Approximate population of Western Civilized world:
Europe, say 350,000,000
Russia 130,000,000
Rest, say 120,000,000
Say 600,000,000
So, double the population of the USA. No prisoners killed.
Russia? RUSSIA?? Your model of ‘Civilized Western Behaviour’ that should be slavishly followed by other countries wishing to bask in your approval holds up Russia as an exemplar? So if Russia does not utilise the death penalty (desite having it on the statute books) then the US and Japan should not either, and they should also adopt such wonderful Russian practices as corruption, expropriation of property, rigging of elections, extra-judicial killings , suppression of free speech and so forth and so on? Or do you have a completely separate reference set of ‘Western Civilized Nations’ that you use when discussing those topics? Or are you just a fool?
Which responsible adult is supposed to be supervising you, and why are they letting you fill the internet with this twaddle?
Included because it is a G8 member.
Ah yes, the Pjen Bible.
The story about the execution of the “blind and frail” Mr. Allen takes up 11 paragraphs. The three victims he ordered murdered get one sentence. His original murder victim goes nameless.
Priorities.
Well, one answer would be to look at other crimes. Why don’t we, as a society, slash and punch the faces of muggers or line up and rape the rapists? My guess is because society, as a whole, should show more restraint in an effort to provide a better model for the way we wish all citizens to behave.
Pjen, what are you trying to accomplish here? If your goal is simply to condemn the US as morally deficient, I think you’re done. You’ve stated your opinion. If your intent is to persuade anyone who is in favor of the death penalty to change their mind, several posters here, with varying degrees of kindness, have suggested that your particular argument is simply not persuasive. As someone who has changed his mind on this issue, I can tell you that the excution of innocent people, the uneveness of the application of the penalty, and the ridiculous amount of time and effort required to apply the penalty persuaded me. I have no interest in what other countries are doing.
The risk of killing falsely convicted people comes to mind. That’s a good moral argument, I think.
I don’t trust the government enough to give it the right to kill me. It bothers me that it does have the right.
Ah yes, the G8, the economic club generally described as ‘the rich democracies plus Russia’. WTF? You put a country in with ‘Civilized Western Nations’ despite it being neither, purely because it is a member of some arbitrary international association, and then hold it up as being morally superior to an actual western democracy?
And you expect people to do anything but point at you and laugh?
Sheesh. I’m no fan of the death penalty, but I can see why some people want it - trying to argue that they’re wrong because you dislike it and some random bunch of countries with varying populations agree with you is an utter crock of shit. If we take that approach we might as well say that, given a sensible amount of rounding, 100.00000% of the worlds population don’t know that pjen exists and don’t give a shit about your opinion, therefore not only shouldn’t you have an opinion, you shouldn’t exist.
Everyone else here is at least trying to give a reason for why they think as they do - why don’t you follow their example instead of jumping up and down saying “I think it’s wrong and 97% of vegetarian mountaineers called Bob agree with me!!”
I think you might be putting a bit of a charitable interpretation on it. Personally, I favour the slightly more prosaic explanation that citizens prefer the justice system to give at least the impression of being carefully weighted, impartial, and restrained in the manner of its punishments in case they have to submit themselves to it. Imagine you’re being prosecuted for an unpaid parking fine and in the next room they’re deciding how many people should pound a rapist in the ass, the judge hearing your case has just finished ruling that someone should have their face cut to ribbons and the clerk of the court is about to start a shift on eye-punching duty. I personally wouldn’t feel too happy my future being decided in an environment like that. :eek:
And what is so different from being in a system that decides in the same way whether to kill a prisoner?
Same argument.
Got any examples?
Regards,
Shodan
The death penalty denies the essential humanity of the condemned, freezing them at their worst moments and refusing to allow for the possibility of redemption. It treats them as nonhumans, as “rabid dogs” who must be put down.
Karla Faye Tucker is one example of the fatal flaw in our DP system. While it’s entirely possible that she was putting on an act, what if she wasn’t? What if she truly did turn over a new leaf?
Let’s also face the sad fact that if she wasn’t a good looking white woman and was a 300 pound black guy named “Carl Tucker” who underwent a similar transformation than the story of Carl Tucker’s transformation would have probably been buried in the back pages of the local newspapers instead of making national headlines.
Yes, exactly. An argument, with reasons, not some specious claptrap pulled out of your arse and backed up with random numbers from the same place.
Personally, I think the DP is inappropriate on practical grounds - it is so emotive and polarising that it diverts too many resources from elsewhere in the judicial system, and it is far to asymmetric in terms of what happens when you get things right or wrong.
If you get it right you have killed someone who would otherwise be in prison - that’s a pretty limited upside. If you discover that you got it wrong, you have just killed someone for no reason, which is going to take more than an apology to put right - a BIG downside.
The practical flaws are so big as to make the moral arguments pretty much redundant.
And yet the most commonly quoted alternative is to lock them up like animals until they die. Unless you accept as a given that EVERY prisoner is, at least in theory, eligible for release irrespective of the number or severity of crimes they have committed, this seems like a very fine distinction.
Pjen, I might have missed this somewhere, and if I have, apologies. Are you saying that a life sentence without parole is a morally superior punishment to a death sentence?
I don’t know about that, either. “Tookie” Williams was also allegedly a changed man, from gang-banging murderer to children’s book author and tireless campaigner against gang violence - sort of - and there seemed just as much fuss over his execution as over Karla Faye’s.
But keep in mind that this particular instance was of someone who killed three people because he was not executed. In other words, there was a hell of a lot more downside to not executing this person than to giving him the needle.
What do we do to “put right” those three innocent deaths? The asymetry in this case seems to be way over on the other side.
Regards,
Shodan
Does killing someone put right those three innocent deaths?
I am saying that the DP is morally inferior to any other punishment because it diminishes the humanity of all involved in it. I believe that if someone is a serious threat to society, then exclusion by imprisonment is the best option morally. I also believe that imprisonment is only really morally acceptable in cases where there is a proven need for exclusion. I believe that imprisonment as retribution or punishment results in so many negatives- loss of ability to return to a valued life, loss of life skills, learning criminal skills, loss of self image, break up of family relationships etc etc etc that our current use of imprisonment as punishment of choice probably causes more crime than it solves. If imprisonment was reserved for those that had to be excluded from society as a threat and an equivalent amount was spent on punishment and rehabilitation in the community as is now spent on prisons, then recidivism rates would shrink incredibly.
One only needs to look at relative rates of imprisonment in different countries to realise that imprisonment is not to do with crime avoidance or societal improvement. If most of Europe can use less imprisonment than the UK and the UK can use less imprisonment than the US, (by many multiples) then something most be wrong with imprisonment as an answer to most crime.
“Allegedly” is right. Tookie never expressed remorse, never agreed what he did was wrong, never apologized to his victims or their families. If he was such a tireless campaigner against gang violenece- why did he remain a member of said gang? Why did he allegedly order more gang killings from his cell? If he was so anti-gang, why didn’t he rat out the killers from the Crips? Not only did he NOT turn states witness against the many killers in his gang- he even bragged that he didn’t rat anyone out.
Thanks for that, Pjen.
I’d like to look at the diminishment of humanity angle, which IMHO is a valuable reason, I might add. If the sentenced person said to you, I would rather die, would you consider granting him his wish?
I believe that if a person is of capacity then a persistent wish to die should not be witheld. This would apply to murderers as much as to any other person, confined or unconfined.
Keeping him in prison doesn’t seem to have done the trick.
Regards,
Shodan