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To "steelman" the opinion you're reacting to, I imagine that the person who wrote "rest in power" didn't do so in spite of recognising that Littlejohn and his accomplice really were collectively responsible for the murder in question. If pressed, I imagine that the person who wrote that would argue that, institutional racism being what it was, he or she doesn't recognise Littlejohn's conviction as legitimate, followed by confecting some conspiratorial just-so story about the cops planting fingerprints on the murder weapon and hiring a lookalike to commit the murder etc. etc. you've all seen the ending of JFK, you know how this story goes.
The reason I put "steelman" in scare quotes is because this alternative interpretation isn't much more generous to the person who wrote that than your interpretation is. Either they're a nutcase who thinks that we should remember this villain fondly in spite of the indisputably monstrous crime he committed (your perspective); or they're more paranoid and deluded about the state of the American criminal justice system in particular (and American society in general) than the average person with QAnon in his Truth Social bio. Either evil, or hopelessly conspiratorial and deluded - not a good look either way.
The anti-death penalty campaigner position is that no one should be executed, and all of the obfuscating about ‘this guy is innocent! He was at the scene of the crime because he stopped to help an old lady change her tire on the way back from volunteering at the homeless shelter!’ Should be read in that light- they don’t want him back out of the streets, they want him not executed, and if calling him a choirboy gets him not executed then they’re happy to do that.
Well, maybe. It's one thing to say "We concede that Joe was a monster, but he still shouldn't be executed, because no one should be." I can imagine a progressive person saying that about a particularly monstrous white person e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy.
I agree that "this person is a monster but they shouldn't be executed" is a harder sell than "this person isn't a monster, therefore obviously they shouldn't be executed" so I can understand why someone would feel motivated to lie for tactical reasons. But I don't know - surely that can't describe everyone saying "rest in power" about a black criminal where overwhelming evidence exists that they are guilty of the heinous crime they were convicted of. Surely some of those people must really believe that they are innocent, even if they have to resort to extremely tenuous and unlikely distortions of the evidence to get there (or retreat into the methodic doubt of "a black man will never get a fair trial in Amerikkka").
I do think it’s likely that such a conspirator exists. Do you have any evidence this guy, in particular, is in that category?
It’s a genuine question, because I don’t have a Twitter account and can’t peruse his posting history. But I think a “steelman” should never look so much like straw.
Well for starters, I'd like to point out that your interpretation of this person's motivation for expressing this sentiment (advocating for life in prison without parole instead of capital punishment, and hence knowingly lying about this criminal's virtues for tactical reasons) is only marginally more sympathetic than mine (conspiratorially deluded about the state of the American criminal justice system), which was in turn only marginally more sympathetic than the OP's (straight up expressing admiration for a violent criminal).
As to whether any evidence exists that this specific tweeter is conspiratorial in the way I described, he recently retweeted (I believe in reference to Marcellus Williams):
and
and:
After scrolling through about four months of tweets and retweets, I have not been able to find a single example of this specific tweeter claiming that a non-black person was wrongfully executed (despite several men meeting that description having been executed this year) or unjustly shot by police officers (although I will concede it's possible that this person is trapped in an echo chamber/media bubble in which he genuinely never hears about white or Native American men who've been executed). This strengthens my opinion that the tweeter's outrage over the executions of Williams and Littlejohn has more to do with BLM than with principled opposition to capital punishment in general.
Yeah, @gattsuru had a pretty damning quote, too.
My interpretation of the original quote was not “knowingly lying.” It was “genuine preference for LWOP over death.” Given the rest of the statements, it’s clear I was being too charitable. I concur with your interpretation that he is culture warring first and foremost.
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