Suggested by the “I love Jesus (the rapist)” thread in GD, which I am too lazy to link to.
I am not looking for reasoned policy positions. I’ll come out right now and say that there are a boatload of rational reasons not to execute rapists who leave their victims alive, and in fact I agree with most of those reasons.
I am wondering about our visceral reactions.
Should a person who overpowers, assaults, and rapes another person be executed?
My gut says yes. Or it would if it had a mouth. What about yours?
I personally find the idea of being sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole to be far more horrifying than the idea of being sentenced to death.
Losing just a testicle won’t stop them raping again in the future. Better just take the whole package to be sure. If execution is out of the question of course.
My gut reaction is pretty much what it is for every atrocity. I want the perpetrator to have to experience the exact same situation as their victim. Not that I think s/he should be raped (as that would just add another perpetrator) but should have the “thoughts and feelings” of the victim downloaded into the brain (and removed from the victim, if possible). I feel the only way to get through to these types of people is to let them feel exactly what they did.
Note: this isn’t necessarily futuristic, either. Hypnotherapy can do a heck of a lot. Ordinarily I’m against hypnosis, but I’d make an exception here.
Castration for all rapes (violent or otherwise), and then treat it as other assaults (if I am not mistaken, both up here and down there beating the ever-loving crap out of someone generally elicits a greater punishment than less vicious forms of assault). If it’s completely non-violent rape then castrate and leave it at that.
Yes, I know, rape in many cases is about power and dominance and you can still express power and dominance without that equipment, but it removes one of the important elements from the equation. Keep expressing that power and dominance after castration and the assault laws will deal with it.
I’m actually kind of ambivalent on the whole notion of rape being a special category of crime considered separate and more heinous than plain old aggravated assault.
This is an interesting idea. For some reason, the idea of someone having to submit to whatever they did seems like mindless torture, but this doesn’t.
But wouldn’t hypnotherapy only work if the person wanted it to? I’ve been “under”–sort of–and you have to work at it. If you had no incentive, you could just tune the hypnotist out and feel nothing.
You would more than likely change your mind if you were being led to the electric chair, and the door behind curtain 2 was a prison cell, complete with color tv, free food, free medical care, free access to a college degree, etc.
You have a very entertaining idea of what prison is like. I’d choose the chair over life without parole in a heartbeat.
I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with killing rapist, but I think it’s too easy for them. Giving them a shot and letting them go to sleep is letting them off with no punishment.
There is also the issue that there is no way to insure that the death penalty can be enforced without error.
[Tom Hanks]
There’s no crying in baseball, and no thinking in this thread!
[/tom hanks]
As I said in the OP, I wasn’t looking for a debate on the appropriateness of capital punishment for rapists; hell, I even conceded that I, personally, would conclude that executing rapists is probably a bad idea. I was wondering about people’s gut reactions.
My gut reaction is that our current execution systems are too easy on rapists. My gut wants to stone them to death.
My brain remembers all the stories it’s read in the newspaper, about wrongful convictions, and especially about executions of people who later turned out to be innocent.
I think a lot of people should be executed. I’m in favor of mandatory death penalties for murder, for violent rape, and for armed robbery. I’m also in favor of deporting people with multiple felony convictions of any kind to third-world countries permanently, and I am in favor of sterilization for multiple felons as well.
I am absolutely 100% serious about this. There are too many people, in America and in the world in general - anything that reduces the population by culling off people who refuse to live by society’s rules is a positive thing in my opinion.
Once they’ve been sentenced to a well-deserved long prison term, just release them into the general prison population.
(Aren’t rapists considered low-lifes by much of the prison population?)