None. But especially not treason. If people die as a direct result of an act which is currently classed as treasonable, then prosecute them for homicide of whatever level is appropriate.
This is clearly motivated primarily by retribution, as is most of what you say in defense of the death penalty, which is precisely why so many are against it.
But I’m curious. Here’s a partial list of the company we keep in executing citizens:
China. Iran. North Korea. Yemen. Saudi Arabia. Libya. Syria. Somalia. Sudan. Laos. Pakistan.
Among first-world nations, only Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore actively executive their citizens. The numbers of executions in those countries, it must be said, are very few.
The list of nations that have at abolished the death penalty overwhelmingly dwarf those that actively executive people. A partial list: England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, South Africa, Russia, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Uruguay, Peru, and I can go on for a total of 95 countries that are against it.
Why do you suppose, those of you who think the death penalty is peachy, that among nations that retain it, a majority of them are oppressive or third-world regimes. Why is it that the most stable, civilized, and free nations of the world are overwhelmingly against it?
How so?
None
All killing of human beings is unethical.
My response doesn’t follow directly from the OP but here goes:
The death penalty is a deterrent, if more crimes had stronger deterrents, less crime would be committed. For examples looks towards the eastern/middle eastern countries. Off with your hand for stealing…GREAT deterrent!
Jail just isn’t what it used to be. Could jail be enough of a deterrent? Possibly but a whole host of things would have to change. Hard work is not cruel and unusual. Basketball courts, beds, reading materials, all things to do in ‘leisure’ time’, not exactly the best deterrent while serving time for a crime.
So two things to fix the current crime/jail system:
- Make jail and actual deterrent (hard labor, little free time, little to no amenities)
- Kick all of the possession, paraphernalia (marijuana related as a start) out of our over-crowded jails
To answer the actual question:
Child related sexual abuse, Rape, Serial Killings, cop killing (don’t really see that as more important but I can see the reasoning for it), Treason (it would have to be a biggie though)
We can’t enforce it fairly, so none.
That seems like a self-defeating argument. If looking to the eastern/middle eastern countries we see examples of people getting their hands cut off for stealing, surely that shows that it is not all that effective a deterrent, given that people are being punished in that manner?
IOW, if it was effective, wouldn’t we have no examples to point to?
Absolutely none.
However… I’ve always sort of entertained the idea of allowing lifetime prisoners a choice for ending their life via assisted suicide. There are too many problems that could arise from that idea (such as the possibility that they were forced into saying “yes” that that system could be too easily abused) that it’s no longer a legitimate option.
For once, I’m in complete agreement with Bricker. Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy? 
If it works and is applied fairly. Do you have a cite for any of that?
Prisoners already work, or at least many of them do. This is really a separate debate and I don’t want to take this thread off track, so I’ll try to put this in a balanced way: there are at least two ways to interpret the above. You are seeing this as an indictment of a prison system that has gotten soft. Other people view it as evidence that a lot of people live in such poor conditions that prison is an improvement or not a major step downward from their lives outside of prison, and that these people lack the skills to live outside the prison system (and do not gain those skills in prison).
As far as “leisure time” goes, I believe it’s because boredom creates chaos. You’ve got a bunch of bored inmates, many of them dangerous criminals – you don’t want them getting violent. It keeps people sane.
In an ideal world, a world where we can know for sure that a person did or did not commit a crime, I would be OK with executing murderers. We can’t let them go and there is no good reason to lock them up forever and pay for their upkeep.
In the real world, no.
I guess a lot of people have a lot more faith in the legal system than me. It may be a good system. It is certainly not a perfect system.
For “normal” death penalty crimes (murder, violent rape) (as opposed to exceptional things like mass killings, wartime treason), I think that the death penalty should be applied only in cases where the defendant has been convicted of at least two independent incidents in two independent trials. The chances of a totally innocent person being wrongly identified and convicted in two totally unrelated cases is one I can live with (assuming that they are truly independent each with its own evidence and so forth… ie, the fact that he’s already a “convicted murderer” from case 1 not being used to influence case 2 in any way).
Let’s see some citations for these assertions.
If I were murdered, I would not want the person who did it to receive the death penalty. Some people carry cards in their wallets that state that. I would feel the same way if a member of my family were killed.
What you said doesn’t make sense to me. I care so much about murdered people that I don’t want to contribute to the murder of even guilty criminals. I have known both murdered people and murderers. I think that anyone who wants to take the life of someone else might want to reexamine the quick judgment of someone else’s morals. We have become used to being the country of execution. We are a killing country. We are also Number One in crimes per capita.
I see this sort of argument a lot, and I have to disagree with it because I think it’s conflating the concepts of morality and justice. They are often correlated, but they are not the same thing. For instance, it is illegal to steal, however there is the common moral dilemma of stealing bread to feed a starving family. While some may or may not agree with it, there is a moral argument to be presented for it. Similarly, there are many numbers of behaviors that are legal but most would consider immoral like lying, cheating, and that sort of thing.
To that end, while it may or may not be practical or cost effective, the idea of the death penalty in my mind is that it is in some cases the only way to achieve justice. And so, if we are to be a society that holds up justice as a virtue then we must enforce the death penalty in those cases.
To that end, I think it’s also fairly easy to determine situations in most cases to determine when it is applicable. That is, the punishment should be proportional to the crime. It is certainly barbaric and vindictive to over-punish, like a 20-year jail sentence of possession of drugs or chopping off a hand for shop-lifting or whatever; to do so would tip the balance against society. At the same time, under-punishing results in a cost-benefit incentive to do crime and fails to act as a deterent and tips the balance in favor of unrule. Thus, we should strive to do the best we can to achieve that balance.
We as a society generally establish an idea of how serious crimes are and, for the most part, most punishments are in line with how society feels about their seriousness. However, to avoid being barbaric, rather than using an eye for an eye method, we try to establish it through an equitable trade of another right. To that end, even those who are guilty of violent crimes typically are punished through some removal of their right to freedom through imprisonment or their right to property through fines or various other rights.
And this is where the death penalty comes in. Life is necessarily the most valuable right; in fact, it is at least as valuable as the sum of all other rights as, without it, one cannot exercise any other rights. To that end, no crime that doesn’t involve the infringement of another individual’s life should ever result in it, but by the same term, anything that does end the life of another is impossible to balance out with the removal of even every other right an individual has. As such, a case like murder necessitates the death penalty to achieve justice.
Of course, one may argue that in some ways, one could consider life imprisonment to be a harsher penalty, and so why shouldn’t we prefer that to death? First, even in prison, one still has plenty of rights and experiences that the murdered will never be able to achieve. But, more importantly, just as we shouldn’t chop off the hands of a thief as it is a harsher penalty, that same logic would argue that life imprisonment is, in fact, equally barbaric as it not only fails to achieve the balance, but adds additional suffering on top of it.
It does get much more difficult to consider in cases where the rights of more individuals is involved, as it is difficult to quantify exactly how much of a lesser right it is worth. For instance, a case of espionage may result in no deaths, but one might argue that it puts the lifes of millions of others at risk and so that balances out to necessitate the death penalty. But that’s a difficult matter to contend and I think it really depends much more on a case by case basis.
Now, there are of course practical concerns, and I can even agree with the idea that without certainty that one is guilty of such a crime that the death penalty should go through. But, again, this is a case by case basis. If we have someone who is on tape committing a crime and confesses to it in open court, does any reasonable person have doubt that they deserve the appropriate penalty? Why should that be different when the penalty is death than if it is something less? At the same time, for practical concerns, I can see in somewhat more hazy cases where there may remain some doubt about intent or whatever that one may be unwilling to do so, and I can agree with that. I don’t, however, think that that is enough reason to outlaw the death penalty in all cases.
And so, specifically to the OP, I can definitely say any murder with intent to kill or in the process of committing a crime. Crimes of passion or accident or insanity may likely deserve a pass. At the same time, I think attempted murder deserves it as one should not get a pass simply for incompetence on their part or resilience on the part of their intended victim.
Larger crimes, like treason and espionage and such are much more difficult. To that end, one might even be able to argue that those who were knowingly responsible for a significant chunk of the economic downturn and so adversely affected millions of families might, through the sum of all that, could theoretically deserve the death penalty. But, again, these are much more difficult and I honestly haven’t put nearly as much thought into them.
As the prosecutor said, if we are going to have the death penalty in Texas, if this crime isn’t a fit for it, then nothing is.
I knew all the people that were involved. I knew the two sisters who were murdered. I knew the father and son murderers. My mother dated Dennis about 5 years before the murders took place. She left me and my sister alone with him and he did some pretty twisted shit to both of us. He sexually molested both of his daughters, one for many years. He sexually molested a 16 year old girl with a beer bottle before slashing her throat.
He maintained his innocence until the very end. Seconds before being executed, he confessed.
I don’t know how anyone in their right mind could read about the murders of the two sisters, age 16 and 9, and not think that justice was served by executing this guy. They should have executed his son, too.
People who personally know victims or perpetrators of crimes are generally not in their right minds. That might be your problem.
There’s people who think that killing people is always wrong, that killing people unnecessarily is always wrong, and there’s people who think that executions increase the murder rate. What he did or did not do is irrelevant to all of those positions.