Should compulsory sterilisation become law?

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LKD, while your analysis of rape is correct, this actually started by talking about those who harmed their children, and were thus shown to be irresponsable with children (woman who killed 3 kids, etc). Here, on many levels at least, sterilisation may be a solution.

Iku, you figure out how and I'll back you on it! I mean, who'll challenge us? We'll have an army of zombies to unleash on the world!

 

Well, NOG, I know the thread was inspired by the French woman who faked mental distress to avoid taking responsibility for the murder of babies (I'm not judgemental, not at all!) but based on silvery's quote above I expanded it to all "known abusers".

In the case of women who murder their babies, I would argue that sterilization is part of the solution. It still doesn't bring back to life the nurdered child. A penalty -- as in hard jail time -- still must be paid, and "oh, she feels really bad about it!" doesn't come anywhere close to cutting it. Neither does the old "men just don't understand" claptrap that unreasonably divides the genders and tries to make them out to be different species of some sort. Honest minded people of both genders understand these situations very well, and one thing they understand is that depression is not a permit to commit murder and walk away with a pathetic slap on the wrist.

Understanding is understanding, but BS excuses should always be recognized for what they are.

 

wouldnt cutting off their hands be a better solution?

 

While I agree that BS excuses are wrong, I do not believe that sterilisation is a solution. Nobody has a right to modify in anyway our body against our wishes. If a child molestor wants to be castrated because he can't control himself, then it's cool, it's all good. But if the person does not want to, it's unthinkable to me to force it.

What a woman like that needs is intense therapy (and someplace where she can't hurt anyone until she's better).

 

2 things:

1: Having proven that one is incapable of sufficient self control to either A: at least attempt to take care of a baby or B: resist the urge to sexually interact with those who do not consent to such interaction, I believe that sterilisation is a fine first step -- not unthinkable at all.

2: I agree about the therapy, but would change the last part to "someplace where she can't hurt anyone ever again." No second chances for murderers and violent rapists, no "get out of jail free cards" for pretending to be sick to dodge responsibility. Either kill 'em or lock 'em up for good. I wonder how the parole board people live with themselves when one of the dirtbags they parole commits another rape or murder. IMHO they are accessories to the crimes their parolees commit. -- make no mistake, mental troubles or not, women who kill their babies are just as much murderers as the guy who goes into a restaurant and guns down the manager.

 

The reason I posted what I did was because this:

indicated that you were only considering sexually based crimes, when in fact you should be considering a MUCH wider range.

Other than that, I think you are either severely prejudiced against psychology as a practice and a science, or you severely misunderstand what we're talking about when we discuss some of these things. I don't believe for a second that the French woman was "depressed". I believe she suffered a serious break from reality, on one level or another. Quite simply, this means that the chemicals in her brain went so screwy that she thought drowning her children and sticking them in the freezer would actually help them; as in, she thought it was the responsable and adult thing to do.

Now, I'm no fan of psychology defenses as a whole, but some times they are accurate. From what the woman described, she either got some superb psychological coaching for that defense, or she really suffered from such an event.

LKD, to put it in a slightly different perspective, imagine an older man is driving home from work one afternoon. On the way home, as he's going through a busy intersection, he suffers a stroke and passes out. His car carreens out of control, sideswipes a minivan, and shoots onto a busy sidewalk. Two people die and a several more are injured. The man survives and, amazingly, suffers minimal brain damage from the stroke (replace with other sudden and debilitating medical conditions if you like). Should he be blamed for the damage his car caused? Should he go to jail for vehicular manslaughter? Should he be put in a place where he can "never hurt anyone again"?

 

NOG, I believe that such cases occur, but they are rare in the extreme. I believe that opportunistic defense lawyers and unscrupulous psychiatrists and other mental health "experts" use the shield of mental illness far, far too often.

In other words, if I had faith in the evaluation system that came down with these diagnoses, of course I would have compassion for them just like the man with the real medical condition (a stroke) that you mentioned. The plain fact is I do not have that faith. IMHO, there is a movement afoot in the world that seeks to remove any personal responsibility from people, sucking away at our very humanity and giving excuse after excuse to those who do not deserve it.

So, I go with your second option -- the little <female dog> was likely coached up the yang to hit all the talking points and symptoms during her testimony.

Here, take a look at this:

Spoiler

A young Wetaskiwin mom convicted of murdering her newborn was hit with a life sentence this morning after the judge ruled she does not have the power to interfere with the jury’s verdict.

Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Joanne Veit dismissed defence lawyer Peter Royal’s application for a mistrial before sentencing Katrina Effert to life with no chance of parole for 10 years.

Her distraught parents sobbed uncontrollably upon hearing the decision.

Royal made the application yesterday, calling Saturday's verdict "perverse," "unreasonable" and a "miscarriage of justice."

He argued there was "overwhelming" evidence that Katrina Effert's mind was "disturbed" both before and immediately after the secret birth.

"If this isn't an infanticide case, infanticide should be taken out of the Criminal Code," he said.

Wetaskiwin Crown prosecutor Robert Robbenhaar said Effert has the option of appealing the conviction, and argued the verdict was not unreasonable and the law does not allow a judge to interfere.

Effert, 23, was convicted of second-degree murder Saturday afternoon after two days of deliberations.

It was the second time Effert was convicted of murdering her newborn baby.

In 2006, a Wetaskiwin jury found her guilty, but it was overturned on appeal last year, and a new trial was ordered after the Crown conceded the original trial judge's instructions to the jury were flawed.

Court has heard Effert strangled her newborn son, later named Rodney, with a pair of orange thong underwear and then tossed his body into a neighbour's yard following the April 18, 2005, birth when she was 19.

Prosecutors argued Effert is a cold-blooded and manipulative killer who strangled the baby because she didn't want her parents to find out she was pregnant.

Royal argued she was in a disturbed state of mind and should be found guilty of the lesser charge of infanticide.

After denying it was her baby and lying to police several times, Effert tearfully confessed that she "panicked" when the baby boy began crying and covered his face with a towel and strangled him with her underwear.

A few hours later she carried the baby into the back- yard and tossed him over a fence into a neighbour's yard.

A forensic psychiatrist testified Effert was suffering from an "imbalance of the mind" at the time, while a forensic psychologist told jurors she had an acute stress disorder.

This case says to me that the general public, as symbolized by the jury, is tired of smug, smart-assed, murderous losers conning the system. I know I am. What these slimeballs do is an insult to those who really do have a disorder.

I agree, it's just that I think they are accurate - -and honest -- far less than we are being led to believe.

 

I'm no expert on Canada, but an insanity defense is nearly impossible to win in the United States. For an insanity plea to work in the US, you have to prove that the defendant didn't realize that what he did was wrong. A lawyer mounting such a defense is more likely to be incompetent, desperate, or actually representing a client who didn't know what he did was wrong. I imagine most legitimately unscrupulous lawyers would be far more interested in unscrupulously mounting a plea that has a reasonable chance of success. In the US, insanity pleas are for the desperate and the insane -- and in either case, the odds are that the plea will fail.

Spoiler

...and even if the plea doesn't fail, the time the defendant spends institutionalized often exceeds the time the defendant would have spent behind bars since, unlike a prison term, a sentence to an institution usually only carries a minimum period. If you don't get better, you don't leave. This is yet another reason that the insanity plea is only rarely used in the US.

 

It should be rarely used anywhere because as you stated, most of the time you end up spending more time incarcerated than the prison sentence. You will not be let out until you are well and most of those conditions are chronic and you don't get well. The best you can hope for is supervised freedom and if you show any sign of going off your meds or your illness emerging it is back to the nut house.

I used to work with these people and we had a junkie who got busted for a minor theft and to this date I think he has spent 20 years incarcerated. He is utterly insane but I am fairly sure he isn't dangerous but if he has been sentenced to mental care they can't let him out until he is deemed well.

 

I wonder why you believe this. I see this mentality often here in the US, but it is far more educated by Law&Order than by actual facts. As Drew pointed out, here in the US at least, a psychology defense is both risky (i.e. likely to fail) and not really better than a jail term. On top of that, the symptoms of a psychological disorder are not just thought, but behavior, meaning you'd have to be planning things ahead of time.

I agree, and it is powerful in certain segments of psychology, but (again here in the US at least) the courts have shot down all such claims that I'm aware of. Despite what CSI or Law&Order may show, you can't get away with murder by claiming to have a "murder gene".

Again, I don't know what it's like in Canada, but here in the US that would never fly. A stress disorder does not exonerate you from your actions. It may be brought up durring sentencing to ask for leniency, but that's it. Even then, it isn't likely to be taken seriously.

Unfortunately, I would guess that psychology defenses are accurate far more often than we are led to believe, probably even far more often than they are claimed. This was quite a few years ago, but when my father was doing his internship for his degree, he worked at a prison. Quite a few of the prisoners in there were psychotic, diagnosably so, and not getting any treatment because they were put in prison instead of a mental institution.

Unfortunately, things like Batman and crime shows seem to have seriously biassed the populace against psych defenses. They consider it an excuse by default, and if the defendant doesn't have 10+ years of therapy history, it isn't believable. It's still treated as a joke more than anything else.

Oh, and for a little perspective, estimates say that somewhere between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1,000 pregnancies result in a case of postpartum psychosis. Most aren't violent, but that's not because the mothers have any kind of "self control" on the issue, it's just the luck of the draw. On top of that, having suffered from it once seems to make you much more likely to suffer from it after subsequent pregnancies.

 

I guess that Canada is a lot more weak willed when it comes to this stuff, then. The guy who decapitated a near stranger (who was sleeping, mind you) on a Greyhound bus and then proceeded to eat the fellow's ear* was given a pass by the courts and ordered into a medical institution. The public was told that he'd likely never see the light of day. Not even a year later, there was a hearing to see if he'd been "rehabilitated" or "healed" or some such horse puckey, and for a while it looked like the public wasn't going to be informed of the results due to "privacy concerns for the patient". There was a hue and cry around the country, and the establishment caved and kept the public apprised of the status of our cannibalistic friend. Thankfully, he was not released, but come on -- you decapitate someone and there's a chance you walk free in less than a year? There's something seriously messed up about that sort of system.

EDIT: all of which is tangental to the topic at hand -- in the case of Vincent Li I discussed, IIRC there was no sexual component to the crime, therefore castration would be a poor choice for punishment.

 

Yeah, but decapitation followed by eating an ear is pretty much a slam dunk for an insanity plea. I mean, all you need to add is the guy fingerpainting rainbows on the corpse or something and it's a shoe-in. Considering the nature of such disorders, giving him a pill probably "fixes" it entirely, though keeping him on the pill may well require permanent encarceration.

 

I don't get it - unless you are talking about forced castration, sterilization does not remove a person's sex drive in the least. A woman who gets her tubes tied or a man who gets a vasectomy doesn't live the rest of his life without sex. In fact, many people who willingly undergo these procedures do so because they want to be able to have sex without having children.

The only thing I would see forcing sterilization on people who be to prevent them from having more children of their own - it would not in any way make them feel disinclined to go after other people's children. (I don't have statistical evidence to back this up, but I would assume that most pedophiles abuse other people's kids - not their own. Pedophiles only get sexual gratification from kids and thus many don't have kids of their own.)

 

Sorry Aldeth, I don't think I've made myself very clear in the original post!

The idea for this thread came about because of the woman in France who killed her 3 children. In her case and cases where people are known to harm their own children (ie, the guy who locked his daughter in the celler and sexually abused her for years), should sterilisation be forced.

Is that any better?

 

I understood you initial intent - I guess I wasn't clear in my answer. I guess my point is that I don't think there are people who have children with the intent of abusing and/or killing them. This French woman and the guy from Austria are very very rare examples, and are certainly not your every day pedophile. (I'm not even sure if the Austrian guy counts as a pedophile, as I think his daughter was already an adult when he locked her up.) However, if you start doing it for people who harm their own children, you may start down a slippery slope and start doing it to all sexual predators. More importantly, I think it misses the point. The problem with these people (and I include the French woman, the Austrian dude, and most pedophiles) lies not in their reproductive parts but in their heads. We should work harder on fixing the upstairs before we work on the downstairs.

 

The threat of "working on downstairs" can have a significant influence on whether or not a person acts on what goes on "upstairs."

 

Unfortunately, Aldeth, both law and psychology have largely given up on pedophiles. The only hope most people hold out is castration, chemical or physical. And, while sex isn't really the root of the problem, testosterone is linked with aggression, too.

 

But that's the thing - when you say sterilization, I don't think castration. In the case of the woman that's a literal impossibility. When I hear sterilization, I think vasectomy or getting tubes tied - and that kind of work doesn't do anything to fix the problem upstairs. And I'd have to think that castration would absolutely qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. And there is the major probelm if you find out later that the guy was wrongfully convicted - you cannot un-cut off your man parts...

 

Well, for the women, it's true that work downstairs doesn't really do anything upstairs (where the problem is). It would only prevent the woman from having her own children. Fortunately, for female offenders, most of what we're talking about are issues involving care for their children, not pedophilia or rape or the like.

For men, chemical castration is both reversible (it's an ongoing chemical therapy, if it's stopped it undoes itself quickly) and effective (blocks testosterone somehow, not sure of details), so I'd argue it is both appropriate and not cruel or unusual.

 

The fact that is can only be applied to men can make it unusual. (Unusual doesn't mean strange, it means similar crimes should receive similar punishment.) It may also violate the equal protection clause in Article IX (which has been SC-interpreted to mean that the law and justice apply equally to everyone).