This is true, which is why I think it’s more cruel. You never know when it’ll be your turn, so you spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.
Indeed, it’s a population full of people that have demonstrated no regard for civilized behavior, and as such cannot be expected to do so in prison. After all, what are they going to do to a guy serving a life-without-parole sentence, throw him in jail? I’d rather die than spend the rest of my life never knowing who it will come from or what kind of abuse I might take getting there.
There’s a simple observational test for whether people prefer a life sentence or a death sentence and that would be the number of prisoners who stop the appeal process.
If the sentence never changes regardless of how high the stack of bodies grows then where is the incentive to stop? In for a penny, in for a pound.
Why would murderers want to leave a state as notoriously lax on crime as Texas? If I were inclined to murder, Texas would be my first choice of where to do it. After I did the deed, all I’d have to do would be to lay low until some poor schlub got arrested and executed for it, and the case is closed, never again to be re-opened. If I were to go to a humane state like Illinois, however, I’d never be safe: The authorities could take a second look at any time, and maybe this time they’ll catch me.
Can you not see how completely irrelevant this is to the point I was making? Apparently not.
Have a juice box and a cookie, and I will try again…
I am not commenting on the deterrence aspect of the death penalty or life with or without parole. I am simply saying that the glib statement that “a person executed never kills again” is utterly meaningless, because the possibility exists that the very existence of execution increases the number of murders that person commits. Therefore, the calculation that needs to be undertaken is a great deal more complicated than the idea that they will never kill again. The actual cost in lives of the execution is not simply one. It may be more than one. It may not be, but it is incorrect to presume the result of an individual person executed is that they don’t kill more than they would otherwise.
He’s also ignoring the fact that there are just more Texans who deserve killin’ than there are in other states. It’s just more satisfying to murder down there!
Insults in place of logic don’t really qualify as debate. I invite you to consume your juice and cookies by yourself.
And I’m commenting on the reality that dead people can’t murder other people which makes your statement wrong. I did this by posting the same “what if” scenery you used only in reverse.
While I have seen dead people sell stuff on commercials and they’ve been known to vote in Chicago I’m not aware of any of them murdering people from the beyond. The death penalty is the ultimate deterrent for committing additional crimes whether it is because people fear it more than prison or the lack of zombie vitamins it doesn’t really matter. It’s effective either way and the effect is cumulative.
I give up. You are right, oh wise one. Even though you failed completely to understand what I was saying, you must be right. Because it is a hell of a lot easier than educating you.
The lifers in prison are not the guys who are looking over their shoulder every day and living in fear. Prison lifers in for violent crimes usually rise up to the top of the food chain quickly. Many of them doubtlessly enjoy living in this primal environment where force is the only thing respected and those who are the biggest, strongest and most vicious are looked up to as role models.
People who talk about how cruel life sentences are, are making the mistake of looking at it through their own eyes instead of through the eyes of the convict. Of course prison life is going to be hell for a nice, polite, upstanding Air Force officer would never think of robbing a couple, raping the woman while her husband watches, and then shooting both of them in cold blood, for the sake of 40 dollars. For someone who comes from the hard life, who has been in prison or jail multiple times already, who has no respect for human life, who would do the kind of sick shit that people get life sentences for, it is nowhere near as scary and cruel-seeming as it is for the nice, friendly, kind, middle-class educated people who post on the internet about what is cruel and what isn’t.
I don’t get it. Why would deterrence be the only valid argument for the death penalty? Deterrence isn’t the only valid argument for other sentences, is it? And it’s not about bloodlust, if you mean just a general desire to be violent. Just like with other sentences, it’s partially about punishment. Does this solve a problem? Yeah, it solves the problem of them needing to be punished appropriately. Of course, solving less trivial problems might be other reasons for it. And what is so special about killing that makes it barbaric?
Why do you say that punishment, in itself, is necessary? Punishment is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But most of those ends are not served by capital punishment. One purpose of punishment is restitution: If you catch a thief, you make him give back what he stole, and perhaps more than he stole to make up for the thieves who aren’t caught. But that’s impossible for the kinds of crimes that get the death penalty: A murderer can’t give his victims their lives back. Another purpose of punishment is rehabilitation: Hopefully the criminal who is caught and punished will learn the error of his ways, and become a better person. But this is obviously impossible with the death penalty. Yet another purpose of punishment is the protection of the public. But escapes from high-security prisons are so rare that, for all practical purposes, the public is just as protected with the murderer behind bars as with the murderer dead. Finally, we have deterrence: If a person knows they might face a penalty for committing a crime, they might be deterred from committing it in the first place. Here, at least, it’s conceivable that the death penalty might have some value. But even here, the statistics don’t seem to bear it out.
My sentiments exactly. I don’t see particularly compelling arguments either for or against the death penalty on moral grounds. But given that you can always come up with an excuse why this or that person should not be executed (she’s found jesus, he’s too mentally handicapped), its probably just better to drop the whole thing. Plus it puts us in better company with the rest of the civilized world.
Well, the way I figure it, we have all sorts of appeal rights on the death penalty and we STILL manage to execute innocent people so I take the position that a death penalty will inevitably lead to state sanctioned execution of innocent people.
I don’t think that revenge is an adequate rationale for something that will inevitably result in the state sanctioned execution of innocent people, even if you end up killing a lot of guilty people, not when there are alternatives available for punishing those guilty people that does not involve executing innocent people.
So the ONLY rationale that justifies the death penalty is one where the state sanctioned execution of innocent people will deter enough other capital crimes that we as a society can look at ourselves in teh mirror after killing an innocent man and say, “it was for the greater good”
Regarding deterrence as an argument for the death penalty I just don’t get it. Perhaps I don’t understand the workings of the criminal mind. But it seems to me that someone who was thinking of the possibility of their getting caught and receiving the death penalty and decided that the risk was large enough that he wouldn’t commit the murder, would be intelligent enough to consider the consequences of being caught and spending the rest of their days behind bars and so still wouldn’t commit the murder. I imagine that the proportion for whom the difference between life imprisonment and death turns the tide would be vanishingly small.
I think the real reason that people are in favor the death penalty is as Xenocrates says, the gut reaction that certain people need to be punished, or in other words revenge/blood lust.
The arguments you hear death penalty opponents put out always seemed to be rationalizations of this underlying feeling. In the same way that those who oppose gay marriage try to say argue that marriage is all about children (despite the fact that they don’t oppose marriage of sterile heterosexuals) when in fact they are trying to rationalize homophobia.
I think you could apply that same logic to any lengthy prison sentence though. If someone knows that they’re going to be imprisoned for many decades if convicted of a crime they have plenty of incentive to shoot their way out, kill all the witnesses, etc., etc.
Shit, the notorious Jesse James Hollywood, of the film Alpha Dog, ordered Ben Markowitz, a 16 year old kid, to be executed after his lawyer informed him that he might face life in prison for Markowitz’s kidnapping. I don’t know how he thought he could ever get away with it. But obviously he wasn’t thinking rationally. He heard the words “life in prison” and he thought, “I’ve got to kill this kid.”
Perhaps my point does not deserve addressing but I must point out that this answer fails to address it.
There is no debate that the Western norms at the time the Constitution were that execution was not unusual and was not considered cruel, and that that was the assessment of the writers of the document.
But it has become unusual since. Norms change. Is it your position that it cannot be considered unusual today or at any future time, even if it is, because it was not unusual at the time the document was written?
As to the discussion regarding the putative deterrent effect of the death penalty - interestingly enough the United States has the death penalty, as does China, India, and several countries of the MENA region. Canada, Australia, the EU, all do not. Limiting just to Western countries compare the murder rates. Does the United States have fewer murders as a result of the effective deterrence of the death penalty? Or does it have roughly three times as many murders as Canada, Australia, and Western Europe? Need a hint?
How about comparing the murder rate in Illinois before the moratorium in 2000 and after? In the decade before it averaged roughly 1200/yr. In the decade after … under 800/yr.
Hmmm. Not much evidence for an effective deterrence is it?
Now I would not argue that a death penalty causes more murders, but to look at the evidence and conclude the opposite is unsupportable.
Justice is appropriately dished out by the state. Vengeance is not.
If some one broke into my house and raped and murdered my wife and daughter, I would want vengeance. I would probably want to kill the perp and maybe even torture him a bit first. But society would not allow me to do that. If I sought vengeance in that way society would, correctly, call me a murderer.
Putting the veneer of civilization on it by having the state do it for me to does not change what it is. Vengeance ≠ Justice.
Because the mandate of justice is that good is rewarded and evil punished. That’s something that goes beyond restitution, or rehabilitation, or even deterrence. You punish the guilty not just to help them (even though punishing them sometimes helps them) and not just to discourage other people from doing what the guilty did (although if that happens, that’s great), but because punishing the guilty is the right thing to do. It’s wrong that someone should commit a crime and go unpunished. It’s not about vengeance. It’s about justice.
The death penalty is about saying, "This thing you’ve done is so terrible, there’s no appropriate response; there’s nothing we can do to you that’s an appropriate answer to what you did except to kill you.