No, you absolutely do not support our legal system. You support an imagined caricatur of it more suited for a dceveloping world or an authoritarian state. The existance of less than moral people has little to do with providing a very careful process before we allow the state to kill them. Your sense of victimhood is palpable, and overblown. This system, which you so decry for supposedly providing more rights to criminals than you, has now resulted in a country with the highest percentage of our population in jail in the world. Higher than the Soviet gulag period even. There are lots and lots of things that I don't want to pay taxes to support, legal due process is not one I begrudge the government paying for.

You so easily conflate anger at the person who did this crime with justification for removing core principles of our legal system. Fine, but recognize it as an emotional response to tragedy, not a reasonable policy proposal. And I agree, his death at the hands of the officers was justified: he shot, the returned fire, he was wounded and died. Justified. How in the world is this relevant to the belief that we should remove due process for death penalty cases?




Quote Originally Posted by RabidPony View Post
I do support our legal system, however, I also realize that it is far from perfect. It is a very unfortunate fact that there are thousands of less than moral members of the legal community out there that have so twisted our legal system that it has come to the point where it sometime seems that the criminals are more protected and have more rights than a good, law abiding citizen. That, I feel, is a shame. I do not advocate death squads or any facsimile there of, I do, however, feel that it is unfair and unjust that someone who murders another person live out their life to it's natural end, incarcerated or not. I should not have to pay to support someone who is a bane to society with the taxes taken from my hard earned money. I can think of much better things to spend the money on. Better pay, training, and equipment for law enforcement for example.

I do mourn the loss of those officers and my sympathies go out to their families in their time of mourning. But that does not mean I will put aside my anger and frustration with the person that committed the heinous act. He did it, there were witnesses who identified him. There was no question as to his guilt. In my eyes, his death at the hands of that officer was justified and only served to save the taxpayers of that city and state the time, effort, and valuable taxpayer money that would have been expended on his trial and incarceration.