“Because of course I don’t want to die. Who gives a fuck about some other person who’s not me?”
Seems like a basic “two wrongs don’t make a right” situation.
Without making this a DP debate, I’m fervently anti-DP. I certainly have no plans to ever take the life of another, but if the dice ever happened to fall in such a way that I killed someone, I’d still be anti-DP. On the flip side, if someone were to kill one of my loved ones, as much as I love to see them snuffed out, I’d still be anti-DP.
So to answer your question, just because someone happened to kill somebody, that doesn’t mean they view killing as right (especially state-sponsored killing). Although in your example, they obviously have a vested interest.
You asked how a person would justify fighting the death penalty but you don’t want to have a debate on the death penalty? It’s impossible to discuss how one individual can be opposed to the death penalty being applied to himself without mentioning how other people are opposed to the death penalty in general. The positions are going to overlap.
Correct. I am interested in the thought process these killers have, not a debate on the DP.
I don’t think they justify it to themselves. Mostly they probably either fake contrition to escape the death penalty or go through sob stories or legal excuses to get the penalty reduced.
It’s ironic, though, that those who already demonstrated a likelihood of sociopathy by actually committing the capital crimes are better at faking contrition and thus avoiding Ol’ Sparky than those who are not factually guilty and thus never had the mens rea which coincides with successful psychopathy.
In other words, I think actual confessed murders don’t really “justify” fighting the death penalty, they just try to look like they are, and they’re good at it because they’ve had practise with it all their lives. Meanwhile, those who are not factually guilty often cannot bring themselves to a wrongful confession because they actually live their lives according to principles, and if they do try to “confess”, it often does not seem heartfelt because they are not used to lying. So they are more likely than those actually guilty to have the final solution to their criminal ways applied.
I wouldn’t be surprised if those on death row were disproportionately not guilty vis a vis those who committed capital crimes but did not receive the death penalty.
The thought process is usually: “I don’t want to die, therefore I should try to say and do whatever it takes to make them not kill me.”
You think a murderer sits in his cell and thinks, “Well, I killed Billy Lyons over a five dollar Stetson hat, so it’s only fair play for them to kill me”?
So, instead of making one person bear the responsibility for killing him, they must all share it equally? That sounds, um, odd.
To OP, I’d imagine it’s something like “I like me better, so you shouldn’t kill me.”
I expect you get plenty of people who kill someone but don’t really think of themselves as killers. Say some dumb 19-year old goes into a convenience store with his friends waving a loaded gun and shoots a bystander. In his mind, he only meant to use the gun as a threat, so since he didn’t really intend to kill anyone, he isn’t really a killer, see? Not like one of those guys who just kills because he likes it. They are the real killers.
A rational person would say that if you go into a store waving a loaded gun, there’s a good chance someone is going to get shot, but it seems a certain percentage of the population lacks a strong sense of cause-and-effect. The car ran off the road and hit a tree just because I was texting while putting on make-up? How could that happen?
This is my thought as well. How much justification is really needed to support “I don’t want to die”?
Okay, but once again, I wasn’t asking about what they say in court or to a judge/jury to try to get out of it. I was asking what they actually think. Or, what they say privately to friends/cellmates, again NOT what they say in a legal arena.
Just cause they’re murderers doesn’t mean they murdered the guy in question.
Why wouldn’t they think “I don’t want to die”? I don’t see why you think people need to justify the most basic human feeling?
[ul][li]It wasn’t my fault. If he just had given me the money, I wouldn’t have had to shoot him.[]It wasn’t my fault - he dissed me.[]He wouldn’t stop crying. I didn’t hit him that hard.[]I had to shoot him - otherwise he would have arrested me.[]It wasn’t my fault - the gun just went off.[/ul]Regards,[/li]Shodan
They think, “I don’t wanna die.” Why is that so hard to understand?
They think, “I’m so sorry I killed Tommy, but killing me won’t bring Tommy back to life.”
They think, “Fuck Tommy for making me kill him, and getting me into this mess! What an asshole! If he were alive, I’d kill him for what he’s done to me!”
They think, “Man, I definitely shouldn’t have got drunk the night after I killed Tommy–then I wouldn’t have been pulled over by the cops and they wouldn’t have found the blood all over the car.”
It’s fairly rare, but sometimes they think, “Boy it was fun killing those prostitutes. It’s too bad the cops caught me, but if I can somehow beat the charges I can start killing prostitutes again when I’m free.”
They definitely don’t think, “I killed another human being, therefore it would be hypocritical of me to defend myself against the death penalty. I may be a murderer, but I’m no hypocrite, therefore I will go quietly to the gallows.”
Why is it so hard for you to believe that murderers aren’t wracked by their guilty conscience and so they meekly accept whatever punishment society decides to give them? If they were the sort that would be wracked by a guilty conscience over murder, they probably wouldn’t have murdered in the first place. So your typical killer typically has an atypical moral code. And even a typical person who feels remorse over killing someone still doesn’t want to die. They’d rather live than be consistent. Funny how that works.
So you want to discuss the reason why one person would oppose the death penalty but without mentioning any of the reasons why people oppose the death penalty?
Without going into any of the reasons why I am opposed to the death penalty, I am. There are other people who arrive at the same conclusion, maybe for the same reasons, maybe for different reasons.
If I, or one of those those other people who believe like I do, were to murder someone, why should our reasoning about the death penalty change? We’d still be against the death penalty for the same reasons that we were against it before we murdered someone. I’d mention what those arguments are, but you don’t want to debate the death penalty.
Now, if someone who is in general for the death penalty kills someone and doesn’t think they should be put to death, I’d say that they have a much harder argument to make. Even then, they could reasonably argue that the death penalty be reserved for [class of murderers they don’t fall into], although it might be hard to distinguish that from a belief that they are special.
I didn’t know this. I never deal with capital cases (I work solely with juveniles) but I can’t imagine anyone waiving jury on a capital case anyway.
Criminals are notorious for not taking responsibility for their actions. Granted, when it comes to something like a murder that they acknowledge committing, it would be hard not to take ANY responsibility, but enough to believe that they deserve to be killed for it? Not likely.
The truth is that crime victims very often DO have some experience being offenders also. I’m not talking about sociopathic serial killers, which are rare, but your typical guy who shot someone in the course of a drug deal or something like that. You can see where it would be easy for him to tell himself that it wasn’t all his fault, and that the victim and he were both willing participants in the situation, which could have just as easily turned out the other way.
It’s a sensitive thing to even talk about because I certainly don’t want to sound like I’m blaming victims, but it’s true that that type of situation is very common and criminals are disproportionately likely to be crime victims, too.
It tends to happen in particularly heinous cases, either because of the shocking circumstances of the crime or if the victim was a child, when defense counsel are concerned that a jury of average joes would become angry and vengeful. Three judges who’ve “seen it all,” the thinking goes, are less likely to react this way. In any event, three-judge panels are far less common than regular juries in capital cases here.