A Colorado judge formally sentenced James Eagan Holmes to multiple life terms plus thousands of years in prison for the Aurora movie theater massacre that killed 12 and wounded 70.
Holmes, a 27-year-old former grad student, received one life term for each person he killed, plus 3,318 years for the attempted murders of those he wounded and for rigging his apartment with explosives. He is not eligible for parole.
You can read the rest @
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/26/us/james-holmes-aurora-massacre-sentencing/
While I agree that Mr. Holmes deserved to be punished, his sentence clearly is what The Founders would have classified as "unusual":
US Constitution, 8th Amendment
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
But these days our thirst for blood is seldom slaked with mere "usual" punishments.
Here is another excerpt from my novella No More Patriots:
Most people don’t feel compassion for the incarcerated or for those shot by police because they think the perps got what they deserved or because they don’t think the circumstances will ever apply to them. Our typical response to the situation is “let them rot in jail”, especially when the perp has harmed or killed a family member. At times it seems like our chief regret is that we can execute a murderer only once, or that a prisoner can spend only one lifetime rotting away in prison. That doesn’t sound like compassion to me. And revenge is not justice.
http://www.amazon.com/No-More-Patriots-Howard-Uhal-ebook/dp/B00X2SU5Q6/
By the way, a US Army staff sargent recently was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing 16 civilians during a rampage in Afghanistan.
That's ONE life sentence, not 16. Why are we coddling military murderers but going overboard when punishing people like James Holmes?
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