Testifying before the Montana House yesterday, Republican State Rep. Janna Taylor explained why she wants to keep the state’s death penalty law in tact: she knows HIV-positive inmates are sitting up at night in their cells, concocting blow darts and shooting blood darts at prison guards.
legal theory
Montana Rep. Janna Taylor Needs The Death Penalty To Protect Against Prisoners’ HIV Blow Darts
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chpinnlr
Is there any evidence to back up this claim of blw dart wieldding, HIV infected prisioners actually transmitting the virus to anybody in the manner she described? If so have the “victims” died from the virus yet? She is arguing the the death penalty not only be kept, but she wants to apply it to attemped murder, at best? I am not necessarily against the death penalty, but what a stupid argument for it!
Adam
My email to Ms. Taylor:
“Please stay out of Michigan It’s where I live, and the thought of an ill-informed, fear-mongering, rumor-spreading individual such as yourself possibly living in my neighborhood–let alone serving in my government–terrifies me more than any crazy scenario you could possibly dream up. As we saw in Arizona, it’s a slippery slope from one person’s “don’t retreat, reload” rhetoric to another unbalanced person’s picking up a weapon. Don’t be an instrument of violence.
Do me another favor. Read this link: http://www.thebody.com/content/art30024.html.
Then go visit a hospital and spend a day volunteering to help HIV+ patients.”
Her response:
“I did not say what you heard. It was way taken out of contacts.” [sic]
I wrote back that, having reviewed the clip again, it wasn’t an issue of context, but education. I do support the death penalty, but when proponents spout such nonsense, how can they be taken seriously?
justiceontherocks
Urban legends are alive and well in Montana.
David Kniazuk
My response from her:
“It was about murderers. My information was from a 2005 testimony in the House Judiciary Committee. I did not mean to offend. I am sorry. Janna”
kayla
I’m no genius, but my mother is a doctor and she assures me that the virus doesn’t last very long outside the body…..so I would guess that it’s very unlikely that even one innocent prison guard has actually gotten infected, let alone died from an HIV infected blow dart. This woman does have an active imagination though, I would have never thought up such a scenario….She should write fiction…..
Codswallop
So she’s another anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-death penalty Republican. How novel.
http://www.votesmart.org/npat.php?can_id=40418#20757
I don’t support the death penalty and it has nothing to do with the “sanctity of life” or any feelings of mercy. One of my biggest reasons is because the US justice system has proved again and again that we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. I have no doubt that we’ve put innocent people to death in the past and continue to do so. The Innocence Project has proved this with DNA testing and in doing so exposed many examples of prosecutors and police willing to manipulate and withhold evidence in order to get a conviction. A DA’s office is judged by their number of successful prosecutions, not necessarily correct ones, and there’s no punishment for pursuing prosecutions they should reasonably have known were false. And sometimes our “justice” system just goes off the rails, as happened not that long ago with the “Satanic Child Abuse” and “recovered memory” cases of the late 80s/early 90s. It’s interesting to me that the political Right complains constantly that government is too incompetent and corrupt to administer health care but they trust it to administer death.
Mostly it’s that I don’t want my government to be in the business of killing its citizens. Once you’ve determined that it CAN kill you, it’s just a matter of political haggling over when they WILL kill you, and our system is stacked against the poor and disenfranchised. While our police and prosecutors are well funded you’re pretty much screwed if you have to rely on a public defender. The difference between life and death shouldn’t depend on how good a lawyer you can afford.
I do think there are people who have done things so evil, so cruel, they’ve forfeited their right to live in society. Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Gary Ridgway. Dennis Rader. I’m not arguing for mercy because they deserve none. Do I think they deserve to live? No, I just don’t think the world is improved any by killing them. If it brought their victims back it would be different. If there really was such a thing as “closure” it would be different. So lock them up forever. Death Penalty advocates like to make it sound as if life in prison means sitting around eating bon-bons and watching Oprah when we know that prison, in general population at least, is a miserable place. Unless you believe that after death they’re whisked off to an eternity of getting a pitchfork in the ass, and I don’t, then death is actually letting them off the hook, limiting their suffering instead of making it worse.
kernelt
How would she know, had she been there herself?
If not don’t go around scary people with your imagination, I think it’s a crime since the supreme court rule that free speech does not protect against false speech like screaming fire in a theater full of people.
D Gregory Smith
No scientific evidence, just plain and simple ignorance and fear-mongering.
We’re working on an official response.