A Warning for JohnT

[Dinner]

Is Capital Punishment a Unique Deterrent? A Dispassionate Review of Old and New Evidence, in Canadian Journal of Criminology
by Ezzat A. Fattah. 21 pgs.

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=95813074

Here is a fairly recent nonAmerican study which concludes there is indeed a deterrent effect with the death penalty.

[Whaleboy]

Oerdin let me get this straight... you are advocating the execution of a 12 year old girl who in all likelihood is mentally ill in order to serve as a deterrent?

Society: "People won't respect us any more, we have to make them fear us. KILL THE CHILD!"

[MikeH]

Revenge is wrong.

[Whaleboy]

As is that study! Numerous assumptions to take DP to be good, and falls foul of Oerdin's own criteria of economic and social conditions.

Still doesn't support "an eye for an eye".

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by David Floyd
OTOH, the purpose of the criminal justice system is NOT rehabilitation (at least not in Texas/the US) - it's punishment.

Bullsh*t. If the deterrent aspect doesn't work then the reform aspect is the next line. And if that doesn't work and the person is a danger to society, indefinite incarceration...

[Dinner]

Originally posted by MikeH
I shouldn't have got sidetracked by the deterrent issue. Whether or not it has a deterrent effect is, at the end of the day, totally irrelevent to the rights and wrongs of the issue. Increased crime detection has a huge deterrent effect as well. If people think they'll get caught they are less likely to commit crimes of any type. Personally I think that's a better way to deter crime than execution.

I agree. Increasing crime detection is a great way to go and we need to persue that in every way possible. Does that mean we shouldn't also make use of the death penalty to deter crime and to punish the worst offenders?

Cutting and speeding appeals means you are just more likely to execute innocent people doesn't it? Surely that's a bad thing. If you are going to execute people it's vital that you do everything possible to ensure you have the right one isn't it? Cutting down on appeals to cut costs is a very, very worrying step. You didn't answer the bit about innocent people getting executed.

The appilite courts don't actually have much power. If they agree or disagree then the case would still be sent on to the Supreme court unless both parties agree to not appeal. I think we can agree that is unlikely so little in the way of oversite has really been lost. We've just sent case directly to the people who can make final rulings instead of paper pushers who have no real power.

BTW check above for my anwser about innocent people on death row.

And what about the racial bias in the penalties you are likely to receive for the same crimes? How can anyone justify an intrinsically system where more blacks get the death penalty than whites for exactly the same crimes?

There has been alot of talk about this but very little in the way of hard facts. HERE is a nice article on race and the death penalty.

[q]
Often such discussion begins with the obvious: the race of the defendant. The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) reports that black murderers represent 35% of those executed, white murderers 56%. As the argument goes, this must be evidence of systemic racism, as blacks represent 12% of the population, whites 74%.

Fortunately, the United States does not execute people based on their population counts but on the murders they commit. As blacks represent 47% of murderers and whites 37%, we see that whites are twice as likely to be executed for committing murder as are their black counterparts

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
Oerdin let me get this straight... you are advocating the execution of a 12 year old girl who in all likelihood is mentally ill in order to serve as a deterrent?

Society: "People won't respect us any more, we have to make them fear us. KILL THE CHILD!"

No, I am not. If you check my first post I was most pointed in not supporting it. I am supporting death penalty in general though.

[Dinner]

Whaleboy: You have written lots of "I thinks" and "I believes" but you haven't linked any studies which support your long disertations of opinion.

I notice that you originally started by claiming there was no deterrent effect, changing to there is a deterrent effect but I don't think it is large enough, going to the death penalty is nothing but revenge killing. Keep changing your argument and maybe you'll come up with a winner.

The death penalty isn't about revenge killing it is about making the punishment fit the crime and by having that punishment serve society through detering future crime. In short it is about justice and the good of society.

[MikeH]

Originally posted by Oerdin


I agree. Increasing crime detection is a great way to go and we need to persue that in every way possible. Does that mean we shouldn't also make use of the death penalty to deter crime and to punish the worst offenders?

That's not why, but no, we shouldn't. I've posted plenty of reasons why not. You still haven't answered with your justification for supporting capital punishment despite the fact that it does (and always has and will) end with the execution of innocent people.

[Dinner]

Quoted from page one.

There is no doubt that a certain extraordinarily small number of innocent people will be put on death row. Now with DNA evidience that number should be smaller then ever. Why do I continue to support the death penalty given this knowledge? Easy, the needs of the many out weight the needs of the few. Since there is a deterrent effect far more innocent people are saved each year then innocents put to death. Just see how few people are executed but presumably how large the number of people who are still alive because the deterrent works.

Basically I'm playing a numbers game. I am assuming that the more innocent lives we save the better.

[MikeH]

You think that murdering innocent people in the hope that it will prevent other people murdering other innocent people is ok?

We obviously just have very different principles.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Lock the girl up for a long, long time, if not life.

Don't give her the DP, because I only want that for those who kill multiple times or those who have done some utterly gruesome murder with no remorse.

[Dinner]

No, that is not what I said. Texas is widely seen as the state which executes more people then anyone else yet in any given year the total number of people executed is around 100. That 100 represents around 2/3 of the total number of executions which occur in the US. Each of those people has been having their case reviewed for damn near two decades and their lawyers have tried just about every thing imaginable to get their clients off. These people have had a fair defense and they are certainly guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Are they guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt? Some are but others aren't, however, the law says they must be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt not beyond a shadow of a doubt. I for one am very comfortable with the idea that these people are guilty. They've had 20 years worth of appeals, arguments, claims of "surprise evidience" and what not. Studies of the death penalty from 1930-today have shown about 0.06% of people on death row are later determined to be innocent and nearly all of them have been vindicated recently due to DNA evidience. Since we now do DNA reviews we can very confident that we do indeed have the right man in nearly all cases.

So if I must choice between the certainity of saving a large number of lives and between running the extremely, extremely small risk that perhaphes 1 innocent individual per century might possibly be executed then, like any good Vegas card man, I will play the odds. I can certainly save lives or I can do nothing and possibly execute the wrong man amoung hundreds of guilty men. That is an easy choice.

[MikeH]

Yes it is an easy choice. The chance of executing the wrong man, no matter how slim is unacceptable. It doesn't matter if lives might be saved (and I don't give the same credance to the research that you do). If something is wrong it's wrong. I don't agree with "the ends justify the means". All that means is you have stooped to the same level as those you seek to condemn.

And in addition to that I have a fundamental objection to the state being allowed to cold bloodedly murder it's citizens, whether they are criminals or not.

[Dinner]

The chance of executing the wrong peson is vanishingly small with modern scientific tools but the likely hood of saving innocent lives is very high. To say you won't save all of those people because you are morally afraid that someone some where might possibly be wrongfully accussed isn't moral. I'd say it is immoral to let those inncocent people die. In such a light the death penalty is surely justified.