In 2015, Billingsley was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with 16 years suspended, after he pleaded guilty to a first-degree sex offense, court records show.
The Maryland sex offender registry shows he was released from prison in October. The registry classified him in “tier 3,” which includes the most serious charges and requires offenders to register for life.
Why shouldn’t he have been out? Did he escape custody or something? Was he locked up and then processed out by mistakes?
Sounds like he pleaded guilty to his prior charges and was sentenced to a lengthy prison term which he served and was then released at the end. Nothing wrong with that.
If anything this is evidence that the way in which we are incarcerating is not working. We had this dude in custody for sounds like about seven years or something? What the fuck were they doing in that prison?
No, but the American prison system just makes people more violent and insane. So, this person was only going to get worse. Instead of asking why that is our politicians just think we should leave people in prison forever. #Murica.
No, but the American prison system just makes people more violent and insane.
Prisons overall seem to do that… Ditto with correctional facilities.
Prisons overall seem to do that… Ditto with correctional facilities.
Not everywhere. This is what a maximum-security prison in Denmark looks like that is designed to promote rehabilitation over punishment.
That’s cool! Over here in LATAM correctional facilities and prisons just make people worse.
Too lenient of a plea deal with such a violent offender.
Compared to what?
The full 30. This woman would still be alive if he’d been kept behind bars. How he worked it out to serve only 7 should be going into a lawsuit, which unfortunately won’t bring this woman back but might send a message to prosecutors and prevent future tragedies.
This woman, yes, but him serving another 23 years could have just been delaying it happening to another woman in 23 years’ time.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the key point here is that prisons should be about rehabilitating prisoners so that they’re fit to return to society. Just locking someone away for 30 years and assuming they’ll come out reformed is flawed thinking; the prison system needs to actively work towards making sure prisoners are safe to release into society and equipped to deal with society. And if one of those things isn’t true, the prisoner should not be released.
In this instance, it’s clear 7 years wasn’t long enough either way. But I doubt 30 years would have been enough either with the current attitude of prisons being for punishment rather than rehabilitation.
Partially agree, but people often age out of crime. Statistically speaking, a 55 year old man is much less dangerous than a 32 year old.
That might be your key point, mine is the prosecutor didn’t do their job.
What did the prosecutor do wrong? They proved that he was a violent criminal and a danger to society. The original sentencing would have him in jail until at least 2029 (if he did not fuck up, reoffend in prison, and serve the full 30) and put him on the sex offender registry (which worked as well as expected).
It was a judge that chose to suspend part of the original sentence. It was a prison system that failed to rehabilitate him. It was a parole board that decided that time served was long enough.
A lot of people (and a lot of systems) fucked up to let a violent individual roam the streets, but I feel like the prosecutor did their job to the best extent that could be expected.
Probably quiet as a mouse when they are overcharging kids. All fired up about nothing.
Any system that classifies things has two types of errors: false positives and false negatives. As you increase one you decrease the other. It’s as simple as that. So if you want to be 100% sure you put every bad person in prison you just put everyone in prison. Anything short of that you’re going to miss some. How many innocent people being tortured or killed by the system does it take to equal the value of killing or torturing one guilty person or even keeping one guilty person in prison for the rest of their lives?
Stories like this primarily exist to justify massive amounts of violence by the state to ostensibly prevent things like this… except they never actually do. The criminal legal system is the only system that uses its own failure to perpetually justify additional investment. As long as you have prisons, you will have this. You will have people who go to prison and become more dangerous. You will have people falsely imprisoned and even murdered. You will have police murdering people regularly and getting away with it in the name of “preventing” crimes like this. All you need to do is look at the clearance rates for police and the recitivism rate for prisons to see that they just aren’t worth the investment.
Until we shift to a public health model of public safety, this is guaranteed. Public health approachs like investment in early childhood education, restorative justice systems, and making mental healthcare more accessible have been proven repeatedly to have multiple times higher return on investment than police or prisons.
While revenge feels good and feels intuitive based on the history of the legal system, it doesn’t fit with modern psychology. Classifier based punitive legal systems must always either cause suffering by action or inaction because that’s part of the fundamental definiton of classifiers and punitive systems. Making sure people like this are in prison means making sure innocent people are also in prison. Is it worth it?
It’s disappointing to see you getting down voted like this.
Like sure, this guy probably shouldn’t be on the streets, but how many innocent people are we willing to imprison in the process of keeping people like him behind bars?
All the while our education, healthcare and social safety nets are being dismantled. All the things that actually help reduce violent crime.
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They caught him on September 29th
Honestly, there are many people on Baltimore’s streets that shouldn’t be on the streets, yet they still are.
Edit: Im a Baltimore native, no idea why I’m getting downvoted for saying something that’s true.
If you do hanous shit like he did, he should have been put in prison for life. I am not for death sentence, thats fucked up.
You did a hanous crime, welp, your life is over. Rest of your shitty little life in prison.
*heinous.
Any system that classifies things has two types of errors: false positives and false negatives. As you increase one you decrease the other. It’s as simple as that. So if you want to be 100% sure you put every bad person in prison you just put everyone in prison. Anything short of that you’re going to miss some. How many innocent people being tortured or killed by the system does it take to equal the value of killing one guilty person or even keeping one guilty person in prison for the rest of their lives?
Stories like this primarily exist to justify massive amounts of violence by the state to ostensibly prevent things like this… except they never actually do. The criminal legal system is the only system that uses its own failure to perpetually justify additional investment. As long as you have prisons, you will have this. You will have people who go to prison and become more dangerous. You will have people falsely imprisoned and even murdered. You will have police murdering people regularly and getting away with it in the name of “preventing” crimes like this. All you need to do is look at the clearance rates for police and the recitivism rate for prisons to see that they just aren’t worth the investment.
Until we shift to a public health model of public safety, this is guaranteed. Public health approachs like investment in early childhood education, restorative justice systems, and making mental healthcare more accessible have been proven repeatedly to have multiple times higher return on investment than police or prisons.
While revenge feels good and feels intuitive based on the history of the legal system, it doesn’t fit with modern psychology. Classifier based punitive legal systems must always either cause suffering by action or inaction because that’s part of the fundamental definiton of classifiers and punitive systems. Making sure people like this are in prison means making sure innocent people are also in prison. Is it worth it?
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This is a perfect case to point out that criminal can kill you and just get put back in prison. Your family will now forever, never be the same and told to forgive them… what a joke
This type of criminal should be killed by the state to protect the civil part of society from a person like this.
Literaly just remove them from life.
Edit: Chad Doerman, decide for me on this case.
The problem with letting the state kill citizens is the shockingly high rate at which it will inevitably kill innocent people.
It should on be reserved for the worst of the worst. Not the people they are not sure of.
Innocent people are being killed by people who have not conscious of guilt don’t care about laws we follow. Kill you just the same.
Fix that fucking legal system and start a green revolution by deleting the worst criminls we have.
It should on be reserved for the worst of the worst. Not the people they are not sure of.
Do you think you’re the first person that thought of this? Do you really think the justice system is too stupid to say “hey, we should be sure before we use the death penalty”?
No matter what system you build, it will always kill some innocent people, because no system works perfectly. How is that acceptable to you?
Innocent people are being killed by people who have not conscious of guilt don’t care about laws we follow. Kill you just the same.
I’d rather be innocent and be killed by a murderer than by the state. Killing even more innocent people won’t help.
Fix that fucking legal system and start a green revolution by deleting the worst criminls we have.
Oh, we just have to fix the legal system, why didn’t we think of that before?
Or we could delete you and be done with it. Sounds good?
You could if you wanted to but im just saying something and thats not really worth the death penalty, or is it?
So we just have to accept the system as it is and not try to improve it? Oh boo thats also a very unoriginal idea, almost all ideas are unoriginal when it come to punishments.
Not just the legal system but society, we live in a society that really does not care about the people lesser in society, literaly try be a homeless guy and get away with a crime where a rich person can just pay the bond and be out!
Im happy you would rather be killed by a stranger than the state, especially crazy if you were innocent. but, I would argue that the person that killed you, if it was in cold blood, did it with malicious intent had a history of murder, killed you in a mass shooting with no remorse, I would protest the shit out of them being executed rather than spending life in prison. I know you’d probably be apposed to me doing so.
You could if you wanted to but im just saying something and thats not really worth the death penalty, or is it?
Actually no, I think people that like the death penalty are pretty much murderers in waiting. Why wait until you kill someone innocent?
So we just have to accept the system as it is and not try to improve it? Oh boo thats also a very unoriginal idea, almost all ideas are unoriginal when it come to punishments.
Where exactly is the improvement when the state kills even more innocent people? Seems to me an improvement would be fewer innocent people put to death.
Ha ha ha that halrious. Because I want people like btk dead, I’m a murderer in waiting, how’d you figure that scooter?
Normal people don’t want to kill innocent people just to kill some people they think deserve death.
The death penalty shouldn’t be a thing. The amount of innocent people it is acceptable to execute in order to catch the “bad guys” is always zero.
Our whole system needs an overhaul, but it starts with the general public acknowledging that prisoners are people too. Even the really heinous ones. We need to realize that and act accordingly. We need to help these people be better, and if we can’t help them be better. Then they need a safe place away from society.
Oh yeah, cheers… Muhammad jesus gay sex. 👍
At that point, you have to try to draw some kind of distinguishing, which will take quite a lot of time, money, and effort, just to create a punishment that is barely ever used and accomplishes no meaningful advantage over life imprisonment except some sort of rather perverse moral satisfaction.
In a perfect world, I’d agree that death for the most heinous case that have no legal ambiguity is essentially fine, but in reality, “not legally ambiguous” functionally does not exist, or at the least, it takes a lot of time and money to find it.
Yeah, a perfect world. I agree. I just feel that people who have killed just because they want to,the people that kill their whole family or 30 kids in a school can’t just sit their and live, it might not be the best type of life but its still something their victims don’t have.
Im mainly really only referring to cases like Chad Doerman. It is an execution case and its not the only one of its type.
Also I forgot to add. This guy in OP’s post is also a candidate for execution. A serial rapist with a long history of his crime now guilty of murdering a inoccent person. I mean what the fuck did she do to deserve that? he gets to keep on breathing? Fuck that! the system is broken and people suck.
The fact of the matter is that you either waste a huge amount of money and time in the process of rigorously defining that category of who deserves the death penalty, or you do literally anything else with those resources.
And frankly, I don’t think the biggest issue with the prison system right now is a small number of people who deserve death instead being alive, so there are plenty of other things that I’d rather invest in. For instance, the fact that security is so lax that being raped in prison is so common that people literally make casual jokes about it.
Simply put, this world where the justice system just knows who deserves to die and never makes any mistakes ever does not exist, whether you like that or not.
See you make it sound like its such a hard decisions. Rigorously define the death penalty? The fuck? You either meet the standard for execution or you don’t, see the case of Chad Doerman (my standard for the death penalty).
Yes the prison system needs updating but im not talking about prisons.
Not asking for that perfect world im asking for a world where a person that commits the most serious of crimes, no longer enjoy their life.
And I’m saying that what you’re wanting is a fairy tale and doesn’t actually exist (or at the very least, costs a stupid amount of money and resources that could be much better used by doing literally anything else).
I don’t think we’re gonna get much further here, so respectfully, I’m going to move on.
the people they are not sure of
lol you mean you put people in prison when you’re not sure they’re guilty over there?
“Yeah we’re not completely sure he murdered this woman so we’re not going to kill him, just put him in prison for 30 years in case he’s actually guilty.”
No,
Executions should be reserved for the worst of the worst and not the legally ambiguous
I don’t think “legally ambiguous” qualifies as “beyond a reasonable doubt” is my point.
Chad Doerman tell me what you decide.
It should on be reserved for the worst of the worst. Not the people they are not sure of.
How is that different than the system right now?
We’re treating the symptoms, not the cause. There will always be shit people out there, but this late stage capitalism hellscape in tandem with incarceration which is punative rather than focused on treatment makes for a really fucked up society where as soon as someone fucks up, they’re basically done for life. This outcome was tragically predictable
I guess killing all of them is one solution, but what the fuck?
It would be hard to do that with the current system. Which means it would require a complete overhaul of the justice system, which I would argue is something that is desperately needed. There are too many corrupt individuals on all level of the system that needs correcting.
Look at BTK he is just sitting there in prison, just chilling allowed to live while his victims are not.
I guess I’m riled up but the Chad Doerman documents I watch because, 3 kids man, 3 kids that did nothing dead and he did not give one shit. His wife was wounded as she lay trying to protect them right there on the front lawn. Maybe its retribution i wish but I just know why he is allowed to live.
Fixing our judicial system is arguably easier to fix than the human condition. We need to help people out of poverty, we need to give people their basic needs, they need education, heathcare and a whole host of things, housing, jobs, the list goes on. I would say if people had access to proper service and live reasonable life will eliminate a lot of crime. Can we do that?
And if someone is falsely convicted of this sort of crime and executed, that person’s family too will never be the same. And it is not possible to create a system in which criminals are successfully prosecuted but where false convictions cannot happen
Yeah, it’s better to imprison an innocent for life than to kill them.
One is acceptable. The other isn’t.
If new evidence exonerates a living person, they can be released. You cant bring an innocent dead person back to life.
Yeah, but that doesn’t mean every innocent person in prison for life is going to get exonerated before they die.
The argument that “the death penalty should be abolished because some innocent people are convicted” doesn’t hold any water because innocent people can be convicted with life imprisonment as well and die before being found innocent. Does that mean we shouldn’t sentence people to life in prison?
Which brings me back to my previous point: it’s acceptable to imprison innocent people for life, but not to execute them. At least in your minds.
It is not acceptable to punish an innocent person at all in my mind, but it is also not acceptable to sit by and do nothing about dangerous and malicious behavior, and so it becomes necessary to choose the lesser evil.
Executions should only be reserved for the worst of the worst. The people who don’t care they murdered someone. A father that executes his 3 kids and is cool with that is a perfect example for it or a person who is a serial rapist who has now committed murder and NOT the legally ambiguous.
“We don’t quite know if you did that crime so it will be life instead of execution.”
“Oh you just wanted to kill 30 people because you hate your life, don’t worry the state will sort you out”
It costs just as much to go through the legal process of the death penalty as it does to imprison someone for life
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Doubt it mate. Give me the figures.
Okay so, do you want to read that article? You can just skip to the conclusion part and the fact check done in 2018, since the article is from 2016…
-------------------------‐ Conclusion Was Dennis Davis correct when he claimed that death cases are more expensive than life in prison?
A preliminary study by South Dakotans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, examining first-degree murder cases since 1985 that have resulted in a death sentence or life in prison, found that on average, legal costs in death penalty cases exceeded those in the other cases by $353,105.[24]
The study was submitted to the State Affairs Committee of the South Dakota State Senate as part of the committee’s hearing on this year’s bill to abolish capital punishment.[3] The study was referenced by both proponents and opponents of the bill during the hearing, and its numbers were not refuted.
While the legal costs were greater, information from the South Dakota Department of Correction shows the average cost of long-term incarceration for a prisoner sentenced to death is lower than that of a prisoner serving a life sentence. Because there are no extra expenses involved in housing condemned prisoners, and those prisoners are incarcerated for less time in state prison, the average savings per prisoner is $159,523.[19]
Since the average savings in long-term incarceration is so much lower than the average additional legal costs, it appears Davis is correct about the cost of the death penalty versus life imprisonment in his home state.
Because the costs associated with capital punishment have not been studied in every state that has the death penalty, and because most of the existing studies are limited in scope, it is not possible to state definitively that the death penalty is always more expensive than life in prison in the United States. But the studies of capital punishment conducted since the Furman decision do offer support for Davis’ claim.
Fact Check- 1000 x 218 px.png Launched in October 2015 and active through October 2018, Fact Check by Ballotpedia examined claims made by elected officials, political appointees, and political candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We evaluated claims made by politicians of all backgrounds and affiliations, subjecting them to the same objective and neutral examination process. As of 2023, Ballotpedia staff periodically review these articles to revaluate and reaffirm our conclusions. Please email us with questions.
Soooooo basically, yeah more expensive in legal fees but literally cheaper because they don’t spend 40 years rotting in a hole.
Also thats not what I’m talking about… pfft.
Did you read it? It costs 350K in legal fees to save 150K…
I did and the over cost out weights the initial cost… in the long run…
No, that 160K savings is incarceration costs, they don’t outweigh the TOTAL costs increase of 190K which are the legal costs minus the savings in incarceration
It doesn’t need to.
A lot of that cost is legal costs, to my understanding, going through the process of the defendant exhausting their appeals and such. Cutting that cost would mean a faster process with less time and opportunity to uncover mistakes, which would lead to even more executions of the falsely convicted
Right the standards are too low already as we have seen death row inmates exonerated and your plan to lower the cost is to lower the standards even further.
How about instead of trying to salvage a system that is clearly not working we abandon it. What is the absolute worst case scenario? A mass murderer piece of shit remains behind bars for that much longer. Instead of trying to lower the standards where the absolute worst case scenario is an innocent person gets killed.
I never said anything about that being a plan to lower costs or standards. My point was the opposite, that costs for capital punishment cannot be reasonably lowered without unacceptable sacrifices
Gotcha my bad
So like… why should there be a different appeal process for capital punishment vs. anything else?
Isn’t guilty guilty? Shouldn’t you have the same avenues of appeal, regardless of what the punishment is?
If that’s the case, then wouldn’t it be just as expensive to go through the appeal process for capital punishment as anything else?
There’s a much more intense appeal process because you can’t un-execute someone.
If some evidence turns up a decade later after someone has been imprisoned for life that proves them to be innocent, while you can’t give them that time back, you can release them and give them a hefty sum of many to at least attempt to repay what you’ve wrongly taken from them. But if you murder them, and they turn out to be innocent, then the government has murdered a completely innocent person for no reason, and nothing can be done to ever make that right.
In a perfect legal system, I think most people would be okay with the death penalty for the most heinous crimes. But because death is a final judgement that cannot be reversed, it needs an absolutely perfect justice system. And er, I don’t think anyone would accuse our justice system of being that.
So given that, it’s much much cheaper to just keep people locked up, and it saves us a lot of money. The only thing lost is a kind of moral righteousness and satisfaction in seeing criminals die, which I’d personally say is one of our less noble instincts anyway.
Honestly, I’d be against capital punishment even in an absolutely infallible justice system. If someone absolutely cannot ever be trusted to return to society no matter what rehabilitative options are available, then locking them up indefinitely still accomplishes this, while also resulting in less death overall
I’d personally agree (and amusingly enough, so would the Catholic Church, though they weirdly don’t talk about that as much as some other social issues).
Ultimately though, that’s more a question of moral principles, which are a lot harder to argue and less persuasive than simply talking about cold hard cash.
then locking them up indefinitely still accomplishes this
The problem is an issue of cost. It’s impossible to imprison someone for decades at a lower rate than executing them.
Executions are expensive, but they don’t need to be. He mentioned the “appeal process,” when I then said should be the same regardless of the punishment.
then the government has murdered a completely innocent person for no reason, and nothing can be done to ever make that right.
So… wouldn’t the same thing occur for innocent people who die in prison? Nothing can ever be done to make it right. It’s the same as sentencing them to death, only much slower and more expensive.
In a perfect legal system, I think most people would be okay with the death penalty for the most heinous crimes.
I don’t know. I see most people against the death penalty saying that they don’t support the death penalty because of some lofty “the government has no right to kill its citizens” principle. Not really based on anything, but it ‘sounds nice’ so I guess people go for it.
So given that, it’s much much cheaper to just keep people locked up, and it saves us a lot of money.
It doesn’t need to be. It’s at least possible to execute people for a cheaper price than imprisoning them. We just choose not to do it.
So… wouldn’t the same thing occur for innocent people who die in prison? Nothing can ever be done to make it right. It’s the same as sentencing them to death, only much slower and more expensive.
The essential difference is the ability for new evidence to come to light that exonerates the prisoner.
Simply put, there exist a non-trivial amount of people who were wrongfully imprisoned and later freed that would be dead now if we were looser with the death penalty. Some righteous bloodlust is not more valuable than their lives.
More simply, if you were wrongfully imprisoned, you’d probably be quite thankful for how hard it is to actually apply the death penalty. It’s really that simple.
The alternative is accepting a significantly greater chance of the murdering innocent people.
Which is generally a disturbing proposition to most people, but I won’t pretend to know how empathetic you may or may not be.
If you want to let people just get executed without appeals, sure. But then innocent people who are depressed by their guilty verdict might choose to die instead of fighting in the legal system
“We should kill people” - rational person
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