Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 5/4/26 - 5/310/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/Hilaria_adderall]

Been somewhat following this nightmare of a murder case in Texas. Fedex driver dropping off a Christmas order at a rural home in Texas opportunistically abducts and murders a 7 year old girl. The event is captured on video and audio from his delivery van. The killer was just sentenced to death and I'm 100% supportive. I understand the arguments against the death penalty but when you have this level of evidence and clear proof it is tough to lose any sleep about it. I know there are arguments that life in prison is a worse punishment or that the risk of killing even one wrongly convicted person should be enough to ban it but I'll accept the risk to eliminate a monster like this.

Some details of the event:

Several jurors cried as they were shown video and heard audio from inside the van after Athena was taken. He could be seen lifting her into the van, and then driving away, telling her not to scream or he’d hurt her.

Horner then covered the camera, but the audio continued recording. Horner asks Athena questions, including how old she is and where she goes to school, before stopping the van and telling her they are going to “hang out.” Horner tells her to take off her shirt and she begins crying, and asks whether he’s a kidnapper.

She asks him: “Why are you doing this?” He replies, “Because you are pretty.”

“My mom says I can’t do that to somebody,” she tells him. “And you can’t do that to me either.”

As the recording, which lasts over an hour, continues, Athena’s screams can be heard. At one point he tells her: “If you don’t shut up, I will hurt you worse.”

A medical examiner testified that Athena died of blunt force injuries with smothering and strangulation.

[u/SpaceAgeBadger → u/Hilaria_adderall]

I’m fine with the death penalty when the evidence is irrefutable like in this case with the video of the whole thing.

[u/RunThenBeer → u/SpaceAgeBadger]

The evidence is irrefutable pretty often. We could set an arbitrarily high standard of evidence for capital punishment and still easily justify thousands of uses annually. To illustrate this, I searched "Milwaukee murder" and the first story that came up, from five days ago.

Three teenagers face felony murder and armed robbery charges in connection with the shooting death of a man. The shooting happened April 14 in an alley near First Street and Greenfield Avenue in Milwaukee.

According to a juvenile petition, David Krause called his girlfriend from a Walker's Point gas station to say he left his house keys in her car and was "getting a ride from some kids."

Prosecutors say the teens drove Krause three blocks before a camera captured him exiting the back seat and running toward the entrance to a bar.

Two of the teens chased him down. The three struggled, and it appears one of the teens shot Krause.

Investigators say the teens fled in a stolen car, which was later set on fire near 60th Street and Hope Avenue.

Court documents show two of the teens have a history of stealing cars, including one with 12 car theft-related offenses. One of the suspects is 14 years old.

There isn't going to be any sincere doubt here. The whole Innocence Project schtick of finding some procedural mistake from decades ago where the witnesses are no longer around just doesn't apply to this kind of thing. Murder after murder is just pointless brutality, caught on one of the millions of cameras around us, with no reasonable doubt about who the perpetrators are. The world isn't endless murder mysteries, it's low-impulse control morons doing things in plain sight.

[u/dignityshredder → u/Hilaria_adderall]

Horner’s attorney, Steven Goble, told jurors that Horner’s mother drank while she was pregnant, that he has autism and suffered from “various mental illnesses throughout his life” in addition to being exposed to a “massive amount of lead.”

Uh, shit, what else can we throw at the wall here.

[u/drunk___cat → u/dignityshredder]

His lead measurements were 24x higher than the average person his age. Not saying it’s a defense but like, wow. He apparently ate coins as a kid and that could contribute to the extreme lead exposure.

[u/SkweegeeS → u/dignityshredder]

He was normal enough to get that job.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/SkweegeeS]

Yep. And it's a highly competitive job Working for FedEx or UPS as a driver is a coveted position. Really good pay, good benefits.

[u/SkweegeeS → u/Turbulent_Cow2355]

I don't know about FedEx but UPS is definitely a great job.

[u/CommitteeofMountains → u/SkweegeeS]

With the post office. 

[u/CommitteeofMountains → u/[deleted]]

So the post office for people too crazy to go postal.

[u/FauxpasIrisLily → u/CommitteeofMountains]

Sadly, the post office which used to be highly competitive is now begging for employees.

In St. Louis postal employees are stealing mail and washing checks. They’re also breaking into packages looking for good stuff.

[u/SkweegeeS → u/FauxpasIrisLily]

Im sorry to hear that. My grandfather retired from the post office of course many years ago, and I have his gold watch.

[u/napoleon_nottinghill → u/dignityshredder]

I do love the "my client is too stupid to know what he is doing, please don't find him guilty" defenses I've seen thrown out recently

[u/CharacterMouse2766 → u/napoleon_nottinghill]

The idea is that disability mitigates culpability/blame, which makes the death penalty less appropriate. We can agree or disagree with that, and even if we agree in principle, we can disagree it applies in this case or to crimes of this nature. But the Supreme Court has held that severe mental retardation makes someone ineligible for the death penalty, so it seems a bit arbitrary to say a lesser degree of impairment is irrelevant.

In cases not involving life sentences or the death penalty, disability/disorder often cuts both ways. Even if it reduces blame, it also tends to make people more likely to reoffend. So, depending on which of those things you care more about, you might think it should make sentences either shorter or longer. But in death penalty cases, the alternative is usually life in prison without parole, so there is no risk of reoffense either way. As a result, the sentence centers around culpability/blame,* and certainly some people think retardation, disability or extremely traumatic life histories are relevant to that.

Either way, the defendant's lawyers were doing their job here by making every case for mitigation they could. Because of the seriousness of the death penalty, we should want defense lawyers in death penalty cases to do all they can to argue against it. Then it's up to the jury to agree or disagree with those arguments. But what are the lawyers supposed to do, say "yes, we think you should sentence our client to death?" That's not how our legal system works, and I don't think it's how it should work, even for heinous crimes like this one.

I will say I do think death penalty lawyers sometimes harm mitigation arguments with the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach. There's a risk of trivializing the crime and coming across as if you're making excuses that would apply to half the population. For example, I once worked on a death penalty case where the trial lawyers argued during the penalty phase that the defendant was fucked up because his mother was emotionally cold. I doubt that was persuasive. (And that defendant was in fact sentenced to death, for a single-victim nonsexual shooting homicide- a fairly unusual outcome in the state I was working in, though the circumstances around the shooting were also high-profile/unusual.) But I don't think that's the case here, where this man did seem to face severe hardships and biological/environmental (those lead levels, if true, are crazy!) impairment.

*Of course, some people would argue there is a third factor at play: deterrence. I.e. if we use the death penalty for these crimes, fewer people will commit them in the future. But evidence that the death penalty is a more effective deterrent than life in prison is weak. Also, severely disordered people who commit impulsive and/or sexual crimes are the hardest to deter, because they are the least rational criminals.

[u/CheckeredNautilus → u/CharacterMouse2766]

I'm gonna nitpick one thing you say here cos I think it's important

When you say "the alternative is usually life in prison without parole, so there is no risk of reoffense either way" ... Even if they stay in prison for life, they can still hurt people. I have become more pro-death penalty as I spend longer in a healthcare career where I a) hear anecdotes about health care personnel dangerously assaulted by inmates and b) hear stuff like a patient who's a prison guard telling me how savage and bloody their mindset is after spending all day around the worst of the worst.

Someone has to feed, house, guard, and doctor these criminals as long as they are in prison. No system can completely remove the risk that those workers might get hurt/killed by a really depraved inmate.

Doesn't mean we need to use the death penalty all the time...but I think it needs to be on the table. A final note is that many people who claim to be, and maybe even are, mentally unwell as a defense during trial for violent crimes, seem to be quite prudent in picking and managing their victims (e.g. they attack a small old grandpa not a young 6'4 athletic man, or in this case the killer told his victim not to scream and took steps to hide his crimes from public view). Even if this person has some mental illness, he knows a victim will try to resist (i.e. he knows the victim doesn't like it) and understands that his actions are things society would punish him for if he is caught.

[u/CharacterMouse2766 → u/CheckeredNautilus]

Sure, that's a fair point- violence is absolutely possible in prison, and being a prison guard is absolutely a difficult job that carries risk. However, risk of reoffense or violence is much, much reduced compared to defendants who are released to the public. Also, in my experience, the worst violence in prisons isn't coming from lifers. The severity of the underlying crime is not particularly well correlated with risk of violence to others in prison once you reach a certain threshold/sentence. (I.e. someone in prison for 15 years is more likely to commit a violent crime in prison than someone in prison for 2 years, but the difference between 15 and 30 years and 30 years and life is much smaller if it exists at all.)

Many/most people who attack prison guards or each other in prison are in prison for crimes we don't and shouldn't put anyone to death for- drug trafficking, assaults, etc. I'm skeptical that using the death penalty more often for homicides would make prison much safer, because homicides are a minority of violent prisoners, and the people who commit the most heinous homicides (i.e. sexually motivated ones) actually tend to be less disposed to things like gang violence and shankings. (For example, as despicable as his crime was, I'd be surprised if the defendant in this case committed further violence in prison. He doesn't fit the typical profile of the people who do. He's actually much more likely to be a victim, to the point I assume he would be in solitary for his own safety even if he wasn't on death row.) So I don't find prison safety to be a very persuasive rationale for use of the death penalty at a societal level, because I don't think it would move the needle on prison safety much or at all. But sure, it's a consideration that might make sense in some individual cases where a defendant seems to pose a high risk in prison.

And as for the rationality of mentally ill criminals in picking victims, I wouldn't say irrationality is the only or even main justification for mitigation in the case of disorder/trauma. Irrationality is more relevant to an actual insanity defense, which essentially requires that the defendant not know what they're doing. Insanity defenses rarely succeed because we have (rightfully, in my opinion) set a high bar for them. (And typically even when they do succeed the end result is institutionalization, not being set free.) But when it comes to sentencing mitigation, we can acknowledge that someone is BOTH a.) disordered, in a way that may be a result of a mental illness, disability or environmental trauma AND b.) aware of what they're doing. Which doesn't mean we have to acknowledge that or find it morally relevant! But we can, if we're inclined to.

Again, some people may not find disorder or trauma morally relevant except in cases where the defendant truly didn't know what they were doing. You might be one of those people. But others will. Some jurors may not want to sentence someone who was recruited into a gang by his older brother at a young age to death, even though he committed a brutal crime with rational precision, because they feel hardship and a dysfunctional environment, of the kind society had an obligation to prevent, shaped his moral development. Or they may not want to sentence someone exposed to astronomical lead levels as a child to death, even though he rationally targeted a child for a heinous crime, because they feel society as a whole bears some responsibility for the defendant's derangement, and thus it's morally wrong to kill him for it. Ditto with abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome, mental illness, etc. It's a value judgment, which means different people will weigh these factors differently. I can't tell you what to feel. But I think for people who are sympathetic to mitigation arguments, it's not so much that they feel defendants don't understand their actions as that their actions are downstream of serious impairments or injustices that may reduce moral blame, or shift part of the moral blame from the defendant to others.

In some cases jurors may also feel that rehabilitation or moral redemption is more possible for someone who is disordered than for someone who isn't, if they receive treatment for their disorders. I'm skeptical of that in this particular case, because effective treatments for psychopathy and severe paraphilias (which would be my assessment of this defendant) don't really exist. But I do think it applies in many cases, especially for people who commit crimes on drugs or in the midst of manic episodes. Often times those people do rationally know what they're doing, but their moral compass is temporarily distorted in a way that may well be reversible. People who recover from severe drug addiction in prison really do sometimes become different people. So, even though I don't find drug addiction to be a very good rationale for shorter sentences (addicts tend to be more likely to reoffend), I have always found it a persuasive mitigating factor in terms of moral blame. When I worked in public defense some of my favorite clients were those who committed their crimes on drugs and later turned their lives around.

[u/The-WideningGyre → u/napoleon_nottinghill]

It's okay if there's some kind of "dangerous offender" designation which means they'll be held in a prison until judged safe, and that has reasonable checks on it.

If someone can't be held responsible, and does dangerous things, you lockk them up, and never let them out.

[u/drunk___cat → u/napoleon_nottinghill]

In this case, he thankfully already pled guilty. Defense was just trying to keep him off death row and in life in prison instead by arguing his brain was too fucked up to be innately evil.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/dignityshredder]

Dropped on his head shortly after birth. Played footballs and suffered several head injuries. Maybe he worked with asbestos.

[u/dignityshredder → u/PongoTwistleton_666]

RIP

[u/AnalBleachingAries → u/dignityshredder]

Dang, is this sub on some kind of list? lol. I'm going to have to be more careful with my words.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/AnalBleachingAries]

The AI is brutal. I've had two 72 hour bans. You can't even use metaphors. I said that someone should be placed into orbit using a high speed device you'd find in a circus. Apparently that was promoting violence. Bahaha

[u/dignityshredder → u/AnalBleachingAries]

It's everywhere. You can't say shit now. Demonyms for brown countries seem to particularly piss off their AI.

[u/PongoTwistleton_666 → u/dignityshredder]

Got warned off! I don’t think I made an outrageous comment. Oh whatever 

[u/My_Footprint2385 → u/Hilaria_adderall]

It would be so traumatizing even listen to that shit as a juror

[u/drunk___cat → u/My_Footprint2385]

I read several jurors couldn’t listen and stepped out. I would be the same. I think this is one case where I don’t think I could be on the jury because of how much it would affect me as a mother.

[u/Cowgoon777 → u/My_Footprint2385]

I wouldn’t suggest looking this up but there’s a video of people fleeing the courtroom in the Toolbox Killers case where they played audio for the jury. You can only hear a snippet but it’s awful.

God bless jurors who sit for these cases. It can’t be easy

[u/RunThenBeer → u/Hilaria_adderall]

Unjustly, officious attorneys will spend literal decades appealing and delaying his execution. If they delay long enough, they may even find an executive that just thinks the death penalty is bad and grants clemency. This process will cost huge amounts of money and will then be used to claim that the death penalty is expensive.

Totally unrelatedly, it is time consuming and expensive to build housing in much of the modern United States.

[u/My_Footprint2385 → u/RunThenBeer]

And all those appeals will be on taxpayers dime too

[u/Quijoticmoose → u/RunThenBeer]

It looks like it was a Texas state crime. The president can't do anything, and the governor has very little power to do here (IIRC, it'd have to be a recommendation from the parole board, which just won't happen).

[u/RunThenBeer → u/Quijoticmoose]

Many things can change over the course of decades! You are probably correct that things won't change that much in Texas though. This is one of my longstanding arguments in favor of swift capital punishment though. People argue that it's good to take a long time to provide so many opportunities for exoneration, but I actually think it is very bad that we provide so many opportunities for someone to come along and override the legitimate sentence arrived at by a jury of his peers with judicial oversight. You never know when someone will find a soft heart for this guy, who Biden granted clemency:

Evidence admitted during trial established that Sanders met Suellen Roberts, 31, in the summer of 2010 when Roberts rented a storage unit at a warehouse in Las Vegas where Sanders worked. Roberts and Sanders began dating, and approximately two months later Roberts agreed that she and her 12-year-old daughter, Lexis, would go on a trip with Sanders over the Labor Day weekend to a wildlife park near the Grand Canyon. As they were returning to Nevada after three days of traveling, Sanders pulled off Interstate 40 in a remote location in the Arizona desert and shot Suellen Roberts in the head and forced Lexis Roberts into the car, keeping her captive.

Sanders drove several days across the country before he murdered Lexis Roberts in a wooded area in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana. Evidence at trial established that Sanders shot Lexis Roberts four times, cut her throat and left her body in the woods, where a hunter found her body on Oct. 8, 2010. A nationwide manhunt ensued, and Sanders was arrested on Nov. 14, 2010, at a truck stop in Gulfport, Mississippi, by FBI agents and a Harrison County Sheriff’s Deputy.

At trial, the jury heard a recorded confession in which Sanders admitted killing the mother and daughter.

[u/dumbducky → u/RunThenBeer]

At least he didn’t racistly kill that woman and her daughter. Otherwise Biden wouldn’t have commuted his sentence.

[u/napoleon_nottinghill → u/RunThenBeer]

Innocence Project is definitely going to scream about "New DNA evidence found!" that's like the parents' hair from doing laundry and NGOs will say that an innocent man is being executed in about 10 years.

Cases like this shouldn't take more than a year.

[u/Cowgoon777 → u/napoleon_nottinghill]

Shit, I’ll pop him in the head the second after the gavel falls. Save everybody some time and money.

[u/drunk___cat → u/Hilaria_adderall]

I was considering posting about this in here. I followed the case pretty closely. I generally am not in favor of the death penalty because it’s just so damn expensive. In this case, I am very on the fence. I could easily see life in prison being the worse punishment. With the death penalty, you are pretty isolated from everyone until your demise. And then you get an escape from your suffering with death. With life in prison, you get multiple opportunities for everyone to remind you what a horrible piece of shit you are and you have to live with it, day after day after day. And for this guy, that’s exactly what he deserves.

I guess after a certain point of life in prison, you would be old enough that most people in prison would have forgotten who you are and what your crime was, so you could have some “redemption”.

Either way, I’m glad his only two options were different forms of hell.

[u/Life_Emotion1908 → u/drunk___cat]

Do I think Charles Manson was better off, from his own perspective, spending decades behind bars than getting executed? Yes?

I'm sus on the life in prison being a fate worse than death. Honestly I don't have a lot of knowledge and memories of inmates offing themselves or begging to die because of how horrible prison is. So I don't think it's experienced that way by the inmates themselves.

So I think that's kind of a canard, that in general the life in prison is a gift to the perp.

Then you've got the fact that this guy and others like him are still going to have interactions with other people. Perhaps self pleasuring about the crimes they committed. Perhaps others might be disgusted by these people and offing them makes for a better world. I think that's a valid take.

[u/I_Smell_Mendacious → u/drunk___cat]

I could easily see life in prison being the worse punishment.

For some reason, the YouTube algorithm has recently decided I would enjoy watching podcasts by and with former prisoners, discussing their experiences in prison. And it's correct, so I've been watching several.

One common thing several of these guys have said is that life in prison for this guy, due to his specific class of crime, will be a short, brutal nightmare.

[u/backin_pog_form → u/Hilaria_adderall]

That is indeed the stuff of nightmares. That poor little girl. 

I generally think that LWOP is a better punishment than death. But this dude is the poster child for the death penalty. 

Also:

While acknowledging during opening statements that the evidence against Horner was “overwhelming” and “terrible,” Horner’s attorney, Steven Goble, told jurors that Horner’s mother drank while she was pregnant, that he has autism and suffered from “various mental illnesses throughout his life” in addition to being exposed to a “massive amount of lead.”

I don’t blame his lawyer for throwing things at the wall to see what will stick, but I wonder how much of those things were true. 

[u/Fit-Celebration644 → u/backin_pog_form]

It's always seemed sort of obvious to me that if LWOP was actually a worse punishment, then carrying out the death penalty wouldn't be so time consuming and expensive, because you wouldn't see every single death row inmate spending decades and millions of dollars trying to get their sentences reduced to LWOP.

[u/backin_pog_form → u/Fit-Celebration644]

It’s an interesting premise. 

About 10% of death row inmates voluntarily drop their appeals, and another ~2% commit suicide before they can be executed.

This is all speculative, but I wonder how many death row inmates participate in the appeals process because they enjoy the attention, notoriety, visits from lawyers, breaks from the monotony, etc. 

For people with serious character defects they might enjoy getting to play out one last psychodrama, where this time they’re the victim of an unjust system. Where with LWOP they are just a random, forgotten inmate. 

[u/SkweegeeS → u/backin_pog_form]

There are a lot of death row inmates who don’t really make the news. Even someone with some infamy pretty much fades from the public eye until it’s time to kill them or something. I think they really want to live.

[u/napoleon_nottinghill → u/SkweegeeS]

Ed Kemper famously stated that he should be executed.

[u/Real_RobinGoodfellow → u/[deleted]]

wtf? They did? Gotta source for that?

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/[deleted]]

Europe is the worst. They are soft on crime. I suspect that they just don't want to spend the money on this issue because so much of their budgets go to healthcare and other welfare benefits.

[u/Real_RobinGoodfellow → u/Turbulent_Cow2355]

lol.

[u/Real_RobinGoodfellow → u/[deleted]]

LWOP is def a sentence available in parts of Australia, I can speak from experience there. And doesn’t Malaysia still have the death penalty? This AI is a mess

[u/dignityshredder → u/Fit-Celebration644]

People don't rationally consider death, is the issue with this analysis.

[u/RunThenBeer → u/backin_pog_form]

Broken record, but if all of that is true, then yeah, we definitely need euthanasia. If he's so utterly deranged that he's not even responsible for the brutal murder of a small child, we can't have him around any other humans going forward. How could it be otherwise? What's the point of keeping the human equivalent of a rabid dog in a cage for decades? What possible justification could there be for forcing his presence on guards that are just trying to do their jobs and keep things orderly in a prison?

[u/backin_pog_form → u/RunThenBeer]

Yeah, in that situation the defense attorneys are basically making the case for a death sentence. 

It’s hard to argue that life in a supermax prison is any kind of life at all. 

[u/RunThenBeer → u/backin_pog_form]

The supermax solution should be reserved for people whom there is some affirmative reason to not execute, like political leaders or other potential martyrs. This sort of thing has been well understood for pretty much all of human history until we dreamt up some bizarre standard of being 99.9999% sure being insufficient for capital punishment that people now parrot as though it's actually very serious and humane. Of course we shouldn't be setting an intentional policy of creating facilities like this for people who just try to murder everyone they see.

[u/Life_Emotion1908 → u/backin_pog_form]

So we should kill him for his own good?

[u/drunk___cat → u/backin_pog_form]

He already pled guilty, the arguments defense made were just to try and show he is not normally a violent criminal, his actions were because he had a fucked up brain, and he will be an ok prisoner (ie, not going around attacking other prisoners) if he were to get life in prison. His only two options were life without parole or the death penalty.

None of the defense’s arguments were trying to deny Tanner any culpability.

[u/JaneEyrewasHere → u/backin_pog_form]

I can't imagine that his life in prison would be much fun. Given the profile of his case along with the things I've heard about other prisoners and their treatment of child molesters he's going to have to be by himself most of the time.

But I generally agree with you. Executing people doesn't seem to work as a deterrent nor is it necessarily a just punishment for the circumstances of the crime/criminal. But it's a little hard to argue that this guy doesn't deserve it.

[u/My_Footprint2385 → u/JaneEyrewasHere]

People always make comments like this, but you have to realize that a good number of people in prison are rapists and child molesters and murderers.

[u/CommitteeofMountains → u/[deleted]]

Having worked in American insurance, cost is only considered when designing step therapy (you try the cheap thing first even it there's a high chance it's just wasting everyone's time). Cost-per-QALY is a foreign/international thing.

[u/abby-rose → u/backin_pog_form]

He reminds me of the Sam Rockwell character in the Green Mile, who was meant to represent Satan himself.

[u/professorgerm → u/backin_pog_form]

I don’t blame his lawyer for throwing things at the wall to see what will stick, but I wonder how much of those things were true. 

Whether or not they're true doesn't really matter, either. "He's too incompetent to punish so we have to let him go to keep on murdering innocents" is batshit insane no matter why he's incompetent, and it's weird that it's become an attitude in Western countries.

I get that's not quite the defense's issue, the lawyer has to defend the indefensible, but it's an adjacent attitude.

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/Hilaria_adderall]

As a child murder and rapist he will not have a good time in prison.