This is a trivial reading of the moral situation, though. What matters are the specifics, not Ideological Purity. It comes across a lot like a fundamentalist saying that if you don’t accept that the Bible is inerrant, you don’t believe in the Bible. Someone who believes nearly everything in the Bible is correct but who disputes (for example) the historical reality of Daniel is a lot closer to a fundamentalist than I am.
Edit: to rephrase: Bob wants the death penalty never to happen. Jerry wants the death penalty almost never to happen. Janice wants it to happen all the freaking time. It makes no sense to put Jerry and Janice in the same camp.
That is the nature of the death penalty; if you oppose it, then how many state sponsored murders are too much? It is a nonsensical question. Once you (again, generic ‘you’) accept that there are cases, however exceptional, that it can be applied, you support your government applying it. The threshold has been crossed. A world of difference between believing that it can *never *morally be applied.
On Jerry and Janice, it seems fairly uncontroversial to say that two people who support the death penalty, support the death penalty. It’s 1 = 1. That’s the only camp I put them into.
Perhaps we’ll have to agree to disagree on this point. When zero is SUCH a special case as it is here, the gap between zero and one is far greater (ideologically speaking) than the gap between one and one-hundred.
Your parenthetical comment is all that matters here. I’m not especially interested in ideology in this, or most, cases. YOu and Mr. K come across as fundamentalists on this issue to me, and I don’t know how to debate with a fundamentalist position.
I understand there’s a difference between “this kid is insane” and “this kid is legally insane”, but I do want to point out that you can have a very well-thought out plan to kill someone and still be insane. At any rate, in my state of Colorado…
You’re right! I can continue trying to convince you why I believe what I do, but I can assure you my stance on this won’t change. We’re probably arguing past each other by this point, but allow me one last try.
I would be for the death penalty if absolute truth were knowable in the courtroom–but it’s not and never can be. Videos and photos can be doctored, DNA evidence can be tampered with or adulterated (even accidentally), lawyers can hide the truth by mere technicalities, witnesses can lie, defendants can provide false confessions to cover up for family members or friends, etc. The burden of truth to support execution is far too high for humans to be capable of meeting, now or ever.
Thus, I’m dogmatically certain that the death penalty is wrong in not just this, but all cases. It’s not just because someone is losing their life, though. Killing is wrong, sure, but that’s not the whole reason. As wrong as murder is when perpetrated by an individual, state-sanctioned murder (with victims that have been proven in the past to be not-guilty on *far *more than one occasion) is a heinous violation of the social contract. It is the only punishment that is truly undoable and non-compensable. If we mistakenly jail the wrong man for 5 years, we can release and compensate him and apologize if/when acquitting evidence is discovered. For people we’ve killed, that is not possible. And even if we accidentally imprison the wrong man and he dies in prison 25 years later, we don’t have his wrongful execution on our hands after the fact.
Further, and more to the point, I’m convinced that there is a larger gap between permitting the government to kill zero people and one person than there is between permitting the government to kill one person and 500 people. The right to not be killed wrongfully by the government trumps… everything else. I cannot think of a more fundamental human right. And given that we can never be 100% certain of a person’s innocence or guilt (particularly for events at which we, personally, were not present–armchair executioners take note), we can never be 100% certain that we’re killing the guilty person. A good society wouldn’t perpetuate such barbarism.
The only answer is to eliminate the death penalty completely; anything else, and you’re patently endorsing the government’s right to wrongfully execute people. There’s no way around that. If you think it’s okay for the government to execute 1 person, then you *necessarily *think it’s okay for the government to engage in wrongful execution. That’s why the 0->1 gap is so much larger than the 1->500 gap, you dig? Whether you think it’s ok to wrongfully execute just one person or 500 people, you’re still supporting wrongful execution. Someone who is completely anti-death-penalty, however, is not. The distinction between supporting wrongful execution or not is much more significant than the distinction between supporting the wrongful execution of a few or of many.
If this doesn’t convince you, I’m sorry we couldn’t see eye-to-eye on this issue. Wanna grab a beer and forget all about mass murder?
I agree with some of what you wrote, but all these statements seem unsupported to me, and I disagree with them. There are some cases in which the burden of truth is able to be met. There’s nothing that makes death-by-state particularly worse than death-by-random-asshole (assuming similar conditions of, and leading up to, the death). The gap between anti-death-penalty and anti-death-penalty-in-most cases is much smaller than the gap between the mostly-against and the bloodthirsty. Endorsing a much rarer death penalty does not endorse the government’s right to execute people.
You realize that the person who drinks a single beer in their lifetime is functionally equivalent to a raging alcoholic, right, and they’re nothing like the teetotaler at all?
You really need to be hit with the “Insane =/= retarded” stick a few more times. Let me know if you don’t understand why I say this and I will explain it quite politely and clearly, in spite of how insulting and profoundly ignorant your statement was.
As for the OP: No. I always oppose the death penalty. Not because it’s unevenly applied, expensive to defend, or that it presents the risk of an innocent death, but because I believe everyone can make a positive contribution to society, even if that contribution is only as a lab rat that provides much-needed insight into the minds of violent people. I think capital punishment is hypocritical on its face (killing people is wrong, so we’re going to kill you); non-productive (it doesn’t unkill anyone); and morally lazy. So much easier to just kill someone who confounds our sensibilities than it is to try and understand why they do what they do.
This. There should be certain cases, cut and dried ones such as this, where if he’s found to have knowingly planned what he did in expectations that people will die, that end in the death penalty. Full stop. No lifetime of appeals.
Someone said this in another death penalty thread (and maybe in this one; I haven’t read the whole thing yet): The reason I oppose the death penalty is not because I haven’t seen a heinous enough crime yet. I oppose it because I think it’s wrong, no matter how depraved the crime.
And on THAT note: because most death penalties are never followed through, I would get rid of it just to save money. Life in prison + appeals, or just life in prison? No-brainer, there.
I don’t like the idea of a death penalty in any circumstances, but admittedly, it’s not a logically, well-thought out reason so much as an instinctive aversion. To think that we as a human species think we have such moral intelligence that we can determine who deserves to live strikes me as wrong. Even if someone else acts out in such a way, I don’t think that action merits a response in kind.
I DO, however, support euthanasia, because I think each person should have the liberty to decide for himself whether or not to continue living. So if Holmes were to request the death penalty, then I would not have an issue with punishing him in such a way.
I’ve already explained what the requisites are for using the insanity defense (i.e. proving the defendant did not know what he was doing was wrong), and at least one lawyer agreed with this interpretation. Please by all means, enlighten us with your profound wisdom as to what it really means.
I don’t understand why you’re so sure that the insanity defense cannot be used, though. You said there’s no way a man who was in a Ph.D. program, booby-trapped his apartment and obtained a bunch of weapons would not know that what he was doing was wrong. I’m not sure what the correlation is. Can’t someone have the intelligence necessary to understand weaponry, explosives, etc. and simultaneously lack the capability to understand that what he was doing was wrong?
Now granted, I’m not necessarily saying there’s enough proof to confirm that he did not know what he was doing was wrong. But I don’t understand how you can so confidently rule the option out based on a display of intelligence that, as far as I know, doesn’t have much to do with distinguishing right from wrong.
I’m not arguing that with you. The law is what it is and I haven’t taken issue with it here. My only issue is with your equating crazy with stupid. So, again, do you really equate crazy with stupid? Because if you do, you need to be disabused of that opinion–and while doing so may take profound patience, it doesn’t really require a lot of wisdom.
So let’s revisit this thread in a few weeks here. Because if Holmes goes the insane route, then the prosecution can’t use their shrinks to examine him. Not here.