Terrorist Eric Rudolph gets 4 life sentences in plea bargain--why?

[smoogatz]

Why is this maniac given a plea bargain? Why is law enforcement cutting deals with admitted terrorists? Is it because he's a domestic, white, rightwing, Christian terrorist, maybe?

[applegrove]

1. I hate the death penalty but even I smell something not too good

here. I guess they just didn't have the evidence.

[adwon]

2. With or without parole?

[greatauntoftriplets]

3. He avoided the death penalty that way by copping a plea....

Must have known the case against him was pretty airtight.

[Dookus]

4. Sounds fair to me

he'll serve the rest of his life in jail and save the state the cost of a trial (or more likely, multiple trials) and it excludes the possibility that he could be acquitted.

I'm opposed to the Death Penalty anyway, so this is as good as it gets. He gets the right punishment, no risk of an acquittal, and much less cost to the state.

[ewagner]

20. Well yes but also

not having a trial means that NONE of the evidence or truth about his entanglements will ever be made public.....

soooooo...................

we may never know if he acted alone or who financed him.

[babylonsister]

5. He 'cooperated' with the authorities, from the news tonight.

Told them where some bombs or mat'l to make bombs were, admitted to his crimes, etc.

[Totally Committed]

6. He's White, he's male...

he's an Extremist Fundamentalist Christian, he's a gun-lover, and he took out an abortion clinic. As I said in another thread already, I am surprised they aren't giving him a medal and throwing him a parade.

Wingnuts really love guys like this.

TC

[Dookus]

7. What did he get away with?

He's going to spend every day of the rest of his life in prison. I don't think anybody was going soft on him.

[wakeme2008]

9. But a Bush pardon is not out of the question is it nt

[Dookus]

10. No

legally it is not out of the question.

But if Bush pardons him, you can have my house.

[wakeme2008]

12. I would not put my house up on that

If Bush 43 pardoned him it would be as he left office at which point, there would be another Repug president coming in and Bush would not care, or a Dem president coming in and he really would not care.

[Dookus]

14. I would

there is zero chance of Bush pardoning him. It's just insanity to even think it's a possibility.

[wakeme2008]

17. Dear Dookus

"It's just insanity to even think it's a possibility."

All I will say is we are both talking about the same George Bush.... :hi:

[Dookus]

18. Yep

and I still maintain it's insanity to think Bush would issue a pardon for Rudolph.

Despite what a lot of people here think, we are not dealing with evil James Bond villains. They are just people we disagree strongly with.

I reiterate my offer to give my house away if Bush pardons this guy. It will never happen, and I think even thinking it's a possibility is a sign of unclear thought processes.

[DoveTurnedHawk]

16. Yes, It Is Out of the Question

Come on.

DTH

[smoogatz]

8. My point exactly.

If this guy was African American or Arab and blew up a fundie church he'd get the freaking chair--twice! Instead he's a white supremacist fundie and gets life without parole. If ever anyone deserved the death penalty, it's Rudolph.

[Dookus]

11. And what happened

to Timothy McVeigh? Did he stick a fork in an outlet by mistake?

[smoogatz]

15. I know I'm stretching a little--

but McVeigh blew up a US Federal building and a bunch of US government employees. Rudolph blew up abortion clinics and gay bars. There's a lot of public sympathy for Rudolph in the white supremacist/fundie universe--there was none for McVeigh, who killed a lot of children in addition to all those federal workers.

[Dookus]

19. There is minuscule support

for Eric Rudolph.

The idea that he's not being given a trial in order to kill him because he's white is nonsense. If he agreed to a life sentence with no parole in exchange for cooperating with the authorities, then it's a win all around.

There was absolutely no guarantee that a trial would've resulted in his conviction, much less a death sentence. He probably would've been convicted, but nothing's a sure thing.

It's a fair situation, and involves no racism.

[smoogatz]

27. No offense, but

You seem awfully certain that:

1.Rudolph has no support within the white supremacist/fundie community, when by all accounts these people supported and protected him during the five and-a-half years he was a fugitive.

2.He wouldn't have been convicted, when the evidence against him was apparently overwhelming.

3.That the government dealt with Rudolph as aggressively as it would have dealt with Arab terrorists guilty of crimes of a similar magnitude.

You seem sure, yet you offer no factual support for that certainty. So excuse me if I'm still skeptical.

[Longhorn79]

28. He slipped the death penalty because he's a white Christian?

Gimme a break. Tell that to Scott Peterson or McVeigh, or David Westerfield.

Wingnuts, huh?

[kenny blankenship]

13. Well he only deliberately set out to kill LAW ENFORCEMENT

and/or public safety personnel. Hey, no reason there why a court or prosecuting attorney would want to get all extreme on his sentencing, right?

Iirc, the EMT worker he killed was killed by a secondary bomb, timed or rigged to explode when the crime scene was being investigated.
Then you have the whole bombing of an international tourist event for political purposes... Pretty standard stuff, really.

Why did they plea him down? I can only guess that his multi-year run from the law must have made it too hard for the prosecution to get a jury that would find him guilty. Only the innocent run, right? The longer you run, the more innocent you must think yourself--very exculpatory behavior in the eyes of juries.

On second thought the whole thing is totally fucking amazing and an explanation should be demanded. Eric Rudolph is an open and shut guilty verdict by virtue of evading the law as long as he did, to the point of starvation. You could convict him of anything at this point. He deliberately targetted law enforcement. Caused an international terrorist incident which resulted in one death but might have killed a dozen people. And add in premeditated murder of a public safety worker, well that usually rates the death penalty whatever kind of court you're tried in, down here in an execution-happy region like the Southeast. (Born here, live here: so I can say that about the South if I want to.)

What do you think is going to happen to Brian Nichols, who killed law enforcement officers escaping from custody?

[Dookus]

21. well

aside from the death penalty, what's more extreme than life in prison with no possibility of parole?

In fact, I think life in prison is worse. So in my mind, he's getting the harshest sentence he could possibly have gotten. As a bonus, the state doesn't have to pay to try him.

[kenny blankenship]

24. I bet

he's of a different opinion. My only interest is in why the government appears to be exceptionally lenient in his case.

[Dookus]

25. They're not being exceptionally lenient

there are many people who have killed more people who have gotten pleas.

A four life-term sentence is not lenient.

[theboss]

31. Life without parole is lenient?

Wow. Ease back, Judge Roy Bean.

[kenny blankenship]

33. Usually you kill one cop

and you get the chair. Try it and see!
Rudolph killed a cop, and another person, and tried to kill more cops, blinded a nurse, and he very nearly killed dozens more people in Centennial Park. And came close to killing more people at the clinic where the cop died, and he injured about a half dozen people at the Otherside bar who, for all he knew would have been killed, by the explosion he created.

Yeah. FUCKING LENIENT. Life is the absolute least someone engaged in multiple acts of terrorism resulting in death could possibly get. Add in the fact that a cop died as well as a civilian, plus a visitor to the Olympics on the scene of the blast died of a heart attack, plus several people nearly died in various incidents, plus the fact over a hundred other people were injured by the same Centennial Park bomb, the fact that Rudolph on two occasion set secondary devices to explode when law enforcement would be sweeping the crime scene in order to injure or kill them, yeah I think if his name was Abdullah Alluah-Akhbar and had a third cousin who once knew Bin Laden, or if his name were Mumia Jamal, I think he'd be certified GALLOWS BAIT.

[babylonsister]

22. I hesitate to voice my opinion about the death penalty here,

but if someone, Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, killed others, that's just wrong and they should pay. And Eric Rudolph is guilty. No, giving someone the ultimate penalty for killing is not going to teach others not to kill, but it will be retribution to the families involved in his heinous crimes.

[kenny blankenship]

23. I'm against capital punishment

but there's no question that it is considered a lawful punishment, and that it is in common use, particularly for premeditated murders and the killing of law enforcement members.

It smells of high level political interference that he was able to cop a plea and get life, when it probably would have been trivially easy to convict him because of the prejudicing effect of his run from the law) I recall stories about several states fighting with each other about who was going to get to try him first, and presumbly sentence him to death. Then the case is federalized and he makes a deal and gets life. Certainly sounds like a Bush era political deal! But maybe there's a perfectly innocent explanation for it instead.

[Dookus]

26. It may well have been easy to convict him

but not guaranteed he would get a death sentence. And, there was a chance, however small, that he would be acquitted.

[THUNDER HANDS]

29. did he do any crimes in Texas

I think jaywalking is a capitol offense down there.

[theboss]

30. None of you should be prosecutors

A prosecution is expensive.

A prosecution is time-consuming.

A prosecution is filled with risks. You could lose.

So, if I'm a prosecutor and I can send a defendat to jail for life with no chance of parole, I would be insane not to do it.

What if they refuse the plea, prosecute the case and lose?
What about the cases they can't focus on because of the resources dedicated to this?

The man is going to die in prison. I call that a win.

And considering I am anti-death penalty, I would find it difficult to lament the fact that he is not being killed.

[cry baby]

32. it's the law. and probably it does help that he is a white christian.