Summary
Anjela Borisova Urumova, 20, received a 23-month prison sentence for falsely accusing Daniel Pierson of attempted rape and kidnapping in Pennsylvania, leading to his wrongful month-long incarceration.
Urumova pled guilty to seven misdemeanors, including filing false reports and fabricating evidence.
Investigators uncovered her lie after finding inconsistencies in surveillance footage. She admitted she targeted Pierson because she had seen him before.
Alongside jail time, she must pay $3,600 in restitution, undergo a mental health evaluation, and serve probation. Prosecutors warned the false claim damaged public trust and harmed real victims.
That doesn’t answer my question
Why should the penalty for falsely accusing someone of murder be death?
The penalty for murder isn’t death.
Why should we have death sentences?
Good question.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption, that a simple accusation by itself means something, it doesn’t. They don’t prosecute a mistaken eyewitness for false testimony. A simple false claim doesn’t bring the wrath of the system down on someone to the point where they are charged for those false claims, you’ve got to show a complete disregard for reality and the system for things to reach that level.
People lie about shit all the time, especially to police, very few reach the point where they are prosecuted for those lies. The ones that rise to the level where they bother to actually do something about those false claims should receive the same full punishment of those false accusations.
If you knowingly falsely accuse someone of murder with the intention of having them be prosecuted and sentenced for a crime you know they did not commit, then you should receive that same punishment, not a slap on the wrist like a year of prison and some fines.
You still aren’t explaining why this merits the state murdering the accuser.
Ok, you seem to want to actually argue about capitol punishment, not false accusations, derailing the conversation for whatever reason.
If your issue is with the extreme of capitol punishment, then you deal with that separately, because that doesn’t apply for 99.99% of crimes on the books. If there’s no death penalty for the accusation, then whether it should apply to false accusations is irrelevant.
Purposeful, false accusations should result in the same punishment as the accusation, across the board regardless of the accused crime. Don’t falsely accuse an innocent person of something if you aren’t willing to accept the same sentence for your knowingly false accusation, seems pretty simple.
What I’m trying to point out is that you made a knee jerk blanket statement (false accusers should get the exact same punishment as the person they accused would have), and refuse to back down even if it means escalating what is clearly not a capital crime into a justification for the state to execute someone.
But I’m sure the way the world and the law works is that there are super easy blanket solutions to something that just nobody has ever thought of or tried applying before 👍
Well, since the answer won’t matter anyway, you just want folks to feel wrong, I’m gonna just throw my 2cents on in.
If you live in a place that has capital punishment, and are willing to use that against a fellow human, you are attempting murder by doing so. If you also were to do this I’m a place where there is a higher rate of incarceration already, proven false imprisonment and executions (see the innocence project for examples), brings further merit to, you were REALLY TRYING to kill this person. So, yes, if you are OK with doing that, knowing you’re lying so bad your pants are on fire, you should be willing to put yourself in their place. They would not be there if not for you and your shit faced attitude.
There’s nothing knee jerk about it. That issue literally only applies to capital punishment. Remove capital punishment and your point disappears, so that should be the focus since it would solve both situations simultaneously.
Instead, you seem to be using it to justify not doing anything at all for the other 99.99% of crimes where that would never even apply. Which begs the question of why you want to continue to let false accusations receive minimal punishment?
Because if the sentence for the innocent person would have been carried out as the death penalty, then an innocent person would have died. Thankfully, in this case, the justice system worked, but if it hadn’t, the outcome would have been the figurative end of that person’s life. The weight of the accusation, especially a malicious one (which this was), should be born by the accuser, should it be proven false.
The justice system executes innocent people even without false accusations. Why do false accusers deserve this more than, say, judges or prosecutors who oversaw the case of an innocent person sentenced to death?
Because the judges an the prosecutors are (we hope) acting in the best interest of the general public, and want to see justice served. They are not the instigators. That’s like saying that your team lost a game because the referee called the rules as they were written. The judge and the prosecutor are (again, we hope) bystanders and only there to help move justice along.
Wouldn’t you want a little more than hope if you were facing this, like the state not being allowed to execute you to begin with?
I never said I was for the death penalty, and this discussion isn’t about it. It is about a person who maliciously accused another of something, and was given a sentence that I feel does not match the crime. If you would like to discuss the death penalty, I’m open to that, but that isn’t what we have been talking about, and not where this conversation started from.
I’m responding specifically to the blanket statement that people who make false accusations should get the punishment the accused would have.
If what you meant was “we should make a special law that only applies to rape accusations” then you might want to clarify that.
Ok, if that is the direction you would like to take this discussion, then we can go that route. I have no issues with looking at the extremes.
So, we’ll say that there is the defendant, and they have been accused of murder so foul by the witness that in their jurisdiction the death penalty is sought.
There are many outcomes to this, but for the sake of the discussion you want to engage in, we’ll look at three of them, and for each, we will assume that the witness has maliciously, and falsely accused the defendant of this crime.
In the first outcome, the defendant is found guilty of the crime and put to death. The witness is not discovered, and goes on living their life.
The second outcome is that the defendant is found guilty and put to death, but after they have been put to death, the witnessn is discovered to have falsified their testimony.
The third outcome is that the defendant is not found guilty because during the trial the witness was found to have lied.
Now, we have three ends to the scenario, each very different. Do you believe that in each scenario, the witness, who has maliciously falsified their testimony each time, should be punished differently depending on the outcome of the scenario? If so, what should their punishment be after each outcome?
Yes, the punishment should escalate in accordance with the harm caused by the crime to the victims of that crime. That was never the part I was arguing against.
Imprisonment for people who are a danger to others and some form of restitution to the falsely accused would be fitting in every case, other than the one where someone was killed by the state. At that point it’s too late to do anything for the victim, and killing them isn’t going to save any money or help anyone.
It’s also a scenario that wouldn’t be possible to begin with if the government wasn’t able to execute people. It’s like trying to solve swatting by swatting swatters instead of saying hey, maybe it shouldn’t be possible to aim lethal government violence at someone to begin with and just hope it’s a gun that never misfires.
It shouldn’t be, unless the falsely accused was sentenced to death based purely on the accuser’s lies.
That would be murder, which can carry capital punishment.