Lisa Montgomery

[Sean Hayden]

Thank you, and no worries Hermit. It's been a boon to my thinking to argue with people like you who are smarter and more informed than me.

[Hermit]

I am not smarter than you, Sean.

[Cunt]

No kidding lol

Hermit, when you do zero in though, you are sharp as fuck.

[Sean Hayden]

Anyway, what'd you think Brian?

Is there anything to how we perceive a moral difference between crimes and physically similar punishments, except when it comes to murder and execution? Why don't we claim serving a warrant for kidnapping is morally equivalent to kidnapping?

I guess that depends on the extent to which killing is, or can be, justified as an expression of moral rectitude. Why is a particular killing, or a type of killing, good, or a type of good?

I presume we don't claim that incarcerating a criminal for kidnapping is the same as kidnapping, even if kidnapping and incarceration are both, functionally speaking, depriving someone of their liberty against their will, because we (generally speaking) don't think that crimes warrant equivalent responses from society - we don't burn the arsonists house down or subject the mugger to a beating etc. We incarcerate the kidnapper in the same way, and for essentially the same kind of reasons, we incarcerate the fraudster, the drugs importer, or the rapist: as a simple punishment for transgressing moral assertions embodied in laws, and for the protection of society(*). The carceral system is a state endorsed and enforced system of social recourse for criminality where prison sentences differ in their length and/or in the severity of their regimes - shorter sentences and/or low-security placements for lesser crimes, longer sentences and higher security placements for more serious crimes.

I don't think that the fact that we have a hierarchy of crimes and punishments is particularly surprising or controversial, or that we consider killing to be at the top of the list. For me the question is not how or why we should allow executions to take place. That, as discussed, merely entails a legal provision. For me the question is about the justification for killing the killer as opposed to simply incarcerating them: what justifies that this particular kind of crime actually does warrant a physically similar punishment? Which brings us back to where I started.


___
* Here we might also talk about prison as a deterrent and a venue for rehabilitation. However, anyone who knowingly commits a crime invariably thinks they're going to get away with it (if they even think that far ahead), and anyone who commits a crime on impulse is almost certainly not involved in weighing up the potential consequences, so the existence of laws, justice and carceral systems probably do little to deter (some people also commit crimes in ignorance of the law). And while lip-service is often paid to rehabilitation is that really possible in carceral systems which over the last 30 years or so have become venues for the mass warehousing of people too poor to post bail, pay fines, or cover court costs, or too ill with mental health or drug and alcohol problems to adequately care for themselves(?) (Incarceration's Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America. [2015, PDF])

This is a sophisticated view, but I think it kind of skirts around an important reason behind why we don't think kidnapping and serving a warrant for kidnapping are morally equivalent: guilt. It isn't just that we don't want to apply an equivalent punishment. In a real sense we don't perceive that we can match the guilty person's act. Doing so would require cruel and unusual punishment, and make us guilty.

In this case Montgomery killed a woman, cut her open and removed her baby. Her actions make her guilty of much more than the loss of life. The victim's husband did not lose his wife to an accident, or to a natural disaster, or disease, but to a truly horrifying and selfish act. He must wrestle with the thoughts of his pregnant wife's final moments constantly.