BREAKING!!! Datalounge favorite Scott Peterson's life is spared!

Peterson got a raw deal in the fact, that he may be guilty but he was found guilty because he cheated on his wife, and that cunt he cheated with was out for revenge. If it never came to light he cheated, no jury would've found him guilty, the evidence wasn't there.

That said, he may have killed her but there wasn't enough evidence for anyone to convict him on that

Oddly enough his cunty girlfriend was out shopping for a book deal before Peterson was even arrested, which is all too typical.

I've never understood the point of death row. Don't most of them die of old age or natural causes waiting for the chair anyway?

How many serial killers are on death row in California? There is like eleven of them.

Christmas came early for many of them.

It's only suspended...only voters can end the death penalty and they have voted down every measure to end it

[quote]he was found guilty because he cheated on his wife

I think it had more to do with the fetus which was expelled from the uterus by gaseous buildup as Lacey Peterson's body decomposed in a barrel in the San Francisco Bay. But I may be wrong about this...

I wonder what the projected cost savings to the state will be if the appeals process halts. The cost of life incarceration is far less than the cost of the appeals process if seen through to the end.

R3 Not really. California hasn't executed anyone in ages, not even scumbags like Richard Ramirez. Those sentenced to death in California never had any fear of actually being executed because they knew California would never carry it out.

Agree r1. The truth is there is no real evidence Scott Peterson actually killed her.

When someone tries to bullshit you that the death penalty is unconstitutional, remind them it is specifically permitted by the Constitution.

XIV Amendment, Section One

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State DEPRIVE any person of LIFE, liberty, or property, without due process of law

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And then the standard mode of execution was hanging breaking the neck and causing death by suffocation.

Uh, r9, where does it say that the death penalty is constitutional? You're a tard.

You call someone a tard and can't figure out that to deprive someone of life means they are executed by the state ? The words were even emphasized to make it easy for you. Are you AOC ?

I wonder how the families of the 65-100 victims of Randy Kraft feel about the progressive gesture by the governor. Kraft is likely the worst (not most famous) of the serial killers from the 1970-80s. If you have the stomach, Google the name of Mark Hall. His body was described as the "map of all torture." And now thanks to Newsom's sensitive soul, this evil man Kraft will live out his natural life. I'm a liberal, but I think the death penalty should be "rare, legal and painful" in cases like this.

R12 He's been on death row FOR THIRTY YEARS. If they haven't killed him yet, what's the point? I'm not against the death penalty, but in most cases, death row just seems like a waiting room for natural causes

R12 - I had the stomach to look it up. I grew up in CA during the so-called "golden age" of serial killers (late '60s thru '80s) and I'd never heard of Robert Kraft. Maybe we didn't hear the news up in north as we had a glut of serial killers of our own for years or the story was crowded out by other CA-based weirdness of the times (Manson, People's Temple, Patty Hearst kidnapping/SLA, Moscone/Milk murders)

^Randy, not Robert. Heh, heh.

Newsom is really shaking things up..

[quote] You call someone a tard and can't figure out that to deprive someone of life means they are executed by the state ?

RETARD, it states that the state cannot deprive anyone of life. How is that pro-death penalty??! You should have been aborted.

[quote]nor shall any State DEPRIVE any person of LIFE, liberty, or property, without due process of law

I'm not R9 nor do I don't support the death penalty, but please read the clause. I assume this is what the originalists who support the death penalty cite over "cruel and unusual punishment" when concluding the DP constitutional.

Doesn’t his sneaky behavior of dying his hair, large sum of money, etc show deception. He was planning to run? Why run if you have nothing to hide or you are innocent? That behavior sealed the deal for me. Same scenario with OJ.

The founding fathers clearly intended the death penalty to continue. It was not considered cruel and unusual to execute people for heinous crimes in the 18th century.

[quote] that cunt he cheated with was out for revenge. If it never came to light he cheated, no jury would've found him guilty, the evidence wasn't there.

Are you suggesting Amber Frey should never have contacted the police when she realized Peterson was married to the still- missing woman who was making national headlines? Police already considered Peterson their prime suspect prior to this.

What evidence are you expecting when a man kills his wife? Unless you’ve got CCTV like that dumbass Chris Watts managed to catch himself on, then there won’t be much. DNA won’t prove anything as they are around each other all the time. The chances of anyone else (such as a random hobo) having killed Lacey and dumped her in the water when Peterson was the one with the boat, and had a strange account of his movements that day, are astronomical.

One of the problems with juries is that they can sometimes be looking for a smoking gun where there is none to be found and no compelling piece of evidence. But with the whole set of facts in relation to Peterson it is clear beyond reasonable doubt he did it.

Good for Gavin! The death penalty is awful. There's no way to mete it out fairly. It's racist. It's classist. It needs to end. Everywhere.

Although I will say that the case of Timothy Evans who was unlucky enough to live in the same building as a serial killer (John Christie) and ended up being executed for killing his wife when Christie had done it, does show that very, very bad luck can happen... but all these years later and there’s no other plausible suspect to have killed Lacey and Peterson’s behaviour was that of a guilty man. Naturally I would be happier if he had confessed the way Watts has but I don’t lose any sleep over his conviction, it’s solid.

I am perhaps the outlier, but for me, a term of life (especially for someone young like Peterson) seems 10X that execution. Do you really want to live in a 10X10 cell for the rest of your life (40+ years) or just get it over with?

R20: Who cares, They're dead. So is their era. Death penalty is racist and barbaric. It violates the 8th Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, what with black and Hispanic people getting sentenced to death at higher rates for the same crimes that whites get life in prison. Additionally, it also violates Equal Protection as men get sentenced to death more for the same crime while women get life in prison.

Pro tip R17: Just FF and ban the little Nazi. It clearly doesn't belong here.

Sorry, but I hope that scum like Randy Kraft, Scott Peterson, Richard Ramirez not only are executed, but that it happens in the most painful inhumane way possible. Read the book "Angel of Darkness" about Kraft, and then tell me taxpayers should support his continued miserable existence.

Seriously, what is the point of the death penalty if most of them are just sitting there until old age does its thing? Kraft has been on death row SINCE THE 80S

R27 it costs more, in the end, to kill them than to keep them alive.

^ In the case of Kraft, killing him is not a luxury it's a moral obligation to his victims.

It was a fact of the trial that the coroner could not establish a cause of death for Laci Peterson. The body was too badly decomposed to do so. If the prosecution cannot establish a cause of death, then simple logic makes it clear that it cannot be established that there was a murder.

It is entirely plausible, well within a reasonable doubt, that Laci died of natural causes, Scott freaked out and dumped the body. Do I think that is likely? No. Is it possible? Yes.

If there is no cause of death established at trial, under cross-examination, then there should be no possibility of a death penalty. The murder conviction itself is not brought by uncontrovertible facts, but by hunches, speculation, a lot of emotion, and the personal prejudices of the jurors. Lacking an established cause of death, even life in prison might be too severe. But a penalty of death, for a murder that can't really be proven to be a murder, is simply too much to accept.

Yeah, Laci died of natural causes.

I support the death penalty only for Presidents convicted of treason.

Scott Peterson is a malignant growth.

Scott was hot back in the day. Sizemeat verficatia?

r27 is the main reason why it shouldn't happen. We all feel that way. Society can be protected by locking them up until they are dead. We do not need to react the same way they did. We can evolve.

Scott Peterson was running drugs across the border.... he was always going back and forth into Mexico with loads of fertilizer. Scott stiffed the wrong people. And did not respond in anticipated fashion when he was told to give up the money and the drugs or his wife would be killed. Go ahead, Kill her. I dare you.

Scott's Christmas Eve fishing trip was known to the public. Her body was then placed there to fuck him over. Peterson should have not gotten greedy. But he never thought he would be convicted on the murder charges, which is why he did not come clean. He thought he was going to walk free of everything, so choose not to reveal why and who she was killed by and be sent to prison for drug and tax charges. He bet and he lost. He is probably safer in prison than he would have been on the outside. He would just have shown up missing one day. And his body would have never been found..

....uh-huh R37

R31, well aren’t you a defendant’s dream. Scott Peterson murdered a wife he found inconvenient and that is reality. Men kill women they’re involved with depressingly often, and as far as I can remember he didn’t claim natural causes during his trial. He did it, sweetie.

That said: I think for the crime he committed, the death penalty was not warranted. He was selfish and disgusting, but I doubt he tortured Lacey and a life sentence is fair and appropriate.

I don't think Peterson killed his wife.

R40, you are as dumb as a bag of rocks. Congratulations.

Hopefully he's getting lots of dick.

[quote]it costs more, in the end, to kill them than to keep them alive.

How expensive can it be to put a couple of bullets in someone's head or just decapitate them?

r43, if we're going to be a country with capital punishment, then we have to give the condemned every legal recourse to defend themselves. This gets expensive, and even so, the US has exuctued what we now know were innocent people.

Do you really want to be a state like China that executes people at the drop of a hat?

No, R39. Not a defendant's dream. Sweetie.

I think the process matters. The rule of law matters. And these laws are written by politicians. They do not fall from the heavens, kissed by the lips of a loving God. So they are all open to scrutiny, a scrutiny from which we all benefit. The point of what I wrote is that in a homicide trial, if the state cannot prove a cause of death, then a death personality is not appropriate. A defendant can be sent to prison for decades for a death caused negilgently. A murder conviction is not necessary. That is entirely appropriate.

But if the state cannot prove the cause of death, there is crucial information about the death that we don't know and will probably never know. When there is that level of ambiguity, then no death penalty. It is too final in a case where we don't have all the facts. Lock him up.

R45, as I said, I agree a death penalty was not appropriate for the crime Peterson committed. He’s despicable, but the death penalty seems to have been given because Lacey was pregnant. An unpleasant crime but not a death penalty crime.

Getting overly focused on proving the cause of death would be unfairly advantageous to defendants who manage to hide bodies for a long time or burn them or (as Peterson did) throw them in bodies of water. We don’t reward that behavior and we don’t let our brains fall out of our heads when trying cases. Lacey was evidently murdered. Peterson shouldn’t have got the death penalty because there’s no evidence his crime was sufficiently cruel to warrant it, not because we couldn’t prove how Lacey died per se.

"Lacey was evidently murdered."

No. Laci was evidently dead. That's what the evidence presented at trial supported.

But the coroner could not distinguish between a natural death and a homicide. That's why the death penalty is not appropriate. It is not appropriate when the murder is 'proven' by an inference, however strong. If a man has a bullet in his skull and the coroner can testify that bullet was the cause of death, that is very different than the coroner taking the stand and saying, 'I don't know. I don't know how she was killed.'

I am not arguing that there can be no murder convictions based on circumstanial evidence. That was decided long ago. But to fix a death penalty on a defendant's head when we don't even know how the deceased came to be deceased is too much. The fact of Laci's pregnancy was as much a fact of the case tried in the court of public opinion as it was the case tried in criminal court. The emotion that surrounded this case is why Peterson got the death penalty. Not the evidence. Because there is a big ol' hole in the evidence presented.

R47, did Peterson claim Laci died naturally?

Let me help you out R45/R47. No he didn’t. His defence tried to suggest an unknown homeless guy murdered her instead, rather than claiming she had died of natural causes and for some reason rather than calling the authorities, he had disposed of her body in the water (even Scott Peterson knew no-one would believe that).

So your whole line of thought is redundant as cause of death was never an issue in the case.