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Comment by asldkjaslkdj | Hacker News Reader

The Sackler family should be completely liquidated. They acted with complete disregard and caused an unbelievable amount of pain. To think, there are people in prison for marijuana charges and these people still walk free. It's an absurd injustice.

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I completely agree. They should be jailed, this unfortunately goes too deep. They are responsible for the death of millions. I would venture to guess close to the amount of people who die in wars

> The Sackler family should be completely liquidated.

This, but literally.

You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how you feel about others or whom you happen to feel it about.

This is a bannable offence on HN, so please don't do it again. It's also completely unsubstantive. Fortunately that's not how your account usually posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Let's not do this here. We're better than this.

Former FBI agent John Douglas argues in one of his books (I forget which one) that if general public knew the whole scope and details of the crimes perpetrated by any of the serial killers he prosecuted, the level of support against death penalty would be close to nil.

Plenty of people deserve to die. Problem is we are awful at accurately knowing who those people are.

I mean, I hear all sorts of really heinous crimes…people who serially kidnap, rape, torture, kill victims in the most horrible ways possible. I am extremely doubtful that there is anything that is much worse than that, and yet I'm still against the death penalty. Perhaps he should explain what it is he sees instead of trying claim we're too ignorant to understand why the death penalty should be instituted?

Always be wary of FBI assertions without evidence. They are fabulous liars with an agenda to make themselves more powerful and scary.

People doing horrifying things justify horrifying things be done to them?

Why? Why is it fair to execute someone who murders 20 hitchhikers, or 3,000 Americans on 9/11, but not someone who knowingly takes actions that lead to the death of (i.e., murders) 500,000 people?

It's not "better" to advocate for leniency (and anything less than capital punishment is leniency for these animals) -- for crimes of this magnitude it dishonors the victims. This is why societies always execute war criminals, and the Sacklers are definitely in the same category as a Saddam Hussein in the number of people killed. Hiding behind a corporation doesn't lessen the crime any more than hiding behind a government office or a military uniform.

If a political party ran on the platform of rounding up the top 1000 corporate criminals and sticking a needle in their arms they'd have my vote from President down to sheriff.

It's not fair to execute anyone. Many countries have banned the death penalty and prominent US politicians oppose it (including Biden). It seems like you're noticing:

"We execute people who murder 20 hitchhikers, but not billionaires responsible for the death of thousands."

And proposing that instead of rectifying that inequality by banning the death penalty, we rectify it by doing the death penalty way more to avoid dishonoring victims? Let me know if I'm misreading you.

"It's not fair to execute anyone."

That's just an opinion, and mine is different. I believe that with very few exceptions, every first-degree murderer should be executed. Note that "first-degree murderer" is NOT equivalent to "person convicted of first-degree murder" which is why I have a lot of objections to the death penalty as a matter of public policy.

How do you propose to sort out the two classes that you have indicated exist? The inability to do so perfectly is largely behind my opposition to the death penalty in general. You can't be meaningfully exonerated if you are not alive. If punishment is what people desire, the American prison system is perfectly capable of satiation. A life in an American prison is significantly worse, in my opinion, than being dead as being dead ends it immediately and life in prison forces a person to deal with the consequences of their actions for a life-time.

You are looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. You think the clearly responsible party should still be free and wealthy?

That is clearly not the only other option next to a death penalty.

"Got a call from some dreamers said they was out for revenge, got excited then I thought about it, started crying, because a year ago my cousin was killed looking for his".

I'm not saying somebody should Rambo it or anything like that.

We need an equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials or the International Criminal Court but for these kinds of deliberate corporate crimes that result in mass death and destruction.

In general there needs to be more personal liability for white-collar crime. Now in corporations it often goes something like this (implicitly or not): "So you say we'll probably earn [this amount] and, when discovered, we are likely to have to pay between [this and that amount] in fines? Well then, that's a great ROI you got there, Roy. I'd say we go for it". And they lived happily after.

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