I oppose the death penalty in all circumstances. The state should never execute a person.
I’m convinced that we have executed innocent people. Do people who support the death penalty really care that innocent people have died from state execution?
I don’t think death penalty supporters really care. They seem to have the, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” mentality. Or, "They might not have done that crime, but they committed plenty of other crimes. Similar to the attitude of those who support the Gitmo torture camp. “Well, even if they weren’t **planning ** terrorism, they were associated with terrorists.”
The number of people who have been exonerated due to DNA evidence should be enough to make even the most fervent death penalty supporter change their mind. However, they continue to support it.
Not speaking for all advocates of course, but my response is that it’s probably the same response you would give if someone posed the question: “Do opponents to the death penalty care if someone who should have been executed wasn’t, and then killed other innocent people?”
Of course you care (I would hope you would), but in your opinion, the greater issues of opposing the death penalty supercede the possibility of another death. Same situation. Interestingly, while evidence of criminals released from death row murdering someone else exists, no such evidence of an innocent person actually executed does (not to say it hasn’t happened, but no such evidence exists), so it seems to me you have a much more difficult moral dilemma.
I wholeheartedly support the death penalty. I believe there are people who will not stop killing or whose one killing was so disgusting that they don’t deserve to live.
However, I think the above two examples are the only time the death penalty should be used. If someone commits a crime of passion, I believe in prison time. If somebody commits a calculated crime of cold blooded murder, they deserve to die.
Execution should only be done when it is absolutely certain that the crime is horrific and that the person did it. I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks everyone who committed murder should be executed.
Even if life in prison means life in prison, nobody can guarantee that the person won’t kill someone in prison or escape and kill again. Ask Ted Bundy’s Florida victims about the latter scenerio. How can life in prison guarantee that the person won’t kill again.
There is some evidence that innocent people have been executed in Texas; not conclusive proof, but certainly enough to raise an eyebrow. Ruben Cantu was convicted solely on the testimony of an eyewitness who recanted after the execution and said he was pressured into identifying Cantu by police while hospitalized for gunshot wounds. Cameron Willingham was convicted and executed based on arson investigation techniques that have since been disproven and are no longer used. Arson experts who testified in hearngs that exonerated and freed death row inmate Ernest Wills say that the evidence in Willingham’s case is nearly identical.
Well, the papers are full of people exonerated from Death Row after a jury decided beyond a reasonable doubt that they did it… and then a decade later, DNA evidence shows they didn’t.
So what method would you use to determine your “…absolutely certain…” standard? A time machine and a video camera?
What bothers me about this is that one part of your critieria is subjective and the other is objective.
You can ‘objectively prove’, beyond a reasonable doubt, that someone committed a crime. However proving that something is ‘horrific’ is completly subjective. You may result to the pornagraphy canard that ‘I know it when I see it’ but that doesnt’ fly with me.
Any ‘murder’ can be made to look horrific. So any ‘murderer’ can be executed by your standard.
Nothing; it makes for a great premise for Kurt Russell movies.
I used to be an advocate for the death penalty and still think that there are many people who would do best on this world by leaving it, but after learning more about the inequities in its application, the effect upon prison workers who have to interact and support inmates on Death Row, and the often questionable legal maneuvering of politically-motivated prosecutors in scoring a death penalty conviction, I find the implementation of the death penalty to be badly flawed even in concept. Also, listening to Fred Leutcher wax lyrically about methods of execution creeps even me out, and I’m not that squeamish about anything.
In regard to executing innocent people, we know for certain that innocent people have been installed on Death Row and denied appeals until new evidence or evidence of gross incompetence or malfeasance has come to light; see another Errol Morris documentary, The Thin Blue Line for an example that not only documented this but actually resulted in the release of a blatantly innocent man. It is approaching statistical certainty that we have executed innocent people, and without question that some people have been executed in the past without what would now be considered minimal due process with regard to a capital sentence. In short, if you support the death penalty, you are accepting that there will be a certain amount of collateral executions of innocent people.
Ahh, so… you DON’T really believe in the death penalty, right?
I Don’t know of any cases with such overwhelming evidence that it was obvious the person did it. About the only way would be to have a cinematic crew with HD cameras filming the action live as it happens.
Otherwise we have to rely on testimony, which could be in error, evidence which could be in error, or in a few cases falsified, or more likely misinterpreted, and the competence (or lack thereof) of public defenders/juries/judges.
THIS is the second reason why I find the death penalty abhorrent. Because there are way too many chances for a mistake.
In case anyone cares about my other reasons:
I find it amoral. I don’t care if you’re the president of the US or a judge, or a jury, or represent the state in some other way. NO ONE person or entity should have the right of taking another’s life, except in self-defense as a response to immediate danger.
It serves NO PURPOSE other than to satisfy our base instinct for revenge. Study after study has show NO correlation with the supposed purpose od the DP as a “deterrent”. In fact most scenarios only show an INCREASE in DP viable cases after the DP is re-opened NOT a decrease.
I don’t support the death penalty, but keep in mind that people are killed in prison all the time. I would not be surprised if you chances of being killing are greater in prison than outside of prison.
Ok, how about not leaving them alone with someone who’s not a guard while we’re doing that? :rolleyes:
Leaving a known serial rapist alone with an art teacher seems criminally negligent on the part of the prison, and makes that example pretty paper thin.
Some (such as former Illinois governor George Ryan) do change their mind.
Others, I suspect, just have a lot more faith than is warranted in the criminal justice system and its ability to determine guilt or innocence, if they think of it at all. From the premise “Some crimes are so horrible as to deserve death as a punishment” they draw the conclusion “There ought to be a death penalty.”
Yet others think that there is a problem, but that the solution lies in making it harder to convict the innocent, not in removing the death penalty. After all, it’s still a gross miscarriage of justice if an innocent man spends life (or even a year or two) in prison.
I wrestle with this question, as I am not a staunch supporter of the death penalty - this is one issue I waver on all of the time. And frankly, I’d as soon eliminate it just to smooth out our dealings with the justice systems of other countries that are quite allied with us in crime-prevention and apprehension operations.
This won’t be painless or come without a price, though, and I think opponents of the death penalty do us a disservice by not addressing this.
I don’t know about Czarcasam, but I do. My sister’s in prison, for god’s sake. I feel that it is a different question than whether the death penalty can be justified.
I agree with you 100%, but the question wasn’t “Can the death penalty be justified?” - it was “Do death penalty supports care if they execute an innocent person?”
For. Sure, I’d rather have it with a higher standard of evidence (DNA or mental fitness + uncoerced confession required) to mitigate the probability of the innocent being executed, but a few will invariably fall through in the long term.
My answer is an extremely well qualified “no”. To be more accurate, I DO care if innocent people are executed wrongly, it’s a travesty, but I realize that absolute perfection is impossible in any human endeavor, it’s inevitable that an innocent man has been executed or will be, but the benefits to society of the DP outweigh that cost. A DP that executes violent criminals at a 99.9% accuracy rate is fine by me. Personally it’s terrible for that 1 innocent guy, but society is much better off with the 999 other guilty men dead.
