Jimmel,
I think you're taking a strictly bivalent (all-or-nothing,
black-or-white) stance on this issue, which I feel does have some
shades to it, so let's dive in.
"I can't believe how gullible all you people are."
That's a loaded statement, and I refute your claim that ALL of us are
gullible. Just feeling sorry for the perpetrator does not excuse the
perpetrator's acts, nor does it blame the victim, etc. But by
treating Wuornos as ONLY a perp and NOT AT ALL a victim, you're doing
the same thing you object to: giving sympathy to the perps (people who
abused Wuornos) and not to the victim (Wuornos herself). More on this
later.
"This woman was an opportunistic con artist whose motive was quite
simply robbery, period!"
Yes, she was those things. Did she con people? Sure. Do all con
artists deserve to be executed? Noooo.
"Now see if you can understand this. She killed people to ROB
them. Can you understand that?"
Yes, Jimmel, I can understand that.
I can understand that she robbed people and that was her primary
motivation, and that the acts of murder were basically done to
eliminate witnesses, and she admits as much in this film (although her
various interviews also show that she either knowingly contradicted
herself, had a terrible memory, had other mental issues, or was smart
enough to plant doubt in the heads of the "bleeding hearts").
But as for the rest of what you said, I don't think things are so
simple. First of all, I don't think you can call all of us gullible.
Perhaps you are reading rather more into what people are saying here
than they meant to say. I don't think anyone so far has said that she
was totally innocent. Feeling sorry for her doesn't mean we think
she's innocent.
There is no conflict in having sympathy for a child who is kicked out
of her house and sleeps in the woods in the snow, even if that child
does grow up to commit heinous crimes. There are two separate things:
an abused child and an adult that acts out. These two separate things
are also somewhat correlated, but not totally: it is not fair to say
the murders were excused by her earlier life and that none of her
later actions were her own responsibility, but it is fair to say that
she had a bad life early on and that probably colored her way of
relating to people (e.g., ability to have patience with others, to be
rational, to have a feeling that she could expect to be treated with
dignity, etc.). She also learned "how people really behave" vs. the
version many of us are taught in church or school: "how we are
supposed to behave." So yes, trading oral sex for cigarettes as of
age 9 was surely a bad choice; I'm sure you could say she was making
bad choices at that time and should have known better. Personally, I
would hope she'd had better parenting, but let's move on.
"That was her motive! Not this tale of of living in the woods and
being raped that was told by Aileen herself. So I would even question
how much of it were true to begin with. And don't rely on Nick
Broomfield to have done his homework and verified any of this because
he had an agenda and people who enter into something like this with an
agenda never do a thorough job because they already have their mind
made up before they start. So we don't really know what happened or
didn't happen."
Well, let's use your own words. I hereby accuse you of having an
agenda and not doing your homework. More than one person interviewed
by Broomfield in this very film did in fact corroborate the story
about living in the woods. Another witnessed her being whipped by her
grandfather. We also know that her biological mother left and never
bothered to really take care of her, and when she (the mother) was
interviewed for the film, she showed a pretty pathetic lack of
knowledge or interest in her child's welfare. Her father was arrested
for molesting an 8-year-old boy. So unless you can refute all of that
stuff, I think we have a case of an abused child, at least. I am not
saying this justifies murder. I'm saying it tells us something about
what happens to people. Saying that others have survived worse things
without becoming serial killers is a valid point, but it doesn't mean
she must not receive any sympathy whatsoever.
Yes, she was a murderer and she robbed. Yes, she surely made up a lot
of stuff, e.g. the torture that she claimed she received from her
first murder victim is probably completely fictional and she later
said that she told that story, during trial, to try to save her own
skin.
Did she deserve to get a big cake at the end and a kiss on the cheek
and an apology from everyone? No.
Did she deserve punishment of some kind? Certainly.
Did she deserve the death penalty? That's a personal decision for
you; I won't recommend yes or no for this one. I don't have so much
of a problem with the death penalty per se, on a theoretical level,
for certain individuals who have committed particularly heinous
crimes, but given certain practical limitations of the US death
penalty program as it has been carried out, I think the program has
some serious problems and needs to be suspended until some further
review can take place.
Did Jeb use her to help get reelected? I certainly believe so. Sure,
he put on his sad, concerned face, but let's not forget what kind of
upbringing he had.
Did Broomfield exploit her? Well, I suppose so. Did he have an
agenda? Sure. But she did request that only he and his crew be
present for her final interview, so from the standpoint of the rest of
the media, their only shot was to ask him what her last statement was.
And let's face it, having police collude to profit from her case was
fishy and Broomfield gets points for exposing that. If the police had
not been found out and disciplined, the whole case agains Wuornos
might have been thrown out - perhaps she would have been released from
prison in that case. I'm not saying that's what I would want - I'm
saying that Broomfield has a point in showing that there were many
people with less than sterling motives involved in the case.
Did she sleep in the woods as a child? Yes, several people recalled
and confirmed that. So no, you don't get to claim that that part was
made up. You can call her credibility into account, but this
particular claim was well-supported by others who really had no reason
to lie at that point; it certainly wouldn't have changed Wuornos' fate
at all if they did lie. Nor did they have really any apparent mutual
benefit to be gained from lying. In my view, Occam's razor says she
did have to spend time living in the woods in the winter in Michigan,
regardless whether she told one, two, or a thousand lies later on.
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