State charges included kidnapping, first-degree burglary and false imprisonment of husband of Nancy Pelosi
The man who was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for attacking the husband of Nancy Pelosi with a hammer in their California home was sentenced on Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole following a separate state trial.
A San Francisco jury in June found David DePape guilty of charges including aggravated kidnapping, first-degree burglary and false imprisonment of an elder.
Before issuing the sentence, Judge Harry Dorfman dismissed arguments from DePape’s attorneys that he be granted a new trial for the 2022 attack against Paul Pelosi, who was 82 years old at the time.
“It’s my intention that Mr DePape will never get out of prison, he can never be paroled,” Dorfman said while handing out the punishment.
I never said that was moral either. I hold the stance that, despite the utter lack of most freedoms, at least you get to maintain some semblance of bodily autonomy while in prison.
On the other hand, forced institutionalization with involuntarily sedation and/or medication is directly violating bodily autonomy. We don’t need to return to the days of deciding to “fix” people without their permission like we used to with transorbital lobotomies.
I don’t know why you think there’s more autonomy in a mental institution than prison, or why you keep bringing up forcing drugs and surgery on people like that’s the only way to help people with mental health issues. Your stance is still not making sense from a moral standpoint.
Mental illness treatment and rehabilitation is the path forward, but it’s not a one-size-fits all solution. I was more direct about this in my other comments: What do you do with people who don’t want help and actively refuse to be rehabilitated?
Practically speaking:
You can’t reintegrate them into society as they are.
You can’t ship them off to an island in the southern hemisphere and wash your hands of them.
Morally speaking:
You can’t execute them.
You can’t lock them up.
You can’t treat them against their will.
What now?
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The American prison industrial complex is a privatized slavery-for-profit feedback loop, yes. It’s an atrocity that needs to be dismantled and replaced with a justice system with rehabilitation and reparation as its core tenets. But, the inevitable truth is that either prisons must exist in some form as the lesser of many evils, or you voluntarily choose to repeat the atrocities of our past.
I’m not arguing against treating and rehabiliting people who have made mistakes. I’m arguing that championing it as the solution to prisons is either an overly-optimistic pipedream, or a hypocritical display of indifference to the idea of involiable bodily autonomy.