One I’ve been wondering about for a while, is the nature of opposition to the death penalty.
You’re going to have to stretch your imagination as the hypothetical is impossible, in fact its impossibility is why I oppose the death penalty. Hypothetical is this; suppose there was a way, a device, let’s call it the Guilt-o-tron 9000, to show the past and read minds. When you plug in a perpetrator to it it shows both the killing that they’re on trial for and their memory of it - whether they thought it was self defence, whether they planned it in cold blood, did it for kicks, whether they thought FBI space aliens told them to kill so that Jesus would come back or whatever. Or whether they were there at all, of course.
So through fictional means we can tell 100% if the person on trial is guilty, both in terms of whether they committed the crime and if they are a danger to society at large. Obviously how we deal with them differs, some might belong in a mental institution, some might be guilty of manslaughter and be confined to prison.
But the stone cold murderers who knew what they were doing - if they were put to death, would you still oppose this penalty?
Reason I ask is because I’m what you’d call a practical opponent of the death penalty - as long as it’s practiced, there’s a non-zero possibility that an innocent man will be put to death. You can let people out of prison, but not bring them back to life. However, if we could know 100% (which, again, is impossible I know) - this objection is removed.
But I think I’m in the minority, I think most opponents oppose it on moral grounds that any killing is wrong. Would you still oppose it?
I’m not a death penalty opponent, but in previous conversations, most DP opponents say something to the effect of, “Even if we could know with 100% certainty that the convicted was guilty, the DP still is wrong or bad because it puts us at the moral level of the murderers and makes us just as barbaric as them.” I think many posters in this thread will probably echo that sentiment.
S’what I thought, but it’s not why I oppose it; if we could get rid of murderers with the 100% certainty that they *were *murderers I’d say fill your boots. Just want to know how much in the minority I am.
My main reason for opposing the death penalty isn’t the chance of killing innocents. That’s a valid reason, and an element in my objection, but the idea of getting beyond eye-for-an-eye justice is a much bigger factor. It doesn’t matter whether the murderer knew exactly what he was doing - it’s not right to kill him for it. Prison is enough to keep the general population safe; anything more is giving in to primitive urges we should be trying to rise above.
My opposition is based on the fact that it coarsens society to use it. And of course innocents are executed and blacks who murder whites are much more likely to be executed, OJ notwithstanding. It is not that a I grieved for crackpots like McVeigh.
By this logic, isn’t fining a swindler a hefty sum of money for committing financial fraud also a form of eye-for-an-eye?
Isn’t locking up a kidnapper in prison for a long time, for the crime of holding hostages against their will, also a form of eye-for-an-eye?
I oppose the death penalty because it’s hypocritical in the extreme to kill someone for killing someone. You can rationalize it all day (like all killers rationalize their actions), but ultimately, it turns the state into a killer.
If we had a device that could, beyond any doubt, establish the guilt and motive of a murderer, I’d have no problem with the death penalty for that person.
I am against the death penalty for anything short of that, AKA any real world scenario likely to happen within my lifetime or my grandchildren’s.
No, because your money isn’t your eye, and imprisonment is at least arguably a matter of incapacitation as punishment. Both imprisonment and execution are society’s way of saying, “We don’t want to play with you any more.” But execution goes the extra step of eliminating the person entirely.
So, I’m with Velocity and Octarine. I would still oppose capital punishment.
Now, certainly, I’d be much happier with the additional safeguards, just as I’m much happier, today, that we have DNA evidence to make verdicts that much more close to certain than they were in the bad old days. I’ll always celebrate a relative improvement in the system. I won’t demand perfection.
But there is such a thing as perfection, and capital punishment isn’t compatible with it.
If you allow the Death Penalty for certain crimes - you can then extend that to cover other crimes. Once you normalize something, it becomes just a normal part of society.
Remember CCTV cameras? When they were first becoming common (about 1970s/1980s) people were horrified about ‘invasion of privacy etc’. Those concerns are still valid today - but we have become normalized to the cameras and we don’t protest about them.
If you allow the death penalty, once people get used to it, there may be groundswell to thinking ‘We have the Death Penalty. What else can we use it for? I don’t like those shonky used-car salesmen for a start…’.
That’s how things progressed in Godwin-Land in the 1930s. People got normalized to horrific infringements on their personal liberties, and so didn’t object when those infringements were used on lesser offences.
If you have the technology to look back in time and read minds, then you also have the ability to see what this person was like as an infant. You can see what made them the killer they are today. I think judges/juries would find it harder to apply the death penalty if the defense attorney could bring the defendant’s childhood state of mind into evidence.
As well, if you have the technology to see the past, it’s probably also trivially easy to heal someone’s brain enough to make them safe to allow back into the world. Given that, there’d be no need for even prison, because you could monitor people to make sure they weren’t having a mental imbalance. Serious crimes would never even happen.
The death penalty has been around in the US for centuries. And yet today it’s almost exclusively used in instances of murder. I can’t recall a single American in modern America getting executed for something like robbery, burglary, fraud, embezzlement, etc.
So I don’t think the slippery slope has applied for the DP in the US.
Sure…but given the “absolute certainty” premise, wouldn’t the slope get a bit steeper and/or more slippery? I think it would…though not with absolute certainty.
I think being able to see the life events in childhood that shaped many murderers would cause judges/juries to be careful when applying the death penalty, hmm? perhaps
My ONLY objection to the death penalty is the very real possibility of executing an innocent person . . . especially given the inequalities inherent in our judicial system. If the OP’s device were real and infallible, I’d be a supporter of the DP . . . not as an eye-for-an-eye, and not as a deterrent. But as and act of justice (the very purpose of the judicial system).
Regarding the idea that the DP “turns the state into a killer” . . . if that’s the case, there’s no validity to the entirety of the criminal justice system. What gives you the right to lock up a rapist or terrorist, thus depriving him of his freedom? Doesn’t that make us just as bad?
perhaps