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POPSEmotional maturity lags cognitive ability in teens More: Study participants, ranging in age from 10 to 30, completed interviews and questionnaires measuring psychosocial maturity and basic intellectual skills, including verbal fluency and working memory. Maturity was gauged by impulse control, sensation-seeking, resistance to peer pressure, risk perception, and awareness of long-term consequences. Researchers found that certain cognitive abilities reach adult levels by the age of 16, while emotional maturity isn't attained till after 22. The study appears in the October issue of American Psychologist, a journal of the American Psychological Association. The organization previously had described adolescents as being competent to make sound healthcare decisions but too shortsighted and impulsive to warrant capital punishment.
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POPSSenator-Elect Scott Brown ---- On The Issues improved hydroelectric facilities and opposes a national cap and trade program. Education Brown supports school choice through charter schools and having a graduation requirement for high school students. Immigration Brown is against providing driver’s licenses and in-state tuition to illegal immigrant families. He is for strengthening border enforcement and instituting an employment verification system with penalties for companies that hire illegal immigrants. Gun issues Brown supports the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. Israel Brown supports a two-state solution that reaffirms Israel’s right to exist and provides the Palestinians with a place of their own where both sides can live in peace and security. Afghanistan and Iraq Brown " who does not list positions on the two wars on his campaign Web site " supports Obama’s decision to send the additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. He said the surge of troops also worked in
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POPSThe Decade From HELL
Mark Morford’s New Year's column speaks for many of us. I would even say it speaks for ¾’s of us... but too many, don’t vote. That’s why we had to endure the Reagan Years, Daddy Bush Years and Dubya’s years of HELL. I believe most Americans are Liberal and if they voted America would be in a different position, one of tolerance and peace. If all Liberals voted, incomes would be categorized as LIVING WAGES. Our health care system wouldn’t be gouging, excluding and bankrupting us while those in charge of who gets what, when it come to medical care, get richer. Reckless wars would not happen. 911 wouldn’t have occurred. There’d be no executions because Capital Punishment would be null. No homelessness, no hunger, and best of all no Beck or Limbaugh because their agenda of hate would not be tolerated. But alas, that America does not prevail. Let’s hope the next decade will bring the kind of world, we long for, we who EMPATHIZE and THINK. It can happen, IF YOU WOULD ONLY VOTE!
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POPSPulling the Plug on Capitol Punishment
Brilliant article, short and sweet, on the history of legal support and current non-support of the death penalty. Strongly recommended, people. It really is interesting. More from the article below: "Ordinarily, the decision of a non-governmental organization to reject a sentencing system it adopted in the early 1960s would richly deserve public obscurity. With states like New York and Massachusetts turning back efforts this decade to revive capital punishment, and with New Jersey and New Mexico abolishing their death penalties, why pay much attention to the American Law Institute? Because the institute has pulled the intellectual rug out from under the current system of deciding between life and death in 30 death-penalty states. The declining legitimacy of the death-penalty system in the legal profession must trouble all but the most extreme justices. The Supreme Court's close association with state killing has never been a comfortable one, and the collapse of any pretense of prin
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POPSCongress Must Pass Republican Leader Boehner’s Defund ACORN Act
or any other form of agreement to this criminal organization. ACORN ally Representative Jerrold Nadler has lead the charge against the Defund ACORN Act. He has claimed that it is an unconstitutional *" Bill of Attainder " an argument that has been thoroughly rebutted by former FEC Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky. Nadler had no such reservations when he co-sponsered legislation to punish AIG employees who had been awarded bonuses. *A legislative act pronouncing a person guilty of a crime, usually treason, without trial and subjecting that person to capital punishment and attainder. Such acts are prohibited by the U.S. Constitution. Congress moving to cut off funds to ACORN for the next 50 days is a merely a first step. An organization with ACORN’s history of voter registration fraud, tax evasion, and criminal activity should never again be eligible to receive any federal funds. Stopping payment to this criminal enterprise is not enough.
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POPSEnding death penalty could save US millions More: Dieter says that keeping execution while reducing its costs is not realistic. If less money is spent on appeals, he argues, the risk of executing an innocent person will increase. He said that ultimately, execution does not deter crime as its supporters hope. Capital punishment has been abolished in most western democracies, and after it was eliminated in the US state of New Jersey in 2007, the state saw its murder rate decline. Dieter cites a poll of 500 local police chiefs, which was paid for by the DPIC and released on Tuesday, showing support for ending capital punishment. The survey found that the police chiefs see the death penalty as the least effective tool in deterring crime. They suggest more efficient use of resources -- such as boosting funding for drug and alcohol abuse programs.
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POPSSympathy for Death Row Inmates !!!!! Not by me Some will disagree with me but why should we care if injections were blotched and took 2 hours. I feel as much sympathy for killers as they had while they were killing their victims. As a matter of fact i think the longer they suffer the better !
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POPSPrison Nation The goal here to keep nation in suppressed condition, in mortal fear of punishment for disobedience. The same with capital punishment. Clear sign of obscurant society, where fear and panic are handy tools to conduct business.
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POPSDoes Phillip Garrido deserve the death penalty? More: The evidence that Phillip Garrido committed monstrous crimes, more than once, appears incontrovertible. I'm in no way suggesting that in his case, it might all be a horrible misunderstanding. But I find it interesting that in the same week Grann's essay wrongful execution of Cameron Todd Willingham ] appears, many people seem more interested in discussing whether rape should perhaps be added to the list of capital offenses, whether Garrido deserves execution — to say nothing of castration, torture, and other things we ostensibly don't approve of as a society — than in looking at how often our justice system sentences innocent people to death. And how, despite all the supposed failsafes in the system, in at least one case, the state of Texas appears to have murdered a man in cold blood.
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POPSI Am Not Him Never was there a stronger argument against capital punishment than the last words of Napoleon Beazley.
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POPS"21 Ways to be a good Democrat" "You have to believe that homosexual parades displaying drag, transvestites, and bestiality should be constitutionally protected, and manger scenes at Christmas should be illegal." "You have to believe that illegal Democratic Party funding by the Chinese Government is somehow in the best interest to the United States." "You have to believe that this message is a part of a vast, right wing conspiracy." "You have to believe that it’s okay to give Federal workers off on Christmas Day but it’s not okay to say “Merry Christmas.” "
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POPSU.S. May Permit 9/11 Guilty Pleas in Capital Cases It is not known whether the White House has approved the proposed death penalty provision. A White House spokesman declined to comment. The provision would follow a recommendation of military prosecutors to clarify what they view as an oversight in the 2006 law that created the commissions. The law did not make clear if guilty pleas would be permitted in capital cases. Federal civilian courts and courts in most states with capital-punishment laws permit such pleas. But American military justice law, which is the model for the military commission rules, bars members of the armed services who are facing capital charges from pleading guilty. Partly to assure fairness when execution is possible, court-martial prosecutors are required to prove guilt in a trial even against service members who want to plead guilty. “Don’t we have an interest as a society,” Ms. LeBoeuf (ACLU attorney) asked, “in a trial that examines the evidence and provides some reliable picture of what went on?”
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POPSDEATH PENALTY- INSTITUTIONAL MURDER China, Saudi Arabia and America are in the company of those who still believe in the right of a society to kill its citizens. Capital punishment leads to more violent crimes. Not less. The act of vengeance legalized.
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POPSThe victory of the emotions "The ghosts of the French Revolution stir on our continent. Youths on the internet receive a hundred "up-votes" on social news sites for suggesting that bankers should be slain in the streets, a thousand for suggesting the same of Republicans. When discussing the morality of this, the voice of modesty that suggests that rich people, Republicans and Mormons have done nothing deserving of capital punishment is down-voted into oblivion. The idea that members of unpopular groups ought to have human rights, too, is met with the contention that they have forfeited their rights by behaving in unpopular ways.
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POPSWhy India's Teachers Do Not Spare the Rod The death of an 11-year old girl re-opens the controversy over corporal punishment in India's immense and unmanageable school system picture: Father Khayum Khan, center, and relatives of 11 year old girl Shanno, wait for her body outside a city hospital mortuary in New Delhi, India, Friday, April 17, 2009. An 11 year old school girl died in a hospital in the Indian capital on Friday, a day after she was punished by her teacher, police and news reports said.
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POPSIran executes woman despite order not to I wonder if Iran will prosecute the prison officials for murder if the Head of the Judiciary (who I presume to be some sort of judge) issued a stay. Or do you think it was officially sanctioned so Iran didn't have to deal with human rights groups?
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