Gracchus

My first letter to be posted in a public forum, nearly fifty years ago, was to speak out against the death penalty. Since then, I have learned more about the depths of human cruelty and depravity.

But I am still opposed to the death penalty, for every reason mentioned in this forum and any that anyone else might think of. :boohoo:

Were I a Christian, perhaps I would second the very logical Roman Catholic bishop, who, when asked whether the children of the "Albigensian heretics" should be spared, replied: "Kill them all. God will know his own." After all, we are all going to die. (By the way, can anyone tell me why Dr. Kevourkian is in jail?)

Perhaps we could give those convicted a choice: death, confinement with convicted criminals, or solitary confinement.

Alonzo Fyfe

Yes, but, those that have capital punishment have MORE murders.

And the reason for this is likely that the absence of capital punishment and the lower murder rate have a common cause, this being a greater overall respect for life in a society. A society that says, "it is never permissible to morally kill" has both no capital punishment and fewer citizens who rationalize that they are in a situation where killing is permissible.


I see that, when it comes to killing other people, you see that it is quite permissible to make up your own facts to justify it.

Tell me, what is the recidivism rate for various types of capital crimes? Do you have the statistics, or rather than believe that recidivism does not work based on evidence, you merely want to believe it without any regard for the evidence.


And, by the way, I am not against capital punishment. What I AM against are people shouting "KILL THEM. KILL THEM ALL" by people who feel they have no obligation to base their claim on sound reasoning and an examination of the facts of the matter.

The person who does that . . . well, in my mind . . . has the moral attitude quite comparable to that of the murderer.

Lobstrosity

I don't know if this has been posted here in some thread or another, but on the off chance that it hasn't, this seems like as good a place as any. If ever there were an argument against capital punishment, it's this:

http://justice.policy.net/proactive/...c9c6c8c7cec5cf

This just honestly makes me sick to my stomach.

A New York Times editorial on the case can be found here, but you might need a subscription to their online service if you wish to view it. In case you can't get to the editorial without a subscription, here's an excerpt:
The rest of the material is covered by the first link I provided.

fishbulb

Said with less sarcasm, that sounds good. If you had to choose between physical security and ephemeral "justice", which would you pick? Because it appears that the two are often at odds. Far better to punish people because they are dangerous than to do it because they are evil. Especially when different people's ideas of evil are as personal as they are certain.

You can be angry and outraged at the crimes people commit, but the evidence suggests that justice systems that focus primarily on revenge and punishment aren't particularly effective at providing public safety.

I certainly hope you're not suggesting that anyone who may pose a risk to someone else's safety should be killed off rather than risk exposing people to them. If that's the case, we shouldn't limit executions to people who have already committed violent crimes; it would be better for society if we killed people before they committed violent acts.

Corrections officers are exposed to a certain amount of danger, but so are police officers, health care workers, and coal miners. For that matter, the fact that people are only imprisoned or executed after a murder has already been committed demonstrates that the public at large also faces certain risks. When you choose to enter certain lines of work, you accept that you are exposed to a certain degree of risk. That level must be managed to remain within acceptable limits, but no one can live or work risk free.

Besides, I doubt executing a few murderers would do much to lower the level of risk associated with living in or working at a prison. Witness the United States: it is an enthusiastic employer of the death penalty and it tends to hand out comparatively long prison sentences, yet it has a murder rate three times higher than any other Western democracy (none of which, I believe, have the death penalty, unless you count Japan), an imprisonment rate five times higher (and the highest rate of imprisonment in the entire world, having recently taken that honour away from Russia), and still has what is by all accounts a very violent penal system. Here is an example of capital punishment not working to improve anyone's safety, even though it is applied so liberally that already dozens of people have been found to be innocent after having been sentenced to death. (And probably dozens more who went to their deaths without having their innocence proved.)

exile

I've just been on another thread stating that torture might be justified in an extreme circumstance so it might seem odd that I don't agree with the death penalty.

The reason I don't IN A MODERN SOCIETY (in a primitive society there may be no alternative) is that there is the alternative of prison.

The primary reason for executing someone must be to ensure he does not kill again. However, we do have other ways of ensuring this - by keeping him in jail. This is expensive and inconvenient but that is the price of living in an advanced society.

If someone, say, takes a hostage and threatens to kill them, then the state is entitled to try to kill them as in this case the life of the criminal must be balanced against the lives of those he threatens to kill.

When you have the criminal safely under lock and key then killing him is murder - even if you are 100% sure he is guilty, which is by no means a given.

Amen-Moses

I don't have a link because I saw this as part of a TV documentary (maybe someone else has a link?) but in the documentary they showed photographs of people who had been convicted of crimes and photos of people who had been freed by the jury, they did not tell people which photos were from which group but just asked them to guess which they thought were in each group purely by the look of the person. (i.e without knowing any of the details of the cases involved)

The results were that there was a statistically significant agreement between those suspects that people guessed as being guilty and those who actually were found guilty by juries!

(for those slow on the uptake what this means is that your chances of being found guilty or innocent by a jury can depend purely on the way you look!)

Amen-Moses

Valmorian

Of course, we all know that the law is not infallable. It would be naive in the extreme to presume that every person convicted is truly guilty of the crimes they are charged of.

I cannot condone the death penalty, because I am not confident that the justice system is without error.

Since the justice system DOES make mistakes, I have to consider what I would find acceptable to have done to ME, if I was falsely convicted.

Lobstrosity

Mistakes like this innocent guy who's about to die tomorrow. Sorry for spamming the link, but I can find no other outlet for my sense of disgust.

Jamie_L

inmeitrust:

Of course incarceration has problems and risks. However, that's different from saying our current system cannot be improved.

Interesting note: there are, in fact, prisons that involve intense isolation of inmates. They have not yet been found unconstitutional. There are also prisons which do not invovle such isolation, but which are run differently from standard prisons, and have much more success in controlling inmates.

Prison problems are much more concrete, objective issues that can be tackled by legislation and added resources. The difficulties of sifting justice and truth out of the trial process is not so easy to improve upon. Thus, it seems to me that solving the prison problems is easier than protecting innocents from the death penalty.

Parol, loopholes, etc. are all "fixable" problems. In my unfounded opinion, prisons are horrible places because society does not want to put the resources into protecting the life and dignity of prisoners. Such apathy is insufficient reason to justify executing innocents. Our society has not even put much effort into trying to fix these problems. How can we say they are unsolvable when we haven't even tried?

You longwindedness is forgiven, despite the accompanying sarcasm.

Jamie

Walross

Originally posted by Vorhis the Wolf:

Guy Paul Moran was convicted because the jury didn't like the fact that he couldn't look them in the eye. So, he got to spend years in prison for the "crime"of being shy. The murder that he was convicted of was committed by another man who was later caught. If Canada had been a less civilized country (ie if it had the death penalty for murder), he would have been executed and the actual murderer would be free to kill again.

Gerry Conlan was convicted because he signed a false confession under torture and death threats by the police who arrested him, and because the prosecutor hid evidence that could have exonorated him. Again, he was eventually freed, but only after many years in prison.

Judges, police and juries aren't the unbiased perfect creatures you seem to think they are. Juries in particular worry me since they are just 12 random people. I don't know about you, but in my experience, people in general are rather stupid, gullible, and given to snap emotional judgements. Given cases like the above, as well as many more, I simply don't think it's wise to trust any judge or jury with something as irrevocable (sp?) as a person's life.

Walross