I don’t believe this is a fair characterization of every individual who has been executed.
A fair number of nations, including our own, have demonstrated that dangerous individuals can be successfully incarcerated for their entire natural lives.
See “eye for an eye” justification.
I’m not sure what the relevance of McVeigh’s arrest record has in justifying his execution. Typically, that would be viewed as a mitigating factor. Additionally, McVeigh had plenty of reasons for his act and was very willing to discuss them publicly. You may not feel it justified his act, and neither do I, but they were reasons that quite a few people (who aren’t killers) can understand.
As to what purpose it served to keep him alive, well it would serve to demonstrate to the international community that we are more serious about human rights than we claim to be, along with several more ethically evolved nations.
Given the cost of conducting a capital case, dealing with all the appeals, and incarcerating the convicted creep during all of that time, it turns out to be cheaper to give him a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Anti-recidivism: the death penalty is the ultimate anti-recidivism punishment. You simply cannot kill someone, or commit ANY further crime, once your are dead. We impose the ultimate anti-recidivism punishment because the crime we fear you will commit “again” is a crime so bad, we dislike allowing you even the possibility of committing it.
Didacticism: we hope with the punishment by death to teach potential criminals that such crimes are not things you should do in a society. This is slightly different, though linked to
Prophylaxis: we attempt to provide a strong enough deterrent so that someone thinking of killing someone will stop for fear of suffering the death penalty.
Revenge: society feels outraged that the crime has been committed, and wishes to see that “justice” is done, which, when examined honestly, usually boils down to wishing that the perpetrator suffer some harm of nature similar in gravity to the crime committed.
There are some other factors involved; when I was in law school, we studied nine different reasons for having punishments for crimes.
Please note that I am not commenting in favor of or against any of these reasons, nor am I offering commentary on the effectiveness of the death penalty in accomplishing any of them.
Please also note that anyone who attempts to assert that there is something inherently bad about the “revenge” aspect of the death penalty should examine the fact that almost ALL punishments for criminal activity involve some measure of societal revenge in action. The death penalty is simply a matter of extreme, and to question the “revenge” aspect is really to get mired in discussing not whether to hire the hooker, but how much to pay her.
Removing from society those individuals who have shown they are a grave danger to the life of innocent citizens.
Killing is killing and life is life. Are the soldiers in Iraq (or the pilots in bombing raids) any different than someone (or society) that pulls a switch or presses a button on a convicted murderer? If you are OK with any justification for one person making a choice to kill another, opposing the death penalty is ridiculous.
No, I believe it’s a lot more complicated than that.
I’m cautiously in favor of the death penalty for serial killers and the like, when there is zero doubt about the person whom committed such atrocious acts, and with recent forensics technology like DNA testing, that window of doubt has become extremely narrow.
But only for people like Richard Ramirez, Gacy, Dahmer and their ilk. I do not believe that people like that can be reformed. People whom kill as a crime of passion (say, catching your wife in bed with another man) certainly shouldn’t be put to death. Severely punished, yes, but not the death penalty. There was a cause behind their action, as unlawful or immoral as it may have been. Serial killers are just fucking crazy.
Even some cases of premeditated murder can have mitigating circumstances (a wife plotting to kill and then murdering her abusive husband, for instance) and also do not deserve the death penalty. Life in prison, perhaps.
Violent crimes against children are a whole other ball of wax. Anyone whom rapes and/or kills little children (and can be proven beyond any reasonable doubt to have done so) I think deserve the death penalty.
I don’t have any trouble with the purposes of the death penalty. I do have some trouble with the application of it, given human fallibility and its rather permanent nature.
OTOH, someone wrongly imprisoned for life can’t have his or her life back, either … but at least there exists the chance that the wrong could be discovered and corrected while there is still time.
As for cruelty - I’m not so sure that imprisonment for life isn’t worse. If I was clearly guilty of some crime that would justify the death penalty, I’d certainly prefer being killed to life behind bars - that strikes me as a living hell.
Here in Canada there is no death penalty, and that lack does not bother me.
“justified” in the sense that it serves (edit: an appropriate) purpose or reason? no, i don’t see the justification
“justified” in the sense that it’s been deemed just? clearly it has in the United States
all I was suggesting in my response to you is that “killing is killing and a life is a life” is an overly simplistic analysis which fatally taints your conclusion that if you find justification in taking one life you are being logically inconsistent in not finding a justification for the death penalty.
basically, i’m suggesting your analysis was crapola.
I think that, historically, the death penalty evolved as an alternative to individual revenge killing.
A society in which, if (you think) someone killed your brother or raped your daughter or stole your cattle, you hunt them down and kill them, is replaced by a society in which you take your case before the authorities, they investigate, and the offender is publicly executed. This is in many ways an improvement, and may have been the only practical way of dealing with people who were a mortal danger to their neigbors when imprisonment was impracticable.
Sounds reasonable to me - by offloading the desire to revenge-kill an offender onto the state, who has a certain objective quality to it, you enhance the respect for the rule of law and you provide some consistency . But the time for this has come and gone.
This whole post is formulated in “logical” language, but:
I can’t see how “eye for an eye” is an argument. It is a postulate, at best an opinion. It cannot be an argument or justification. If you want to justify death penalty, you will need to come up with something it does to society, some effect. “Eye for an eye” cannot serve as a justification, it is just an action.
I do not understand the “balance” thing. Who says that “balance” is needed, how is this balance defined, why do we need it, and what is its purpose?
Even if one admits that stronger crimes need stronger punishment, I cannot see the conclusion that the strongest crime needs the death penalty. This is presented as a logical step, I can’t see why.
The whole post is formulated as a sequence of logicial conclusions where I can’t see any.
I guess it depends on how bad you think a person has to be before they forfeit their own right to life. Yes, some people say “never” when it doesn’t effect them. Or when their relative is the one being accused of murder.
If their relative was killed by someone who had served 15 years for murder and who was paroled, it might change their tune.
Aren’t there people (and I use that word loosely) whose crime(s) are so heinous that they shouldn’t be allowed to live. How about child killers? Google “Lattie McGee” and read the story of a 4 year old child who was tortured to death, his own skin torn away from his body, no square inch of his body left unspared by his mother and her boyfriend. The state who will house, clothe, and feed these monsters for the rest of their natural lives claimed they did not have the money to provide a proper burial for the victim. How can anyone say a life in prison is punishment enough for that?
Joel Steinberg is now a free man. His illegally adopted daugher Lisa is dead by his own hand. Where is the justice in that?
Whether or not it is “enough” is not the question when it comes to whether or not to institute the death penalty. So far, this thread has done a good job of avoiding a descent into the argument that surrounds the validity of the death penalty, but you appear willing to take it there, so here goes:
Simply put, if killing intentionally is wrong, then it becomes no more right to do it in the name of the state. Regardless of what some person has done, taking their life is no more “right” than the taking of life they have themselves committed. It doesn’t become any more right simply because it’s done as punishment, or because it has legal due process controls on it.
And, the death penalty suffers from one other important difficulty: the possibility of erroneous application. This is not some minor, virtually never likely to happen chance, either. Enough people on death row have been exonerated by subsequent evidence to make us quite chary of accepting that the mechanism of “due process” is sufficient to avoid error in the death penalty. If you are going to make an error, wouldn’t it be better to make an error that leaves a person alive, than one that kills the person, and you find out about it later?
You don’t think that taking the life of an innocent person is worse than killing a killer? I am definitely not saying kill all killers, nor do I say kill until it is definite that they have killed either heniously or repeatedly.
But in a few individual cases, there are people who are such monsters that nothing short of death is justified, either because of their acts or because it is the only thing that will keep them from killing again.
I have yet to meet a police man or anyone in law enforcement who doesn’t believe in the death penalty for some criminals. Ann Rule, who knew Ted Bundy while he was committing his serial killings, defended him for the longest time until she finally realized that she was defending someone too monsterous to live.
It is absurd to suggest that the death penalty is the only way to ensure that a person will not kill again. I’m sure you understand how incorrect that statement is.
Face it: the main reason for your support of killing certain people is that you believe they “deserve” it as a penalty for what they did. That’s nothing more than state-sponsored revenge. We’re mad at you for having been a heinous person, so we are going to kill you for it. Morally, that’s repugnant to many people in this country, and the rest of the world.
That is technically true, in the sense that you can put them in a hole and never let them out.
Lovely, an anti-DP’er with a self-righteous streak a mile wide. I’m sure we’ll be getting many thoughtful, well-considered posts from you which are not at all ad hominems, yes sirree bob.