Summary
Stephanie Diane Dowells, 62, was strangled during an overnight visit with her husband, David Brinson, at Mule Creek state prison in California.
Brinson, serving life without parole for four murders, claimed Dowells passed out, but authorities ruled her death a homicide.
This marks the second strangulation death during a family visit at the prison in a year; Tania Thomas was killed in July 2024 while visiting inmate Anthony Curry. Investigations are ongoing.
California is one of four states allowing family visits to maintain positive relationships.
Which begs the question, at what point is the death penalty a reasonable option?
People here love to talk about killing billionaires, who kill with paper.
The obvious answer: never. Not because of humanism and all that. But because we cannot trust judges and executioners.
Did you not read the story? He just killed his own wife, while in prison. It’s not like there’s a chance he was set up by the police. How do you say never?
We’re more than capable of preventing a single individual from causing harm to others without having to kill them. Failing to do so here isn’t justification for introducing the idea to kill them instead.
If we actually had a well run justice system, I don’t think executions would even seem remotely necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Long_Island_Rail_Road_shooting
Here’s a pretty famous case where there were numerous witnesses who survived the attack.
I have to go now.
What’s your point?
There are a lot of examples on this planet that say “never” without devolving into a cesspool of violence. Maybe take some inspiration from those places.
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/25211.jpeg
people are getting caught up in semantics instead of answering your question, so ill give an opinion as to why its different.
wealthy people are not subject to the same laws and punishments, based souly on their wealth and power getting in the way of the “normal” judiciary process. compared to similar crimes and punishments done by someone who is not in the same class.
the death penalty is also used as a tool to silence political enemies and dissidents, especially in political systems that align with fascism, authoritarianism, etc. (itll start becoming more common in the states, they will just label political rivals and dissidents as “terrorists” more often) whether they commited the crime or not.
essentially, why we may want to redistribute the wealth or “call for the death” of billionaires, its more so that out of everyone, even lowly murderers, their very existence, at the moment they HOARD 1 billion dollars, kills roughly 13,000 people who could have been lifted out of extreme poverty, by that same amount of money, per year, but instead succumb to poverty related deaths.
someone like elon musk as an example, just holding on to a (volatile) 348 billion, causes ROUGHLY 1,000 deaths per day, of people living in extreme poverty, just by him simply holding on to that money. the top 1% in general contribute to roughly 9,159 deaths per day just by hoarding their wealth.
21,500 people on average die from extreme poverty, per day.
they collectively contribute to killing nearly half of the worlds poorest people each day, so that they can have fancy things, and have fancy friends, and do fancy stuff.
that is colder than anything that even the most mentally deranged “lower class” serial killer has ever done.
at least in my personal opinion.
That’s a very interesting thought, deaths per billion hoarded. I was trying to find more info about that topic but couldn’t find anything
Could you point me in the direction of more info?
Locking folks up for life is cheaper. I’d be fine leaving Elon on a deserted island somewhere around Point Nemo and occasionally airdropping food and the like.