Thread: Saddam Dead

^ Failure to prosecute a crime due to lack of money or time is a miscarriage of justice. Every victim of a mass murderer deserves his or her day in court if nothing else to prove to the world that John Doe did in fact kill the victim.

I would have liked to have seen Saddam hang for the mass exterminations of the Kurds rather than the 'lighter' crime of being responsble for killing a few hundred people.

The point that bothers me is that we hold people without charges in secret prisons around the world yet here we caught someone who really was a nasty horrible person and we handed him over to the Iraqis to hang for what is a lesser crime? Just doesn't make any sense.

There should have been an international tribunal in the fashion of the Nuremberg Trials in which evidence was present and a verdict reached. We didn't let the post-Nazi government in Germany convict and try the worst Nazis; why did we let the Iraqi government hang Saddam when it wasn't the post-Saddam Iraqi laws that were broken?

Saddam's crimes were crimes against humanity and the trial, sentence, and punishement should have been conducted in an international arena.

Originally Posted by surasak

There should have been an international tribunal in the fashion of the Nuremberg Trials in which evidence was present and a verdict reached. We didn't let the post-Nazi government in Germany convict and try the worst Nazis; why did we let the Iraqi government hang Saddam when it wasn't the post-Saddam Iraqi laws that were broken? Saddam's crimes were crimes against humanity and the trial, sentence, and punishement should have been conducted in an international arena.

these boys thought they knew best......about everything.

and they were wrong about practically everything.

Originally Posted by surasak

Failure to prosecute a crime due to lack of money or time is a miscarriage of justice. Every victim of a mass murderer deserves his or her day in court if nothing else to prove to the world that John Doe did in fact kill the victim.

That's your personal understanding, it's not shared by most jurisdictions around the world. Once someone is convicted for something like 15 life-sentences, or lined up for execution, what's the point of adding to the sentence? Other victims and their relatives will have to accept that the perpetrator is being punished, with or without their particular case making a difference to the punishment, with or without trial.

Here in the U.S. even if a person has been convicted of one murder he or she will often stand trial for any others committed (typically, though, they usually confess to the rest of them, thus, saving the need for a trial and most of the time the trial rolls up all crimes into one for efficiency).

I'm just confused as to why we accused Saddam of crimes against humanity/genocide but never tried him on that.

^ Saddam trial was key and very important. It was foolish to let the Americans handle it alone, and give it away to revengeful nationals. The Hague would have been a better place and probably more entertaining to watch.

Originally Posted by stroller

Other victims and their relatives will have to accept that the perpetrator is being punished, with or without their particular case making a difference to the punishment, with or without trial.

Hans Blix, the former UN weapon inspector said it so well:

"I hope that Saddam will be put on trial for all the crimes he has committed, and not executed in a rush.
Coming generations of Iraqies has the right to know what he was responsible for, what he did."

As a consequence of the quick execution, Saddam is not guilty for all the other crimes he was accused of.
Innocent until found guilty in court..

Originally Posted by surasak

I'm just confused as to why we accused Saddam of crimes against humanity/genocide but never tried him on that.

Yes, one would have expected him to be tried in Den Haag, but then, the US aren't exactly known to adhere to or aid the implemetation of international law.

Originally Posted by lom

As a consequence of the quick execution, Saddam is not guilty for all the other crimes he was accused of.
Innocent until found guilty in court..

Yes, I can see how this would have been better in a high-profile case like this, as I said earlier, I would have prefered for him to get several life sentences, for various reasons.

Then other crimes could also have been looked at on an as-needed basis. But he was tried in Iraq and dealt with by the system there. I am not going to shed any tears over his death.

He's dead and good riddance. Ask the families of the other people he killed how they feel about that.

Originally Posted by Butterfly

... The Hague would have been a better place and probably more entertaining to watch.

Yes, maybe they would've had a cell-phone below and above the trap door.