Free Republic

Robert Dale Rowell, 50, was executed just after 6 p.m. Tuesday in Huntsville for killing two people at a crack house in Houston 12 years ago. Rowell had already served a sentence and had allegedly killed a fellow inmate before the bloody rampage in 1993 in which Raymond Mata, 38 and Irvin Wright, 52, were killed. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review Rowell’s case last month. Rowell was the 18th inmate executed this year in Texas and the first of two scheduled to die this week. Condemned inmate Shannon Thomas is scheduled to die Wednesday evening for a triple...

How could this mentality arise and develop ? We should go back to the twenties to find the ideas which triggered all this. The ideas There was in psychiatry (not only in Germany) the tendency to make value judgements on the individuals and the groups on the basis of medicine or medical-sociology. Some pieces of writing considered scientific (even today) had prepared the ground. The most significant work is "The Permission to destroy life unworthy of life" published in Leipzig in 1920, written by the renowned psychiatrist Alfred Hoche and the respectful judge Karl Binding. The book had such a...