I would deem that acceptable.
The cost of justice should not be a deciding factor in whether or not it should be pursued.
But few murderers are killed, most are given life sentences.
If the family of the murder victim happened to kill the murderer, I wouldn’t be crying for him, to put it mildly, and were I on a relevant jury I’d nullify.
The point is not that he deserves to live. The point is that the state should not have the authority to kill him. I’m certainly quite comfortable with him being dead, and have no real issue with the fact that he died in agony, as you say he deserved that. It’s the fact that the state was involved that makes it a problem.
And yes, I’ll quite happily condemn as immoral the majority of humanity through the majority of history, at least by today’s standards. Racist, homophobic, misogynistic dicks, the lot of them. I have no real problem adding execution to that list. Because we are better than that, and getting better all the time.
I have no doubt in 100 years people will look back on today in horrified judgement, and that some things that I happily do they will judge poorly. That’s good, that means humanity is improving.
I’m not going to respond to the abortion issue simply as that would be too much of a hijack, and knowing this board it could take over the thread - but I’ll discuss your point in another thread if you like.
- But what gives your the right to judge the majority of the world and call them barbaric?
- Steophan is pro-choice, so he did. What is your stance on abortion?
Well, the Taliban definitely didn’t murder Daniel Pearl, seeing as it was actually Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and all.
Remind me what country al-Qaeda was ever the legitimate government of?
Not every murder rises to the level of being a capital offense.
Make your mind up.
So some murderers should go free?
No. Some murderers should be imprisoned for life. Some other murderers, who have committed particularly heinous deeds and for whom there is an airtight case for their guilt, should be executed.
How heinous does a crime have to be for someone to lose his/her right to live?
More or less heinous than having the victim sit in agony for over half an hour?
Every state that currently has capital punishment defines what extenuating circumstances can merit capital punishment for murder.
I am convinced that within a few decades we shall look at judicial killing the same way we now look at slavery.
The same arguments- supposed necessity- were advanced to maintain slavery for many decades more in the USA than in other liberal countries. And nearly a century after the civil war before allowing African Americans full citizenship. Maybe American exceptionalism just takes a few more years to wind the moral compass round compass round.
The idea that this guy will be a poster child for stopping the death penalty is ridiculous. If anyone it would likely be someone saved by say The Innocence Project. When you use DNA, rather than some legal “technicality”, to prove innocence of some death row inmates it would carry better weight.
If none of those guys were the “Rosa Park” of the death penalty, this guy sure isn’t.
Totally irrelevant to the current discussion. No hijacks, please.
But you were asked for your opinion.
Yes, but someone saved by the Innocence Project is not as good a poster child as one who has actually been executed. Proponents of capital punishment can always say “see, this guy was eventually saved, so that shows that the system works”.
There was an interesting - but not great - film about this called “The Life of David Gale”. It’s about a group of anti-capital punishment campaigners who struggle to find the perfect poster child. In the end one of the campaigners gets himself sentenced to death, and executed for a crime that is later uncovered as a fake
I actually rather pity death penalty advocates
the desire for revenge is a basic undesirable urge. We have worked hard to stop other basic undesirable urges like the desire to rape, bully, steal or otherwise harm. We xpect civilised people to control their base instincts.
But it seems that with certain groups- criminals, people we find ourselves at war with, social groups we despise and so on, even apparently modern societies remain stuck in an atavistic and infantile response mode- thirsting after revenge rather than justice.
I tend to find those people able to consider carefully their control of base instincts to be somewhat better human beings than those that revel in surrendering to their base desires.
I see this thread has already devolved into people calling each other barbarians and mollycoddlers, so I’ll just say this: the Rosa Parks of capital punishment won’t be a convict. It will be an executive branch official who refuses to carry out a sentence.
I don’t get the revenge idea about death. You could choose to punish the guy for a long time, but you choose to end his punishment early. I guess if you believe in hell it makes sense, but if you believe in that, then you are probably a Christian, and thus would have to deal with the fact that the Bible says that taking revenge is a sin. You couldn’t do it because you’d wind up in hell.
I’m not saying there can’t be other motivations. But revenge seems like the absolute worst.
There are certain people who, by their horrific actions, deserve to die. Those examples are not many, but you know them when you see them. The fact that other nations don’t do this is odd to me. We kill bears that eat people and mad dogs-some people are no different. It’s not revenge-it’s safety.