Sure; the statement “proportional to the nature of the crime committed” is meaningless and, in fact, false. If a person steals a large amount of money, he isn’t punished by merely taking the same amount of money from him. If a person commits perjury, you don’t punish them by telling them a lie.
You then go on to say:
This is obviously preposterous and with a moment’s thought I don’t even think you believe this is true; you’re just argued into a knot, that’s all. The purpose of punishment is not to “uphold the power of the state,” it’s to maintain social order and promote the general welfare of the populace. If the only purpose was to uphold the power of the state then logically the state would be better off executing everyone for anything. The power of state, in a civilized country, exists solely to, and only to the extent required to, promote the general welfare of the citizenry.
[QUOTE=Smapti]
If the state has the power to kill while engaged in war, or to protect innocent life, or in the course of enforcing the law, then it follows that they also have the power to kill as a means of punishment.
[/QUOTE]
No, that does not follow. You’ve made no logical case why that follows.
ANYONE has the moral right to kill while defending themselves against a party with deadly intent; what you’re first describing is merely the extension of that concept to the state. Killing in cold blood is not, logically, an extension of that. If it were, then why don’t I have the right to kill people as punishment? I can kill, legally, in self defense, or in war, or to defend an innocent life. So can I shoot my kids as punishment? If that doesn’t logically follow, why not?
Per the cite, the numbers show that blacks convicted of murder are less likely to be sentenced to death (and even less likely to be executed) than whites convicted of murder.
Conversely, if you think you have any insight into these matters then I strongly urge you to actually share this insight here, instead of making completely pointless claims that someone who reviewed some vast amount of literature would see how right you are.
The entry is a little ambiguously worded so its impossible to tell if it’s making the claim you think it is, but if it is then it is wrong. See for example Figure 5 in the first cite I posed for Smapti. It is absolutely true that race of the victim is a bigger factor than race of the defendant, but false that race of the defendant isn’t a factor. Note also that white-on-black crime is the least likely to be subject to the death penalty, something of a problem for your “gang crime” theory.
I’m perfectly content to observe that you have strongly held opinions on a subject about which you evidently lack even the most basic grounding. That’s enough for me to conclude that this isn’t about evidence for you, which makes me not very interested in bringing you up to speed on the subject.
Actually, a major factor is whether or not the person you kill is a stranger, or an innocent bystander. Most murders are inter-race, but blacks murder whites about three times more than whites kill blacks (cite). Other crimes are even more marked -
That doesn’t follow logically. Executing murderers is how we can not have people receive worse punishments because of their race. Not executing them creates a miscarriage of justice.
Then again, you need to produce some kind of evidence in every individual case, that prejudice played some part in the sentencing. Simply asserting that it happens isn’t enough - you need to show some evidence that will overcome the proof of actual guilt. Or else show cases in which white murderers were not executed, and I may agree with you that they should have been.
That figure is for a 10 year period in one city. The numbers in Wiki are over a 30 year period for the entire US.
I tossed that out as one example. There could be any number of factors.
What I said was “I think it’s most likely that …”. How do you get from there to “strongly held opinions”? I think it’s most likely that you’re projecting your own strongly held opinions on the subject. Frankly you seem a bit race-obsessed (IIRC you are a civil-rights attorney, but correct me if I’m wrong about this) and you hijacked this thread which is about a case that has no real racial angle to it into a discussion of a theme much dearer to your heart.
In any event, despite your presumed expertise on this matter, you’ve managed to add very little of substance beyond your assertions about how right you are. If that floats your boat, by all means go for it.
So if as a school yard monitor you see Billy throw a rock and hit Jane, then your response would be to throw a rock at Billy so that everything evens out.
So I wrote a 200 page manuscript and read in reading over the first 50 pages, find 10 errors and correct them. Since I didn’t find any errors that I didn’t correct the manuscript must now be error free.
I think this scenario as written speaks a lot to the reasoning behind your responses in other threads. In that you believe that police who witness a crime should act as judge jury and executioner.
The only justifiable reason the police should shoot the man, is if by doing so he can protect someone else who is in immediate danger, not just because he witnessed a murder. With the death penalty there is no immediate danger from the criminal who is already in custody. Therefor the only reason for the death penalty is pure revenge.
My response would be to detain Billy. What my response would not be would be to let Billy go because Trent got detention back in '87 even though Adam said he saw Gary throw the rock at Susan.
No, you continue checking. You don’t throw the manuscript in the fire because, gee, you’ve found so many typos, surely there must be an its-it’s error that nobody will notice until after it’s been published and it’s too late to undo what you’ve done.
I should also add that that graph scales the likelihoods by a “Defendent culpability index”, which means that the study authors assigned each case a score based on severity of crime and defendent prior history and so on, and then ran a regression on the likelihood of death sentence correlated to race and this score. But that scoring is kind of black-boxy, and may not be accurate, and at the least makes the sample size practically a lot smaller than it would otherwise be.
No, because it’s entirely possible to be punished with no death penalty.
Human history is replete with live people who report that they’d prefer death to the circumstances they find themselves in, and live people who take action to bring themselves death.
Question: If you are arrested, factually innocent, sentenced to death, live on death row behind bars for 18 years, THEN you get proven innocent before you’re executed, will the first words out of your mouth be, “The system works”?
this is why I’m not a supporter of the death penalty. not because I don’t believe some people just need to go; they’re few in number but there are broken and unsalvageable folks among us. but that the standard of proof to gain a conviction is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” I’m not comfortable with that standard of proof being sufficient to elect to take someone’s life.
A wrongful conviction can be overturned. A wrongful execution cannot.