In his opening statement, the defense attorney referred to the beatings, rapes, kidnapping, robbery, murders and arson as “events that got out of hand.” They were willing to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison, but the prosecutor wants Death. And I agree.
Ideally- Death followed by however long a Hell that God decrees.
I’d settle for life without parole, Annie-Xmas’s icky drink meal & MeanOldLady’s beating-robot.
A-X, MOL- we disagree on a lot, but right now, I want to marry the both of ya!
TriPolar- say it! say it!
Big man - quaking in my boots here. Good to see what your view of the constitution is.
If we’re not 100% certain, we can’t kill people. That doesn’t mean we can’t convict them, only that we have to respect the small possibility of error (and we have learned since the advent of DNA that that possibility isn’t really so small).
Yeah, but let’s make it a little harder. Instead of you, what if it was your son, your daughter, your spuse, your brother or sister? Would you be willing to sacrifuice one of your own “innocent” children for the mere satisfaction of an active death penalty (an institution which serves no actual practical purpose, I might add).
Thjis remains a red herring. I have made no assertion or suggestion that the errors happen by malicious design. I presume they are all perfectly innocent mistakes.
Unless you’re one of the mistakes.
If you want the death penalty, then you want a system that will guarantee rthe executions of innocent people. Calling it “sad” does not alter the fact that you want it. I think you’ll also have to go a long way to explain why there is any downside to NOT having a death penalty. The public is just as protected without it, and the possibility of recersing error is preserved.
The standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt, not “beyond a shadow.” That latter phrase is a poetic convention, not a legal phrase.
Youir suggestion that we lower the standard to a “preponderance of the evidence” is so preposterous, and so guaranteed to convict and kill even more innocent people that I’ almost at a loss for words. Do you have no moral center at all? The “preponderance” standard only means, “more likely than not,” and allows for massive reasonable doubt. It’s used only in civil lawsuits, not in criminal cases, and CAN’T be used in criminal cases, because the Constitution requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Why? Why should they have any choice in what happens to them?
So, you think that someone who steals clothing at gunpoint should be forced to be permanently naked? :rolleyes: The life they have is not the one they took from someone else. What you seem to desire is not restitution but revenge. You hurt us, so now we are going to hurt you back.
It serves society by (a) protecting it from those who would do others harm while (b) maintaining the integrety of our rules, instead of saying “killing is bad, unless we do it, in which case it’s okay, even innocent people who happen to have the bad luck to be poor and Black.”
I’m not saying it’s “cruel and unusual,” I’m saying it’s a double standard, it’s unethical, and it’s a punishment given disproportionately to the poor and minorities.
Please provide a cite for the percentage of life-without-parole prisoners in the past 50 years who have escaped prison and committed other violent crimes.
What risk to society? These people would never be released, even if they were surrounded with a nimbus of light and every religious icon they passed wept blood.
Your timeline is ridiculous.
No, they haven’t removed themselves from society. They have merely demonstrated themselves to be *a threat to *society. They are still human.
Quoted for fucking truth.
I ask you for the same cite as upthread: percentage of life-without-parole convicts who have escaped and committed further acts of violence. Prison violence is a separate issue and should be dealt with separately.
Our *entire justice system *is built on the principle that it is better to let a guilty person walk free than to convict someone who is innocent of that crime. If you don’t like it, you should work on rewriting our Constitution and legal system. Or maybe you could just move to a country that’s more in line with your values. Perhaps another country that still uses capital punishment, like China, Iran, or North Korea. Who could resist such bastions of freedom?
No, innocent people can breathe *exactly *as easily as if that person had been removed from society in another way. And every time the state *kills *a “guilty” person, innocent people have to wonder whether or not the person was truly guilty.
How is it suffering to not kill another human being? The only benefit to killing them versus locking them away until they die is revenge. And that’s not the job of the state, and it’s not a legitimate reason to kill.
People are not dogs. People are not tumors. People are people. We don’t get to pick and choose when to treat them differently, just because we don’t like them, or don’t like something they have done. Historically, when we have done so, it has been in the contexts of slavery and genocide.
The system you support is used to remove the “cancers” of those who are often too poor, or of the wrong color, to be treated like rich white people who commit the same crimes.
Your examples were all of reasonable doubt.
I understand that in countries without a death penalty, activists are targeting life without parole as being “cruel and unusual”. Not to hijack the thread, but if we didn’t have a death penalty, would you be as accepting of LWOP?
Um, no.
I can be for all sorts of laws and rules and systems, yet still hope to avoid the negative consequences of those systems.
And, while I can’t speak for Corner Case, I’m assuming that he or she is willing to live in a society with the possibility of being condemned to death for a crime he/she didn’t commit. Whether Corner Case is willing to “be one of the innocent executed” is, frankly, a stupid question, and I think you know that. Corner Case is willing to take the inherent risk of living in a society with the death penalty. I’d say that absolves him/her of any lack of “moral validity”. There is no special exception.
This is an incredibly important point, regardless of one’s stand on the death penalty.
It might absolve the person if the mistakes were evenly distributed throughout society. But they aren’t. A poor person is significantly more likely to be one of the mistakes on the altar of revenge.
Unless a person is in one of the groups more likely to be wrongfully accused, convicted, and executed, then by being willing to accept those errors, they are being willing to sacrifice other people at a greater rate than themselves. And that is lack of moral validity.
Yes. As long as there is a reasonable process for appeals, I recognize that some people need to be permanently segregated from society. I just don’t think that the way we do so should be irreversable, i.e., death. I’m sure the poor and minorities will still be convicted at a higher rate, but at least there’s a chance to correct the errors and salvage some part of their lives.
This needs to be emphasized and repeated.
If we could lock up the really really dangerous people, making sure they would never escape or have one second’s worth of enjoyment, I would not want the death penalty.
Ted Bundy became his own lawyer so he could gain access to the photos of his crime scenes, and dead bodies. He used them to jerk off in his cell.
If memory serves those two rabid dog tumor assholes are white. BTK is white. Ted Bundy was white. Albert DiSalvo was white. About the only serial killer/mass murdered I really remember that was black is Wayne Williams[Atlanta child Murders] Just a quick romp through crime library does show a couple orientals in California, and a tiny sprinkling of blacks. The majority of killers that I would see executed happen to be white. I will concede the not rich part though, not that many rich people in the US, though firmly middle class and upper lower class. A few homeless/vagrant whites in the mix.
What about Timothy McVeigh and OJ Simpson?
We already can do this, and we already do.
So what?
Because it would save taxpayer money and trouble? Seems reasonable to me. Hell, I see no reason at all to prevent suicide in most of the prison population. You’re a violent criminal and want to off yourself? Be my guest. Install security cameras if you’re worried about guards “helping” prisoners commit suicide. If you’re not in prison and want to kill yourself, it’s easy enough, after all.
You’re only talking about serial killers which are a tiny minority of those on death row. You see them because they are the most sensationalized, but for every white serial killer there are dozens of poor blacks and Hispanics you never heard of convicted of much more garden variety murders. A lot of thm are gang bangers and drug dealers and the like. Even the wrongly convicted are rarely angels, but that doesn’t mean they still can’t be wrongly convicted, and that’s where the chance of error and/or basic indifference in the sytem and by jurors is likely to show uo, One Crip with dreadlocks is as good as another. If he didn’t commit this murder, he probably did something else. That’s where the mistakes are made.
What about them?
I going to politely ask for a cite on that.
No convicted killer has ever escaped from prison?
So we can’t guarentee they will not have a second’s worth of pleasure. And I wonder how thw victims’ families felt about that.
Kind of disputes the black/white thesis of murder conviction and death penalty.
So you want to change the death penalty to only apply to really heinous crimes? Because you ignored pretty much everybody but high-profile serial killers. What’s your cutoff?
Good point. Of course, then we run into the problem that *nobody *is allowed to kill themselves. Not really fair to let someone convicted of a heinous crime off themselves and not a person dying of a terrible medical condition.