Jared Lee Loughner; one more act of cowardice
So the Tucson gunman who shot 19 people, killing six, Jared Lee Loughner proves his cowardice one more time and pleads guilty to avoid a death sentence according to the Washington Times;
“He’s a different person in his appearance and his affect than the first time I laid eyes on him,” said Judge Larry A. Burns, who then accepted the plea agreement and added that he found it to be in the best interest of everyone involved.
The outcome was welcomed by some victims, including Giffords herself, as a way to move on.
“The pain and loss caused by the events of Jan. 8, 2011, are incalculable,” Giffords said in a joint statement with her husband, Mark Kelly. “Avoiding a trial will allow us — and we hope the whole Southern Arizona community — to continue with our recovery.”
Of course, karma has a way of rectifying these missteps of justice, like with Jeffrey Dahmer.
Category: Legal
He killed a child. He won’t last long in general population.
The way I understood it, he had been going through psychotherapy for months just to get to a point where he was mentally competent to stand trial. I’m not defending him. I just don’t think it’s an act of cowardice. I see it as the opposite…after all that therapy he got to a point where he realized just how heinous his act was and felt remorse.
I could be way off…defense attorneys may have just said “There’s no way you can win this so, if they offer a plea deal, fucking take it!”
Who knows?
Plus Nicki has a point too
I’m guessing he won’t be put in any prison’s general population. That’s a guaranteed lawsuit when he gets offed, and no warden is stupid enough to take that chance.
If he’s competent to stand trial, he’s competent to live out his sentence in general population. He’s a criminal. I doubt he’ll be given special dispensation because he’s extra heinous.
Jeff, it IS an act of cowardice. He had no problem killing a 9 year old girl but he’s afraid to die himself? Nicki has it right, once it’s learned he killed a kid? Segregation for life! Hopefully THAT will really drive him crazy. I hope he is assigned to a prison here in Az, I have “hood” contacts that are either in the can or have family in the clink…
“He’s a different person in his appearance and his affect than the first time I laid eyes on him,”
CNN is reporting that he’s on a bunch of psych meds, no wonder he is a different person. Geeze, a judge that doesn’t understand cause and effect?
Nicki: it’s my understanding that prisons often will isolate famous/notorious prisoners they believe to be at risk for their own safety rather than place them in general population. Not my field of expertise, so I’m not sure. Some of the LE folks here will have to confirm or correct me.
I personally wouldn’t shed a tear for Loughner if he got offed in prison. But his family would likely file a suit based on the grounds that the prison failed to take measures to protect him that it should have based on reasonably foreseeable threats to his life. And given today’s legal climate, they’d IMO have a better than 50% chance of winning and collecting huge $$$. I just can’t see any warden taking that chance.
He’s not stable enough for a regular prison. My guess is they’ll stuff him in a hospital for the criminally insane somewhere.
I’m going to take an unpopular stance. I think (and have thought) that this man was seriously mentally ill for a long time prior to the shooting in Tucson. He is probably a paranoid schizophrenic, and was actively psychotic at the time of shooting. I don’t think he’s any more responsible for his behavior under those circumstances than any of our guys who get so fucked up from PTSD that they dive under the table every time someone drops a frying pan. Mental illness is a horrible, and very poorly understood thing. It’s based of off physiology; certain neurotransmitters in the brain are either overproduced or underproduced (serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, for example) and that leads to the constant overstimulation of the brain. Imagine not being able to filter certain things out. The feel of your clothes on your body, the hum of the fan, the cars outside. The buzzing of the electric lights. The brain in a lot of mentally patients can’t turn that off like we (the non mentally ill) can. There’s an overload of disorganized sensory information that can’t be turned off. The brain then reorganizes them into patterns it can understand. These reorganized patterns usually take the form of auditory hallucinations. Visual are a lot more rare, but the voices tend to start out friendly. ‘Someone looking out for you all the time. Someone who cares and understands, someone who knows your secrets’. The voices gradually turn darker and darker. Many schizophrenic patients KNOW the voices aren’t real, but the constant whispering gets to them. The voices come all night, all day, all the time. Some tell them to hurt themselves, some tell them to hurt others. As a healthcare provider, I’ve seen a lot of nasty diseases. In my personal opinion, very few are scarier, or more tragic than mental illness. He’s probably sane now and now will have to live with the guilt of what he did for the rest of his life. I feel compassion for this kid. His family failed him. His school failed him. We, as a society failed him through our… Read more »
ANCCPT, I agree with everything you said, except for one aspect. The “compassion” for the mentally ill has begun to overshadow the protection of the rest of society. It’s time to realize that mental illness does need to be vigorously addressed, even if that means violating personal rights and freedoms. Would you allow an ebola victim to wander around, affecting– and possibly infecting– others? Someone suffering from plague or anthrax? Of course not. The mentally ill shouldn’t be allowed to do so, either.
ANCCPT – I’m going to sound heartless here, but I feel sorry for rabid dogs too. They are sick. And yet, we put them down for society’s sake. Loughner should be put down as well.
I’ve got a buddy who’s a LEO and has a JD. I can certainly find out what he thinks about the whole putting Loughner into gen pop.
Nicki: please do. I for one would love hearing his take on the issue.
Couldn’t have said it better myself Pinto. I’m not a fan of the comparison between PTSD and whatever ailed this murderous bastard, however ill he may have been.
It’s not compassion for the mentally ill that lets them become a threat to the rest of us. It’s people ignoring the warning signs. In almost every case of the mentally ill shooting people up, there were warning signs. The Aurora shooter’s psych doc was trying to contact the school to let them know he was becoming unstable. Mr. Loughner’s school had recently expelled him, and barred him from campus due to erratic behavior, and he was documented as asking his parents ‘if they heard voices too’. Mr. Cho in the VA Tech shooting was ‘ordered’ to received psychiatric treatment, and ‘hospitalization was strongly recommended’, but there was never any follow up.
So, these men were clearly becoming ill, not much differently than getting pneumonia, or cancer. The illness was pretty well documented in all cases, and the respective mental health system/MH professionals watched them deteriorate, knowing full well that these men could become acutely psychotic and not in full control of their actions, AND DID NOTHING.
These men did terrible things while they were ill, and have proven that they are dangerous when untreated. That said, our penal system isn’t a the right place for people who are sick. These men need a good, residential lockdown unit where they can be watched, and cared for, but allowed to try to live a good of a life as they can given their conditions.
And Nikki, I’m not going to disagree if the happenings are a pattern. Serial pedophelia or sexual assault, I would agree. Those are a persistent danger to society at large, and have a very high rate of recidivism. The ‘Exile versus execute’ argument is one I would take for those guys. But these guys above….I think they were seriously sick, and their respective support systems failed them.
Again, it’s not compassion that let these guys get to this point. It’s *not* having the compassion to to make the hard decision come down on em with the full force of the law to get them into treatment.
@8; I don’t know about the family filing a suit. Did Dhalmer’s family file suit?
#11 – Just be careful about the mechanism and standards for this. This lady —
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=GRA19040903.2.13&dliv=&e=——-10–1—-0–
— was famously institutionalized for preferring a younger lover to her husband (Thomas Szasz’s Karl Kraus versus the Soul-Doctors includes a long extract from Kraus’ articles on the subject…before her escape, her lack of violent reactions and escape attempts was supposed to be a sign of mental illness; after her escape, so was that…)
…and I often enough see the Left trying to characterize political positions contrary to their own as mental illness, so where does it lead?
Come to it, that would be a hell of an end run around the Second Amendment. “Don’t lock up gun owners for owning guns. But since gun nuts are just that – nuts – lock them up for being mentally ill. Piece of cake! For my next miracle…”
And Kilo, I didn’t compare the actions in acutely psychotic state to PTSD. I was using as an example that most of us here have a fair amount of experience with to illustrate a point.
Please don’t mistake me as justifying the killings. Murder is inexcusable, and I’ve never made the argument that they should go free. But to place what is essentially a kid who never got treatment into the general prison population for something he did while not in control of his actions? I’m not sure that that’s what a civilized people do. He needs permanent hospitalization, and constant monitoring. General population is a horrific place for the ‘normal criminal’, let alone a seriously mentally one.
It’s just my position that people that do this need a safe, permanent place to be medically and psychiatrically treated. There used to be a legal plea of guilty but insane, where they would permanently commit the person to a long term locked mental hospital. It fell out of favor in the 80’s. You can’t execute someone because they are/were sick. Based off of that, we would be hanging DUI drivers who kill people left and right (Which would provide a hell of a deterrent after a few high profile executions….)
And in terms of full disclosure, I work for an air ambulance company in Arizona. If I hadn’t been at drill that weekend, There’d have been a strong chance I would have been on the scene.
This one is close to home in more ways than one.
Twist: I don’t believe Dahlmer’s relatives did. But wrongful death suits filed after deaths in prison are hardly unknown. It’s no stretch to think that Lochner’s family might file one were he placed in general population vice protective custody and soon afterwards offed by another inmate. Given his notoriety and status as a child murderer (albeit not a typical child murderer), a claim that Lochner being targeted by other inmates should have been foreseen would IMO likely have some merit. That claim, properly presented and supported, might well be enough to convince a jury to order a deep-pockets defendant (such as the state of Arizona or the Federal government) to cough up quite a few $$$ for negligence.
Alberich: agreed. The same applies to low-life skinheads like the Sikh temple shooter. Absent clear evidence of danger to self or others, who gets to choose who gets arrested/involuntarily committed? And what are the grounds for either?
I was stationed in Korea when it was IMO about 1 or 2 steps away from being a police state. I’ll pass on seeing that again, thanks.
@17 Alberich, that is precisely why the mentally ill now wander the streets with little or no supervision. Several very high-profile cases of people wrongly committed to “insane asylums” — and hospitals notorious for their care of the mentally ill — caused the doors to be flung open and the hospitals shut down.
You are absolutely correct that increased control of the mentally ill could backfire on those members of society that are simply unpopular. This is just another ingredient in the stew of uncertainty that has caused our society to freeze in addressing this problem.
I hear ya ANCCPT. It’s just a hot button issue with the varying degrees and effects PTSD has on sufferers that I try to prevent the stigma and labels such comparisons have the potential to bring. Wasn’t trying to paint you in a negative light in any way. Good commentary from you btw.
OK, got a reply from my buddy. Here’s what he said:
“That’s up to the staff at whatever facility he’s sent to. They assess the risk and make a determination. If he doesn’t agree, he can fight it. I suspect though that just due to the nature of his crime, he’ll wind up in Colorado’s federal ‘Supermax,’ where everyone is locked down 23 hours a day.”
I trust him, because he’s super smart and has been on both sides of the legal table – as a US Attorney and currently a cop.
ANCCPT – I don’t disagree that the mental health system failed them, and they needed to get fixed. I wonder, however, if some of these nutballs are fixable. Some will argue that sex offenders and serial killers are mentally ill too. I doubt these guys can be fixed in any way. There’s a point where they need to just be removed from society.
The probelm may not be the help they get but “getting” the help.
“The number of state hospital psychiatric beds dropped by 14% nationwide from 2005 to 2010, pushing the severely mentally ill into emergency rooms, jails and prisons, according to a report advocating for more inpatient treatment.”
“However, the discharge of hundreds of thousands of people has proved to be disastrous, said the report, noting that “95% of the nation’s public psychiatric hospital beds [have] disappeared, but community psychiatric care exists for fewer than half the patients who do need it.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-state-psychiatric-beds-20120719,0,7173400.story
There are community centers now and out-reach programs but the system makes it tough to get any care. My story is way too long but I have experience in this with a severly autistic son. I just a lowly retired SFC and I am willing to pay for his help but can’t even get that doen with out extremely long waits, insurance and legal issues and appointments too far and few between.
Nicki: if Loughner ends up in the CO Supermax, he likely won’t need further protection – as your friend indicated. If not, I can’s see how he’ll not end up in the protective custody portion of whatever prison in which he ends up serving his sentence. He’s simply too high-profile and vulnerable of a target for the other prisoners.
“He’s simply too high-profile and vulnerable of a target for the other prisoners.”
Hondo, that’s the whole point. *evil grin*
I understand that, Nicki – and viscerally, I agree. But Prison Wardens and Staff also have a duty to ensure the physical safety of the inmates. And if they’re knowingly or negligently complicit in doing something that causes or contributes to an inmate’s death – well, let’s just say most Prison Wardens and Staff like to go home at night vice enjoy their institution’s hospitality.
Being serious for a moment… they have to assess the situation. There are a ton of child molesters in general population, and they are KNOWN not to last long in those environments. Yet, I don’t know if there’s any general rule that puts these people (and I use that term loosely) into some kind of special protection. Even though Loughner is more infamous, I’m not sure they would treat him any differently. I suspect that my friend is right, and that this is a moot point anyway. They might just lock that shit show up in Supermax and leave him there to rot.
ANCCPT said it: “It’s not compassion for the mentally ill that lets them become a threat to the rest of us. It’s people ignoring the warning signs. In almost every case of the mentally ill shooting people up, there were warning signs.”
Charles Whitman in Texas in 1966, and Laurie Dann in Evanston, IL in 1988 both exhibited warning signs but those were ignored, as did James Holmes in Colorado and Wade Page in Wisconsin, and the Norway gunman Anders Breivik in 2011.
The warning signs are there but people tend to do nothing about them.
At the same time, can you truly justify locking up someone just because he has extremist views and spouts extremist rhetoric, or because he’s posted a not-so-funny video on YouTube?
Comedians trying to make jokes about the Aurora shootings were castigated for that, but those jokes don’t make them mentally ill or criminal, just stupid and tacky.
I think Heinlein was right (again). To paraphrase: Either this guy is insane with no chance of getting better, or insane but could get better with treatment, or he is not insane and is just an evil fuck. If the latter, execution is fine with me. If the first option, he will forever be a danger to others and in mental anguish and killing him would be an act of mercy. If he gets better, how could he live with himself? The only decent option would be suicide. I’ve got no problem with the State beating him to the punch. I have no sympathy for the guy – my sympathy is reserved for his victims.