I support it 100%. I think the way it is currently carried out is ridiculous.
I am in favor of a separate system for capital offenses. I don’t have all of the details, but once the state serves notice of intent to seek the death penalty, it moves into a different rules:
Appointment of an attorney who specializes in capital cases with an increased budget.
Full and 100% access to DNA testing/evidence
Expedited appeals with additional focus on actual guilt/innocence.
More lenient rules of evidence/admissibility/discovery to the defense.
jt, for the most part, guilt and innocence are not really at issue. When the state executes someone you can be 99.9% sure that he was guilty. However, the manner in which the DP is applied is often an issue. Black men who commit capital crimes are between 15 and 50% more likely to be sentenced to die (depending on the state) than white men.
Black men who kill white people are even more likely to be sentenced to death.
I find both of those facts as unacceptable as the prospect of executing someone who is innocent.
How would you go about correcting this injustice other than having the government pay for private defense attorneys and raising the budget for defense? In this case, why limit reform to capital cases? Surely, the same disparity exists for lesser offenses. Disadvantaged folk deserve just as effective legal representation as privileged folk.
Sure, but to my mind it’s a more egregious fault in the system when the death penalty is involved- especially considering how rare life sentences without possibility of parole are.
Those faults are present and need to be addressed with or without capital punishment.
I’m not sure what you mean by “rare” for LWOP sentences. For murder one in Florida, for example, it is either death or life without parole. The judge has no other options.
**RNATB **is referring to the establishing innocence part as what may happen during the appeals process *after *the court has found a defendant guilty. Your ‘correction’ was unnecessary.
I do not. I think murder is morally wrong in most circumstances, that includes cold-blooded murder as punishment, no matter what the crime was.
If self-defense results in the death of the assailant, it’s unfortunate but shouldn’t be punishable.
I support assisted suicide because the person desires and consents to death, and abortion because I think the rights of the mother trump those of a fetus who could not survive outside the mother’s body (or in the case of late-term abortions for medical conditions, has an uncertain chance of living at all or would live in pain and suffering).
By that logic shouldn’t the rights of the government and people to punish criminals by the means they approve by a majority override the rights of the criminals?
Its fact that from time to time we execute inncent people.
I think you have to jump a pretty high hurdle to engage in state activity that kills innocent people.
The only moral rationale that I have ever heard is deterrence. If killing one innocent man will prevent X murders then I could probably live with it.
If it turns out that the one innocent guy that is sacrificed to prevent X murders is usually a black guy in the south, then I might want the threshhold to be higher.
To me it all comes down to deterrence. I’m sure there is SOME deterrent effect, but is there enough.
