Khmer Rouge gets 30-year sentence for 20,000 deaths
Scott Maniquet, National Post
Over 30 years after the fall of one of the most savage regimes in modern history, a UN-backed court has convicted the first senior member of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to ever be tried.
Kaing Guek Eav, a.k.a "Duch," supervised the torture and murder of nearly 20,000 people in his role as the communist Khmer Rouge's prison chief. It is estimated the around 2 million Cambodian's died in total from 1975 to 1979 due to torture, execution, starvation or overwork at the hands of the government led by the notorious Pol Pot.
If Cambodians were critical of the glacial pace of justice when Duch's trial started last year, today they were outraged to hear that he had received a 30-year sentence, minus 11 years for time spent waiting for his trial.
5 comments:
Well, if he'd gotten 60 years - which would certainly ensure that he died in prison, instead of possibly being released at the age of 86 - that would be 16 hours per death. Would that be better?
Or are you - like the Post - implicitly calling for the death penalty here?
What would you suggest, Downes, should we rehabilitate him, sing a rousing Kumbaya and let him tearfully tell us how sorry he is for killing TWENTY THOUSAND PEOPLE? I will assume that the excruciating-daily-torture-for-life-penalty is off the table and I don't know how simply killing this thing in human skin expresses our extreme disgust at his crimes. Still, I would think at least a fucking life sentence (where "life" actually means life) would have been appropriate.
I would agree that a life sentence is appropriate.
What I was objecting to was the characterization of
"eight hours per murder", which could not be corrected with a sentence of any length.
Then what you object to is the simple truth that the value we put on lives is pretty low. In Canada we don't do consecutive sentencing and I personally think that is a shame. Why should someone get a volume discount on murder? I think it would have been incredibly appropriate to sentence this man to 1,600,000 years in prison; 80 years for every life he took. The number is ridiculous as we certainly know that he will die long before his sentence is up but such a sentence says EACH life was valuable and EACH life must be accounted for in sentencing. If we only care about rehabilitating the killer we devalue the lives taken by the criminal.
The guy in Manitoba who beheaded the poor kid on a bus got ZERO time behind bars.
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