Regarding Dorner and the support of capital punishment

[mokawanis]

I take the position that Dorner should have been taken alive, if possible, and put on trial. Maybe it wasn't possible to take him alive, I don't know, but given the fact that the LAPD shot up two cars and wounded innocent people is a good indication that they weren't interested in bringing him in alive.

If he had been taken alive would you be calling for his execution by the state? If not, why are some here expressing the opinion that the cops were right to burn the cabin down and kill him?

I'm wondering how many people who are glad Dorner was killed by the cops also support capital punishment.

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. I oppose the death penalty...

even for disgruntled ex-workers who go postal and murder innocent people because he thinks their father did him wrong. I would have been happier with him spending the rest of a long natural life in a jail cell.

[ZombieHorde]

2. I am against capital punishment, and I don't know the details of the burning,

however, Dorner was obviously very dangerous, so I can understand why the cops would choose to burn down the cabin.

I would have rather Dorner was taken alive. I imagine the cops could have waited for him to run out of food, and then see what Dorner does in that situation.

[Heather MC]

3. I would have been ok with capitol punishment, if

he had received a fair trial, unfortunately it was clear when the police shot the first wrong vehicle then the second, he had no chance of a trial fair or otherwise. It's as if we are starting to treat domestic suspects like we are currently treating international suspects. Kill first.

I don't sympathize with Dorner, i fear we are moving further away from a justice system that keeps us civil in our punishment of criminals.

Without fair trials and due process, we might as well go back to the days of witch hunts.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

4. To me, it's a lot like the Osama Bin Laden situation.

I am 100% against capital punishment, and vocally so.

However, I can't fault there being a looser rules of engagement given the target.

With Dorner, smoking him out doesn't automatically mean killing him. He could have easily exited the cabin before it became fully engulfed in flames, at which point I would expect him to be apprehended and subjected to justice (assuming he didn't come out shooting, that is.) And it's not as if smoking a suspect out is anything new or unheard of: think John Wilkes Booth, for starters.

With Bin Laden, had he fully and unequivocally surrendered with his hands up to the Naval Seals, I would fully expect him to be taken alive. I can only take the President at his word that the mission was not intended solely as a kill mission, but instead as a kill-or-capture mission. However, absent that capitulation, they were dealing with someone who long advocated violence and in his videos always carried a weapon at his side, so I don't necessarily blame a looser rules of engangement. As much as I would like to have seen Bin Laden taken alive, if it comes down to his life or the life of one of our men, I'm going to err on our side.

[FarCenter]

5. He had just killed one Riverside sherrif's deputy and gravely wounded another

At that point I don't think that law enforcement had any obligation to take further risks to their members in attempting to capture Dorner.

[mokawanis]

6. That is, I think, a valid statement

because he gave every indication that he wasn't going to allow himself to be captured alive and he backed up his statements by killing the deputy.

I was hoping to direct my op at the people who were making emotionally charged statements that Dorner deserved to be killed in order to stop his crime spree and to ensure that more police officers and/or civilians weren't hurt. I wanted to know if those people would support the death penalty for his crimes, had he been taken alive.

[Fire Walk With Me]

7. Police as judge, jury, executioner. This is why we have due process.

[loli phabay]

9. when your shooting at the cops theres no obligation to try not to kill you

I have never heard or seen anything that says leos have to be suicidal in order to facilitate an arrest when dealing with an armed killer.

[Fire Walk With Me]

10. This does not excuse their having shot 64 bullets at two women and shooting up two more suspects,

without making positive ID in very different vehicles than they were actually looking for, as well as their trends of earlier behavior including shooting 90 bullets at a teen after a high-speed chase (Germany released some 85 bullets total in 2011, 49 of them being warning shots; how do they do it and not this sole PD?).

I've seen them use this same dominate and overwhelm tactic against peaceful protesters, in lesser proportion of course, over and over. It is their way. They are out-of-control.

[libtodeath]

8. Take him alive if safely possible and then due process

I oppose capital punishment totally but that is a states issue at the moment.

[kestrel91316]

11. I don't like the death penalty for the most part. I also don't like when police kill

people without benefit of due process.

In this case, arguments can be made for and against the merits of killing him the way they did (or else he killed himself). Because of the long history of abuses by LE in So Cal, I am of course concerned that he might have been taken into custody without killing him or anyone else dying, but was instead killed outright. I'm not the one to decide which was the proper course of action, and now probably no one will ever know for sure.

LAPD are still a bunch of jackbooted fascist thugs for the most part. They have no one to blame but themselvesfor how the public feels about them.

If he had been tried and convicted, I don't know if I would support the death penalty for him. I tend to not approve of the DP for anyone who wasn't "right in the haid" when they committed their crimes. If he was delusional or had severe depression or PTSD that went untreated, yes, I consider that "not right in the haid".