This is crazy , prosecute a 97 old man

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by arauca, Jul 16, 2012.

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  1. pjdude1219

    pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Morel this is probably one of the worst.

    and the response to exatradition one of the most interesting in being told that the statute of limitation on war crimes ran out



    most of these are hard to find out about do to them being from or committing there crimes for soviet republics. most lived an allied states
     
    pjdude1219, Jul 17, 2012
    #21

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  3. arauca

    arauca Banned Banned

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    It took long time to prosecute Eichmann so do you think this one will survive 3 years , perhaps at that age he is senile
     
    arauca, Jul 17, 2012
    #22

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  5. Bells

    Bells Staff Member

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    I'd donate my time and help prosecute him for free. I'd even donate funds to the State to help pay for his prosecution.

    He helped kill over 15,500 people.

    He is being shown more kindness by being tried than he showed his victims when he murdered them. It isn't about victory. It is about justice for the victims of one of the worst crimes in human history.
     
    Bells, Jul 17, 2012
    #23

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  7. Hoatzin

    Hoatzin ruminant bird Registered Member

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    There is no statute of limitations on murder. And if only the lawyers profit then at least half of them work at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. So what's the prob, Bob?
     
    Hoatzin, Jul 17, 2012
    #24
  8. seagypsy

    seagypsy Banned Banned

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    I'm not inclined to be merciful to a criminal on account of age. And not this one in particular. But having known the direct german decendants of a man who was forced into the nazi army and "offered" the position of SS officer. I have an odd perspective. This guy was being pushed to join the SS. He refused. So they sent him to the front lines in Russia. He managed to make arrangements for his family(the people I know personally) to escape to the USA but he did not fair so well. On the front lines he refused to fire his weapon because he did not believe in the cause and was killed by a sniper within days. Killed by a sniper was the official story the family was given. I can imagine he was executed.

    Basically he was punished for his refusal to join the SS. I can imagine anyone who was "offered" the position was given certain "incentives". They had very good reason to believe their own lives and the lives of their family were at risk if they failed to comply. I tend to think anyone that has survived in hiding this long still fears for their life now as they probably did then. I can't imagine that a lifetime on the run, in hiding, denying who you really are, living with the shame and guild over acts left unchecked, can be a sweet ride by any means.

    Still I find it difficult to feel for this guy. I have never been in his shoes so should not judge, but I think I would be more merciful if he had turned himself in decades ago and devoted his life to educating people about what happened and promoting charities to improve the lives of the ww2 victims. Maybe I ask too much. Maybe that would have put him at risk of murder by the hands of other outstanding criminals. I don't know. I don't really feel like I have any right to judge even though it is a task I find easy to do.

    Definitely makes me question myself.
     
    seagypsy, Jul 17, 2012
    #25
  9. quadraphonics

    quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you're offered a choice between being killed yourself, or murdering a 5-digit number of innocent people, you're ethically obligated to choose your own death.
     
    quadraphonics, Jul 17, 2012
    #26
  10. GeoffP

    GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Yup. On the plus side, it would be Call of Duty time.
     
    GeoffP, Jul 17, 2012
    #27
  11. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    People feel a great sense of relief when a really evil person is captured and a jury of citizens declared to his face that he is, indeed, evil--with the entire population of the planet watching. I promise that a good many of the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of his victims will sleep a little easier, even if he drops dead ten seconds after the reading of the verdict.
    It's not for him. It's for us. It reassures us of our humanity, that we can never forget or forgive crimes of that nature.

    I've posted this in another discussion and some of you may have read it, but it's quite relevant here. When I was in Yugoslavia in 1973 (some of you kids probably never heard of Yugoslavia) my friend took me downtown to the main park in Niš, one of the largest cities in Serbia. There were three monuments in the shape of weeping humans. He explained that the large one represented the Jews, who suffered most under the Nazis. The second one was for the Serbs, because it's their country after all and they suffered too. The small one was for the Gypsies. I thought I misunderstood his word in Esperanto. "Gypsies? You guys hate Gypsies. Why did you build a monument to them?"

    He said, "Because even the Gypsies didn't deserve that. Nobody did."

    We have a Holocaust Museum here in Washington. (I haven't been there, places like that make me cry so badly that I can't see anything.) They have one exhibit that is just a pile of luggage that people brought with them to the camps. They carefully wrote their names and addresses on the various cases. They assumed that when the war was over, they'd be going home. And don't get me started on the baby shoes. Honestly, I don't know half of the exhibits they have because just reading about that stuff makes me cry.

    Some neo-Nazi scumbag walked in the door one day with a shotgun hidden under his raincoat, and killed one of the guards. An Afro-American guard! That was just too poignant.
    I think a lot of people would like to walk past his cell, just to see him and to let him know that they (or more likely their parents or grandparents) survived. There are a lot of reasons why capital punishment isn't necessarily the kind of "justice" that is needed after a crime.
    You don't understand evil. I'm not sure that any of those guys ever really repented and realized or decided that they were wrong.

    For one thing, antisemitism was one of the defining motifs of European Christendom for more than a millennium. Many people raised their children to believe that the Jews were determined to destroy their way of life and make them all their slaves--or at least their clerks. Even people who weren't raised that way lived among people who were. They were excoriated for being wealthy, even though that wealth was due to a Christian misinterpretation of a line in the Bible, assuming that any lending of money for interest was equivalent to usury and therefore a sin. Since it was only a sin to lend but not to borrow, they were happy to borrow from the Jews, who naturally became bankers. Duh?

    Anyway, once you've murdered dozens or hundreds or thousands of innocent people, you absolutely have to spend the rest of your life believing that you were right. Who could live with that memory if they realized they were wrong?
    Arguably the most important service that civilization performs for us is justice: deciding who's right and wrong. This does away with the Stone Age system of the stronger killing the weaker. The certainty of justice is in fact what makes civilization even possible: We no longer have to devote a considerable fraction of our time, attention and other resources to protecting ourselves against each other, allowing us to be more productive, generating the surplus wealth or "capital" that advances civilization.

    Civilization has a legal system that appoints people to do the judging properly: accumulating all the evidence, weighing it, arguing it, listening to all the witnesses, consulting with experts in the law, and finally making a dispassionate ruling on behalf of all of us. You and I are not supposed to judge others, unless we're called upon to be jurors and do it right.
    Nothing wrong with that. But when you find the answer, be satisfied with it, and with yourself, and move on. No one is perfect, but if we all do the best we can it will be okay.
    I'd just roll my eyes at that. Except then I pick up my newspaper and see the Jews punishing the Palestinians for the Holocaust, because they were never given the chance to bomb Germany.
    Hell, every day there's a story about some guy who risked his life to rescue one child.

    It's an instinct in our species. We're pack-social, which means that we watch each other's kids. But more than that, our children have the longest maturation of any mammal. (Elephants grow up in five years, whales in two.) That means that we have to be on our toes and keep an eye on everybody's kids for a decade and a half, because their parents have a lot of other important things they have to do in addition to being parents.

    I mean geeze, that is one of the defining characteristics of human beings: to be kind to children.

    It is not even a slight exaggeration to say that anyone who can kill children casually is not human.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jul 18, 2012
    #28
  12. Syzygys

    Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    Now instead of crying about the age, I think senility is more important. If the guy is full senile, he is not going to get the punishment, so that would be a valid reason not to prosecute him....

    Just let's not change his diapers...
     
    Syzygys, Jul 19, 2012
    #29
  13. youreyes

    youreyes amorphous ocean Valued Senior Member

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    As any crime goes, it requires proof and substantial proof for such claims. And an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence...what sounds of children of survivors from the concentration camp will come forward to talk about his crimes? obviously no. If he is to be tried and live to face any sort of reprimands for his past actions, than the accusation must be less severe to reflect only evidence that will put him behind bars as fast as possible. So as much as everyone "loves" the guy and wants him to be the right shoulder of Hitler, if you want him to face punishment, follow up only on evidence that can get him jailed or handed swift justice...rather than making him into a scapegoat of all war crimes of that time.
     
    youreyes, Jul 19, 2012
    #30
  14. Asguard

    Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    Only one thing (and this is specifically aimed at bells but everyone as well) how do you know he's guilty? The person they allege him to be was tried sure but if he hasn't been tried how do you know it's him? Also the idea of absentia trials leaves my blood cold, it's too easy for them to be a complete frame up
     
    Asguard, Jul 19, 2012
    #31
  15. Syzygys

    Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    His name, you dummy....
     
    Syzygys, Jul 19, 2012
    #32
  16. youreyes

    youreyes amorphous ocean Valued Senior Member

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    His name would have to be checked against the name in the Nazi documents, as part of a trial, in order to determine his identity more clearly.
     
    youreyes, Jul 19, 2012
    #33
  17. Syzygys

    Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    And that would be a problem???

    By the way this is the dude who already ran away from Canada, probably with good reason, when he was 85. So just because he has been able to duck justice he should be rewarded by non-prosecution???
     
    Syzygys, Jul 19, 2012
    #34
  18. Asguard

    Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    Innocent people never run do they?
     
    Asguard, Jul 19, 2012
    #35
  19. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Fortunately the Germans are compulsive recordkeepers and they maintained that practice during the Nazi era.
    I don't think that was Syzygys's point. I think he's merely saying that this suspect has avoided capture and prosecution, which means that we have to put extra resources into the effort.

    Unfortunately, running away does make a lot of people assume one is guilty. Yet our newspapers are bursting with accounts of people who were wrongly accused, and even more sadly, people who were wrongly convicted and were only exonerated (usually by DNA analysis but there are many other reasons) after 20 years in prison, and sometimes only posthumously.

    Running away from the police, on the other hand, is generally regarded with great suspicion. We are all legally required to submit to questioning and to arrest. We're supposed to trust our own attorneys and the legal system itself to sort the guilty from the innocent. (See above for my opinion on that trust.) So leaving town, or emigrating, when you know the authorities are looking for you, is legal. But running away when they've found you, and a police officer tells you to stop, is not. In fact that, in itself, is a crime that can be prosecuted.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jul 19, 2012
    #36
  20. Syzygys

    Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    Do they? And there is a huge difference running at 40 and 85. At 40 I might be affraid that I could get the short stick of the law, at 85, I would be happy to get free healthcare...

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
    Syzygys, Jul 19, 2012
    #37
  21. Gremmie

    Gremmie "Happiness is a warm gun" Valued Senior Member

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    The way I see it, they know it's him...Hell, they've had decades to track him.

    Once guilty, always guilty. His age means nothing. I would offer him no quarter. You reap what you sow. Fuck him.:shrug:
     
    Gremmie, Jul 19, 2012
    #38
  22. Tiassa

    Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    A Fair Trial Should Suffice

    While I certainly have no problem arguing mercy for elderly pot smokers, and such, I just don't see the rationale for a statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.

    To the other, I also support Truth and Reconciliation Commissions insofar as I will accept that lower-level participants in atrocities did so for perception of having no choice, and it is more important to get the truth from them than take vengeance.

    It's too late for a Holocaust TRC. If they have the right guy, then he should be brought to trial.

    A fair trial.

    Though I think executing him, if found guilty, would be a bit extraneous.

    If he survives the pressures of so heavy a trial, why not let him live out his final days or years in shame, knowing that he failed hide long enough?
     
    Tiassa, Jul 19, 2012
    #39
  23. Asguard

    Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    Tiassa The stress of a trial is the only issue with his age, I mean lets say he's innocent and has to face a trial at 94 it would probably kill him and when he's dead hes just going to be labeled as guilty even though he hasnt been convicted.

    If he is guilty I dont paticually care but I worry that he could be someone with a similar name or looks like him or was in the same area or whatnot that 70 years latter is getting the blame for what someone else did.

    On a side issue though, I seem to remember someone charged over the Bosnian massacre not being tried due to I'll health though I could be wrong about that
     
    Asguard, Jul 20, 2012
    #40
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