Life doesn’t stop at birth.  Although an unregistered commenter, Patti, I guess you may see further comments. I assume you also support Dr Tiller’s right to life and also Scott Roeder’s right to life in prison.

gerad, again you are right on point.

I have but two comments -
first, it is not “abortion rights”  it is CHOICE, that is the individual “right”, the courts-government are required to protect.  The court does not grant a “right” to a medical procedure be it termination of a pregnancy or an appendectomy.  If we are to ever get past this idiotic “debate” (bs framing) on abortion, we need to make this point every time the question is raised. It is disingenuous for the teabaggers to protest about not wanting the government to make their medical decisions, because at the same time they think it is okay to have the government make someone else’s medical” decision. 

second point - the death penalty is wrong, just as war, assassination of foreign leaders, sanctions against governments (read Haiti, Iraq, Cuba, Iran - though strangely not Sudan) that in effect only cause undue harm and death to individuals.  The only way to have a non-violent world is to live and act in a non-violent way. As much as one would think the world better by the removal of such despicable individuals such as Reider, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Bush, Robertson….. we only lower ourselves when we take such actions.  I for one think Reider’s remaining days would be best served collecting and cleaning the bedpans at the Kansas mental hospital in Liberal, Kansas, followed by nights in a cell next to a screamer.

As one who is pro-life, yes I also oppose the death penalty and unnecessary war(current one in Iraq/Afghanistan especially),the jury,of course, came to the right decision. But,it seems,there’s some hypocrisy going on. Are those who are otherwise against the death penalty, making an exception, because a doctor who did abortions was murdered? How many of you are against the killing of, say, convicted cop killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal?

This is a very sad case. An innocent law-abiding person is murdered in cold blood
in the sanctuary of a church, none-the-less. The person who pulled the trigger is obviously—to
me anyway—not the sharpest tool in the shed. Where are the pundits like
O’Rielly, Limbaugh, Roberts, and Beck who for months, even years, encouraged
people like Scott Roeder to violate others rights and even take another persons
life? These people have incited murder and do not have the moral courage to take
responsibility for their actions. They all have blood on their hands too, just as if
they had pulled the trigger. They justify killing in order to save lives? Can’t they
see how hypocritical that is?

Oh, I think he should live a very, VERY long life—in one of the most notorious prisons where even the guards are afraid to go in.  You know, put him in a cell with a Hannibal Lechter-type, or a guy who gets off on breaking bones.

So he can live in pain and terror the rest of his life.  After all, he’s a terrorist.

You kind of figure that if Roeder was working for Blackwater when he committed the murder, this trial would have been abandoned due to “national security” concerns and he would be walking free.

I guess he should have signed up first.

I am generally against the death penalty.  In this case I believe the death penalty would be the correct punishment.  And I would propose the following method:  A gun with one bullet is placed at his head and the trigger pulled up to six times, once per hour, before the round is chambered. And spare me the false equivilences of war, terrorism, political assasination, and abortion etc etc.  This is a person who does not deserve to wake up each day thinking himself some kind of hero;  he is nothing more than a murdering scum who used fake religious fervor to cover up his cold blooded psychopathic desire to enjoy inflicting death.

Gerard, not only do I agree with your assessment, but I think that the parallels go even further.  If the principle that this murderer killed in order to save lives is without merit, then what merit does pre-emptive war carry?  Is not his defense exactly that which was and still is used by US and UK officials (aka State terrorists) to justify their sanctions, bombings, and pre-meditated mass slaughter of other countries’ peoples?  Are they not basing their wholesale first-degree mass-murders on the meritless notion that they were killing in order to save (American) lives?  How can this man be condemned for what the State carries out regularly as a matter of policy, and why is it that the retail crimes deserve life sentences or worse, while the wholesale crimes of officials acting under the cover of the State escape responsibility?

“Only the grand scale and technocratic impersonality of the crimes conceived and directed by the [U.S.] ruling elite acting under cover of state authority distinguish them from garden variety killers.”
(Darrell Hamamoto)

“The problem the United States faces is that almost all of its invasions violate international law, and sometimes, as in the case of Iraq, in a blatant manner. So how do the political elite and the news media reconcile this contradiction? Simple: They ignore it. It is virtually unthinkable for a mainstream U.S. reporter to even pursue this issue.”
(John Nichols and Robert McChesney)

“We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?”
(Lucius Annaeus Seneca - the Younger, Roman statesman, philosopher)

“To initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
(International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany - 1946)

“A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have an air force.”
(William Blum)

Of course the conviction and punishment of Scott Roeder is justice.  Murder is wrong.

But ... does anyone besides me see the gross inconsistency between Mr. Roeder’s crime and the crimes we are permitting—no, ordering our military to carry out in Afghanistan and elsewhere? Is war not murder on a massive scale? And what kind of “law” condemns it in one instance and permits—even encourages—it in the other?

And beyond that, what about mass deprivation of food,
denial of shelter, clothing, medical aid?

Questions like this, uncomfortable as they are, need to be faced if the human race is to remain human.

Whether you are in the pro- or con-abortion camp you should rejoice that this jury told Mr. Roeder and his potential imitators unequivocally that their U.S.-style “Omerta” cannot be tolerated under any circumstance.