The cites I’ve listed, that show actual crime statistics versus you know, personal anecdotes based on a handful of murders you heard about as a young man, show that it’s nothing like a 100% deterrent. The stats in general show either a negligible difference or just the opposite, depending on whose study you’re looking at.
Did you even bother looking at the information I posted? Have you bothered to look at correlations between FBI and Vital Statistic Departments’ compiled murder statistics in DP vs. non-DP states? The data I’ve seen doesn’t support your theory of deterrence at all.
Here, I’ll even give you another cite so you don’t have to scroll up.
Even Erlich’s studies, which are often used by pro-DP people to cite a deterrent effect doesn’t really show a strong correlation. From the same cite I just listed:
Ah. I see. So, in other words, no, you blithely ignored the actual fucking facts I posted, in favor of a handful of personal anecdotes and an appeal to emotion. Boy, you should be in politics. :rolleyes:
You do know that a majority of stranger-murders (that is, murders where the victim and perp did not previously know each other) are not prosecuted as pre-meditated murders, correct? That is, quite a large number of them are considered “impulse crimes”…robberies gone wrong, the criminal panicking, etc.
Ah, what the fuck, you haven’t bothered with facts yet, why start now? Appeal to emotion and vengeance! Woohoo! I’m executioning like a motherfuck!
You honestly think any of these perpetrators are thinking about the consequences of their actions when they commit their crimes? I think you’re livin in a fantasyland, bud.
Do you beat your child to teach him not to hit other children? I ask again, how do you teach people not to kill by killing them? I ask again, have you ever found “do as I say, not as I do” to be an effective teaching tool?
Have you ever been in prison? How about a maximum-security prison? You think life in prison is easy?! DYING is easy, life in prison is a fuckin’ bitch.
I’m all for Truth in Sentencing. Life without parole should mean just that. The only way you leave those bars and walls is in a coffin. But, imo, the Death Penalty is obscene, and has no place in civilized society. I saw the bullshit in “do as I say, not as I do” when I was 5, and I haven’t gotten dumber since then.
Of course, these are just anti-DP arguments based on refuting that there is a deterrence rate. You want to try some of the other debates/arguments, we can go that way too.
Pick one.
The staggering number of overturned capital punishment convictions on appeal? The theory that it’s virtually certain we’ve executed people who did not commit the crimes they were executed for?
The inequality of the DP’s application, the racial disparity in capital punishment applications?
The sheer scale of incompetence by both lawyers and the courts in a not-insignificant number of DP cases (the defense lawyer who slept through his client’s trial, and the federal judge who decided on appeal that defendent did not actually have a right to a lawyer who stayed awake through his trial being one of the most obscene in my offhand-memory)?
The sheer economic cost of execution versus life imprisonment?
You want revenge, it’s your right to go ahead and ask for it, I suppose, but don’t dress it up in terms of deterrence, it’s probably cheaper to kill em than keep em locked up, we don’t get these cases wrong, etc. Because the facts aren’t on your side.
Convicts on Death Row can escape too. Should we deny them their lawful right to an appeal so we can kill em faster, so there’s no chance they can escape?
Here’s my suggestion with respect to the death penalty: I think that we (the State) should be able to put to death anyone we determine guilty, however, if it turns out that the person put to death was indeed not guilty, then the prosecutors, the judge, the cops, and the jury should all be convicted murder, and the prosecutor should be given the death penalty. Strictly for deterrent reasons, mind you.
I hate all of this “soft on crime’, “soft on criminals” crap that the pro-death lobby throws at the anti-death crowd. I’m not soft on crime; I just don’t think the State should be in the business of vengeance. Let’s just throw some Christians to the lions while we’re at it. We are supposed to be above this barbarism.
Personally, I am against the Death Penalty. You know why-- all the things listed above.
However, in certain rare cases, I think that society needs to kill in revenge. To purge. To balance the books. Monsters who savage little children to death for short-term personal gain should be destroyed.
Yes, they are entitled to a fair trial with competant representation. Further, these special cases should be doubly- and even tripley-scrutinized. If their guilt is determined and they are found to have been sane at the time, they should be wiped off the skin of the world.
What about people who are wrongly convicted and sent to life in prison without parole? If spending the rest of your life in prison is worse than dying (in your opinion), is this somehow "better’?
A system which cannot help but send innocent people to life in prison cannot be defended as just, right?
not to speak for Dio. but, he failed to put (IMHO) the ‘obvious’ line “w/o ability to correct the action”. a sentence can be corrected (obviously one does not regain the time spent incarcerated, but the person can be freed), but once executed, there is no possability of ‘correcting’ that wrong.
(yes, some one can die in prison immediately after being sentenced and not have that available remedy, however, the DP precludes any potential remedy for “oops”)
do you not see a substantive qualitative difference between: “availability of potential correction for errors” and “no availability of possible correction for errors”? no one guarentees the success of any particular avenue, but when there ain’t even an avenue, do you not see that as a significant difference?
Surely you’re kidding. Of course it’s better to be alive then dead.
This ranks right up there with perhaps the dumbest thing I have ever heard regarding the Death Penalty. By your estimations, why don’t we just kill everyone instead of imprisoning them?
I can’t decide if you’re foolish, or facetious, but either way this is stunningly stupid.
Of course it’s better to be alive, but Dio said the advantage of prison over the death penalty was to make people suffer for a long time.
So you’re innocent, and have spent 50 years suffering, knowing every day that you could have had a family, travelled the world, fallen in love. You’ve suffered. Yet the death penalty is “too fucking easy”. Sure, no way to know you’re never getting out, just like there’s no way to know that a innocent person might be executed.
I was just disagreeing with the crystal clear absolutes some here see.
I’m against the DP for a great many reasons, but if this were instituted I’d be much less shrill about it. However, we’d have to be sure that the independant group is well-insulated from politics, emotions, and public outcry. I’m not sure that’s possible.
Well and good, but you’d need to have more than just a belief. I am of the opinion that if we are going to put people to death for purposes of deterrence, then we had better make sure that deter it does. Not ambiguously, in a horoscope, Magic 8-Ball, could-be-interpreted sort of way. We would need to have clear, unambiguous, black-and-white, beyond a shadow of a doubt, real-world proof that it deters. Watertight real numbers that a child could understand. So far such a thing has been as far from forthcoming.
I can certainly understand those in favor of it. After all, in the weeks after the murder of my father, I would carried out the death sentence myself.
What I don’t get, is those that say, “I’m against the death penalty in most cases but guys like this deserve to die”.
Basing the idea of the death penalty on the heinousness of the crime to me is not logical. Guess what? Every murder is heinous to someone. There is no nice way of killing someone. Weather I hold Angelina Jolie on top of you so you are smothered by her breasts or if I gut you alive and decorate my aluminum Christmas tree with your internal organs, you are still dead.
Then there are people that get ‘special protection’. For instance, killing a Police Officer is an automatic death penalty in some areas. Why? Why isn’t the death of a school teacher as important. Or a clerk? Or a homeless guy?
If we are all equal before the law, then why are some people more valued? If two men standing next to each other fired guns and one shot and killed a cop, and the other a homeless man, do you think they would both get the same punishment? What if they were on opposite sides of town? They wouldn’t.
To me, a person should either for or against the DP. If you kill a homeless person or the President. If you kill someone drunk driving or if you empty a machine gun at a daycare.
Whether you are a white person killing a black person or a black person killing a white person, it shouldn’t matter, but in the real world it does.
Prison escapes are rare.
Life without possibility of parole is the correct sentence.
The death penalty is not a deterrent.
It may actually cause violent crimes.
Heinousness has nothing to do with it.
Being willing to kill people in the name of justice is not strength nor is locking them away weakness.
No, it isn’t. And it isn’t. But (in my mind, at least), it isn’t about strength or weakness. It’s not about revenge or rehabilitation or even about preventing more crime. It’s simply about the fact that some people deserve to die, and sooner rather than later.
We will have to differ on whether killing a child is worse than killing an adult.
In retrospect, perhaps we simply define “evil” differently. Inflicting long-term harm on the innocent as a means for short-term gain or gratification is as close a definition as I have at the moment. And I feel that evil must be put down whenever it is encountered. The brutal killing of a young child is the ultimate long-term harm of the innocent for short-term gain. So, in my mind, those who do so are the most evil, and they must be erased from this life.
But it is the sorting them out that is the problem.
It’s more evil to kill a child than an adult?
So, if I kill a 100 year-old man, that’s practically not a crime?
The thing is, you will protect what you hold most dear and precious. Death to those that destroy what you like, and life or maybe 20 years for killing people you don’t care for so much.
Nothing ambiguous about it. It’s common sense. Just as common sense says that any form of punishment has a deterrnce factor to some degree. Whether that is enough to compensate for other factors that would increase the murder rate is not my concern. I don’t see anything wrong with ending the life of those who commit such crimes. As I said before, they deserve nothing less.
“If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, we have killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers, and doing so would in fact have deterred other murders, we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This, to me, is not a tough call.”
John McAdams - Marquette University/Department of Political Science
*