Kaczynski Case
The Unabomber case confirms our absurd legal system. Consider that our society has a difficult time with death penalty cases. Theodore Kaczynski would confess in return for a life sentence; it’s refused. He tries to kill himself (Jan. 9) and everyone starts feeling sorry for him. Meanwhile the lawyers wrangle about sanity. Who cares?
If he was willing to confess to the crimes and accept life imprisonment, what more could we as a society want? Now we will be informed of legal manipulations that obscure his crimes.
The waste of time, energy and the costs for this charade need to be stopped. Let’s start feeling for the victims, not the criminal.
BARRY LEVY
Redondo Beach
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Kaczynski is being put under suicide watch so that he will be alive to face a death sentence. Huh?
NANCY J. THOMPSON
Irvine
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Re “Unabomber Trial Tests Faith in Justice,” Commentary, Jan. 7: George Will states that the “purpose of punishment is to civilize the wholesome . . . desire for vengeance against the vicious,” and opines that this desire for vengeance “buttresses civilization.” Oh, really?
If so, then shouldn’t we encourage the slaughter, even genocide, in the Mideast and the Balkans, since that killing is predicated on vengeance for real (and imagined) wrongs? And believe that these actions taken in vengeance will add to human progress and civilization? Mr. Will, you shock me!
The world’s great religious prophets and modern-day leaders have always maintained injunctions against killing. They have taught nonviolence and a moral duty to forgive (which does not excuse culpability). Why? Because it is restraint, not vengeance, that “buttresses civilization.”
Thus, in regarding Kaczynski: Killing a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic whose actions were rooted in a delusional desire for “vengeance” would only reduce us to the same primitive level as the accused. If he is found guilty, locking him up for life will keep us all safe. It will also make us better people because we have renounced a desire to take another’s life, in spite of our angry, bitter, all-too-human feelings.
KAY REGESTER
Ventura