Well personally, I’d prefer the money in our justice system go toward preventing and reducing crime not obtaining retribution. The attitude of the U.S. when it comes to issues like this is just Neanderthal…and the rest of the civilized world sees it that way. In the U.S. being “tough” on crime (or drug abuse) is better politically than being effective against crime or drug abuse.
Like I said in my previous post, I wish everyone who argues here for the death penalty was sentenced to 1 hour hard labor having to explain our criminal justice system to a Dane. (I don’t even favor it, and I’ve already had to serve my time!)
Thanks to those who have come up with names of probably-innocent people who have been executed. However, I will continue to point out that it is a Catch-22 to be put in the situation of having to find an innocent person who has been killed: If they are discovered to be innocent while alive, they don’t get killed. And, interest in having any sort of formal enquiry about their innocence usually wanes once they are dead. Add to that the case that I reported where there is a move to try to test after-the-fact and it is being resisted by the state involved. Finally, there is the sort of circumstantial evidence that comes about by the fact that some who have ended up going free have only had that happen for quirky reasons…like the person in the documentary “Thin Blue Line”. Even after that came out, it was quite a fight to get the state to grant him a new hearing.
In short, you have to be in willful denial to believe that innocent people aren’t getting executed in this country! So, we throw the question back at you once again, death penalty advocates, what is an acceptable ratio of guilty to innocent in the execution process?
Did anybody bother to read the rest of my post, or did you stop after the first sentence? The point of my post was, in fact, contained within the remainder, and the opening sentence quoted by other posters was simply to state that the death penalty is not about deterrence, so I was not going to deal with that aspect of the OP. The point was to examnine the system and severely restrict the circumstances under which a convicted felon receives the death penalty. I do not believe it is an inappropriate measure in some very exceptional cases, and possibly it should only be allowable at the Federal level, not the state. Review of such cases should be extraordinary, and involve more than one judge.
BTW, Fear Itself, much as I enjoy LOTR, I do not use it as a philosophical guide to dealing with the modern world. It was a wonderful fantasy with a very black-and-white morality. Besides, are you suggesting that we escaped murderers their freedom because they might do some good action in the forseeable future? If you read the books, as I assume you did, you might remember that it was Gollum making his way to Mordor and tipping off Sauron about Bilbo & the Ring that accelerated the whole war process, resulting in a rush job, a hasty, damaging war, and the deaths of tens of thousands. Had he not, the matter would have likely been quickly and quietly resolved by Elrond & Gandalf, with Sauron never knowing the Ring had even been found before it was destroyed. So it isn’t a very good argument even by those terms. but that’s another thread.
lucie, sorry…Although I did choose to quote your line about retribution, you were not the primary person I was (or should have been) venting at. In fact, I have sometimes wondered myself if there could be something like a higher standard for imposing the death penalty…like “beyond any doubt whatsoever” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
In the end, though, I just don’t see that this is likely to be all that practical AND I don’t see why it is important enough to have a death penalty that we have to work our butts off to try to find a way where there is essentially zero likelihood of an innocent person being killed. And, also this doesn’t solve the “equal protection” problem of the way in which the death sentence is not applied uniformly across, e.g., different races of people. (Too bad our Supreme Court who seem to have recently discovered the importance of “equal protection” when it comes to making sure Bush wins Florida didn’t seem to find it relevant in the death penalty case a few years ago when they were presented with hard statistical data of the bias in applying the death penalty!)
MGibson. Polio? That was a virus, eh? And what about flu season, you know they give shots for that, right? They match the latest mutation of the virus.
Anyway, haven’t been a part of this thread since the beginning.
I think that the death penalty should probably be kept. There are some reform issues, and of course the whole “It costs more to kill a man!” thing is crazy. You can cite me all day. Life sentences can get just as many chances for new trials, appeals, and so on. I did a ton of reasearch on the subject two years ago and I found many reasons for reform, not abolishment.
The point of the death penalty is two-fold. One: retribution, plain and simple revenge. Kill the bastard. Unless you are some peacenik hippie I don’t want to hear one word about it. Innocent people were killed in Germany, too. Should we have not gotten involved in WWII? The law is there to punish; force is there, sometimes, to kill. Whether in large-scale justice or small scale justice the end is the same.
The second point of the death penalty is something a poster brought up earlier, that they aren’t worth society’s time. We don’t want them. They are completely detrimental to our existence. Kill them.
Now it all becomes a matter of practice. Here I will support everyone: we need some reform to the system. It is very loose right now. Some states give life sentences for crimes that other juries have handed down the axe. We need a more objective basis for its application, but I don’t think it should be removed altogether. I don’t want to support a Dahmer or a Gein(sp?).
If you think that we have cured either one of those things you are, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid. There are a limited but nontrivial number of polio cases every year. Hell, people still get bubonic plague in this country. All we can do with viruses is fend them off.
I see. Everyone gets vaccinated? I didn’t know that.
If we merely “fend them off” then there isn’t a cure for anything, including bacteria. Not to put too fine a point on it :wally
But then, we were talking about the death penalty.
So the government, which apparently can’t get anything else right, can get this right where innocent people’s lives are on the line? In this case, my friend, you have more faith in our government than I do!
By your reasoning, we shouldn’t send anyone to jail. After all, they might be innocent, and the way the prison system works, they may be killed inside, or at least deeply psychologically damaged. Certainly they have lost a chunk of their lives, probably their friends and family, and the chance to ever go back to anything like the life they had before. If they do get out, they don’t get a hell of a lot of opportunity to do anything but become a career criminal, whether they were one to begin with or not.
I see no reason it should be unreasonable to keep the death penalty, subject to heavy review and strict Federal guidelines. The knowledge that their cases would come under such intense scrutiny would cut way down on the number of death sentences passed, even if it was to be permitted at the state level. Knowing that Big Brother was going to look at every aspect of the way a case was handled would be a huge incentive to avoid even a hint or misconduct, laziness, or mishandling. There’s your deterrence right there (aimed at the courts, not criminal in this case). I do beleive there are certain cases where there is no shadow of a doubt about the guilt of an individual, and a few of those are sufficiently horrendous that that individual should be killed quickly and painlessly. These are the cases I am talking about, not the ones built on casual evidence, represented by incompetent lawyers, and tried in Texas backwaters. And no death sentence should be unscrutinized by an outside judge or panel of judges with no connection to the original judge.
The system is screwed and needs to be entirely dismantled and rebuilt if it is to work. As administered today, yes, it should be gotten rid of, and nobody executed until such a time as a working system of review can be established and see to all the existing cases (sure, that means a lot of them will die of old age before the backlog is caught up, but since it should not exist instead of the appeals process, they are no worse off than if their sentences were commuted immediately to life with no parole).
Okay, I guess I’ve belabored the point long enough.
Lucie, I don’t really think we disagree on that much. If you are so gung ho on keeping the death penalty and you want to go ahead and put into place protections to seriously prevent innocent people from being killed and it being applied in a biased manner, I won’t try to stop you. It will make the expense difference between killing and imprisoning for life even greater than it is now, but hey, it is still not much in the grand scheme of things.
I may even support this as the best I am likely to get in a country that seems so intent on keeping the option of killing those that society think did things deserving of death. I personally am not really an anti-death penalty absolutist. I.e., I do not believe a priori that there are no circumstances under which someone should die for what they have done. I just think as a practical matter it is simply not worth it…not worth the expense, and more importantly, not worth the danger of making a mistake, which unlike imprisoning someone, is completely irrevocable (although I admit you are right that being in our prison system can leave you with irreversible problems too…still taking someone’s life is still somehow the ultimate irrevocable act IMHO).
Analogy Police! aynrandlover! Come out with your hands up!
Fighting a war is nothing at all like executing a criminal! That’s ridiculous. It would be a far closer analogy to say that sending troops in to stop Hitler’s boys was like sending the SWAT team after a gun-toting nut on a shooting spree. Execution is more like if we took the soldiers we had captured or who had surrendered, interred them in prison for a decade, then took them out and slaughtered them.
I have serious misgivings with a moral code that believes that the ends justify the means. Certainly, I’d happily use a melon scoop to revoke the birth certificate of someone who harmed one of my daughters. Revenge is very emotionally satisfying, even vicariously at times. But I think it’s unwise to consider public policy based on my base emotional reactions rather than study, reason, and forethought.
Everybody says that the system needs reform. People want it to be faster, cheaper, and more foolproof. The problem is that it just isn’t practicable with any formula we’ve managed to devise. There are plenty of folks who wait in jail for many years before the evidence that proves their innocence comes to light. “Swift” to them means “death.” And “cheaper” means less investigators, fewer chances to clear themselves, and shoddy representation.
In a perfect justice system, one where guilt or innocence was determined with certainty, would I support a death penalty? Sure. I do think there are people who have relinquished their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness through their actions. But given the cobbled together procedures we have in this country, I’ll pass thanks.
While the question of innocent people being put to death is certainly a cause for reexamining the death penalty, I believe that the central issue is the paradox contained within the process. We say, in effect, to a person convicted of murder, “As a society, we feel SO offended by the act you committed, that we are going to commit the same act.” If murder is so foul when committed by a citizen, why does it lose its status when committed by society? I believe that some people have done such horrid things that we should lock them up and keep them away from society from now on - forever. It will be the penalty they pay for their crimes, and it will keep us safer. But killing someone is our ultimate crime, so we should refrain from doing it when we have the chance.
Ptahlis (sorry if it is misspelled, its on the other page and my server is too slow, you know who I mean) the war analogy is exactly correct. Germans are wrong, kill them now. We don’t need no stinkin’ investigation.
I don’t like to think that innocent people get killed. I don’t want innocent people to get killed. But I also don’t want to support these bastards. Cable tv, free food, a fucking college degree?!!? I had to PAY for my damn degree.
Its bullshit. They stepped over the line and did not respect anyone else’s life. Why should we respect theirs? It isn’t a question, CC, of “two wrongs don’t make a right.” We’re putting a guy down who doesn’t belong here. His very essence is detrimental to existence. To keep a guy like this alive is injustice to everyone he killed. Yes, it IS revenge. Plain and simple. If there is no chance of reform, why keep the guy alive? That is compassionate? So he can write letters to people, get interviewed on 20/20? Have a fan club? Sorry, I don’t see it.
In the end, if the only way you’ll accept something is if it is perfect we’ve got an impossible journey ahead of us. Businesses would go under, our legal system itself will collapse. There is a call for reform to make the system better. Perfection is an illusion, in this case. Short of dictatorship or monarchy the laws are always going to be a little flimsy, and some people on both sides (good and bad) are going to slip through the cracks. Innocent punished, and bad guys getting off. To point to this and say “See? We can’t use the death penalty!” I return, “See? We can’t use the law at all!”
I definitely do not feel the ends justify the means. I hope I have never said anything leading anyone to come to that conclusion. I feel the problems with the death penalty are in its application, not in its existence.
I see no reason it should be unreasonable to keep the death penalty, subject to heavy review and strict Federal guidelines.
I see one. If we did what you suggested, the cost of execution would be even greater than it is now. That’s millions and millions of dollars which could be spent on education, healthcare, improvements to law enforcement, or other things that would be far more beneficial to society. But it seems you’d rather we spend the money to satisfy your lust for revenge.
“We say, in effect, to a person convicted of murder, ‘As a society, we feel SO offended by the act you committed, that we are going to commit the same act.’ If murder is so foul when committed by a citizen, why does it lose its status when committed by society?”
But couldn’t the same argument be used against imprisonment? After all, we as a society forbid people from locking up other people against their will, so how can we as a society turn around and lock people up against their will? How can we protect liberty by taking it away?
Or fines? We also forbid people from taking other people’s money and property against their will, so how can society do the same thing as punishment? How can we defend the sanctity of property by taking property?
I’m not necessarily defending the death penalty. It’s just that the hypocrisy argument (how can you punish murder by taking a life?) isn’t the best argument against it.
You and I obviously view WWII completely differently. In my mind, we went to war to stop the Nazis in the middle of a crime spree, not to punish them after it was over. Certainly there was an element of making them pay for their crimes (revenge), but primarily it was so those crimes would not continue. If it were merely a revenge motif, we’d have just wiped them completely off the map, shooting every last soldier. With regards to our system of justice, once you have the criminal sitting in solitery, you are at the point in war where your enemy has surrendered and been disarmed. At that point we do not simply euthanize the opposing force.
Do I enjoy paying for the bloated prisons and the murderers getting degrees? Hell no! However, when it comes down to it, it’s just more damned expensive to kill felons than it is to house them. When people talk of streamilining the appeals process, that jeapordizes the lives of innocents awaiting execution. So the question becomes one of whether I would rather abolish the death penalty and save a few bucks, keep it as its current level of expense and risk, or set up a death penalty system that is cheaper to implement but results in a greater risk of killing an innocent. All told, I’ll take getting rid of the death penalty altogether. I save a view bucks and I don’t have to worry that someday the state will strap me or mine down on a table waiting for the poison.
Society may put them to death but society did not murder anyone. Killing another human being is not automatically a murder. For example self-defense isn’t called murder.
Murduring someone is the ultimate crime. Killing someone isn’t always a crime and sometimes it is even the right thing to do.
However I do believe there are valid reasons to be against the death penalty or at least concerned about it. But “its wrong to kill” isn’t one of them.
Robodude, lust for revenge is an highly personal matter and if I felt it toward someone I’d be the first person lobbying for their release so I could get my hands on them. But vigilante justice is another thread and has no place in this discussion.
By making it so difficult to even qualify for a death sentence, I suspect the cost would go down as there would be far fewer people on death row and executions would become rare and extraordinary. Only a certain types of crime should qualify, and the evidence would have to pass a very strong smell test before such a sentence could be considered the first time. The problem is in the existing administration, not in the existence of the death penalty.
If a single emotional sound byte is the best you can come up with, don’t bother. This is GD, in IMHO. If you have a real opinion, state it and back it up.
If we could set up the system such that people could be executed at a cost per person equal to or less than what it costs to lock someone up for life and eliminate(not just reduce, eliminate) the possibility of executing an innocent person, I would have no problem with the death penalty. But until we figure out exactly how to do that, we shouldn’t be using it.
I had said that we shouldn’t kill someone if we can avoid doing it. I know that killing in self defense is an “acceptable” killing. So in that case, I would argue that it is unavoidable. In fact, if there were another way to defend one’s self in the face of an attack, then I couldn’t condone the killing. However, in the case of deliberating over what should be done with a criminal, killing him is avoidable, and so something else should be done. I see no hypocracy in suggesting that incarcerating or fining a person is acceptable, but being incarcerated or robbed is not. I think it’s possible, and advisable to make the distinction between being robbed as an unforseeable and unpredictable event, and commiting an act which has, as its known penalty, a fine. Taking money from someone is not, in and of itself, good OR bad, but the context does make some difference. Premeditated killing is wrong, and no individual nor any state should partake in it.
