On The Third Hand
A Proud member of the Brigade of Bellicose WomenThe liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. — Samuel Adams
| On The Third HandA Proud member of the Brigade of Bellicose WomenThe liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. — Samuel Adams |
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02 December, 2001: "Tribunals and Trials"By Kathy Kinsley I've been staying out of the whole tribunal controversy; I'm sitting back and waiting to see how it will be used. To some extent, I agree with both sides of the disagreement. Tribunals could be badly misused, and I have that same instinctive "yuck factor" on it that others have on the stem-cell issue. On the other hand, I'm not too sure I want to see millions in tax money spent on public defenders and appeals (since they would almost certainly get the death penalty). On the third hand... I've had another idea. One of the most popular appeals by defense lawyers in really atrocious crimes has always been to use the "insanity" defense (see John Hinkley, who attempted to assasinate ex-President Reagan). If a defendent is proved insane before trial, he/she is committed to an insane asylum. Now... the basis of the "insanity" defense is the inability to tell right from wrong... the belief that one's acts were right in commiting a horrible crime will generally get one declared insane. El Qaida and other terrorists believe that murdering innocents is right. By our standards (and those of most countries), they qualify as insane. So why not have them evaluated by a group of psychiatrists and commited to a nice high-security insane asylum? We could build one on Wake Island or some other out-of-the-way place. One advantage is that this would be terribly insulting and humiliating to them. The second advantage is that we could study these guys and find out what makes them tick, and after being fed some of the drugs that are routinely given to mental patients, I suspect we'd get lots of interesting information. Some of it we might even want to broadcast as anti-fundamentalist information.
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