Prosecutors Will Seek Death Penalty for Amy Bishop in Deaths of 3 Colleagues

May 25, 2011, 11:40 pm

Prosecutors will seek the death penalty against Amy Bishop, the former professor accused of killing three colleagues during a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville in February 2010, The Huntsville Times reported. Ms. Bishop is charged with murder in those three deaths and with attempted murder in the shootings of three other employees of the biology department. She was indicted in March, and her lawyers have said they intend to use a defense of “not guilty by reason of insanity.” A trial date has not been set.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

E-mail

SophieMerry

Does this mean her quest for tenure is on hold?
akprof

Premeditation and careful planning seems to be the hallmarks of what makes a killing eligible for the death penalty as a punishment. That seems a perfect description of an execution. Seems to me that carrying out the death penalty puts us on the same moral plane as the people we are executing.

Besides, sitting in prision for the rest of my life seems to me to be a much more cruel pubishment than letting me out of prison early – even by killing me. I’ve always thought that McVeigh would have been much more punished had they locked him up and never let him talk to any press or potential book authors!!
CU_Alum

The legal definition of insanity is not the inability to control one’s actions. Instead, it is the inability to distinguish right from wrong. (There is a variation based upon an “irresistible impulse”, but Bishop’s lawyers are unlikely to make that argument.) The definition dank48 offers would apply to involuntary acts, but voluntariness and sanity are very different concepts. The actions of someone who is legally insane are just as likely to be voluntary as anyone else’s, but the insane person won’t understand that she is doing anything wrong.

The reason our legal system acknowledges insanity as a defense is that the definitions of serious crimes include a conscious choice to act in ways society deems morally wrong. (Some such crimes aren’t so clearly wrong in the moral sense, but that is a different discussion.) By definition, someone who is legally insane cannot form that mental state. That is why a finding that someone was insane when she committed a crime requires a verdict of not guilty. Dank48′s proposal to require the opposite verdict would turn some of our legal system’s most fundamental principles on their head.
CU_Alum

Premeditation is what distinguishes first-degree murder from lesser degrees of the crime. But not all first-degree murders are subject to the death penalty. In states that have capital punishment, the prosecutor has to prove that one or more pre-defined “special circumstances” are present before the defendant can be sentenced to death. The killing of two or more people is on the list of special circumstances in most, if not all, death penalty states.
goxewu

If “carrying out the death penalty puts us on the same moral plane as the people we are executing,” does arresting and taking to jail (i.e., kidnapping) a kidnapper put us on the same moral plane as the arrested kidnapper? Does imprisoning somebody who imprisoned (e.g., held for ransom) put us on the same plane as the perp? Does fining a wrongdoer put us on the same moral plane as a robber? Does giving a wrongdoer a choice of paying a fine or spending time in jail put us on the same moral plane as a blackmailer?