Making a killing.

Another week, another example of an appalling waste of skin brutally murdering an innocent person, and another post by the Ambush Predator* asking why the hell the bastard is kept alive.

An 85-year-old widow was brutally murdered by a drunken thug who broke every bone in her face and robbed her of £350, a court heard yesterday.

Did he have a record as long as your arm? Don’t they always…

Jobless Robert Tozer, 20, had recently been released from prison when he burgled retired teacher Joan Charlton, whom he had known as a neighbour since childhood. He repeatedly assaulted her with a bottle in the living room before searching upstairs for cash.

And that wasn’t enough:

Tozer came back downstairs to discover the injured pensioner trying to reach the phone in the hall to call for help and launched a merciless attack. He stamped on her head, cut the phone line, deactivated the fire alarm and tried to set fire to her body despite knowing she was still alive.

Tell me, why should a creature this depraved still be left sucking oxygen? Why should he spend the next 22 years eating, drinking and being attended to by pretty prison officers dedicated to 'looking after prisoners with humanity', maybe even arranging to have his every thought published on the Internet, and maybe even, if this campaign succeeds, voting in the next election?**

Well, for two reasons. One is that if there is a chance of genuine reform, no matter how slim, is it right for society to shrug its collective shoulders and say 'fuck it, let's just waste the bastard'? I'd say no. Sure, Tozer will probably be the feral two legged animal he is now for his whole life, but while I don't like sharing oxygen with the cunt and cunts just like him to actively want him killed by the state on my behalf because of the presumption that he will never reform is a step too far. Is that presumption so different from establishing a database of 11 million people on the presumption that they may be kiddy fiddlers? That brings me on to the second and much stronger reason to keep Tozer alive. The Thylacosmilus and I probably disagree on whether it's right for society to write off its scumbags as unredeemable and kill them, and fair enough because it really comes down to each of us to decide what values to hold. But as I've argued before with the Sabre Toothed One, there is a good reason for keeping the creature alive despite not feeling the remotest sympathy for him. Government power is rarely reduced and all too frequently extended. That's probably always been the case, but as we all know in Britain in the last few years the government has a terrible record at bringing in legislation which it promises will "only" be used against terrorism or organised crime or whatever the devious bastards think is needed to sell the new law to the public. However, the reality is that these new powers that the state has granted itself have been used largely against ordinary people instead. Would you really trust the power of life and death to the sort of people responsible for things like RIPA, the Civil Contingencies Act, detention without charge for weeks, the database state, the surveillance society, and so on? Would you trust the bastards whose cameras solve maybe - maybe - one crime in a thousand and watch you the rest of the time in case you do something? The bastards who use supposed anti terrorist laws to spy on people's bedrooms - their fucking bedrooms for Christ's sake - to see if they don't really live alone and should be paying more council tax? The bastards who are happy to try defendants without a fucking jury if they can't be fucking bothered to keep the jurors safe and/or free from influence? The idea of bringing the death penalty back with the sort of government Britain has these days (and seems likely to have for the foreseeable future) is frankly fucking horrifying, and one of the few positive things that I can say for the mob of self interested wankers of Westminster is that as a group they've decided not to put the issue back in the hands of the people. Anti-democratic? Yeah, probably, but I'm not the first to note that democracy is no guarantee of good things and nor is a decision democratically arrived at necessarily right, moral or just. To use a cliché 51% of a population voting to enslave the other 49% would be democratic, two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner is democratic. For that matter presuming that 11 million people might be nonces and putting them on a database is democratic, though with the British electoral system I admit that's for a fairly loose definition of the word. The point is that even if it has majority support, and I concede that it probably does, that doesn't make it right for the state, supposedly on our behalf but potentially for its own reasons, to kill someone who is wholly in its power and utterly helpless to prevent it. More importantly it's extremely unwise to trust that power to people who regularly demonstrate how untrustworthy they are.

UPDATE: and then of course there's this, but like the morality aspect I feel it's a side issue when compared to the need for us all to trust an untrustworthy state not to start executing those who don't deserve it too.

* Also here - congrats on getting an H/T from The Tele, Julia.
** Don't care too much about the possibility of him writing on the web about it. The example JuliaM links to is indeed a blog of a prisoner who claims to be a reformed murderer still inside, but he also says that prisoners do not have internet access and that he posts via mail to other people who put it on the blog for him. Firstly we don't have to read it if we object, and secondly, how the hell can anyone stop it? His mail is screened and his visits are overseen by the prison service as it is, so short of banning all communication with people outside, people who may well never have committed a crime themselves and wish to communicate with him, it simply can't be done. As I've commented before I don't want prisoners voting because despite the best efforts of the authoritarian bastards who run the place getting jailed is still largely optional in the UK at the moment, but I really can't get too worked up about cons being able to blog by proxy.