Death Penalty

[Swordsman3003]

a penny for your thoughts

[Swordsman3003]

Oh, I guess I forgot that its possible that somebody might want to institute the death penalty in their country.

[Churba]

Yeah, I was just thinking that myself. I don't have a position on the issue, really.

I am, however, in support for a life sentence to mean a LIFE sentence, not just 25 years.

[RedMage007]

I'm alittle torn on this one. On the one hand studies have shown the death penalty is a more effective deterrent to violent crime. On the other hand a significant number of perfectly innocent people get zapped (Cough "texas" cough) in a severely overloaded criminal system.

The laws in some states are obscene. In texas "grumbles" they will zap people who are mentally retarded. (Not to mention women, but I wont get into that here.) many times bypassing a fair appeals process.

On the other hand after a certain point it's nearly impossible to rehab someone back into society. Pedophiles, serial rapists and murderers are pretty much stuck that way. I personally think it does mankind a favor to remove them from the gene-pool.

One of you is going to point out that a study has shown the death penalty has no significant impact on crime. That was highly public and ultimately incorrect study that used highly biased research. While I am religiously against the death penalty I am in favor of healthy research ethics.

/rantoff

[Honor]

there's also no option for my position...

That is, my country uses the death penalty and I am theoretically in favor of it.

There are absolutely conditions... predilections... people who, by all the best information we have, are incapable of "rehabilitation" or "getting better".

There are also absolutely people who just don't need to be breathing my air. For instance, there are several different sorts of 'rape', but I think real live honest-to-gosh 'rapists' really don't need to go on breathing.

Thing is this... There is no appeal, no reprieve, and no pardon for anyone who's been executed. I'm having difficulty at the moment finding the origin of the idiom "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt" but history (and particularly recent history) shows us just how loose this standard has proven to be in the past, when the deciding factor is, to use the well worn joke, twelve people who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.

If prison is serious, and thus requires serious 'proof', then execution is absolute, and thus should require absolute proof. Quite a bit more than merely "beyond a shadow of a doubt", and well into absolutely beyond question or reproach.

[Honor]

(Not to mention women, but I wont get into that here.)

I'll just point back toward the hitting a girl thread. What you've got between your legs should be absolutely no consideration in whether or not you can have the death penalty applied to you.

On the other hand after a certain point it's nearly impossible to rehab someone back into society. Pedophiles, serial rapists and murderers are pretty much stuck that way. I personally think it does mankind a favor to remove them from the gene-pool.

When you say "serial rapists and murderers" you mean serial rapists and serial murderers, right? Rather than "Serial rapists and all murderers"?

As I've said elsewhere on the forum, I'd add to that list anyone who's established and entrenched religious or sociological views either justify or require them to kill other people for similar views or lack thereof... i.e: If you think it's ok for you to kill black people because they're black, or white people because they're white, or gays or 'abortionists' or christians or muslims... You get the idea.

One of you is going to point out that a study has shown the death penalty has no significant impact on crime. That was highly public and ultimately incorrect study that used highly biased research. While I am religiously against the death penalty I am in favor of healthy research ethics.

Well, then...? Are you going to link to evidence of the disproof, and the studies that 'prove' that it is a significant deterrent?

[Leeloo]

On the one hand studies have shown the death penalty is a more effective deterrent to violent crime.

That would be the same studies that show the US having less violent crime than Europe? If the death penalty was "a more effective deterrent" as you say, the US should have way LESS violent crime.

As I see it, capital punishment cannot work in a country where the people have morals. Who do you get to push the button? Someone who doesn't have any moral problems with killing people - but we call them murderers. So, we have two people - one who is convicted, possibly on shady evidence, and one who is killing people right in front of our eyes. Shouldn't they switch places, so that the one we know is willing to kill people gets executed instead?

And what message does capital punishment send? "Killing people is ok. See, even the state does it". It's like parents hitting their kids to teach them that grownups never hit anyone.

"Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf

[Lulujayne]

I'm against it. Totally and utterly.

While I don't think the criminal justice system is perfect in any way with or without it, I don't think that eye for eye killing is justified. The women involved in the murder of Sharon Tate (and others) were not given the death penalty and have admitted years later that death would have been favourable, they live with the horror they commited every waking and sleeping moment, and so they should.

I also think the death penalty is so arbitrary from country to country that it's insane. You can (and would) be executed in Thailand for drug offenses that would only warrent a few years of time in Australia. That moral grey area makes me very uncomfortable with the idea of capital punishment.

Also, coming from convict stock on my Grandfathers side, I'm glad my great great grand-whatevers weren't hung for the tea they stole and were sent to Oz to make me

[Sahrimnir]

I'm against capital punishment. Both because of the risk that somebody innocent will be executed and because I don't think anyone deserves to die, not even murderers.
Anyone who executes a person is a murderer himself.

[RedMage007]

Sush honor. I was hoping nobody would notice I had been drinking and trying to post something that requires a degree of thinking.

I would be happy to dig up those studies. I think the AMA debunking one is still pretty hot. Quite honestly there isn't solid proof on either side of the arguement. But if you want some food for thought. Australia, Japan, England, France, Switzerland and Denmark do not have the death penalty and they have signifcantly lower violent crime rates then the USA. Especially in the area of gun deaths. Japan alone has less then 300 in the ENTIRE COUNTRY over course of a year. America has... I think 120,000 a year from just guns.

Now I'm going to finish my vodka and head to bed. <3

[LeftTentacleGreen]

I don't believe the death penalty is a very good solution.

There are times when our personal sense of vengeance tends to take over and we want to see our enemies die for what they've done to us. But i also feel that's when society must step in and be better than the individual.

However, I do feel our current system of punishment for these social miscreants and parasites is unacceptable. I believe we should completely dehumanize the criminals in our prison system. The cage itself means nothing if society feels like a cage once they are released (or escaped). We need to do more to destroy their violent personalities.

As such, I think we should deny them clothing, deny them the ability to walk on two legs, force them to eat from troughs like cattle, deny them vocal language when they socialize with one another (gag them), and deny them the use of their opposable thumbs (bind it to their hand). Let them understand the true nature of what it is like to live as an animal.

[WangyJohn]

It's not used here, and I'll leave it to that.

[TheCrush]

If you cannot restrain yourself I think you need to be restrained. If you cannot be restrained I think that the best solution is to remove you from the equation. Thusly, I -conditionally- support executions. Though, I think they're handled incorrectly.

Like others here I'll give the big three: pedophiles (those that have a genuine psychological fuckup, not "Dude, she said she was 17!!!") serial/repeat rapists and serial/repeat/multiple murderors.

I think anything done to ONE'S OWN BODY needs to be decriminalized (i.e. drugs), so long as you are capible of functioning in society. If you malfunction and start taking your malfunction out on others you get "restrained" until you learn restraint. No methadone, no weaning doses... cold fucking turkey detox 'cause you got yourself there.

I believe that in just about every other case the aim should be REPAYING SOCIETY for the inconvenience you've caused it's members with a nice side of therapy and counciling until we've rooted out where you got that it was permissable to fuck with something that ain't your own. See, if they understand where things went wrong they can understand their own motivations, and thusly be -able- to change.

Edited to add: Also, I believe that executions should be handled by the survivors or surviving family in cases where there are any, and only handled by the state when there is no one else. It is not a debt to the state that needs to be settled. For some it will give small satisfaction to remove the individual who maimed them or theirs, and if that is all the aggressing individual can do to make amends... then by all means.

[Unholy]

I dont believe in the death penalty. I dont care how fucked up someone is, I dont care what they did, I dont care if they commited an act of genocide, I dont care if they are HIV infected child molesters, we should not kill people. Incarcerate them for life, fine, incarcerate them for 50 years, fine, but I dont think we should kill people in the name of justice. America has the death penalty, and there are probably more murders in Philadelphia than there are in most european countries.

[MistressMaggie]

I don't think Canada has the death penalty, but I'm not 100% sure. I think we just have the "dangerous offender" label which means we can put people in jail for an indeterminate length of time until we decide they're no longer dangerous. Paul Bernardo, for instance, will never get out of jail. There is no parole for dangerous offenders.

That said, if my assumption about Canada not having the death penalty is correct, I agree with it. I only think it is a deterrent in the cases of gang members and other warped individuals who are trying to get back into jail. Also, there have been several cases lately of people who were on death row who had their sentences converted to life in prison being exonerated now.

I took a philosophy class this term, and the only pro-death penalty stance I agreed with in theory was the one that stated that it should only be used where the accused has been proven without a shadow of a doubt to be guilty, and it was premeditated murder, not a crime of passion, or a murder for profit.

I'll figure out the name of the philosopher when I get home from school later.

I agree with Thurgood Marshall as well, when he says that the death penalty is wrong because it has not been proven to work as a deterrent, and all the pro-death penalty arguments can be boiled down to being a deterrent. He also argues that the death penalty does not respect the dignity of the criminal by using his own form of justice against him, as a Kantian may argue.

[Aeridus]

Instead of killing off people who do really bad things, I say we send them to an entirely different continent. Somewhere completely inhospitable, with extreme weather and strange beasties. A continent that has a long name which begins with A.

...Antarctica.

[ManaUser]

Wow, we've got some F-ed up ideas floating around in here.

Anyway, no, I don't believe in the death penalty. I don't even really believe life imprisonment. I think the system some countries have where the longest sentence that can be given out is "indefinite" makes more sense. That is, (probably after some minimum length of time) the they would be released if and only if it can be determined that they are no longer a significant threat.

I also agree very much with something TheCrush said. Real justice is about compensating society (or better yet the actual victim) for the damage someone has done. Revenge is not justice. Punishment is not justice. Protecting ourselves from dangerous people is also not justice.

Real justice should be the ideal, revenge should be avoided. Protecting ourselves (e.g. indefinite sentences at the like) cannot be avoided. Punishment is far from ideal, but fear of it can be an effective way to control people who would harm others. It's certainly overused in the US today, but there may not always be a better option.

Lastly, I see pedophiles have made the list of unforgivable persons, twice. This is kind of a pet peeve for me. What precisely do you mean by "pedophile" and why do you feel they are the moral equals serial rapists and serial murderers?

[Lowky]

Lastly, I see pedophiles have made the list of unforgivable persons, twice. This is kind of a pet peeve for me. What precisely do you mean by "pedophile" and why do you feel they are the moral equals serial rapists and serial murderers?

A pedophile is someone who is a sexual predator on children ie prepubescent say roughly under age 10. It is a crime that the victim can not FULLY recover from, they can learn coping skills and the like but they are pretty much fucked up mentally for life. Anyone who does this to a child should be removed from society, permanently. Personally i say kill them more so than murderers, but if you really don't want to have a death penalty then lock them up throw away the key, and never ever let them see the light of day again.

[Pyretimeth]

My view has less to do with various individual failings and more to do with dangerous societal constructs.

I believe that there are some things the government should not have the liberty of taking from you, and that your life should be one of those things. For all meaningful intents and purposes, I believe life imprisonment serves the same purpose... only without, you know, all the murder.

*Edited for clarity.

[LeftTentacleGreen]

If you cannot restrain yourself I think you need to be restrained. If you cannot be restrained I think that the best solution is to remove you from the equation.

Anyone can be pushed to that psychological breaking point. There are no exceptions.