Capital Punishment causes more murders?

[december]

*Originally posted by Pjen *
I guess that the Death Penalty is such an emotive issue, that even when a reasonable ‘thought experiment’ is proposed, the debate necessarily descends to incomprehension and abuse!

Pjen – Please stop whining and try to understand the responses you’re getting. Waterj2 said sarcastically what I said politely. We don’t agree that you provided “a reasonable thought experiment”; It looks more like a straw man. To see why, try these two thought experiements:

1. If the Death Penaly caused many more murders, would you
   favor it?

2. If the Death Penalty caused many fewer murders, would you favor it?

These two questions answer themselves. However, with no evidence either way, you asked the 2nd, but not the 1st.

I appreciate casdave’s report on what happened in England after the death penalty ended. In the US, after the death penalty was declared unConstitutional, there was a huge jump in the murder rate. After it was reinstated, the murder rate went down.

The trouble with all these statistics, as casdave implied, is the difficulty of inferring a cause and effect relationship. Many other factors were simultaneously affecting the murder rate, so it’s unclear what a change in the death penalty law alone would have done.

[Tymp]

Originally posted by december

1. If the Death Penaly caused many more murders, would you
   favor it?

2. If the Death Penalty caused many fewer murders, would you favor it?

These two questions answer themselves.

Really? See, I would answer both of these questions with “no and no.” I suspect that not everyone would have the same response. My opposition to capital punishment is not based solely upon its in/effectiveness as a deterrent to criminal action. No matter how effective the death penalty might be as a deterrent to potential criminals, the issues of potential mistakes and excessive institutional abuse of basic liberties would not be affected.

However, if it could be shown with some certainty that deterrence is a myth, as in question one, I suspect that few current supporters of capital punishment would maintain their positions. The exceptions would be those who freely admit that revenge, rather than protection of society, is the basis of their support of the death penalty.

Originally posted by minty green
Killing is ok with a good enough reason.

If you mean killing as an action taken by an individual, I am in complete agreement with your statement. However, when it comes to the state, which has infinitely more power than an individual it might kill, the matter is quite obviously still debatable.

[ExTank]

Ned:

A society that utilizes brutality will produce more people who utilize brutality than one which doesn’t.

Prove it. Executions today are hardly the grisly, “brutal” affairs deliberately not shown on Braveheart. They are about as bloodless and clinical as humanly possible.

When society places so little value on individuals why should we be surprised when individuals place little value in each other.

Horseshit. Probably upwards of 95% of society values individual lives; the 5% (or less) that doesn’t are the ones society culls.

Is it a coincidence that the most peaceful western societies have the least punitive criminal justice systems?

Unfounded correlation. Or, as we might say out west, “you’ve got the cart in front of the horse!” It’s entirely possible that these “western societies” of which you speak have less punitive criminal justice systems because they have much lower rates of violent crime. Which necessitates the other? Are punitive criminal justice systems a response to violent crime? Or is violent crime a response to a punitive criminal justice system?

I believe that capital punishment challenges any conception of the sanctity of life replacing it with a philosphy that killing is ok with a good enough reason.

This ain’t exactly a news flash. Ask any veteran, any cop who’s had to draw their service piece, anyone who’s ever had to use lethal force to defend themselves. Of course killing is ok with a good enough reason.

But that’s a world of difference between killing for country, in the line of duty, or in self defense, and killing for recreation and/or profit. The first three are deemed acceptable, sometimes even moral, while the latter two are not. People who don’t ken the difference, or refuse to acknowledge it, are deemed a “menace to society” and put to death.

And people (individuals) who elevate their [conflicting] motivations and desires to equal status with the motivations and desires of society, and thus the state engendered therby, are whack in the first place. McVeigh seems to have done this very thing, even though there are mechanisms within society and the state for redressing his grievances. He went directly from “I’ve got an issue” to “BOOM!”. No letter writing, no protests, no drive to “expose” the issues he championed. When he didn’t get his way, or get it quickly enough, he simply assumed for himself the moral authority of all of society and the state to declare war.

In this regard, he’s morally equivalent to the abortion clinic bombers, and fundies who feel it’s okay to kill doctors and nurses who perform abortions. McVeigh just achieved a higher visibility.

Bottom Line: individuals can take a life, but only for reasons that society deems reasonable and justifiable. Whether you agree or not isn’t exactly irrelevant, but only as relevant as the portion of society that happens to agree with you (or vice versa). In the context of the DP, society can take the life of an individual who has demonstrated, by heinous action, that they have no regard for the lives of other members of society. Why? Because our society has agreed that it is thus, and our state’s laws, interpreted by the highest judicial bench in the land, has deemed it legally acceptable.