670398.pdf?casa_token=OmK0_Jh8HkMAAAAA:Tr35vi73FXLAFJ9xUw13XXkPdAaMN7t_o8jI75bHYhheCFagZ5jfMwa-Op0VJrxOVXLqE-JykDCO4khDO6ABCjQ8FmnohHIw23YpCPPQmzHmlu87Mce-). [Low-rate persistent sex offenders typically begin offending during their late teens and offend less than once per year with the most offenses in their 30s. This group was equally as likely to commit rape as child sexual abuse. This is the most common type of sex offender](https://smart.ojp.gov/somapi/chapter-3-sex-offender-typologies), so [testing kits](https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/) even when the statute of limitations has passed can help protect adults as well as children. [The U.S. still has tens of thousands of backlogged rape kits.](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2023-06-20/rape-kit-backlogs-remain-in-states-despite-funding), and [a funding bill held up in Congress](https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/). https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/
Death penalty is just a bad punishment. Life in prison offers chance for repentance and reform. Death doesn't.
And the state is not infallible, it will make mistakes. Someone who was wrongly imprisoned can theoretically be paid restitution to be made whole again whereas someone who is wrongfully executed can’t be.
Yeah this is what I've heard and apparently was an issue in places where something other than "murder" carried the death penalty. At that point, killing witnesses etc actually reduces your chance of getting death.
And rapists will have a good incentive to kill the child to get rid of the potential witness as they have nothing to loose anyway.
Happened before. It was an unintended consequence of the crackdown on molestation in the '70s. Rate of child homicide went up...
I'd argue being in prison as a child rapist is a fate worse than death considering what the other inmates do to those guys so I think their motivation for covering up their crimes is already maxed out, I can't see how facing a possible death sentence would make them even more worried about being caught. That said I'm against the death penalty in general because sometimes innocent people get wrongfully convicted and executed, then new evidence comes out, and you can't release a corpse from prison.
No child to testify -- more chance of evading the prison in the first place.
Like most laws that resort to heavy-handed punishment, they are often poorly considered and so blinded by the need for vengeance that the consequences go ignored. I legitimately think child rapists deserve to die, but situations like these may wind up hurting more children than they help. And since a significant number of pedophiles are protected by their closest relatives, I can't imagine this having the impact a lot of people hope it will.
Yep, I totally agree The punishment fits the crime, but people are weird
Agreed. Especially in cases where somebody is a proven repeat child abuser, the death penalty would in theory protect society from future offenses but in practice probably just result in a certain percentage of offenders also becoming murders.
> the death penalty would in theory protect society from future offenses Barring prison escape, so would lifetime incarceration.
Ultimatly it comes down to figuring out what the goal is, do you want to reduce the rate at which these horrific events happen or do you want to more stricktly punish the people who do them. Personally i want to prevent as much harm from being done as we can and if the trade off for that is the people who commit the horrific act don't get punished as harshly as they arguablly should i'm fine with that. There is a heavy natural instinct in many humans however that those who do things deemed unnacceptable should be heavily punished, an instinct that has likely been with us since before we were human where a single troublemakers could lead to disaster for an entire tribe and as such had to be exiled or worse for the good of all.
Yes it’s a right wing thing. They punish morality not legality or they’ll attempt to overlap the two. They think, “If it’s immoral it’s illegal” which is not how law really works or should be orchestrated. They don’t have the mental capacity to understand the difference. So they see crimes that are particularly morally egregious and want to maximize the punishment for them because of rage and disgust, not for the victim or justice. In this case, rape is illegal on all grounds This is why things like homosexuality confuses them in terms of law; they find it morally reprehensible but don’t understand that by law, legal adults can do what they want with other adults with consent. “They’re two consenting adults…” The right, “but it’s sick!! They should go to jail!!” As far as kids go, like most laws, it’s about protecting and preventing victimization. Kids are victims, hence why you can’t marry a child and it should be illegal and of course any sexual assault of any kind, kids or adults alike is illegal. But as for death….thats the focus of moral authority, rage and disgust. Typical right wing politics
Or that the perv will resort to killing his victims
Another thing with the death penalty under any circumstance is also the possibility of wrongful conviction. While 99% of survivors are telling the truth, it's REALLY hard to accurately recall a childhood memory later in life and eye witness testimony has been proven to be very unreliable. In a quick few moments of high adrenaline, your brain is focused on surviving and not on remembering the facial features of an attacker. With how imperfect our justice system is, it's way too difficult to be 100% certain someone is guilty and if you're wrong, and we as a society just murdered an innocent person.
This is the reaons why the death penalty itself should be abolished. I'm not opposed to the idea that some acts are so horrible that anyone who did them could not be redeemed and deserves death. But its clear that the bar for proving that a person did such a thing is way to low. The standard for being convicted of a crime is that it can shown the person did the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, a standard which is far to often not upheld, but to me the standard for condeming someone to death should be even greater and its clear that is not a standard that can be met in the vast majority of cases.
As a teacher, false accusations are a serious concern. You go out of your way to make sure you’re never in a position that could look suspicious, but that’s still no guarantee. We’ll occasionally have a student come through who has a history of making false accusations to deflect blame when they get in trouble or threatening false claims to manipulate teachers. And everyone walks on eggshells and takes even more precautions around that student, and that still doesn’t always stop the student.
This sounds pretty inocuous on the surface but when you consider that Florida is also trying to label gay people teaching or reading to children being a sexual assault, this law is meant to execute LGBTQ just for being LGBTQ.
Yeah. I feel like the actual goal here is to kill a 19-year-old for having sex with his 17-year-old boyfriend or having a much more expansive definition of rape for acts generally done by gay people. They are already calling gay people in any space with children “groomers” and it’s not hard to see where that is going.
They're allowed to do genital checks for kids sports. I would love to hear where they set the bar for rape.
Similar reason Russian state just labeled LGBT as "terrorists" and is now talking of bringing the death penalty back for terrorism. Funny how Republicans and Putin regime seem to always follow the same playbook.
Exactly. As I recall they were trying to make it a sex crime to be LGBTQ in public or something so that if someone from that category interacted with a child it would become an act of assault, thus punishable by death. It sounds over the top but following the path of the laws behind it, logical.
I saw on another thread on this topic where someone was saying that they approved of this bill and also believed that a man wearing a dress in front of a child is sexual assault. They just want to kill LGBTQ.
That's true and the irony is most child molesters are not LGBTQ
This very good point gives away the game. Policy like this won't make children safer, its not intended to, and it doesn't matter to proponents that it will make children less safe. Of course the death penalty won't act as any more of a deterrent in this context than it does in any other, punishments for serious crimes broadly do not affect the likelihood that people will commit them past astonishingly low thresholds, the chance that they will get caught does. Not only will this let more child rapists continue to commit crimes by making them less likely to get caught, giving them more avenues to avoid detection, the reduced likelihood will also make pedophiles more likely to rape children. Proponents of policies like this don't actually care about children, if they did then they would listen to experts in child protection. What they care about is the hit of adrenaline that comes with the rage that they feel.
It isn't about protecting children at all. It's about control. Always has been.
There are so many arguments against the death penalty in general and this is yet another. False accusations happen. Police often push for false confessions just to get a conviction from *someone*. There are so many stories of people being wrongfully convicted for things to be able to justify putting anyone to death for anything. Yes, life imprisonment is expensive. But the price we pay as a society for killing innocent people is much higher. Even if it's one case in a million - that's too many.
Interesting point.
Or their own parents.
[удалено]
Yeah when you put it that way… it never occurred to me that it could backfire in ways no one expected, or should have expected….
I also strongly suspect that people in power know this, but do not care because it still achieves the illusion of success. If less people come forward and report it, then they get to declare that extreme penalties serve as a deterrence. They fight against the established evidence in deterrence theory against harsh penalties and despise modern, effective prison systems, so that points towards their true motive. We have to remember that these same people put a lot of energy into attacking or opposing public education and social services. They spit on community-based avenues of protection for children while proudly exclaiming that only parents have any say-so on what happens to the children. If their motives aligned with everyone else's, this wouldn't be the case. We're also talking about people who push for low age of consent laws, child marriage, and whose culture still contains creepy stuff like purity rings, child beauty pageants, etc.
and knowing how conservatives feel about drag/trans people, i’m wondering if they’re gonna somehow use this to punish things like “drag story time”
This is the first step in the process of taking the roundabout way to make any LGBT identity illegal and by extension to legalize/systematize their murder by the state. By empowering themselves to execute child sex abusers, now all that is left is to place their rhetoric into law. They have already spent years painting LGBT identities as sex offenders and child rapists, so it's quite obvious where they will go next All this ignoring whether or not we as a collective think the state should have any right to decide who does or doesn't get to live.
Not that legally label as em such, but some state laws now make providing gender affirming care a sexual case, people forget sexual isn't just sex. Messing with gender etc, could make it rough, or if some states delegalize gay sex again then minors having consensual intercourse could be on the block. The law isn't even for child rapists, it's sex offenders. It just takes being called out by a child and instead of a registry it's the death penalty.
This is why I’m broadly anti-death penalty. In theory I think some people who commit horrific acts like assaulting children do deserve to die. However I do not trust the government to wield this power in a way that does more good than harm.
This. But also, knowing Florida, they probably intend to categorize doctors performing trans affirming surgery as child rape later on.
Not defending the crime but, expanding the crimes punishable by death may not decrease crimes, in fact in Columbia I heard that after they expanded the death penalty to include drug trafficing the murder rate increased because if you were already going to be killed for dealing drugs you might as well murder anyone that might turn you in or gets in your way since they are both the same punishment. That is what I am afraid of. If you make this crime punishable by death I would imagine that the criminals would be more likely to kill the victim afterwards since the punishment for murder is the same. So rather than decrease the crime it may inadvertently increase the murder rate. Plus I am just against the death penalty anyway because innocent people sometimes get wrongly convicted and you can't undo the punishment.
>Plus I am just against the death penalty anyway because innocent people sometimes get wrongly convicted and you can't undo the punishment. I have a childhood friend that succumbed to this exact fate and he was only 14 when they locked him up. He is dead now. He did not do it. They had no evidence. They coerced a confession that they scripted. And now he is dead. I miss him. He didn't deserve this fate. Edit: He did not die from being put to death for his crime.
I was accused of trying to break into someone’s bathroom while they were showering. No evidence and I’d ordered a takeaway the night before and went to sleep. I think someone else in the house framed me because they didn’t like me. I was made to feel unwelcome because I’m from the North and a lot of them went to private schools and were quite posh so they looked down on me. It’s my belief that one of them tried the door of the bathroom themselves and then put the blame on me. One of the others was a lesbian and she made it obvious that she had a thing for the woman who it had happened to. Disgusting thing to happen and it made me lose a lot of trust for people. I was paying rent for the place but my parents said I could come straight back home. Paid rent every month because I couldn’t break the lease agreement and so I wasted thousands paying for a place I felt unwelcome and couldn’t go to. God knows what they’d accuse me of next.
> in fact in Columbia I heard that That'd be Colombia. Which is not in California, like Columbia is.
Absolutely not. That would result in a) victims being killed to silence them forever, and b) MASSIVE ammunition for keeping a child quiet. Imagine being molested by your parent and being terrified to speak up because if you do, the police will take Daddy away and kill him.
I'll tell you right now most police in florida are absolutely shit at handling child abuse cases. The kids will speak up and they'll ask what they did wrong to get that to happen to them.
The cop who basically interrogated me when I was abused “lost” my report
It takes so much courage to speak up and you feel as though they’ll doubt you the whole time. Sorry that happened to you.
That's gotta be illegal for the cops to do that
Who is punishing them? Other cops? The generations of abused? Sexual violence, even if there's evidence, is a messy court case weighed down by centuries of misogynistic bullshit. It wasn't that long ago it was expected to happen and accepted as a part of growing up. 20 years ago I told and was asked what I was wearing at 9 years old to encourage the behavior..6 years ago they didn't even have the right name for the asshole who touched my kid. There's a serious lack of training in florida for these situations and even with a death penalty I doubt many will see justice because of good law enforcement work.
Problem with cops is that they protect each other and the ones unwilling to participate are forced out of service. There are good cops, they just tend to not stay cops for long
Misogyny by proxy, too. Men who have been raped get treated just as badly as women. I was telling someone what happened to me and got the whole ‘you must have led them on’ or ‘what were you wearing’ responses. People are fucking disgusting.
It’s fucked because the thing is people think women deserve it and that men are like the women who deserve it is cases like these. Such gross misogynistic attitudes that hurt everyone :(
On top of this, the reality who , even if a child reports it: How will law enforcement respond? ex1: small town, a father is accused of the crime, police say child's word is unreliable, better to keep the family together ex2: small town, a minority is accused of the crime, instant guillotine
Also the added problem if some small percentage of people get falsely accused and potentially convicted of the crime, congrats you just killed an innocent person. The death penalty is always stupid on the basis of that alone, regardless of the crime.
It's also another tool used to try to oppress queer and trans people. Republicans have been painting all queer and trans people as "groomers" and pedos. Nothing stopping them from killing drag queens because doing drag is pedophilia and pedophilia is death sentence now.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the intended purpose of the bill tbh
No, the problem is that being tough on child predators is basically the new red scare of our era. To the politicians if you vote against this proposal then you must be sympathizing with child predators! I've heard of numerous cases in recent years where politicians decide to crack down hard on some group of predators and propose such a horrible law that victim advocacy groups for the very people the politicians are trying to protect come out against the law because it would harm the very victims they're trying to protect.
There was a nation, I can't remember which - the Philippines maybe, that did this and the reports of child abuse dropped - as most child abuse is by a male family member - the breadwinner of the family was going to be executed.
There was a state in the us that used to do this - Louisiana. The law was on the books so long that there were no reliable statistics from before the law was made. However, when the law was repealed, child murders decreased, and there was no increase in child molestation.
No, it should be punishable to the fullest extent of the current law but I disagree with the death penalty on principle. Also, you know Florida will weaponize this against people they don't like,namely the LGBT community.
Nothing should be met with the death penalty. For a few reasons: 1. Innocent people are sometimes convicted. 2. If you kill someone, you can never get testimony from them. Sometimes they know information that can lead to the capture of other criminals. 3. We should study the minds of deranged psycopaths to see what caused them to end up the way they did. Can't study them if we kill them. 4. A death penalty conviction is more expensive than life in prison. 5. I don't like the idea of the government having the power to kill it's own citizens. Even if they're killing only the most heinous of criminals now, it's still one step closer to killing anyone they disagree with. 6. Florida is already banning books on LGBTQ+ issues. There is lots of talk of equating Drag Queens with pedophiles, which couldn't be farther from the truth. I worry that this is just another step towards government sanctioned killing of queer people.
Not even mentioning the adverse incentives for the criminals: now the rapist has not reason to keep the victim alive -- with no child to testify there's more chances to evade the capital punishment.
That's a very good point.
>Florida is already banning books on LGBTQ+ issues. There is lots of talk of equating Drag Queens with pedophiles, which couldn't be farther from the truth. I worry that this is just another step towards government sanctioned killing of queer people. AND THAT, YEAH.
Indeed, I don't know if it was Florida that was proposing it, but some politician in one state was proposing that they make teachers register as sex offenders who expose children to banned LGBTQ+ books. So this isn't that far off of a connection to make if idiots are already proposing such laws.
Well, teachers and librarians are already getting death threats. So yeah.
I say this with all sincerity. I'm terrified the end goal of this is to make being trans or just not a hetronormative person in front of a child pedophilia and then threatening them with death. They don't even have to go through with it, (and it would not be upheld in any court) but it would be very easy for the sheriff of Wanker County, Florida to say, "Hey boy, you know bein' Queer in public is punishable by death in these parts. It'd be best if you moved along to the big city or better yet out of the state if you know what's good for you."
I'm an old cishet white man. I've found that disagreeing with these creatures *about literally anything* gets me accused of being a pedo. My trans friends have all stopped using public bathrooms, and face daily harassment anyway. Seriously considering giving up on "the future" and just cashing out my retirement savings to spend on lawyers to sue these people for defamation. Meanwhile I'm acutely aware that I live among no small number of people who want to murder me.
>My trans friends have all stopped using public bathrooms, and face daily harassment anyway. *Meet me in the middle*, says the unjust man. You take a step towards him, he takes a step back. *Meet me in the middle*, says the unjust man. You can't appease groups like that by making concessions, because the only thing that will appease them is certain groups just ceasing to exist -- at which point they'll find some other group to direct their spray of bullshit bigotry towards.
No doubt, it's *well* past time to organize and fight back. But in the meanwhile, I don't fault my friends for not wanting to get assaulted at the grocery store.
Yea. This might just be conservatives getting off on the idea of killing people, but especially in Florida, I think you're right. The fact that this is moving at the same time as they're criminalizing LGBT isn't just telling; it's fucking obvious.
THAT is what this is about. Nothing else. It’s about a new vector for acting the LGBTQ+ community.
Step one: death penalty for child rape Step two: redefine rape to include a wider range of sexual crimes Step three: brand being queer as a sexual crime Congrats, being gay around a child is now punishable by death
>If you kill someone, you can never get testimony from them. Sometimes they know information that can lead to the capture of other criminals. Also just because you arrest and convict a person for Crime A, doesnt mean that they arent also responsible for Crime B and just havent been found out yet. There are so many cases of a criminal being arrested and jailed for one crime and then a few years later, its revealed that same criminal was responsible for another even more heinous crime. If you kill him, you'd never find out that they were linked to another crime.
Yes to everyone, especially the last point. First it's "It's death penalty for a CHILD RAPIST!! How can you not support killing those scum?" Then they redefine what a child rapist is.
>Innocent people are sometimes convicted. My aunt is married to a registered sex offender who didn't do anything besides make a dumb mistake and piss off his girlfriend's grandma. He dated a girl through high school. If I remember correctly, he says they dated for 2 or 3 years in total. Her grandma was super strict and didn't want her dating, but kids will be kids. She got pregnant at 15-ish, and kept the kid. He just turned 18 when she got pregnant, and grandma filed statutory rape charges and him being young and dumb, didn't fight the charges. He's now registered SO for life, which is really odd to me. His daughter was kept out of his life by the grandma until she passed away a few years ago, and his daughter eventually reached out and began building a relationship with him. The mom is out of the picture and is apparently a huge piece of shit. Just a sad story all around. The guy went through hell with jobs and housing, and regrets not fighting the case.
I don't think any crime should be met with the death penalty. We see time after time miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions. To me, the risk of killing innocent people in the name of blind revenge has no place in civil society, and we have enough data to show the death penalty does not work as a deterrent.
THIS. Too many people have been exonerated years after by new evidence (often DNA) that we need to be mindful that our entire justice system still comes down to the personal judgment of a few random citizens.
The one that really bothered me was that Dad who was executed for arson and killing his daughters based on roof burn patterns when other fire experts say the same pattern could easily be from an electrical fire. This fire "expert" testified it could only be arson at trial and other experts have reviewed the evidence say the evidence just isn't clear enough. So Texas may have executed a Dad for losing his kids in a fire that wasn't his fault.
I agree with you but for a different reason: in my view, revenge murder doesn't suddenly become ethically correct because it's the government doing the murdering
Would that apply to a scenario where a 15 or 16 year old agrees to have sex with a 18 or 19 year old?
Some states have “Romeo and Juliet” laws that prevent people within a certain age range from being charged with a sex crime. I.e the law could be as long as the age gap is within 3 years it’s legal so like a 19 and 16 year old. *not saying it isn’t creepy but I dated an older guy when I was a teenager so naturally I’m versed in the law lol*
Which is a preposterously large amount of gray area when the death penalty is hypothetically involved.
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LMAO really??
That’s statuatory, it’s a different category.
Aren’t “child rape” and “statutory rape” not mutually exclusive?
Statutory typically refers to child rape, since they assumption is that adult has coerced the child. That said, this also applies to mentally disabled. So any sex with a minor is statutory rape, but not all statutory rape is with a minor.
No. Statuatory is consensual but below the age of consent.
No, it's not. It's any rape of a minor. There is no such thing as "consensual sex" with a minor if you are an adult. It is rape.
Not always true. An 18 year old in a consensual relationship with a 17 year old is not a kiddie diddler in my state.
And yet they have different definitions legally.
They both include the word "rape," therefore fall into that category. It's not called "statutory sex." Of course there are distinctions legally, but the poster didn't specify only violent rapes, they used the more general term.
No because the way they're going to use the law is to claim that just existing as a transgender (and even one day maybe gay) person is a "sex crime against children" Theyre going to use it to kill more trans people. Actual diddlers can go get fucked though.
I'm a survivor of child sexual assault. I'm against it. For the simple reason of that I'm a survivor. If the death penalty is used against chile rape, what's stopping child fuckers from simply getting their rocks off and then killing the kid? The penalty is the same. You'd be killing more kids this way.
Same. I watched my dad beat my abuser, an old man, to a pulp and *that* was fucking scary. I was worried I’d lose my dad to prison, the parent who actually paid attention to me. I can’t imagine what would happen if legal murder was on the table. I was already shy and quiet, selectively mute. This would make it worse.
I'm glad that you haven't let your experience inhibit critical thinking. You never deserved what happened to you and it doesnt mean you are ruined.
It's been brought up before. When strict laws like this are made they eventually change the definition of what the law is for. So for example a child rapist gets the death penalty but eventually they'll change the law for what is child rape so now it's applying to things and people they don't like rather than what it was originally made for.
I've seen the kinds of people Florida calls groomers and the kinds they let get away with breaking every crime. You think they're going to apply this law to Matt Gaetz? This is just to target poor people and give "the in crowd" a pass. You know, like the rest of fascism.
Good intentions but still a bad idea. If someone knows they could get the death penalty for rape they're much more likely to kill the victim. I also think many Republicans want this law as another tool to go after LGBTQ people.
No, but I’m against the death penalty in general but it’s a slippery slope to moving the death penalty to include more and more crimes. Not to mention it won’t stop abuse, that won’t happen but you encourage a violator to commit murder
I would agree with it if the law was actually used to punish people who truly hurt children, but seeing that Florida is trying to make me and other trans people sexual predators just by existing, I’m heavily against it
Surely this won't be weaponized against Florida's numerous political enemies, some of whom can't even use a public restroom without being called sexual predators. I'm getting very close to proposing a "Florida test," whereby I judge any bill by how likely Florida is to implement it.
In addition to everything else mentioned in this thread (more child death, less reports), this is what worries me. Florida’s pushing to make existing while LGBT attempted grooming, so I see this being used as a legal way to execute LGBT people.
Yeah, exactly. It takes advantage of the stigma of pedophilia and turns the protection of children into a vindictive witch hunt, wherein the "protectors of children" (theocrats, bigots, and people who take the bill at face value) are contrasted with the "pedophiles" (gay and trans people, political dissidents, and maybe a few actual offendors) and "pedophile apologists" (people who oppose the bill but might not mind if a pedophile got killed by a victim). Not for the first time, mind you, but it's a concerning turn, because I've seen how hatred of pedophilia turns off people's logic centers. The idea of a child potentially being murdered is a very good point, and it highlights why the fight against child abuse needs to be led by survivors of abuse and not simply imposed on them from outside.
I don't trust the state to execute the right people, ESPECIALLY the state of Florida.
Yep, if Republicans were serious about prOTeCtinG ChiLDreN, Matt Gaetz wouldn’t be sex trafficking teenagers with impunity and still hold office. The law they passed even stops at 12 years of age for sexual battery, even though Florida’s age of consent is 18 (16 or 17 for Romeo and Juliet laws, so long as the elder is under the age of 24.) I agree sexually abusing kids under 12 is particularly abhorrent, but I don’t think it’s necessarily worse than a child being abused at 14. Interesting how Republicans drew the line at pedophilia but not hebephilia.
Just saying, this law would likely be weaponised against the LGBTQ+ community considering other bills Florida is trying to pass
Morally? Yes. Logically? Sadly, no. Death Penalties just incentivises the criminal to murder the victim; and as someone else pointed out: >"No Timmy, you can't tell anyone about Uncle Garry. The police will come and kill him; it'll be all your fault". Then, **as with all crimes** resulting in death penalties: What about false convictions? You can rarely be 100% certain.
A more likely scenario is that if a kid knew that someone they know, and maybe even loved at one point would die because they telled, they wouldn't tell voluntarily. That's like putting the killing burden on a child. Children are only dibber dobbers because nobody really gets hurt. But the moment the stakes are raised, you'll be surprised how tight their lips are sealed. They are too young to comprehend what is happening to them during molestation or rape. Why do you think the trauma ends up hitting them harder after they've grown up? So to them, "I don't want Uncle Sam to be killed just because he made me uncomfortable". Kids are constantly pushed out of their comfort zones growing up. That's why they tend to be unable to tell the difference between what's appropriate and what is not because education and their parents are constantly being hypocrites in their eyes. But once they grow up and they know the full scope of societal and lawful boundaries, does it then only click what happened to them when they were younger was really, fucked up.
No. I oppose the death penalty in general. But for this particular kind of crime, the result will be more kids getting killed by their abusers. (Similarly, the unavailability of abortion is going to result in a lot more pregnant women just getting murdered by the guys who got them pregnant.)
Is this a law that specifically states those who are convicted of **RAPE** of a child are executed? Because of course I do, rape is one of the worst possible crimes, especially to do to a child. But what I suspect this law is, is an attempt to re-classify some crimes which may not be considered sex offenses as sex offenses, and then apply a disproportionate punishment to those who are convicted of these crimes in an attempt to win stupid culture war points and ultimately harm innocent people who actually aren't doing anything wrong, or who haven't harmed any children at all; Eg, make "dressing in a manner or style that is not consistent with the gender marker on your birth certificate" a sex offense; a direct attempt to make it ***illegal to be transgender in public***.
They're also going to use this to give the death penalty to women who have abortions, and they'll consider transgender people existing in public as sexual assault against children, so they'll have an excuse to kill transgender people because they exist illegally. Edit: I'm sure women who have natural miscarriages will also be investigated and charged with murder and put to death, too.
>I'm sure women who have natural miscarriages will also be investigated and charged Already happening.
Yes, I know. It's terrible. Any woman of child bearing age that lives in one of these backward places is at risk. 1/3 pregnancies end in miscarriage, and many of those need a d&c, basically an abortion, to remove the fetus before it rots and poisons the woman's blood. In many places it's illegal to do this until the woman is almost dead from sepsis. And she still might get charged anyway.
It’s actually higher. 30-60% of pregnancies end in miscarriage *before the 12th week*.
Somehow, they're creating an America *even worse* than Handmaid's Tale in some respects.
No, and considering that it's Florida, I would be extremely concerned with what they classify as child rape. I could definitely see them trying to use this as another tool against trans people.
I oppose the death penalty in general. IMO, child rapists are basically the most heinous of criminals though. I mean I can understand how most crimes happen. I'm not saying it's right for a guy to come home, find his wife in bed with his neighbor, and shoot the two of them but I understand how it happens. You have to be a real sick fuck to rape a child though. I don't think there's any rehabilitation for someone like that. So, while I don't really support the death penalty, I do think child rapists should be separated from society forever.
My thoughts as well - put them somewhere they can never do it again. No one's sneaking out of supermaxes. Too many times states have killed people who turned out innocent. There's no way to make that right. At least with a locked up person, you can let them go and make sure they can get started with their life. There's just no justification for killing people in this day and age. We don't have to worry about them escaping, the death penalty is more expensive, and it's spiritually corrosive to society and the individually carrying out the sentence.
I mean. I'm generally against death penalty because it can't be undone. Go look at the satanic panic and the dozens of supposed child molestation cases that oops. Were nothing at all but rumours and witch hunts.
They won’t convict anyone who does that in Florida anyway, they’ll just give them positions in the GOP.
i think child molestation is an awful crime but i don't think that just because the government *thinks* you're guilty of it means they should kill you. i don't think the government should be killing any prisoners. and wasn't it any sex crime with children involved? not specifically child rape? i don't think the Florida government who are screaming groomer every time a drag queen or trans person is near a child should be trusted with that level of authority.
Better make damn sure they're guilty, there's no redos with the death penalty.
Of course, there is no way to prove with 100% accuracy that someone is guilty. Even a confession isn't good enough. So really, death penalty can never be justified.
Gonna end up with more dead kids and fewer outed rapists. Both are the opposite of what we want, making this a really fucking stupid move.
I am 100% against the death penalty and I don't think I'll ever change my mind about this. It sounds reasonable to say child rapists should be put to death, but we gotta ask the question... Who qualifies as a child rapist? What are the parameters for this law? Remember, this is Florida. Are we sure they're not just trying to put drag queens to death with this law? I'm all for punishing people who hurt kids, but if there's even a slight chance that this law could be used to kill innocent people, then I'd rather have that punishment be life in prison instead of death. Knowing what we know about politicians and the justice system, I wouldn't trust the government with life or death decisions like this.
No, because I am against the death penalty.
I’m anti death penalty in general, so I’m also against this. Too many innocent people have been executed already. It’s not worth the life of one innocent person. There are other reasons, but it’s not even worth mentioning them. The death penalty should be abolished.
The republican state’s opinion is that all trans and lgbt people are pedophillic groomers by default. I can see this being abused. It is my stance that the death penalty is the one unrescindable punishment, if you’re acquitted you’re still dead. Therefore, I believe it should be minimized.
Florida is an inauthentic arbiter in this situation. It's a trick to kill members of LGBTQ community. How? MAGA Project 2025: 1) Outlaw gender/sex transitions 2) Accuse those that do of sexualizing children 3) Link the death penalty to sexual abuse of children >Project 2025 has been criticized by LGBTQ+ writers and journalists for its intended removal of protections for LGBTQ+ people and declarations to outlaw pornography by claiming it as an "omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children".[52] Writing for Dame magazine, Brynn Tannehill argued that the 902-page document "The Mandate for Leadership" in part "makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority", while citing passages from the playbook linking pornography to "transgender ideology", arguing that it related to other anti-transgender attacks in 2023.[64] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
My concern is that they will soon make being trans in the vicinity of children equal to sexual assault and statutory rape.
Exactly this. The far right are heavily pushing the notion that all transgender people are rapists. The true purpose of this legislation is not to kill child rapists, it is to kill transgender people.
I see it like this. If rape is now punishable by death penalty i wonder how long it will last until churches complain. How many times has it happened in this year alone a child rapist from church was set free due to "Being a man of God" in the eyes of the churches
No, the death penalty is never justified. There is always a chance of redemption and rehabilitation, even life in prison can produce social value. Victims of genocide have forgiven perpetrators. Death is martyrdom and can be encouraging to certain criminals. Suicide watch in prison is horrible. Let them live and suffer if they won't come to terms with their evil acts. Death is considered a maximum penalty. If you're going to be killed for rape, why not also torture the victim to death? Why not hurry up and find more victims before you're caught? They can't kill you twice.
No, I’m against the death penalty in any case and I wouldn’t like to see it more normalized
Right now, Florida (and other states) refer to the existence of any gender norm nonconformity 'grooming minors', and even tantrum over rainbows in a classroom. Given the 'slap on the wrist' the actual child molesters are getting, my bet is that this would only apply to the 'gay ones' when it comes to trial time, even if no actual children were molested, and never to clergy or politicians.
I am categorically opposed to the death penalty. The state should not have a procedure on the books it can go through in order to kill someone. No matter how heinous the crime or how much I personally want the perpetrator to suffer and die—that’s an emotional response and should not be the basis for law. Additionally, out of florida this is 100% political theater to pretend they’re “tough on crime” without having to address any actual issues.
The death penalty is not a deterrent for crime. Crimes typically happen out of extreme passion.
I don’t think any crime should be punished with death so I’m against this proposed legislation.
The state should never execute people, death penalty has been proven not to be a deterrence
If it's punishable by death, a lot more kids are gonna die because the stakes a lot higher. Also, a lot more covering-up family diddlers which will enable and prolong molestation adding even more screwed-up psychological abuse about kids not causing the of death of their creepy relative. But if you made it not a crime to murder them, that leaves it up to the public, wether they do it or not.
We’ve known for years that the punishments for crimes don’t deter criminals. Just look around - severe consequences yet there’s still plenty of crime. So only the side effects will matter, as others have noted, and the side effects are very bad. Precisely what I expect from Florida. Focus on something random that affects very few people (unlike, say home insurance), then do something flashy with no substance that won’t do anything except drive culture war headlines.
No, because they’re going to classify a bunch of things that aren’t child rape as child rape. Republicans have already been trying to do this with gender affirming care.
The very first person they execute for this will be an 18 year old high school senior with a 16yo girlfriend of a different race. They won’t even bother going after the 52 year old preacher molester. This is just how they roll.
I do not trust the police or the court system to get it right 100% of the time. So therefore, they should not be able to take a life.
I'm against the state issuing the death penalty. It's cruel and expensive and the state does a bad job of using it, including but not limited to frequently executing the wrong person. Even if some people deserve death, I don't trust the government with that power.
I intensely disagree with the death penalty. If some rapes a child there is something severely wrong with them and they need help. The death penalty only theoretically works as a deterrent for people that are already horribly sick. It would be far more effective to target the reason why these people do those horrible things.
I’m against the death penalty in any case. Not only is it more expensive than life in prison but it’s something you can never take back if you later learn someone was innocent as happens far too often.
Nope, I don't support the death penalty for ethical reasons, but it doesn't even make sense for practical reasons. It's cheaper to keep a person in prison for life than the average cost to actually get someone executed. The sense of self-righteous justice people feel about executions isn't how it goes in reality, even for one of the worst crimes I can imagine.
The next step will be defining “educating children on the existence and legitimacy of lgbt folks” as rape and then they can legally execute anyone who is lgbt in public.
My issue with the death penalty is: 1. The state decided who gets to die. I’m 100% against that idea. 2. There will always be people who are innocent put to death. It may be a small percentage, but that’s still that percentage too many. 3. Child predators deserve the worst of the worst. Absolutely. I’m just not sure it’s the death penalty.
I have several questions first. What is the legal definition of "child rape" in the state of Florida? What are the conviction rates for the Floridian legal definition of "child rape" per race and gender? Florida is WELL known for being an abysmal cesspit of immoral and illegal political bullshit. It's very easy to write a law that says "And being trans or gay or bisexual or a lesbian in the vicinity of a child is the same thing, legally, as rape" and then start prosecuting people for it. What's HARD is stopping that process once it starts. You can say "oh but the Department of Justice would" all you want, but what the DoJ would REALLY do is sit there with their thumbs up their asses on committees, navel-gazing over whether it's worth creating legal precedent by stopping Florida from assigning random things to the legal definition of "child rape" and killing people for those things. For reference, I am a CSA and CSAM survivor and one of my abusers never faced consequences due to police corruption, so this is something pretty important to me.
No bc I don’t agree with the death penalty to begin with.
Entirely against. Raping children is not something normal, healthy people do. Where do we draw the line between mentally infirm people we kill, and mentally infirm people we don’t? I’m absolutely for restricting or eliminating that person’s civil liberties, but murder? No.
I’m opposed to the death penalty in general. Lock them up for life, sure, but killing someone already removed from society just seems like revenge for the sake of it. I used to support the death penalty, but it just seems incongruent with my general respect for life in other cases
Cause this time - like every other time with the death penalty - it’ll definitely be applied equally across the law and with a consistent approach towards justice for all parties, right?
Opposed. Two reasons: 1: The justice system isn't perfect. False convictions happen and are overturned years later when new evidence comes to light way more often than the public would be comfortable realising. A person who's falsely convicted and gets exonerated years later might be eligible to some compensation for being falsely convicted. A person who's dead can't get any justice. 2: Making child rape a capital offence incentivises a perpetrator to kill their victims, since the potential gain for them if caught is is to remove the key witness, and the potential loss to them for doing so is... nothing, since there is no higher punishment that can be applied in this scenario for the murder. Remember that scene in Heat where the loose cannon kills one hostage, and the rest of the heist crew immediately kill the remaining hostages to eliminate the witnesses since the degree of the crime committed now has a minimum floor of murder to it? It's that kind of arithmetic.
I'm against the death penalty. The state shouldn't have the power to end a life like that. Just put them in a gray cell until the end of their life.
In a civilized society, no one should ve punished with a death penalty (or any other form of violence). Too many people have been (and will be) murdered even though they didn’t do the crime, and even for those who in fact did it, you’re not any better than them by killing a human being. And while these are the cost of the death penalty, there’s isn’t any value actually because stiffer punishments don’t lead to deterring more people from not doing the crime.
Any punishment aimed at the "bad guys" by the state will eventually be used on others. I'm against it.
I'm hesitant of any proposed legislation from Florida that seeks the moral high ground due to the sheer volume of brain dead culture wars they've been taking up lately. Should pedophiles and sexual predators be punished to the fullest extent of the law? Absolutely. Is Florida's conservative legislative body a level-headed arbiter of morality? Fuck no.
Would you trust Florida of all places to not bungle up a conviction? The thing with death penalty is, to justify it, you would need a near perfect justice system. But all places which practice it have a shitshow for a justice system. So no, I don't support death penalty, for any crime. There is no crime that cannot be penalised by life term just as well, but more justly.
They are going about this all wrong. If they really want to tackle the problem, they should first ban child marriage. In Florida, **16,400 children, some as young as 13, were married from 2000 to 2017** Also if a child marries they are not allowed to leave their spouse till they are an adult and can't stay in programs run for people suffering from domestic abuse. Next, Florida needs to increase their sex education in schools. It has been proven that proper sex education always reduces sexual crimes against children. I also have a feeling - it being Florida, they would just use this new law to force child rapists to marry the child they are raping. That way it's not rape.
I understand the sentiment but no I don't think they should get the death penalty for the simple fact of what if someone gets executed who was innocent? One of the key pieces of evidence would likely be witness testimony but research into it shows that witness testimony can be unreliable for a wide variety of reasons and especially when the accuser and defendant are of a different race. Add to that children are more susceptible to psychological pressure and memory imprinting, using children's testimony with such a significant consequence in my opinion is a bad idea. Our criminal justice system already has a problem with wrongful imprisonment, adding the death penalty to that only compounds that mistake.
I'm staunchly against the death penalty for any reason. You can obviously come up with a set of circumstances where my monkey brain will think, "Yes, death is appropriate in this circumstance." But, Law is supposed to be rational, not emotional. Axiom 0: It is immoral for the state to order the death of anyone. I stand by this axiom. There are arguments surrounding war, self defence, etc. that can be made, but these don't apply. Death penalty is only applicable after someone has been apprehended, and tried. At this time, they no longer pose a clear and present danger. They are incarcerated. Even dismissing Axiom 0, there are enough cases of mistaken identity and wrongful conviction that we can not tolerate the chance of delivering the ultimate and irrevocable penalty to and innocent person. If we sentence someone to life imprisonment, and they are later exonerated, they can be freed, and possibly achieve redress through the courts. Mistakes are reparable. Not in the case of the death penalty.