Because emotional arguments are manipulative, and they don’t address the merits of the position. And, if we’re getting down to facts, pretty much no sentence deters crime, and I don’t know of any that brings people back to life.
No list speaks for itself. Ok, Iran executed over 252 people. Why did they execute them? Did they do so because the people executed killed people, or did they do so because the executed guy had sex with another guy or because they said, “You know, I don’t want to be Muslim anymore.” I think that makes a difference.
The reason that a country like China, or North Korea, or Iran is a bad country that Americans don’t want to be associated with isn’t because they execute people, but because they’re totalitarian dictatorships that don’t guarantee basic rights of due process, democracy, religious freedom, freedom of speech and so on.
Lets look at it this way. Lets say France brings back the guillotine (I know they won’t, but go with me here). Do they all of a sudden become a totalitarian hellhole?
What a ridiculous thing to object to. He has the same opinion as you, apparently (if that’s what “not particularly in favor of” means, which really who the fuck can say), but without the craven pandering to the status quo, and that makes his statement asinine? Christ, I would hate to live in your world.
I don’t know, if you kill 223 people a day, I think that would really deter crime, though I know I don’t think it would in any way justify it. I mean lets be serious, we would be down to only the insane and the truly desperate committing crimes with that sort of execution rate and today’s crime solving methods. We would also be killing what? 60 innocents a day with our current record of convicting the wrong person for the crime, but within a few years, I think you would have to see a real drop in crime if a society was willing to be that horrible.
Yes, I do not like the current system of capitol punishment that we use. But I would not be against a more streamlined version for 3 times convictions as long as we reformed other major areas of our system with it. So no, my position is actually far from the absolute position taken by others and stated by kaylasdad99.
More likely you’d see an escalation in crime, namely an escalation from ordinary crime to terrorism/guerrilla warfare, given that it would mean that you’d be systematically killing people for being poor and dark skinned. You aren’t going to deter people from crime via punishment who don’t believe that the system punishes people for committing crime instead of for race or being poor. You will however panic them and convince them they might as well take some of the enemy with them.
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So no, my position is actually far from the absolute position taken by others and stated by kaylasdad99.
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Yeah, an opinion for which you called him a stupid person, which was a ridiculous position to take. “You’re not smart enough to support capital punishment!”
By the way, the phrase you’re looking for isn’t “not particularly in favor of the death penalty.” It’s “in favor of the death penalty.”
It sounds like most of their executions are for murder, major drug offenses, other violent crimes, or sexual abuse of children. Religious crimes, treason, and sodomy are also punishable by death.
Yes, that’s the idea. The argument was never ‘these countries are bad because they execute people.’ The point is that at this stage in history, most democracies have realized that the death penalty is wrong. Most of the countries that haven’t gotten to that point are countries that don’t give a shit about human rights. Thus
That may be true. What it would really encourage is mass emigration.
See, that reflects a bias, though. When you say, “Most democracies have realized that the death penalty is wrong”, you’re working under the assumption that the death penalty IS wrong…that it’s something self evident. Since I don’t agree with that, the argument doesn’t convince me. You’re assuming what you’re trying to prove.
Except for the fact that the judicial process involves actual judges, juries, and executioners - all of which are separate entities. You’re on the right side (IMO), but your argument is fucking terrible.
I thought we were discussing Capital Punishment, not Capital Deterrence. You don’t execute someone in order to stop other people from committing crimes, you execute someone as punishment for the crimes that person has already committed. The only person you are trying to deter is the person you are executing, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that Capital Punishment is 100% effective in that respect.
Nonsense. First, death penalty supporters all the time try to claim deterring others from commuting crime as a reason for it, including in this thread. Second, executing innocent people certainly doesn’t deter the actual guilty party. And third, it’s a false argument since they aren’t likely to be committing similar crimes anyway in the future whether or not you execute them; the Joker is fiction, in the real world escape from maximum security prison isn’t likely to happen once, much less more often.
We don’t execute people for deterrence or for punishment; if we did, we’d care more about executing innocent people. We execute people in order to get off on killing them. It’s a power/revenge fantasy, with emphasis on “fantasy”; we don’t care about actual guilt or whether the results are good, we just want to Feel Tough.
Remember that the death penalty consistently polls majority support in Europe. It’s probably more accurate to say that most citizens in those countries believe that the death penalty is not wrong, but do not care about it enough to advocate for its reinstatement.
