Death Penalty - News, Thoughts, Info
 

This is a place to share news, thoughts and information regarding the Death Penalty.

I saw how they carried out the Firing Squad end of life and liked that way.
 

As long as they are breathing the violent criminal mind is active. They are always a threat and set free because of the system. See system below.

:fastdraq: The Really Old West Ruled. Kill someone. Get killed.:fastdraq:
Utah too
Then the progressive Old West added a sheriff, then the jail, then the judge, then the jury, then the bigger jail, then the lawyer, then the bail bondsmen, then the prison for criminals, then the lawyer teams, then the institution for the criminally insane, then the rogue cops, then the appeals, then...we have today's repeat offenders..

Okay, my cat woke me at 5 AM..on my day off. :mohawk:
PS. I do believe in forgiveness. Peaches is still Yowling...and safe.

I'm familiar with the "eye for an eye" quote. Apparently it "makes the whole world blind".

(I am opposed to the death penalty.)

Hot Hot Topic.


I'm cold when it comes to this subject, pro death penalty, that includes for me ANYONE who's raped,
messed with kids, or the elderly.

You can't reform child molesters or rapists they WILL do it again.

Circa 1993, but I'm sure you get the point.
 

yes. Hot topic.
I used to be opposed to it, thinking suffering in prison was the best punishment. But we don't have those medieval dungeons any more. We have guys in prison with Facebook accounts and on dating sites, luring in naive women and writing to innocent children.

Overkill. 9 death sentences. That's good.

Isn't that ironic???


I bet if they find a mate they have the right to marry, we on the other hand do not. Just isn't right.

I have mixed feelings. There are so many cases where people were wrongfully convicted. Today with DNA and advances in forensics its less likely. I don't think anyone should die and value life, however if a person abuses, kills a child, should we spend the HUGE amount of money to house him, feed him, for the rest of his life? Let's say it cost 20K per year for that one prisoner and thats no frills. Do you realize some people LIVE on 20K per year? That 20K could provide for another child and perhaps collectively prohibit reoccurrences in the long run.

We are paying for and housing thousands of violent repeat offenders. Studies show so many of them purposely repeating crimes because they are so institutionalized they don't want to be on the streets any more. Its sad but true.

At the same time who really gives us the power to exterminate our own kind? It's a tough agenda but I think i would lean more towards the death penalty when it came down to repeat offenders and pedophiles where it has been proven there is no cure. If they are conscious enough to consider their actions then they should know the repercussions. If they are mentally challenged but there is no successful therapy why should they be allowed to repeat offenses at our expense when so many people can use that money to contribute to our society.

I think they should take a big ass island and plop them on it. If they survive they can live there and torture each other. If they can't then they don't. We should not have to spend so much damn money to take care of them the rest of their lives.

http://i225.photobucket.com/albums/d...enalty-1-1.jpg

What about the dispproportionate number of people of color sentenced to death for crimes where white folks are more likely to live?

What about those who are innocent but found guilty?

Death is irreversible and there have been many wrongly convicted who have later been exonerated.

What about the effect of the death penalty on a convicted person's innocent family and friends?

What about the execution of the developmentally disabled? What about the mentally ill?

Juries are filled with every day folks, often desperate to return to work, who have no training regarding racism or xenophobia or other diseases of the overculture. They convict based on "beyond a REASONABLE doubt" but some innocent people look guilty to jurors using their most conscientious reason.

I've served on a capital murder jury. It's not like matlock. The ends are not all neatly tied up. There are holes everywhere. I was not impressed with the process, the lawyers or most of the jurors.

I do not believe in capital punishment.
I do not believe in an "eye for an eye".
I do not believe in killing killers, raping rapists or abusing abusers.

I do not believe capital punishment is an effective deterrent to violent crime and more importantly I do not believe it brings healing or peace or closure to victims of those crimes.

I do not believe capital punishment is a more cost effective or time efficient method of justice.

And crucially, I do not believe our legal system is robust and/or fair enough to be given this kind of power. Our legal system is deeply flawed and deeply corrupt, it is inherently racist and classist.

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I have lived in countries that have abolished the death penalty. Those were not places overrun with violent criminals. In fact statistics show they have less, far less violent crime than we do.

An interesting & brief piece on a recent forum on the death penalty, members were from law enforcement agencies in the US and Europe.

On October 13, 2010, officials from the U.S. and Europe held what may have been the first international forum of law enforcement officers on the merits of the death penalty in reducing violent crime. The officers discussed whether capital punishment actually helps to keep citizens safe, assists healing for victims, and uses crime-fighting resources efficiently.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/inte...-death-penalty

This was posted on the Breaking News thread by me. Cross-posting here:

Well, if all of the above offends you we could just go back to a feudal system of crime and punishment where you didn't get a trial (no lawyers), there was no bail (no bail bondsmen), there were dungeons but those were for torture not imprisonment.

You can have a legal system, in which case you have to put up with the fact that the legal system must play by the rules or you can have an ad hoc system of crime and punishment for which there is another name: lynching.

ETA: Let me also point out that even WITH the current system of laws, we routinely execute the wrong person. In Texas a man was executed for killing his three children in an arson fire. Except that when actual fire experts looked at the crime, they determined not only was it NOT arson but it could not have been arson. Several studies have also found that black men are three or four times as likely to be given the death penalty for the *same* crime even if you hold every other relevant detail constant. And a disturbing number (approaching a third) of those death penalties are eventually overturned on DNA evidence. So if we go back to the Old West system of lynching--and once you pull out the legal system, all you're left with is mob justice--do you really think it will be any better? I'll tell you right now, since we've *run* that experiment--it wouldn't be.

In the Deep South, into the middle of the last century, a black man could go from having a nice day to being hung from a tree in an afternoon all because he bumped into a white woman. That was also swift and sure 'justice'. Thank you very much but I'll take the set of problems flowing from having a legal system--even one as flawed as ours--to ad hoc 'we think this person did the crime, so that's the person we'll punish for it' mob justice.

------

Some further thoughts on the matter

It seems as if we have forgotten both *why* we have the legal system we do and how long we struggled to get it. So I thought I'd remind folks that our legal system, flawed as it is, is still better than anything that had existed Western society before. (And by 'our' I am talking about the Western legal systems that are the descendants of British Common Law.)

There was a time when the sovereign could have you picked up and imprisoned for whatever reason he might wish. You had no right to a trial. Perhaps, if you were wealthy, you might be able to buy your way out of trouble but barring that you were going to be shuffled off this veil of tears and if you were lucky, it would be sooner rather than later because later *always* involved horrific tortures on your way out. This was changed by the introduction of habeus corpus which requires that the accused be brought before a court so that the legality of the imprisonment (it's justification) can be examined.

Okay, so you're alright with habeus corpus. Trials are fine as long as guilty verdicts are forthcoming, right? Well, this is where we get to the next great advancement in Western legal thought--the idea of the fair trial by jury. It was once the case that trials were more or less shows. One was highly unlikely to be acquitted. There were no rules for what constituted evidence, nor was there any right to have your accusers cross-examined. You could be compelled to testify against yourself and refusal to do so was considered admission of guilt. All of this was true into the 18th or 19th century in Western civilization. The long arm of the law could reach into your home, at the time of their choosing, and 'search' (read plant) for evidence. All of this began to change when Europe began the long, hard, transition from a Feudal system to democratic nation-states. The fourth and fifth amendments exist for a reason and it's not to provide cover for people who want to be 'soft on crime'.

So now we're a little closer to modern day. One poster has spoken eloquently on how great the legal system--meaning the lynching system--was in the Old West. Keep in mind that most crimes didn't necessarily go to trial. It was more along the lines of "that's the person we think did it, so that's the person who is going to be punished for it". This was usually done in a very ad hoc and quite arbitrary manner. The problem, of course, is that mobs aren't real intelligent and aren't really interested in justice they're interested in punishment. So as long as *someone* paid the price (meaning someone was killed) for the crime that was good enough for the time being.

I won't belabor the point about lynchings of black men.

Lastly, the rules and strictures that modern police forces have to work under. Again, while it might seem that these are just to provide cover for 'soft-hearted liberals' they are actually all there for fairly good reasons. For instance, before the Miranda law the cops could use all manner of dirty tricks to get you to confess to a crime. And they DID use tricks and coercion. So finally the Supreme court decided that the accused had a right to a lawyer and had a right to speak to someone who actually understood the law before having to say word one to the police.

I always find it quite remarkable that people have these romantic ideas that if only the law were not hamstrung by rules, we would have a crime-free society. Nothing could be further from the truth. At present, I'm listening to an audiobook called 'The Third Reich in Power'. In the chapter just finished, there was discussion on the system of denunciation of Germans for crimes against the State. What is germane here is not the particular crimes but how the legal system handled them. Trials in Nazi Germany were pretty pro forma affairs. If you were a Nazi, you would probably walk. If you weren't, you would find yourself either in prison, in a concentration camp, or executed. Evidence didn't really matter, accusation did. Now, I'm not saying anyone is suggesting the Western democracies become Nazi Germany. I am, however, curious as to what the substantive difference is between an arbitrary legal system whose real purpose is to grease the wheels to the executioners block and what is being advocated here?



Cheers
Aj

There is certainly no doubt our governmental system is corrupt and doesnt work. IMO. So I wouldn't be surprised if it worked elsewhere or that it would here IF we didnt have criminals running our country.

I have often maintained that I don't have a problem with a *civilized* country exercising the death penalty option. But a civilized country doesn't have citizens throwing tailgate parties outside prisons where an execution is taking place. The United States does.

If a nation behaves as it if understands what it means to exercise the death penalty and treats it as a somber, solemn affair and not something to celebrate, then sure that nation can be trusted with this ultimate power over the life and death of the citizenry. Since my undergrad days, when I hit on my idiosyncratic reading of what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution, I have maintained the following: the government should not be trusted with the power of life or death over the citizenry any more than is *absolutely* necessary to maintain a legitimate state. This informs my thoughts on two hot button issues--the death penalty and abortion being legal.

In both instances, I do not think that the State has any vested interest in either killing any given criminal or in forcing any given woman to have any given child. I have not yet seen a compelling argument describing how executing any given criminal helps the state preserve itself. We already concede to the State a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. We empower police to carry deadly weapons and we empower the military to have weapons of unfathomable destructive power. I think that is quite a bit of power already.

My concern with the death penalty orbits around the problem of mistakes in conviction, the disparity between what a man of color can expect in a courtroom and what a white man can expect in a courtroom, the disparity between what a poor person can expect in a courtroom and what a rich person can expect, and lastly, the temptation to use the death penalty, ultimately, as a *political* tool. It would be insanely suicidal to presume that because we're talking about the United States that it could never come to pass that a future administration might use the death penalty for political ends.

I'm unconvinced that the death penalty has any deterrent value. Sure, the death penalty is going to deter law-abiding citizens like all of us here, but then so is the prospect of a prison sentence. Someone who is going to commit some heinous crime isn't going to be deterred by the prospect of execution any more than a prison sentence will. So it serves to make the law-abiding afraid but not the criminal. It seems to me more about revenge than justice. I don't think I want the State to be in the business of revenge.

Lastly, on this issue of how prisoners are treated. Do we want prisons to be 15th century snake pits? Another insight the West finally got around to was that loss of liberty is quite a punishment. I don't believe prisons are or should be resorts. However, there are plenty of examples that we can look to if we want to make our prisons more horrible than they already are--the thing is, every one of those examples is not in a country that could be called democratic in any meaningful sense. I'm sure that Chinese, Russian and North Korean prisons are all little slices of hell--do we really want to be China, Russia or North Korea?

Cheers
Aj

I voted other because I am so in the middle on this topic. Always have been.

For someone like this--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_E._Duncan_III

a north korean or chinese prison is a gift that he doesnt deserve.....his dna should be wiped out of the gene pool permanetly and forever....these are the kinds of people that deserve the death penalty in my opinion...

My emotional side over rides any of my logical thinking, I'll be honest. I would not want the person to live if they harmed one of my own. I would want them dead.

IM in total agreement because I know what i am capable of it anything ever happened to one of my loved ones.....i would demand retribution and vengence regardless of the outcome and you know what...I guess i would be prepared to pay the price for it....im still wondering how in the hell that joseph duncan is actually still alive, i thought for sure he wouldve been shanked in prison by now...

Okay, so you would not, in principle, have a problem with returning to system of ad hoc vendetta such that if someone kills your brother you can kill one of their relatives? I mean at the point where we are talking about state-sanctioned revenge, why involve the state at all? Why not just go for the direct, personal route? Because now we're not talking about justice, now we're talking about vengeance.

And I'm not saying that if someone harmed my wife, son, granddaughter, sister et. al. that I wouldn't want revenge--but that's why I live in a (nominally) civilized nation because I need to check my *own* impulses as well as others.

Cheers
Aj

I am going to answer this honestly. If harm came to mine, I would do it myself or I'd want front row seats so they could look me in the eyes before they died. That way I can see my own in theirs, and they see what I feel in mine.

I know it's not clear thinking it's more emotional. So my answer is ugly

Taken from Amnesty dot ca

This actually leads me to a question I've been asking myself lately:

Human sacrifice has been a practice in different societies in history. Did it go away or did it just transform into these types of things?

and

In a podcast of "Speaking of Faith," with Krista Tippett, she spoke with Michael McCullough, professor of psychology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he directs the Laboratory for Social and Clinical Psychology and also teaches in the Department of Religious studies. He wrote a book called, "Beyond Revenge," where he analyzed extensive data from social scientific studies on humans and animals as well as biology and brain chemistry.

During that podcast, he mentioned that Japanese macaques are very status-conscious and intimidated by power. He said, "If you're a high-ranking Japanese macaque and you harm a low-ranking Japanese macaque, that low-ranking individual is not going to harm you back, right? *It's just too intimidating. It's too anxiety-provoking. But what they do instead, and this still astonishes me, is they will find a relative of that high-ranking individual and go seek that low-ranking cousin or nephew and harm him in retaliation...So it's as if they're saying, "You know, I'm not powerful enough to get you back, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to harm your nephew...Here's the kicker, is when they're harming this nephew, most of the time they're doing it while the high-ranking individual is watching. They want the high-ranking individual to know that, 'You can harm me, I know you can harm me, I know you're more powerful than I am. But rest assured, I know how to get at what you care about and what you value."

And then Krista Tippett's response intrigued me: "I had this realization a few years ago when we did a program on the death penalty. It might seem simple, but it seems so stunning to me to realize that the criminal justice system, and even, and especially, the death penalty in history, was progress because before there was any kind of criminal justice system, human societies regulated themselves by precisely that ind of revenge you're describing."

So, if she has a point, though I personally think the death penalty is extremely repugnant, maybe society demands a certain amount of blood-letting, a certain amount of human sacrifice, in order for peace to be kept and in order to keep people from taking the law back into their own hands?

I asked a few friends if they thought the death penalty was a modern form of human sacrifice. One said no way. Another said, yes - and also mentioned the religiosity around the deaths of soldiers to fill another part of that same societal yearning. So I guess I do wonder if the death penalty serves some sort of vestige blood lust. Humans are pack animals and predators and yet most of us live lives very far away from that reality.

I am against the death penalty for this reason: killing people is wrong. And if it is wrong for a citizen to do it, then it is wrong for the state to do it. It makes no sense to kill people because they kill people. It is just state sanctioned violence and revenge. If killing people is wrong, then it is wrong for everyone and we need to be consistent, otherwise we are a bunch of hypocrites. There is no justice in revenge. We are no better than the criminals who commit these crimes if we commit the same crime against them. You can't sanitize murder with a syringe. Sorry, that's the truth people.

I am against the death penalty. Also i oppose war -- another state mechanism where innocent people and beloved family members are killed.

on a personal note
 

I believe in the death penalty. I also believe an eye for an eye... why should someone who has murdered in cold blood be allowed to continue to live albeit prison is not living, an hour of sunshine a day if you behave... if you had behaved in the first place... well ?????? Sorrow and remorse, where is that? and you want a TV and a play station cuz NOW you are bored. I am not sorry that I feel this way but I do feel sorrow for the families who are left behind, the children who are left behind and ALL the unansered questions cuz you plead out, escaped the death penalty and now instead of paying for what you did, you get to live. WHY??? Someone showed you mercy and you did not and now you live with that.

I absolutely believe in justice, and those who commit heinous crimes need to be locked up. With todays supermax prisons, there is no need to fear someone will escape and re-offend. But that is justice, not revenge. I believe that revenge harms the one who seeks it as much as the one on the receiving end. It feeds off the pain caused by the perpetrator and allows that pain to fester. Revenge doesn't make things better. It just perpetuates the cycle of violence and injustice.

I understand.

Two of the people closest to me have been the victim of violent crimes perpetrated by people they/I know.
I have had overwhelming urges to harm those perpetrators physically. To destroy them.
My desire to harm them has been so great that I have consciously gone out of my way to avoid situations where my own emotions might overcome my rational thought, my ethics (regarding taking a life or harming another person) and my sense of self-preservation.

I also know, my job is to love and support those people closest to me to help them to heal and to carry on with their lives. That is the most important thing, I as an individual, can do. In my experience, vengeance doesn't heal.

As far as "the state" is concerned - I do not trust that our legal and justice systems are unbiased enough to be granted the power to take a life.

To me the natural question that should arise from this debate is -

The death penalty doesn't work - it neither reduces (nor deters) violent crime, so:

How do we prevent and reduce violent crime?

We talk about how much it costs to keep perpetrators on death row through their (rightful) due course of law, we talk about how overcrowded prisons are, how short sentences are, how rehabilitation doesn't work...

But we don't talk about tightening legislation around gun control. We don't talk about making weapons for personal use illegal all together (NRA-forfend). We don't talk about substance abuse as endemic to our nation. Or the "blind eye" law enforcement turns to domestic violence in so many cases. Or the reality that the impetus is upon a rape victim to prove s/he was raped...

And we don't discuss the NEED to dramatically alter our national fiscal priorities so that we can strengthen our social services, education and physical/mental health systems; provide more support for parents and children; and training for teachers and nurses and school counselors (those on the front line of raising healthy non-violent people).

I'm reading, hearing, and listening to you all, it's a hot topic! I won't post much though cause it's ugly and it comes from an emotional place. I will be reading and learning from everyone though.:)

So a quick question:

Hypothetical 1: We live in a culture where vendetta is allowed. I think your brother killed my father, so I kill him. Justice has been served, revenge has been had. It turns out years later, that another man killed my father.

Hypothetical 2: We live in a culture with the death penalty. The state thinks your brother killed my father so they try, convict and kill him. Justice has been served, revenge has been had. It turns out years later, that another man killed my father.

Question 1: What substantial consequential difference is there between these two?
Question 2: What is the substantial moral difference between these two?

Cheers
Aj

Cheers
Aj