If you actually go through the mental exercise of evaluating spanking as a means of punishment, you can’t really justify it at all. It does NOTHING positive whatsoever. The only results from spanking are negative.

I am beyond side eying. There is NO WAY the father is not complicit in this. No way he doesn’t know about the padlocked, feces filled bathroom where a kid is being tortured to death in his house.

What keeps me anti-death penalty is that life on death row is often long and actually BETTER than general population. They get really good health care (cause you have to keep them alive to eventually kill them) and it costs tax payers a ton of money. I’d rather have horrible people like this suffer the rest of their…

My stomach is turning. I hope this woman never sees the light of day again.

The boy weighed 30 pounds when he was found

The funeral isn’t about him either. It’s to honor a loved one.

Nice try but no way am I being sucked into a spanking debate.

I feel like we have decades of research demonstrating that AT BEST physical punishments are no more effective than alternatives and are associated with troubling outcomes. You’re essentially teaching a child when someone smaller and weaker does things they don’t like, that a physical reaction is appropriate.

“We use it now when my school-aged son is outright refusing to discuss or correct his misbehavior and has closed off all other avenues of correction.”

If it gets to the point that the only way you can discipline your kids is by beating them and having them hate your guts then a) you are a shit parent or b) your kid has some issues and you should get professional help if possible.

I feared my father until the day he died; his “whoopings” were that brutal. I guess that’s the point. It was so commonplace and normal when I was coming up, but if I have kids, I can’t see myself hitting (spanking) them. It feels morally bankrupt if you are trying to teach them positive values and respect for others.

To me the key thing is that the child reported being spanked to the school. That sets off warning bells.

Geez Robin, let a woman, you ex-wife in this case, attend the funeral of a man she knew since she was 15, a man who was family to her for a long time, who is the grandfather to her child. Don’t assess the quality of their relationship and decide she can’t attend. I’m sure you had a large role in generating whatever…

“open hand spanking” = hitting

I love how instead of enshrining the eminently sensible, even-kids-understand it idea of “don’t hit people” in law, we instead have lawmakers debating and deciding exactly how and how much we can hit our very young children. I seriously just adore the idea of grown men and women arguing the granular differences…

But the ethical debate on this (in the law school that I went to) ws really about the question of “what is is like living with domestic violence” is it similar to being kidnapped and tortured and then, you’re trying to escape, so you figure out how to slow down or kill your attacker (you spend your quiet time figuring…

The “pre-meditation” argument always strikes me as ludicrous in cases like this: self-defense (and that is what this is) that is not “pre-meditated” does not work with the abuser if larger and physically stronger.

The reason charges were brought is because she shot him while he was sleeping

I think we all know why.

Can someone please explain to me why many states are totally cool with Stand Your Ground laws/using deadly force to “prevent death or great bodily harm” but this little girl faces life in prison for shooting someone who repeatedly threatened to kill his entire family with that very gun?