Trump Nominee Brett Talley's Apparent Thoughts on Capital Punishment: "Just Shoot Them"
NOV. 20 2017 3:45 PM
By Jeremy Stahl
Since his confirmation hearings for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, 36-year-old Brett Talley has come under criticism for his relative inexperience, his failure to disclose that his wife works as a lawyer in Trump’s White House, and the fact that he didn’t reveal that he’d apparently written a series of pseudonymous message board posts on the website TideFans.com under the username BamainBoston.
In those posts, which covered a wide range of sports and nonsports topics, BamainBoston was open about his enthusiasm for the death penalty. In 2015, for example, BamainBoston noted that it would be “awesome” if Alabama brought back the electric chair. Later in the thread, BamainBoston proposed an alternative means of execution, saying that a “bullet’s cheap.” One year earlier, responding to news that an Oklahoma inmate named Clayton Lockett had died of a heart attack on the gurney after his lethal injection was botched, BamainBoston wrote: “Just shoot them. That’s effective.”
In a post this year, BamainBoston indicated he had worked on capital punishment cases in his career. That post read as follows:
Handled a bunch of death row cases in my previous job. With one exception, every one of them admitted that they’d committed the crime but were trying to mitigate to life without parole based on some excuse—drugs, violent childhood, etc. And the one exception the guy was clearly guilty. I don’t know the details on this Arkansas case, but death row cases with an actual innocence claim are kind of like abortions based on rape, incest, or the life of the mother. They certainly happen, but the whole debate shouldn’t turn on them.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/11/20/trump_nominee_brett_talley_s_apparent_thoughts_on_capital_punishment_just.html
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