South Dakota is going to kill a man this afternoon. You and I, through our government, are going to kill a man tonight, a vile man who may deserve worse than killing, but whom we need not and should not kill.
The man we are going to kill is behind bars, contained, posing no immediate threat to society that cannot be addressed through other means than death.
Killing this man will restore no victim’s life. Killing this man will not save other lives. Killing this man will not bring “closure”; as pastor and former legislator Steve Hickey just said on public radio, seeking to kill this man by the force of law has only delayed closure (of such a thing is ever possible) that could have been achieved more swiftly by returning the killer to his cell and throwing away the key. Killing this man will only reinforce our costly and futile tradition of killing by the force of law.
A killing is happening before our eyes, but “pro-life” lobbyists and candidates are mostly silent. Alas.
We are going to kill a man today, a man we don’t need to kill.
A clinical psychologist at Stanford U. who was a schoolmate of the man makes some points that have not been pointed out in the press:https://www.facebook.com/drkalehzan/posts/10156254600057772
Facebook links don’t seem to work for me. I typically get this message on DFP Facebook links, and got it again when trying to go to David’s link:
Is there another means of accessinbg the article David has linked to?
Does anybody see any correlation between this man’s death and physician-assisted suicide? The reason I ask is that if a society is too ethical to kill its worst criminals, that means we need to at least grasp that the alternative is incarceration without the chance of freedom. Would a man who knows he will be incarcerated until he dies from natural causes be very different from a person who knows he has a terminal illness that will remove all quality from his life? The prisoner in this case has made it known that he wishes to die as punishment for his crimes. Although I agree that there are a lot of “pro-life” folks who are also hypocritically OK with the death penalty, and that conflict should be called out, I’m not sure I am ethically opposed to the death penalty in general.
The orange three year old in the Kremlin Annex is salivating at the thought of a prisoner being executed. He wants the death penalty brought back and probably would not be shy about pulling the levers to initiate whatever means of death is used.
Jackley is still waiting for a court decision so they can go ahead and kill a person to show that killing is wrong.
BCB … I don’t see her article either.
I was 7 when Donald Moeller murdered Becky O’Connell. It was close to where I lived and I was petrified. I was also present outside the pen, reluctantly when the death penalty was carried out. I don’t think it’s our jobs as humans to kill someone whatever their crimes may be. If there is a God, I see no evidence that he made mere human beings into judge, jury and executioner. There is no doubt that Rodeny Berger is a horrible person, but if we sink to that level as a society, what does that make us?
Here is Dr. Kalehzan’s post:
Michelle Kalehzan
17 hrs ·
Tomorrow my home state of South Dakota will execute a man, Rodney Berget, who was widely known as “slow” during our childhood years growing up in Aberdeen. In direct violation of our US Constitution, an individual with Diminished Intellectual Capacity – documented by psychological testing results obtained in his early childhood – will be executed tomorrow. The fact that I just so happened to know the kid when we were growing up – and know he had intellectual challenges – makes me shudder in horror that our home state of South Dakota is executing him tomorrow. It’s barbaric and it’s unconstitutional. PLEASE voice your concern to the Governor before it’s too late. This is morally, ethically, and legally WRONG.
About this website
THEINTERCEPT.COM|BY LILIANA SEGURA
Rodney Berget Says He Wants to Die. South Dakota Plans to Kill Him. But Experts Say His Execution Would Violate the Law.
Rodney Berget is scheduled to die on Monday, despite evidence of an intellectual disability that could prohibit his execution.
Thanks David!
I am not pro-death penalty but none of you that are arguing against the death penalty but believe it is ok to kill by aborting an unborn child have no say in this discussion.
I fully believe retroactive abortions should be mandatory for chronic abusers of the rules of Cory’s blog. That would be ewe, OldStopmebeforeIwhineaboutiutofstatecommentersagain.
Next time you feel an urge to make noise, don’t.
mike, you are wrong in your statement you posted and nasty. You need to find peace brother. All the hate and support of killing do not help anyone. peace
Didn’t the Scotus decide we couldn’t kill mentally deficient people and Georgia went ahead and did it anyway?
I don’t believe in the death penalty, but the more I see and hear from wingnuts like Drumpf and OldSnowdriftsoapweed, the more I lean towards the death penalty to correct certain behaviors.
Shortly before 6:30 p.m., Jackley told the media he had received word of the denial from the Supreme Court and that the execution would go forward in about 30 to 45 minutes.
“We are at a point this evening where the Constitution was satisfied, and it will now be up to the Department of Corrections to carry out the court’s sentence of capital punishment.
My sincere prayers for all involved as well as for the victim’s family.
Interesting and relevant details about Berget’s sad upbringing, beaten by dad, etc. in this special appeal to Daugaard from the chair of the Special Olympics
https://medium.com/specialolympics/dont-kill-rodney-berget-ed62596c0bbf
“We are at a point this evening where the Constitution was satisfied,
with the shenanigans it took to get a 5-4 extreme right wing majority on the court, I have serious doubts the majority worries about satisfying the constitution. Th enablers that enabled the court to get this way did not appear to bother with the constitution while undermining basic tenets of decorum and protocol.
mike, your hand just pulled the handle to kill this man.
I found this interesting (from USA Today) “Berget wants to partially redeem himself in the public eye and in the minds of his family by accepting his punishment,” Jackley wrote in his response to the U.S. Supreme Court. “It is not Juliet Yackel’s place to thwart Berget’s wishes.”
Yackel has an extensive background as defense counsel in death penalty cases. She represented former Indiana death row inmate Darnell Williams, who was granted a stay of execution in 2003 in a nationally prominent case and later had his sentence commuted to life without parole.
In her reply to the state’s brief in opposition, Yackel argued that the lower court’s decision on Berget’s mental capacity was “fundamentally flawed” in disregarding early precedents and that Berget’s lawyer “abandoned his ethical duties as counsel.” She added that Berget “lacks the capacity to represent himself.
As a Libertarian, I oppose broad attempts to use government coercion to micromanage people’s lives and force non-Christians to act like Christians. That approach doesn’t work, and it has high social and economic costs.
In the thirteenth chapter of Romans, though, the Bible seems to suggest government should avenge crimes of aggression such as theft, violence and defamation. The vengeance of civil government will rarely, if ever, be precisely proportional to the crime avenged. In this case, it seems to me it was pretty close.
From the good sources offered here, I must conclude that executing this man is a travesty of justice.
I have worked with people with mental disabilities for many years and their easily persuadable nature sounds just like this man’s. You can talk many of them into almost anything.
Life in prison would be just. Execution is not.
The issue stands on its own, distinct from abortion.
We detained and disarmed a criminal. We then held him down and killed him. That’s an improper use of state power.
Then our legislature needs to pass the appropriate laws to get us to pro-life. However, this is not the only area of our lives in which our state is not pro-life. We have much work to do.
He was termed of Diminished Mental Capacity. The Third Reich used Kyron on such useless eaters. It was not as efficient as Colt AR-15s. Civilization advances.
What was the mentally diminished prisoner’s last statement?
Witnesses who are able to attend the execution, according to policy, are:
Attorney General Marty Jackley
Bradley Zell, the judge who convicted Berget
Minnehaha County State’s Attorney Aaron McGowan
Minnehaha County Sheriff Mike Milstead
Representatives of the victim
Member of the news media
A number of citizens to be determined by the warden
Curtains blocking the execution room will be closed until the warden orders them to be opened.
Berget will be given an opportunity to make a final statement.
It’s just sickening. There’s no rational support for state sanctioned killing. It costs more and doesn’t abet safety.
It does satisfy the desire of a few for revenge, totally extra-constitutional. It also helps those less certain of their strength and courage to feel more so, instantly giving the lie to that. Last, there are politicians who support killing because it gains them votes.
It’s just sickening. There’s no rational support for state sanctioned killing. It costs more and doesn’t abet safety.
It does satisfy the desire of a few for revenge, totally extra-constitutional. It also helps those less certain of their strength and courage to feel more so, instantly giving the lie to that. Last, there are politicians who support killing because it gains them votes.
I have not followed all of this man’s trials and sentencing but I wonder how a person with severe mental issues can be prosecuted in a court of law. How can fair judgement be made on the impaired? These people should be in mental institutions at early ages to provide help. Putting the mentally challenged in prison is not in the best interests of the people as this case proves. We’re doing it wrong, unless euthanasia is what we seek. Kill all who are not as functional as what we deem normal.
Jerry, we don’t want to put them in “mental institutions” with people who have mental illnesses but average or better IQs. Schools have special education classes for them and communities have good programs as they become adults. In the late 1980s I worked with such folks at the Northern Hills Training Center in Spearfish.
There is no law mandating that supported programming or employment be continued once school is finished. In most cases that’s okay because families want the best for their member with a low IQ/developmental disability, so they enroll her or him in a program. However, some don’t. In a few cases the family is the problem.
Issues of mental illness and diminished capacity are mitigating factors that ought to be given controling weight in death penalty decisions under current law. While the SCOTUS has ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute someone with severe mental illness and/or significant diminished capacity, and has established a threshold that cannot be constitutionally breached, the Court, unfortunately, has deferred to each State to make such determinations as to whether a particular defendant meets that threshold by following certain minimum, but necessarily ambiguous, standards.
The important and fundamental question, however, that really supercedes all other considerations raised by the death penalty involves whether to permit the state to kill someone who has been effectively incapacitated and is no longer a meaningful threat to others.
That differs from abortion in that the decision whether to terminate a pregnancy is never made by the state, it is made by an individual who has a right to defend her body from any unwanted appropriation.
The truely remarkable aspect of those who support the idea that the state should be permitted to make an irreversible decision to kill someone is that they are often the same individuals that absolutely do not trust the state to make many much less significant and reversible decisions. These same death penalty advocates think the state cannot make wise or fair decisions about regulating climate change, regulating water and mineral rights, deciding how to use tax dollars, etc, etc, yet they are perfectly, yet oddly, fully confident in the ability of the state to decide whether to kill someone.
Even the frequent proof by groups such as the Innocence Project that the state often errs in making these life and death decisions does not seem to deter these death penalty proponents who do not trust the state to correctly or fairly decide much less severe matters.
Attorney General Marty Jackley says we killed a man in a “professional, humane, and dignified” way yesterday. Why does that not make me feel better about the state’s use of force against an unarmed, tied-down man?
Johnson spoke directly to people who believe the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment after the execution Monday night. She said what the state did to Eric Robert and Rodney Berget was quick, painless and clinical. Nothing compared to what happened to her husband.
“The back of his head was gone. That’s cruel and unusual punishment,” Lynette said.
https://www.ksfy.com/content/news/The-Johnson-family-reacts-to-Rodney-Bergets-execution-498972821.html
Thank you, bcb, for answering how the court says you can’t execute insane but Georgia did it anyway.
So, Troll, are you saying being a prison guard should be a no risk job?
The man said he wanted to die as spending 30 years in a cage was to much of a punishment for him to endure. The state did him a favor then while the family will continue to suffer their loss. “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves,” kinda fits the bill.
It seems that many people think the government is too incompetent to regulate businesses, regulate firearm ownership, or provide social safety nets. Many of those same people have no problem with that same government conducting investigations and trials that determine who should have their freedom taken away, or be put to death. If you don’t trust the government to play a role in those areas, why would you let them make irrevocable decisions like putting someone to death?
How many South Dakota residents breathed a sigh of relief at this man’s death? Do you feel safer?
For the folks who made statements regarding our ability to protect society from evildoers by keeping them locked up rather than committing state-sanctioned murder, you realize that this guy was put to death for killing a human while he was already locked up, right? So this is a perfect example of mere incarceration not always being enough to eliminate a threat.
I don’t know about his actual mental capacity, just the headlines you have all seen, but mental capacity aside, I think it is important to understand that sometimes killing a person is the only real way to stop them from hurting others. You can call that immoral if you want, or sinking to their level, but it is a fact nonetheless.
Sorry, Ryan. An assertion that begins with “sometimes” is an opinion not a fact.
That folks was me. Follow up. Why hasn’t the State of South Dakota been taken to task for the lack of guards for their facilities? These killers were not trustee’s, from what I can gather, they were convicted of violence and they were working in a place of profit for the state. Shouldn’t the state have adequate guards to protect themselves from mentally disturbed and from all prisoners?
Case in point. Some lay claim that arming school teachers would protect students and yet, in this case, we seem to leave the incarcerated an ability to make these sort of attempts on the weak links. Why have weak links when there are lives at stake?
porter, seriously? Do you actually mean that anything that doesn’t occur 100% of the time is an opinion? You obviously just want to argue with me, which is fine, but that’s even dumber than most of the dumb things you say. Please, make yourself sound worse and try to dance around the idiocy of your comment.
jerry, you raise questions related to our ability to humanly incarcerate violent criminals which I think help make my point. The only way to guarantee a criminal can’t victimize anybody is to allow them no contact with anybody. This can only be achieved through solitary confinement or the death penalty. I don’t think somebody can convince me that solitary confinement is necessarily more humane than putting somebody to death in a non-violent manner.
Ryan Dakota … Arguing with you would provide no benefit to the group. It always ends with you going home to Mom, crying. The idiocy is saying that “sometimes” killing someone is the only option. That, Dakota, is the fact, nonetheless.
I am not advocating solitary confinement like with Charles Rhines, what I am saying is that to try to keep people from being convicted of violent crimes, we should be look for solutions before we get to that point. Mental health treatments and working to catch the mental issues before they become a threat to society. Healthcare and social workers to work to keep a healthy society both physical and mental.
If all of that fails, then at least have a penal system that protects guards and inmates alike. When you have such a weak system that these two could breach one security system and almost succeed in their plan to escape, that tells me the system is inadequate and probably needs more guards to do the job as well as to screen the inmates that are in the for profit prison industry.
I think Ryan has a point about this being a second killing. I think Donald Moeller deserved death. Other than that, the others who have been executed were just state-sanctioned murder. I would make it much harder to apply the death penalty.
Wasn’t society protected from Berget? Did he get out of prison and kill again?
Lock up protected society from this man without taking his life prematurely.
Alright porter, you knocked that idiocy dance out of the park. Back to the kids’ table with you now.
jerry, I absolutely agree that our court and prison systems need work, but ultimately there is no guarantee that a violent person will not victimize others unless they have no contact with others. We can all discus the merits of risk versus reward with allowing violent criminals to interact with other people, but stating that incarceration protects society from violent criminals is just plain not true.
Donald, I agree that the death penalty should be a last resort rather than the rather hum-drum option that it sometimes appears to be.
I never said “that incarceration protects society from violent criminals”, but I wish I would have. That is prison’s purpose.
What I have always said is that with mental health screenings, at earlier ages, could help in the treatments of violent behavior before it gets dangerous. If then we see that the young person cannot or will not be able to adjust in the real world, then there should be places for them to be institutionalized as a last resort, rather than just turning them loose to fend for themselves until they do violent acts on the innocent. Many people, when they are under doctor’s care, can function with the help of prescription drugs. This must be monitored to make sure the patient is taking them though.
Incarceration is not 100% effective in protecting society from violent criminals, but it does not follow that incarceration does not protect society at all. Develop some nuance.
I was deeply saddened that we continue to support state-sponsored killings of our fellow citizens. This man was a pile of garbage, but I don’t want to be a part of his death.
It doesn’t matter where I sit, Ryan Dakota. There are a dozen or more here who are your intellectual superior. Your group (Jason, OS, Happy Camper, Miranda, Nelson, Deutsch, Evans Hickey, grudznick and numerous minions) won’t ever be able to radically influence the young people of SD, who learn so much from Cory. The FreePress is free because Cory decides it will be free. It will be balanced because the good commenters here from around the world insist that it is balanced. So different from that oppressive, inclusive and misinforming blog from Brookings y’all cling to with closed minds.
Remington Jones and others have very ably illustrated the fundamental disconnect within those self-described as right to life, but also anti-government, pro death penalty, tough on crime.
I think it’s the same wilfully blind disconnect that enables them to lionize a man who lies extensively and daily, supports violence, ignores the constitution and grinds away at the democratic freedoms of the republic known as the USA. The last is, of course, the Arrogant Ammoral Abomination in the White House.
From the net today- “Today the state of South Dakota violated the U.S. Constitution when it executed Rodney Berget,” Yackel said in a phone interview. “Rodney is someone who the state itself deemed intellectually disabled over 40 years ago.”
Among those who called on the Supreme Court to halt the execution was Timothy Shriver, chairman of the board for Special Olympics International.
Berget competed in South Dakota’s Special Olympics state games as a boy in the early 1970s, Shriver said.
I wondered who had declared Berget intellectually disabled.
It was not made clear yesterday in what I had read.
mike, you said “Lock up protected society from this man” but this man killed a person while in lock up. Prison guards are part of society. Some people can’t be stopped.
jerry, I agree with the goals you seem to express, I just doubt our ability to actually create and maintain the effective system that you describe.
porter, why are you so caught up with people’s level of intelligence? Life is not an IQ contest. The people you listed in your parenthetical are not my “group” just because you like to argue with them as much as you like to argue with me. Seems more like they are your group. I have no interest in influencing any young people, other than my own offspring, in this state or any state. And finally, just to prove how wrong again you are, I don’t even know what blog you are accusing me of clinging to. This is the only blog I read.
debbo, I think the disconnect you speak of is similar to the disconnect created when people say that the death penalty is wrong because it is the end of a life but those same people consider themselves “pro-choice.” I am pro-choice because I think it is a woman’s right to determine whether or not she hosts another human inside her body. However, I do think growing fetuses are “life.” So, I understand and acquiesce to the weighing of one life versus another, or the rights of one person versus the rights of another. I think the application of the death penalty is ethically comparable to abortion and assisted suicide from a societal standpoint.
Damn man, Whitey got put down today, in prison. “James (Whitey) Bulger, the South Boston mobster who was captured after years on the run, was killed in a West Virginia federal prison by at least two inmates, according to two Federal Bureau of Prisons employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information was not yet public.
Mr. Bulger, 89, had been transferred to the U.S. Penitentiary, Hazelton in Bruceton Mills, W. Va., on Monday and was beaten to death shortly after his arrival, according to the two prison workers. One of workers said that the inmates were thought to be “affiliated with the mob,” but did not know the specifics of the association.”
Mob justice is really no different than state justice.
Ryan Dakota … You’re the one who brags about how many diplomas hang on his office wall. Life is not the ability to afford and “somehow” get through college. You post here to try and influence me, then? Or just people you disagree with? Or are you just bored in your office? Let me guess. You’ve had a birthday within the last month.
Ryan, I dispute that being pro-choice should logically or morally lead to supporting the death penalty because both end a life, and dispute that these views are “ethically comparable.” I have never met a pro-choice person that favored ending a life.
Rather, the pro-choice position I am aware supports allowing another person the right to decide whether another entity – from blastocyst to fetus, be it considered a life or something other than a life, can use her body.
Pro-choice folks think that if a woman makes the difficult decision to prevent the unwanted use of her body, she should have safe health care in doing so.
The pro-choice folks think it inappropriate and generally morally wrong for a government to demand by law that anyone give birth or refrain from doing so, as this should be a personal decision of the individual outside the scope of government regulation.
But pro-choice folks simply do not support “ending a life” by abortion or the death penalty. Hence, the idea that these positions are ethically similar focuses too narrowly on only one aspect of the situations.
On the other hand, I can see your point that imposing the death sentence on someone who wants to die appears on the surface to be the equivalent of assisted suicide. The flaw I see in that position, however, is the reason for wanting to die seems less than voluntary. Absent facing a lifetime of incarceration, one must ask whether the condemned would feel the same way and desire to die.
This seems to differ from the case of someone suffering from a terminal illness, often extraordinarily painful and debilitating. Folks in that circumstances cannot be helped by pardons or clemency, hence the decision to commit assisted suicide seems an actual voluntary and rational choice.
Bcb – well said. I agree the reasons behind the deaths are very different but I’m merely taking the issue to the extreme for conversation sake. Abortion and capital punishment are very different, obviously. The comparison between the two is only to the extent of life versus death. In one case people can see the justification of the killing due to situational factors, so in the other case you can’t say without creating self-contradiction that no life should be ended “unnaturally.” That’s the boundary of the meaning of my comment.
wrong porter. I didn’t brag about my education, you asked me how many degrees I had and I answered your question. Just like saying that you guessed wrong about my birthday is not bragging about my zodiac sign. More super secret info for porter, huh? You diabolical genius!
Wrong Ryan. You told me to go away and sit with the kids. The point is that I’m the lightweight on this blog. Even if you get rid of me there are really smart people here who won’t let you get away with saying your opinions are facts. As the thread unfolded, you were schooled by several of them.
BCB-you’re like Yoda.
Porter, I haven’t done what you’re saying I did.
Don’t play victim here, you are an antagonist. Don’t be the bully who cries immediately when stood up to.
Berget did not kill a guard in society. The guard was part of the lockup Berget was confined to. The same lockup that kept society safe from him.
Ok mike, so was RJ Johnson’s widow a member of society? Or is she also not worth protecting like prison guards who apparently aren’t members of society according to you.
I think the point about the guard is that the difference is in the setting. As a guard, Johnson knowingly accepted a job in immediate proximity to dangerous, convicted criminals. The general public does not willingly accept such a position.
Johnson and his family are certainly members of society, and his employment differentiated him from the general public.
Our laws are intended to provide a greater level of safety to the general public. People who choose to work within prisons, especially maximum and medium security prisons, willingly step into a setting of much greater risk.
Berger being in prison greatly enhanced the safety level of the general public from him. Just the opposite for prison employees.
BTW, I worked at Community Alternatives of the Black Hills for a couple years in the early 1990s. That was a private prison on highway 79 on the south side of Rapid City. I think it might be a juvenile facility now. It was minimum security operating on a contract with the state. I quickly learned that prisons are a different world. Very different.
I agree with BCB’s comment about the difference between state executions and abortions. I do find a fascinating parallel however.
Both involve instances of the state wanting to control the body of another. The big difference is, one has committed a heinous crime, while the other merely wants to enjoy the same rights as any other law abiding, autonomous adult.
Ms. Debbo, I think your point about Mr. Johnson knew the risks of his job, but I have to wonder then if Mr. Johnson knew the risks of being all alone with the criminal element. Case in point is Whitey’s murder in prison yesterday and the lack of guards to protect inmates as well as guards.
“Mr. Bulger’s death will be remembered, too.
A shortage of correctional officers has become chronic in the Trump administration, leaving some prison workers feeling ill-equipped and unsafe on the job, according to a recent New York Times investigation. Some prisons are so pressed for correctional officers that they regularly compel teachers, nurses, secretaries and other support staff to step in.” New York Times 10-31-2018
We incarcerate more and more every day while not increasing the guards to control them in the same manner. There is always a risk, but to make the odds even higher for inmates to think they can get away with the murder of a corrections officer, must not be acceptable. Our state must do better to protect our officer’s, it is the least we can do to demand accountability, have we?