You do know that this is naive bullshit? You DO live in a society where people are “being killed right and left over nothing by morons who have no fear of the consequences,” to the extent that they’re being killed left and right.
Do you really think that anyone who’s in the state of mind to commit a murder *really *stops and debates with himself, “hmm, if I get caught, I might get convicted, and I might get the death penalty. Better wait till the bleeding hearts have there way; I wouldn’t mind life in prison at all.”
If anyone about to commit a murder thinks they’re gonna get caught, aren’t they more likely to think in terms of figuring out a smarter way to commit the crime? But that’s beside the point; how many murderers think, at the time they’re committing the murder, that they’ll ever get caught? That’s just not the way the human mind works. It’s also not how actual fact works: the death penalty has been proven time and time again NOT to be a deterrant to murderers.
Add to that the kind of people who are probably murderers to some extent because they don’t give a FUCK what consequences are.
The only people who think the death penalty is a deterrant are people who’d probably never commit a murder in the first place.
A pity we don’t have such a country. The US certainly isn’t it.
Seriously, how many times do we have to tell you this before it sinks in? Compare crime rates, and especially murder rates, of the US with those of other Western democracies that have no death penalty.
I really can’t see how any reasonably intelligent adult can believe this. It bespeaks a worldview that is incredibly naive, to say the least.
When you choose to murder (using the legal definition of murder) or violently rape, or torture another person…you CHOOSE to forfeit your life. That the ending of your life happens to be carried out by the justice system is irrelevent to me, and it is not murder when you die, it is simply an inevitability, an extinguishment. You CHOSE it yourself, by the previous choice you made. If you don’t like the high price, don’t get your wallet out.
That’s all well and good, but it’s not that simple. First the defendant has to be proven guilty of this crime, beyond the shadow of a doubt, with all the necessary appeals. Even then, innocent people get executed. The process is not perfect, and while your thesis that the act of committing a violence crime should lead directly and naturally to the forfeit of the criminal’s life, it does not work that way.
Speaking only for myself, I am not against the death penalty because I don’t think that the world would be better off without certain people in it. I’m not against it because I wouldn’t want to kill the person who harmed someone I love. The problem is, the DP process in this country just doesn’t work. Justice is not swift or certain. The entire process that must spin out for a person to be executed is costly, fraught with flaws and the possibility for error, and takes roughly a decade. However that might aggravate you, it’s just a fact that if the state wants to execute people, the process for doing so will be complicated and involved. To do it any other way would undoubtedly lead to unacceptable miscarriages of justice.
Add to that the real possibility that the death penalty is being meted out in a racially inequitable fashion, the geographically skewed distribution of executions, and the fact that it’s simply not a deterrent, and I’m left with little reason to be in favor of it, even if I fervently believed in “an eye for an eye.” I think it would be profitable for people to distinguish between their natural desire for swift and proportional retribution and the reality that the death penalty process as it stands now just does not do what they want it to do and probably never will. IMO, that’s just as well, since the many quandaries the DP poses negates any value it might have for me as an instrument of justice.
Well, for one thing, with the exception of a few states there isn’t a whole lot in the way of capital punishment going on in the U.S. Too many courts for too long were loaded with anti-death penalty judges who would use any excuse they could come up with to thwart its application. (I recall one instance where a conviction and death sentence were overturned because the judge claimed the criminal had inadequate counsel. Why? Because the man confessed and the judge claimed no competent attorney would allow his client to confess.)
And during this time, many people grew up in a country without the death penalty and then once it began to be applied again they viewed it with abhorrence, which created a substantial support base for politicians and judges to continue to try to interfere with its application. During the time I grew up no one I ever knew of ever thought twice about killers getting the death penalty. It was only after it had been abolished that nationwide opposition to it seemed to grow.
Further, all death sentences were commuted when the death penalty was invalidated in the early seventies, and the country is only just now getting to the point where murderers of the last 10, 15 and 20 years have exhausted their appeals and are being put to death.
So there hasn’t been any kind of certainty to the application of the death penalty for over 30 years. And even now, states such as California have the death penalty on their books and they have prisoners on death row, but still they manage to find one way or another to prevent them from happening for the most part.
This, along with, in my opinion, the lethal injection method of execution, has resulted in a criminal population that is pretty much unconcerned with the death penalty. When people are tempted to commit murder these days, they aren’t very likely to be thinking it’s a given that they are going to be executed for it. When I was growing up, everybody was of the belief that if you killed someone, you “were going to the chair” and that was all there was to it.
This reminds me a business oriented radio program I was listening to once. The caller kept claiming that he should be able to acheive success in a certain venture because after all, he knew of someone else who did and if that guy could do it, so could he. The host kept trying to dissuade him, but to no avail. Finally, he said: “Look, I was in a plane crash once, and I was very lucky…I survived. Does that mean that if you’re in a plane crash you’re going to survive?” The countries you mention have vastly different national and societal histories than the U.S., and the answer to your question lies in the innumerable ways in which their histories differ from ours.
Well, I hate to sound like an old codger, but if you had lived in this country anytime up to the early to mid-sixties, you would very likely have felt just as safe here.
Precisely! I don’t view legal execution as premeditated murder any more than I view arrest and imprisonment as kidnapping. If you choose to break the law, you will be treated in ways that are forbidden otherwise.
Interesting question. I’m not sure how I’d view this.
It might be self-defense. However, you could argue that the inmate doesn’t need to kill the executioner. The executioner is unlikely to put himself in the position where he has to be killed in order for the inmate to escape the chamber. If the inmate produces a gun, for example, the executioner isn’t going to stand in his way.
You could also say that killing the executioner is not going to prevent the inmate’s death. It just means a delay while they find someone else to do the job. So the inmate couldn’t argue that killing the executioner was saving his life.
All that’s from a moral viewpoint, naturally. From a legal viewpoint it would be said that the executioner’s actions are sanctioned and licenced by the state and that the inmate has no legal right to defend himself against them.
But this is circular; you choose to forfeit your life because the DP exists, and the DP should exist because you choose to forfeit your life. Your argument is predicated on the existence of the DP.
This, I believe, cuts to the heart of the DP situation in America (I had a whole long post on this typed out, and it got et by a browser crash). Here’s my take:
What you blame on “anti-death penalty judges”, I believe is an inevitable consequence of the very nature of the death penalty. The judicial system can not help but recognise the utterly irrevocable nature of the punishment, and as such ties itself in knots trying to eliminate mistakes (which of course it can not). It therefore front-loads capital cases with appeal after appeal, in the hope that this will eliminate any possible error. I don’t believe that these appeals are any less fallible than the original trial, indeed often less so, given that several of the stages are limited in scope (after a certain point, I believe that even new evidence is not permitted, a fact I find mind-boggling). Note that this fallibility extends both ways; I believe that both innocent men will be sent to their deaths, and the guilty will have their sentences commuted, and neither is justice. I therefore believe that the death penalty in the US is performing a delicate balancing act. It can not exist on any scale large enough to be fair or just without collapsing under its own weight. If sufficient people were executed for the DP to be a “normal” and justly applied sentence, both the costs and the inevitable executions of innocent men would make its existence untenable. It thus potters along, existing between the minimum level at which it can possibly have any point and the maximum at which it can survive. Both are low, IMO.
Events such as the Illinois exonerations (again, uncovered by journalism students, not appeals) deal serious damage to death penalty support. An innocent man was within 2 days of execution when stayed, based not on the success of process, but on the actions of a group of students. He is now free. His stay was based not on new evidence, but on the basis that his IQ was too low to comprehend his punishment. He is not alive today because of the orgy of process we lavish on our death row inmates, but in spite of it.
This occurred in a period in which approximately 22 people a year were executed, on average. How can this be justice? What is the point of a system in which fewer than 1 murderer in 1000 eligible is executed? How can such a system have any conceivable deterrent effect? And if such an horrific mistake is possible, given such a low execution rate, what then are the chances that we will have an error-free system on the scale you seem to wish? If the death penalty represents justice, why then is it far more likely that you will be sentenced to death if you are a black person killing a white one (Cite)? Such crimes are vastly over-represented in the present death row population, and why? Is a white victim’s life worth more? It’s all very well to insist that murderers deserve to die (they probably do), but when one looks at the practicalities of the system, it becomes plain that death is not a tool we are capable of wielding.
I don’t see how such practical considerations can go unaddressed, and be overridden with blithe assertions that a murderer has “forfeited his life”, or that you’d rather be free of murder and rape than abolish the DP to feel superior (yeah, because that’s why other countries get rid of it). The DP does not free you of murder, and it is incapable of so doing without killing many innocent men. How many? Who knows. How many is acceptable? In my opinion, none. Since a perfectly valid alternative to DP exists (LWOP), to my mind there is no benefit to it beyond the emotional, weighed against the immeasurable cost of the state killing an innocent man.
Without some sort of cite I’m finding it hard to believe that this is all there was to it. It is my experience that “inadequate counsel” defences work extremely rarely, but I’ll be happy to take a look at a link if you have one.
Neither of the two countries I have lived in have the death penalty. I feel perfectly safe, despite the unpunished murderers you seem to be convinced are roaming the streets.
You are ignoring the central issue in this argument by pretending that there is no alternative to the DP. Living out the rest of your life in jail seems to work pretty well as a deterrent. I seriously doubt that someone who intends to commit murder really thinks: “What the hell, we don’t have the DP here, so I’ll just go for it”.
See my response to Starving Artist above. Now I’m scared to leave the house in case one of those unpunished criminals that my government encourages to repeat-offend might gleefully slaughter me with no fear of repercussions.
BTW, Abbie Carmichael? I think GusNSpot was using “enlightened” in an ironic sense in that post. He seems to be challenging “So, if this POV is so superior, how come Americans are not coming around to it.” Like I said earlier, the question is it’s NOT so obvious.
This sermon by a Presbyterian minister has some interesting arguments against the death penalty. But what led me to it was Gus’s question about the survivors of victims, and what they might want to see done. Because I recalled Dennis Shepherd’s statement at the sentencing of his son’s killer Aaron McKinney, and wanted to quote it here:
As lissener and Pastor Renwick have pointed out, there’s a very fine line between justice and vengeance. And I think that’s worth thinking long and hard about.
So, the substance of your argument here appears to be that, if we applied the death penalty properly, rather than letting those bleeding-heart liberals talk us out of killing the murderers, then everything would be OK. The only reason that the death penalty has failed to be a deterrent, according to you, is that it has not actually been used very much, but rather is there for show.
Well, why don’t we focus our attention, then, on the US states that actually use the death penalty, rather than just talk about it? In fact, why don’t we look at the one single state that accounts for over 35% of all executions carried out in America since 1977—Texas. Now, if there’s one place in America where you can be pretty confident that murder might get you the death penalty, it’s Texas. Admittedly, Texas’s penchant for frying the guilty has toned down a little bit since George Bush moved out of the Governor’s mansion, but they still execute more people than any other state, accounting for 12 out of the 41 executions conducted in the United States so far this year.
(Note: my source for this information is not some bleeding heart anti-death-penalty website, but the website of the Clark County, Indiana, Prosecuting Attorney. Indiana has the death penalty).
So, Texas knocks off its murderers at a higher rate than any other state in the country. Surely, by your logic, its murder rate should be among the lowest. But it ain’t. According to this table, Texas’s murder rate exceeded the national average every year from 1995 to 2002, except 1997 when Texas managed to tie the national average. Furthermore, of the states that have more murders than the national average, only a single non-death penalty state (Michigan) is in the group.
Actually, the countries i listed are very similar to the US in many important ways. Similar standards of living and of overall affluence and advancement, similar justice systems, etc. Sure, their histories differ in many ways, but if you think that these historical differences account for America’s higher murder rates, perhaps you’d care to explain exactly what differences might be the cause of this, and why such differences have led to higher murder rates in the US.
Exactly what is it about the United States that causes its rate of violent crime, especially murder, to be so far above the rates in other Western countries? Surely there must be some reasonable explanation? I mean, some people argue it’s because Americans have more guns, but you’re probably going to reject that argument. I suppose i could put forward the possibility that Americans are, by nature, just more brutal and inhumane than Canadians or Australians or Swedes or Germans, but i don’t really believe that to be the case.
Really? According to the US Department of Justice, homicide rates in the US in 1999 and 2000 were just over 6 per 100,000 (2001 spiked to 7.1, but that was due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks). Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, the homicide rate was consistently between 7 and 9 per 100,000. It dropped in the late 1940s through the 1960s, but i’m not sure how you can credit the death penalty with this result, given that the death penalty had also been in force during the higher murder rate period of the 1920s and 1930s.
More likely, the general prosperity and low unemployment levels during the post-war economic boom contributed to lower crime rates. Do you think it’s any coincidence that those crime rates began to rise again during a period when the boom was ending, oil prices skyrocketed, and stagflation meant that America was faced with a situation of growing unemployment combined with rising prices?
I’m not saying that this is the only reason for the rise in violent crime. All i’m saying is that it is at least as reasonable an explanation as your attempt to credit the death penalty with reducing murder rates. At the very least, unlike your own argument, my theory has the virtue of corresponding fairly closely to the statistical evidence.
Some people argue that the death penalty is good because they believe, from a moral point of view, in the concept of an eye for an eye. While i might not agree with the moral stance that these people adopt, i can respect the fact that we differ on the issue. The people i have less respect for are those who continue to argue, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the death penalty actually constitutes a deterrent to violent crime.
You are close to me here. I too think the DP has no real deterrent effect.
I do think it absolutely removes the possibility for a repeat.
But the thing I want to address is the cause of or the difference in countries.
If the DP has no proven effect on stopping murder, why are other countries so great? It is not the fact that they have no DP … right? Or is that the claim?
So… Lets look at the differences.
How many poor and uneducated are trying to cross their borders illegally?
Now many legal and illegal immigrants do they have per capitia per year?
What kind of health care? Are these countries equal to the care and at the same tax rate and cost of living on an ( cost an average xx hours work to buy a average gizzmo… ?) do they support their homeless and how? What is their ethnic mixes?
What exactly are the things that make them different?
Most of these ‘safe’ countries don’t have the dangerous places that you are afraid to walk in. Not because you don’t have the DP but because of being totally different places.
The whole mind set and ways of doing things of in AUS, CAN, GER, et all along with the other factors I have and have not mentioned make those comparisons a green and purple argument. ( I’m so tired of apples and oranges )
It is a sorta, “If you don’t have and never have had my problems, don’t go saying you got the answer to it all in one fell swoop.”
IMO, you can’t take history, location, attitudes etc. out of it…
No, you can’t remove history, location, attitudes, etc., from consideration. I agree with you.
And, to tell you the truth, i don’t think that those countries have lower homicide rates simply because they don’t have the death penalty.
But if all this is true, then surely the United States, in its attempts to reduce the amount of violent crime, would be better of examining the myriad other factors that might contribute to a high murder rate, rather than adopting the deluded approach taken by Starving Artist which argues that having the death penalty will, by itself, lead to a safer, more civilized society.
I believe it contributes to a safer, more civilized society. I will also say, as I believe should have been apparent from my posts to this thread, that I also believe in what you call “an eye for an eye.” You have ignored this aspect of my posts and tried to make it appear I’m arguing something that you feel more well armed statistically to rebut. I’ve said several times that I believe that if you deliberately choose to take a life, you deserve to forfeit your own. As it is now, you live out your days (provided you don’t escape and some judge or parole board doesn’t set you free) reading books and magazines, watching television, lifting weights, creating art, visiting with loved ones and getting three squares a day plus a roof over your head.
No way that seems fair and just to me. If you decide to deprive someone of a lifetime of experiences and enjoyment, you deserve to forfeit your own. I don’t understand why it is that people like you seem to find this concept abhorrent. It only seems fair to me.
Unfortunately I don’t have time right now to address all the questions you’ve posed to me. Although the answers definitely exist, they are complicated and multi-faceted and I just don’t have the time available now to go into them.
I’ve not tried to make your argument “appear” any way other than what it actually is.
The reason that i have not attempted to address your belief in the moral rightness of the death penalty is precisely because it’s a moral position that is not amenable to being swayed by rational argument or statistics. I’m willing to concede, also, that my moral opposition to the the death is probably also not amenable to being changed by rational argument and statistics.
But when you say:
then you invite an appeal to comparison, especially when those comparisons suggest that countries without the death penalty are indeed “safer” than the US, and that they are indeed places “where people aren’t being killed right and left over nothing.”
In fact, even within the United States, it’s quite clear that states without the death penalty have fewer murders, on average, than states that do have it. I noted in my last post that Michigan was the only non-DP state to have a murder rate higher than the national average over the whole eight years 1995-2002. Alaska (no DP) exceeded the national average in five out of those eight years. No other non-DP state even came close to the national average, and the overall murder rate in DP states as a whole was, in 2002, almost twice as high as the overall murder rate in non-DP states.
I’ll say again, i’m not arguing that getting rid of the death penalty in the DP states will necessarily cause the murder rate to drop; but evidence suggests very strongly that the presence of the death penalty, even in places like Texas where it is actually enforced with some regularity, does very little or nothing to discourage violent crimes like murder.
You’re quite welcome to your beliefs about all that, even your overly dramatic attempt to paint the US prison system as some sort of luxury hotel chain or health spa.
Just don’t pretend that your moral support for the death penalty can reasonably be accompanied by an appeal to its practical effect on the rate of violent crime and the creation of a safer society, because the evidence is strongly against such an interpretation.
I, personally, am not %100 against the death penalty in all cases. I am for the death penalty when it is common knowledge that everyone involved is clairvoyant, and can see the past with perfect knowledge.that’s a joke, son
No, seriously, I think it’s been shown that the DP is not an effective deterrent. The only two other rationales I can think of are pre-crime prevention, and vengeance.
There is no way I would ever agree that vengeance would justify even one false execution, ever, in the history of the world.
So that leaves us with the justification that if you execute someone, that person is never going to commit a crime again.
Now, if your ONLY two options were death, or life with parole, I would actually have to think about it, because you have to weigh unjust executions versus the extra murders that will be committed by those released.
On the other hand, if you truly have life without parole, there are still a few scenarios under which the “lifer” would be released.
– Political, legal, or societal change. I think that if we assume a revolutionary change in America enough that convicted lifers get free, well, we have worse things to worry about right there.
– Pardons or won appeals. I think that, while there should be fewer releases of violent offenders due to parole, I do not think the evidence should be sealed. If there is evidence that the lifer is not guilty, they SHOULD be set free.
– Escapes. This is the best argument for keeping the DP, assuming true LWOP. However, I think that the number of people falsely executed in the past 50 years has been far greater than the number of people killed by escaped murderers given LWOP. What say everyone else?
Well, I can see where it would appear that way to you. My appearing to invite comparison with other countries was not something I had in mind when I said what I did. What I was thinking of was the U.S. pre-death penalty abolishment vs. after death penalty abolishment. Regarding other countries, it’s apples and oranges. No true comparison can be made, as I’ve already spoken to. You can accept or reject it as you wish, but I’m not going to rehash it all over again.
As in all things involving societal thinking, these things take time. People aren’t going to go through life with the notion that it’s pretty much a given that if they kill someone they are going to pay with their lives until enough time has passed – and enough executions have consistently been taking place – for it to sink in and become part of the day-to-day thinking of the citizenry in general. As it is now, the death penalty is applied too sporadically and there are too many loopholes for anyone to feel anywhere near absolutely that if they kill someone they are going to pay for it with their own lives.
See above.
“Overly dramatic?”
First of all, kindly show me where any of what I said is untrue. There is no exaggeration at all. Everything I said takes place routinely in every prison I’ve ever known of.
And secondly, what about the person who was killed and had even these enjoyments taken away from him or her? I’m sure that if you could ask them, it would seem that a prisoner’s life is pretty good considering what they were left with. And unlike the case with the prisoner who put himself where he is, they had no choice in the matter!
If you will go back to my original post or two to this thread you will see that the moral aspect of executing murderers was the primary reason I had for posting. The “safer society” aspect was brought up later. Nevertheless, I can tell you from personal experience that the U.S., which had the death penalty and applied it consistently up to the sixties, was a much safer place then than it is now. Just last week, as a matter of fact, another convenience store clerk was killed here. He was fifty-five years old and had a wife and two teenage children. It was a neighborhood store in a residential area and he was widely beloved by the areas residents. He was killed by an eighteen-year-old idiot in a robbery that netted virtually “nothing.” And I would be willing to bet you virtually anything that you’d care to mention that the eighteen-year-old idiot has not gone through his life with the notion that if he ever killed someone he was going to be killed in return.