Why Tim McVeigh's execution was wrong...

[QUOTE]
***Originally posted by Jackmannii *
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Hmmm, When Manny says that you assume that Tison would have received the death penalty. You respond by saying that you said no such thing, yet in the next sentence you say that he was deserving of the death penalty. How is your saying that Tison was “deserving of the death penalty” any different than Manny saying “you assume Tison would have received the death penalty”?

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Hmmm again. Your initial post was a challenge for an anti DP’er to address the Tison case. Manny takes the challenge and you backtrack. And FTR, the comparison of the Diallo case to the Tison case works in this scenario. Most killers in prison (hell, most prisoners) don’t escape, and most cops don’t shoot unarmed people.

Was Manny harsh in his response to you? Yes, some of his comments were unnecessary. However, that doesn’t change the fact that his rebuttal to your challenge was logically sound.

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by jab1 *
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jab1, these are noble ideals, but policy generally has tradeoffs. No innocent person deserves to be executed. No innocent person deserves to be murdered by an unexecuted murderer, or because the DP would have detered his murder, but it wasn’t used. We can’t have it all.

This point was dramatized in The Cold Equations, a 1954 short story from Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. I still remember reading it. A description from the web says:

A site that discusses this story in much detail is http://www.tiac.net/users/cri/coldeq.html

People should be bound by cold equations only when there is absolutely no alternative. THAT was the message of that story. (I’m quite familiar with it.)

No one has convinced me that there is no alternative to the DP.

I think you made some fair generalizations. But in my case, if I believed that 1) the DP saved a statistically significant number of lives and that 2) instituting the death penalty was a cost-effective way to save lives then I would favor the death penalty.

I agree though, that the bulk of the argument centers around values and not fact. That is, there is no possible empirical response to the retribution / vengeance / entertainment cluster of justifications.

I just wanted to say thanks for the responses. I’m leaving for vacation tomorrow (3 weeks in Thailand! S) and probably won’t be posting. Anyway, it’s an interesting debate and you’ve raised some good points, especially about the number of innocent people that could wind up dead with a fast-track DP.
I can imagine the horror of being executed for something you didn’t do and the irreversable nature of the DP. On the other hand no system will ever be perfect. That is not meant to be callous, just a statement of the situation.
Anyway, thanks again.

Testy.

Not necessarily. The nice thing about prison is that unlike execution, it is reversible - if someone is convicted and later found to be innocent, he/she can be released.

Here’s a question for those of you who continue to insist that the death penalty is an effective deterrent: Do you really believe that spending the rest of one’s life in a maximum security prison is that much better than death?

While whether we should or shouldn’t is still open to debate, there are plenty that richly deserve such a fate.

To me, this is the only anti-DP argument that works, and the only reason that I oppose the DP. Too often, we simply cannot be sure we have the deserving party.

he shouldn’t’ve died because my ideas weren’t carried out.

This is what I think that the victims of the bombing should’ve done

instead of watch the execution, they should’ve been able to----

get ultra HP paintball guns and shoot him at a distance of 10 feet with brass-eagle paintballs. Repeatedly and daily.

chinese water torture

get the WD-40 out, get the hinges on the old-school Roman Catholic torture devices out

then, when he’s good and near dead, they should give him the 1000 cuts of death. (take a thin-bladed, sharp knife and make small, shallow cuts all over his body, each about .25 inches long, reminiscent of paper-cuts)

I’m not sick or twisted in the head, I just think he should get what he deserves

When OJ Simpson was arrested, it was said that had if he been tried on a death penalty basis, he might have pleaded guilty in exchange for life in prison. Whether or not that’s true for OJ, I believe that sort of thing has happened with other killers. This would indicate that some murderers have preferred life in prison to execution.

All that really means is that even murderers have the will to live, the instinct to survive.

The instinct to survive is why the death penalty is a stronger deterrent than life in prison.

This discussion appears to be dying an appropriate natural death (in the period since I went off line and moved out of Texas, lessening my risk of being hauled bodily off the street and being executed for a crime I did not commit), but in response to adam:

Gratifying as it would be, I don’t expect that juries, past or present, would necessarily behave as I would want them to. You may wish to confer with a logician on this point.

Re A. Diallo, I think that bringing up this point might have been relevant if the cops in question had been found guilty of first degree murder in the case and if the alternatives of heavy prison time or execution to prevent a repetition had been an issue. Since they weren’t, relevancy vanishes.

My perception is that murder victims are an embarrassment and/or annoyance to all too many anti-death penalty advocates, who ignore them to focus exclusively on the loss of life of those convicted of murder. There are human consequences to that sort of tunnel vision that deserve acknowledgment.

Your perception? well, does that let you off from having to provide** evidence** that death penalty foes find the crime victims an “embarrassment and/or annoyance”? I think not. Please provide support for this assesment of those who disagree with you.

Charlie Reese’s opinions on the matter:

This sounds kind of neutral, actually. Lest there be any doubt, he definitely believes we should have a death penalty:

Er, uh… why, O Wise One?

Gosh, it couldn’t be because doctors are trying to SAVE lives, could it?

So we shouldn’t mourn him? We shouldn’t be upset? We should just shrug our shoulders and say “C’est la vie”? We should do nothing to try to prevent this from happening again?! And what would Reese do, I wonder, if a judge were to say, “Mr. Reese, I’m very sorry we executed your son for a murder he never committed, but we were SURE he was guilty. No hard feelings? It’s that old bug-a-boo human error, you know. In fact, by your own opinion, I should not even have to apologize for it.”

Later, he makes a feeble attempt to bring in the abortion issue (he’s against the abortion of a collection of cells the size of a pin-point).

Columns like this is why I refer to Reese as the Jack Chick of newspaper columnists. The sad part is that he would probably consider that a compliment.

What about premeditated murderers? For example the guy in Japan who used the knife said that he wanted the death penalty. Probably the only reason why he committed the murders is his mentally unbalanced state made him think that he could get the Japanese goverment to kill him.

The fact that he wanted the death penalty makes me think that its not much of a deterrent.

He does have a point, jab, there is risk (sometimes a fatal risk) in everything we do. The question is whether the benefit of something is worth the risk.

With most things (like accidents) the amount of risk is quite clear. Not so with the death penalty. We have no idea how many innocent people have been killed. Also, with most things the benefit of given activity is very clear. The airlines help us get to places faster and thus save us time. It is possible to weigh this against the risk of crashing and dying. The benefits of the death penalty are much less tangible. They don’t seem to do society any good other than satisfy a sense of justice (or revenge). It is unclear what we would lose if we didn’t have the death penalty.

Given all this, I think we reach the same conclusion. The death penalty, as it currently sits, is unacceptable. We don’t have enough information to decide whether the benefits are worth the risk.

Review this and other threads on the death penalty, and the web sites devoted to the heroes of the anti-death penalty movement. Consider the amount of time and attention given to killers and the minimal to no acknowledgment of their victims. Consider also the outraged response when an occasional anti-DP advocate is prodded into responding to this lack of sensitivity. It’s like listening to a certain species of right-winger (i.e. Rush Limbaugh) when he is accused of being mean-spirited and lacking empathy with disadvantaged people - it provokes wrath because there is a degree of truth to the accusation.

Dr. Lao thinks it’s unclear what society would lose without the death penalty. The families of Melissa Ann Northrup and Colleen Reed already know what they’ve lost.

I was comparing it to life in prison without parole. And I was talking about society as a whole. We can cite anecdotal cases back and forth forever to illustrate our points, but it doesn’t prove anything. Do you have any evidence to show that there are fewer repeat murder offenders in states that use the death penalty?

And still we don’t know the risks accociated with the death penalty. It is foolish to embark on any potentially life threatening endevor without some idea of the risk. What if 1% of excuted people were innocent? What if 50% were? What about 90%? At what point do the losses out weigh the gain? Do they ever?

Many people in favor of the DP are against life-without-parole because of the danger of the criminal escaping. Usually, they will cite an incident like that of the seven men who escaped form a Texas prison last year.

I would like to know just how often this happens. Just how often do convicted killers escape? Is it often enough to be worried about? Or is it more likely that someone will be struck by lightning?

IOW, is the risk acceptable or not? (Bearing in mind that there is no such thing as a risk-free scenario.)

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Jackmannii *
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Sorry, non-responsive. Provide evidence that, in your words

to death penalty foes. “amount of time and attattention given to the killers”/and your assesment of ‘minimal or no acknowledgement’ etc. does not even begin to constitute considering victims an embarrassment/annoyance.