Maria Roque filed numerous police reports and got a protection order. But the system that was supposed to protect her failed.

Maria Roque was just 34 years old when she was shot and killedon the steps outside her West Side Chicago home, in front of her 8-year-old daughter.

Her daughter and her 14-year-old son both witnessed Roque take her last breath.

In the weeks before she was killed, Roque repeatedly took all steps domestic violence victims are told to take. She got a protection order against her former boyfriend, Kenneth Brown. She also repeatedly went to the Chicago Police Department for help. She filed one police report after another and never gave up.

But the system failed her.

  • SaltySalamander@fedia.io
    92·
    7 months ago

    “Evil” isn’t real, it’s a word we made up to describe shitty people. Beyond that, until we humans are perfect and never make mistakes, the death penalty is never going to be the acceptable answer. Too many innocent people end up killed by it.

    • bestagon@lemmy.world
      31·
      7 months ago

      Or the fact that it does nothing to address the causes of crimes that don’t stem from a “risk-reward” assessment and just lets whoever’s left behind have some false sense of having done something

    • yeahiknow3@lemmy.world
      23·
      7 months ago

      What’s extra comical about this claim is that if nihilism were true, as you claim, then a fortiori the death penalty would be completely permissible.

        • yeahiknow3@lemmy.world
          11·
          7 months ago

          The only person using rhetoric here is you. There are morally depraved people out there whom we colloquially refer to as “evil.” I don’t know why you insist on having a semantic argument. If “[moral depravity] does not exist,” as my interlocutor claims, then nihilism would indeed be true.

          I would also like to point out that the ethical arguments against the death penalty in the scholarly literature are very weak and it remains an open question whether the death penalty is advisable on practical grounds. Morally it’s unlikely that any good argument exists to make it impermissible to kill “evil” people. You can check out the latest edition of any textbook on ethics, such as Living Ethics by Schaffer Landau, which syllogizes a variety of arguments on this topic.

            • yeahiknow3@lemmy.world
              1·
              7 months ago

              Let me again recommended this textbook on Ethics: https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/living-ethics-9780197608876

              The death penalty is chapter 20.

              Also,

              1. “Death” isn’t (or should not be) a punishment. We don’t “punish” rabid dogs when we euthanize them. Sometimes the alternative is simply worse.
              2. Earlier you said that “evil cannot be quantified” and therefore doesn’t exist. However, quantifiability is not an ontological prerequisite. If it were, then almost nothing would exist, including you and me.
              3. You don’t need to resort to straw men. Respond to my arguments instead of arguing with yourself.
              4. Moral claims wouldn’t be “arbitrary” unless nihilism is true, which you’ve denied.