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Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Clifford Boggess

After watching the documentary on Clifford Boggess' death row case I felt the familiar feeling I get after watching an E!Insider Special on Charles Manson. To sum it up it feels like, 'This person is seriously a psychopath.'
I'm not really partial to the mitigating or the aggravating factors of this case because I still believe that the death penalty is wrong no matter what. What I am partial to is the fact that Boggess came from a family with a history of mental illness, an uncle who was also a criminal and a mother who had drug and alcohol problems along with abusing her children. His childhood was rocky and traumatic. There was no stability in his life. He was shipped off from an irresponsible and abusive mother to an adoptive family that couldn't take care of him and then sent him to live with some other relatives. This lack of stability in the earliest years of childhood is one piece of a recipe that spells criminal or murderer or just plainly to a dysfuntional adult. In Boggess' case it obviously lead to murder.
We have to take into consideration the psychological factors and the biological factors and the environmental factors in order to evaluate Boggess not for the death penalty, but as a human being. In some regards I sympathize with him because he is probably a sociopath, and that is unfortunate. I wonder what it would be like to grow up without emotions or a sense of anything central to human behavior.
                                               Anyways, Boggess was a murderer and he was executed (wrongfully) so there's no point in studying what created a murderer because he'll never get to sit on Freud's couch. He would have never been fit to be released back into society because he was a sociopath and everyone could tell that he may have convinced himself that he was human, but on the inside it just wasn't possible. Taking into consideration his value as a Christian and an artist is a useless sentiment as well. There are enough Christians in the world and most of them aren't cold blooded murderers. There are enough artists in the world as well who are much better painters than Boggess. Even some people in this school are much better artists than Boggess was, although that is subjective. He has no value as either of these things, but he has value as a human being. I don't know how his lawyers overlooked that little factoid. He was a human being and so are his executers and so were the men he murdered. This puts everyone on an equal plane unless one counts Sociopath as a different level, (which I kind of do). The point is, Boggess took life away from a human and is therefore being punished for it in jail. A life's sentence would suffice. Even though he was having the time of his life in prison, he has to live with being a sociopathic psychokiller. The executioner won't be punished by taking life and that is NOT fair. It's not moral. It's not just. It's nothing but a pathetic attempt to help the society feel clean again and to enable the families to grieve improperly.
                I've basically argued everything against Boggess that can possibly be said, but the fact is that he is a person. No one person has the right to take another person's life away on a whim like this. The execution was wrong.

2 comments:

  1. “You eat meat and you kill things that are better than you are, and then you say how bad, and even killers, your children are. You made your children what they are....”
    Manson=Awesome. 'nough said

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