Because it’s pointless and always implemented unjustly. Overwhelmingly, it’s race and gender and how much money the accused has and who the supposed victim is that determine whether someone gets the death penalty, not what they’ve done.
Not even close to being accurate.
If this statement is accurate, it just means there needs to be more executions, not less.
There’s something to be said for that, but you also have to consider that releasing a guy who was wrongly convicted 20 years ago doesn’t really accomplish much. His life is still ruined; he’ll be unemployable as anything other than unskilled labor (and even then, most reputable employers wouldn’t touch an ex-con); and any personal relationships he had are likely to be long gone. I’m not saying that we should leave wrongly-convicted people in jail, but let’s not kid ourselves that there’s any possibility of restoring “justice” at this point.
Gender?
In response to the OP: no, I don’t think capital punishment is going anywhere. Countries have abolished it and brought it back before , after all.
Simplicio,
India uses the death penalty exceedingly sparingly, although there are actually quite a number if offences which qualify and another one was just added last year. The two most recent people executed were both Muslim terrorists responsible for the 2001 attack on government buildings in Delhi and the 2008 Mumbai attack.
Will the death penalty ever go extinct?
Hopefully not. Hopefully, what will happen is that we don’t take 20 years to complete an execution.
Prior to the 90’s much of Europe consisted of dictatorships, if you look at western Europe most countries had stopped using it by the 1950’s(last executions being WW2 related most likely), even if it remained on the books(in many cases only for wartime crimes) for longer.
In case you don’t know, that was one of the reason a given for why the injustices continued for so long, the fact that the death penalty was no longer an option. If if had been, the prosecution and the Crown would have been far more careful and they likely would never have been convicted at all.
I am opposed to the death penalty. I have been instructed as Counsel in capital cases. But, I am also opposed to know mindless assertions of who is of who is not “civilised” based upon statistics from a website. There is nothing stated at all about the cases, its merits, review done, trial proceedings, type of crime etc. That decides whether a system is “civilised” not the type of penalty imposed.
You mean that the USA and Japan stopped killing for a bit while it ironed out the legal niceties? took you about 4 years I think in both cases. Not really “abolition” in any true sense as it was never taken off the books.
Not a hope in hell for that, nor any need. It is neither an effective deterrent nor does it accomplish anything that life incarceration cannot. Japan and the USA will abolition it fully in time.
No, I’m aware of the arguments. Not that they form a rational argument* for* the death penalty of course, just further impetus for improving standards all round.
not the people, the system.
The most “civilised” process in the world does not offset or negate the barbarity of the end result.
Leaving a person to rot in prison, caged like an animal for the rest of thier natural life?
or released back into the general population after receiving advanced training in criminal techniques at the hands of thier only daily companions, other criminals and free to commit additional crimes?
Any punishment you want can be redefined by someone else a “barbaric”.
Like it or not, it’s the truth.
Why?
A woman is much less likely to be targeted for the death penalty for the same crime (they are punished less harshly for crimes in general). For that matter, you are more likely to get the death penalty for killing a woman than for killing a man.
That’s certainly not how it works in America. In America death penalty cases are usually run in a much more slapdash and often outright corrupt fashion than non-death penalty cases. They get the worst defense lawyers (the sort who sleep through trials or show up drunk), the flimsiest (or outright faked) evidence, the most blatant bias.
No it’s not.
Because you claim that only a certain segment receive the death penalty because of their gender or race. Which if true, means there are people that are avoiding the death penalty because of there gender or race.
I believe that the death penalty, particularly in the U.S., is bound to go away. As a kind of evolutionary step up the ladder. It will happen; when, however, is something I wouldn’t put money on.
exactly, that would barbaric.
indeed, that would be a terrible system. We should seek to ensure that it doesn’t happen.
You seem to be implying that the two scenarios above are something I’d advocate and are the only other options to the death penalty.
yes, you are free to make up your own definition of barbaric, just as I did. There is no objective standard and I don’t claim there is.
Any punishment and suffering cannot be undone. However, as long as the death penalty is not imposed there is chance of rehabilitation of the guilty and release and recompense for the innocent.
Or that people are being targeted because of their race, class or gender.
Will the death penalty ever go extinct? Yes, right after ethnic cleansing campaigns and massacres go extinct.
Before then, not bloody likely.
I say we offer definitions for “effete” or “decadent” as the standard for judging cultures that went too far past “barbaric”. Y’know, so long as we’re name-calling.
Believe it or not, the death penalty is declining in Texas, in part due to juries now having the option to sentence a defendant to life without parole, which wasn’t available until 2005. I don’t know that it will ever go completely extinct in the U.S. unless and until some U.S. jurisdiction sees a case like the Timothy Evans case that led to the abolition of the death penalty in the UK.
I’d have to disagree with that. The Birmingham Six were convicted largely on the “expert” evidence of Dr. Frank Skuse, who was later found to have miscalculated the finger swabs by a factor of 10, which led the jury to believe they had handled nitro-glycerine rather than a brand new pack of playing cards. The judge in the trial said at sentencing words to the effect of: “If there was crime that deserved capital punishment, this is it.”
I’ve no doubt they would have been executed, had the law been in place.
I am too. And if sentencing a teenager to death and then waiting 25 years to kill the middle aged man is not a cruel and unusual punishment I don’t know what is…