What if you gave the convicted criminal the choice-life in prison with no chance of parole or the death penalty. And I mean prison not see a shrink every day,sit and watch cable, and bitch that the prison food is not up to you dietary standards. And if you choose the death penalty it will probably be at the end of a rope or something else quick and inexpensive(for those we want to save money)
There are easy cases cases to prove and hard cases to prove. We all know of some of each. The problem is knowing which one you’re dealing with at any one time. The problem is knowing where the line is.
The problem isn’t in saying if this particular madman is guilty of something horrific. It’s in saying which particular madmen are guilty. Sure, we can all, millions of us, focus our attention on one crime and feel very confident about the verdict, but how many crimes are there? How much attention do we have?
Do we want penalties based on the best case scenarios, where a man sticks around for 20 years, repeatedly committing the crimes and is eventually caught? If most crimes were like that, I’d bet our justice system would run like clockwork.
I don’t understand this. If systemic abuse was wrong when he did it, isn’t it still wrong if it’s done to him?
Ditto killing murderers.
Show me one. (Well, I accept there were some cases of "legal lynching in the South in the old days, but find me one in the last couple decades.
Not that I doubt that Texas hasn’t screwed up a few times, mind you.
My only defence of the DP is to make sure he never kills again. Prison does not do this.
By convention, the reintroduction of the death penalty cannot be proposed (or discussed) in Parliament. It’s a while since I last read about it, but it’s my impression that the convention is closer in force to the prohibition on proposing the abolition of the monarchy than to, say, the Salisbury convention.
Furthermore, the UK is a signatory to the Sixth and Thirteenth Protocols of the European Convention on Human Rights, and, whatever else one might think of them, I doubt either New Labour or the Tories include being expelled from the Council of Europe among their foreign policy objectives.:rolleyes:
I do seem to remember some radio station getting an MP to promise to present a Private Member’s Bill on a topic chosen by the listeners - you can guess what idea narrowly won.:smack: (He never presented that bill, of course - there are limits to what one wants to sacrifice one’s political career for, and ‘promise made to a radio competition’ doesn’t usually make the cut.)
Toby (not a Brit, but sometimes awfully close.)
This whole thing is about the taking of a life - obviously. We all agree that it is morally wrong to take a life, and the more pain and suffering that is inflicted, the more wrong we believe it to be, and the more innocent the victim is, the more wrong we believe it to be. The more times that an invidual takes lives, the more wrong believe it to be.
But if the government tells us to kill people, for example, when involved in a war, or when duly appointed as guardians, or to kill someone who has broken our moral - and legal - code, we agree that it is morally acceptable.
One of the criteria we use to define mental illness is to judge how closely an individual complies with society’s mores. If a person kills another person, and particularly if he seems to have derived pleasure and to have a compulsion to perpetuate that behaviour (except, of course, in state condoned circumstances), we judge his compliance to be virtually nil, and therefore, logically, to be mentally ill. But if he is judged, in almost every other respect, to be in full control of his faculties, his deviance in respect of the sanctity of life is considered to be overriden, and consequently we judge him to be sane. If sane, we may kill him. If insane, we won’t kill him, we’ll imprison him.
I cannot see how that huge deviance can allow that person to fall in to the sane camp. Therefore, he shouldn’t be executed. Transgressors should be removed to a place where they cannot harm anyone again.
In the mean time, we should be working towards discovering what psychologically, socially, genetically - whatever - causes that deviant behaviour, and to finding a cure.
For me, the sanctity of life is paramount. Otherwise, we become, in some way, in some degree, like them.
But we all agree that if it is nessesary to take a life of a killer to save the lives of inocents, the policeman should pull that trigger. If we have some sociopath who we are 99% sure will kill again, given the slightest chance- why do we not pull the trigger to save the life of that innocent?
I think we’d all agree that to have a blanket rule saying there should be no restrictions on the taking a life would be as equally stupid as saying that there is no situation where a life could be taken. From that follows the dlemma that you (inadvertently) illustrate. 99%=OK, 95%=OK?, 80%=…you take my point. What degree of certainty is acceptable?
Another thing that worries me about what you have said is that it implies pre-empting the judicial system. One person, in the heat of the moment, decides whether another person should live or die. I’m uncomfortable with that. I appreciate that in life or death situations, the niceties of having a group discussion as to what action to take may not be possible.
Y’know, all this talk reminds me of Jack Unterweger. Released from Austrian prison after 15 years of a life sentence for murder, championed as an example of successful rehabilitation. Then he went on to murder 9 more people.
Eh…with all the talk about morality and certainties and the question of the question of personal responsibility, I still just get the feeling that the universe is just out to screw everyone, no matter what. 
The US of A has a similar case with Jack Henry Abbott
So?