Are people who believe in the Death Penalty by definition Evil?

[KrazyHorse]

****ed up the numbers a little bit:

a) 37, not 36

b) 7652 was solely manslaughter releases. There were also 4131 releases of murderers. Total = 11783

[KrazyHorse]

The major factors in preventing large numbers of homicide reoffences by somebody convicted of a homicide are threefold:

1) A long jail sentence. This serves two purposes: first, to provide a better chance of real rehabilitation simply by giving the system a longer period of time to work on the inmate, and second, to keep the offender in prison long enough that he is out of the "danger zone" of ages which commit large (relative) numbers of murders. 30 year-olds kill people. By and large, 70 year-olds don't

2) A non-violent prison environment. Well-supervised prisons which do not brutalise their inmates (either directly or through the hands of other inmates due to negligence) will, in my opinion, allow for better-adjusted parolees

3) Careful analysis prior to granting parole, and good supervision on parole. Some people are much more likely to reoffend than others. We need to be careful about which inmates we release. We need to keep close watch on them.

I'd rather err on the side of caution than release a dangerous criminal into society. At the same time, I feel that we can achieve as good a measure of protection from violent individuals as can any system involving the death penalty...

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


Nor is it acceptable to falsely imprison them and take years from their lives.

The issue isn't the penalty in those cases, it's the integrity and thoroughness of the entire judicial process. I'm in favor of commuting death sentences when there is any plausible doubt, or when the evidence may have been sufficient to convict, but (in my view, at least) isn't sufficient to justify a capital sentence.

IMO, Stanley "Tookie" Williams shouldn't have been executed here in California last month, because the only evidence related to the crime was shotgun ballistic evidence and the testimony of participants in the crimes, who received favorable consideration from the state in return for their testimony.

I never got into the whole "he's reformed" argument, because IMO the trial evidence should not be considered adequate to support a capital sentence.

while it is not acceptable to falsly imprison, fasle imprisonment is not as grave an error as false taking of life which could be interpreted as state murder.

let me just repeat

However it is a fact that state does miscarriage justice and that alone is enough reason to create a system which will not allow it to be fatal for the people it is done against.

We are at a stage in our development that we are able to prevent it , thus the society should take the steps to realize the potential. When we as a society become capable to stop miscarriages of justice that will be the best, but being pragmatic we have to steps that we can and this is once clear step in the right direction.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by Sava


and again... this would be a flaw with the JUSTICE SYSTEM in general... abolishing the DP would not fix this.

No, but it's a cast-iron guarantee that the state wouldn't be killing innocent people in the name of (perverted) justice. And surely even in the US that's viewed as a good thing, right?

And with decades of appeals at the disposal of someone who was convicted... there is more than enough of a checks and balance in place to protect against innocent people getting convicted.

Laughable. It took 20 years to free the McGuire 7. How many people on Death Row are executed within 20 years?

Furthermore, aren't those decades-long stays on death row pretty much proof of lingering doubt, or is it simply some great scam by US lawyers?

No system is perfect.

Exactly, and death is so terribly irreversible.

But you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It takes a peculiar mindset to call the death penalty a "baby". Is the principle of killing people the single most important factor of the judicial system to you?

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by snoopy369
The death penalty does not need to deter crime.

It prevents them quite effectively.

Want to bet? I would imagine it gives criminals an added incentive to leave no witnesses, and would tend to give added vigour to attempts to resist arrest.

Britain hasn't executed anyone in 40 years. Civilistion has yet to come crashing down around our ears.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Fact: in a study by the US Dept. of Justice - Bureau of Justice Statistics, 40% of state prisoners convicted of Homicide and released in the year 1994 were re-arrested (spreadsheet as of 2002).

Two queries here-

1- What were they arrested for?

2- What was the conviction rate?

I'll leave you with a line from "Casablanca". "Round up the usual suspects."

[Agathon]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat

Why is the state obligated to support and sustain the life of these murderers? The state would be justified on the basis of its legal and judicial systems and social norms. Some states in the US don't have the death penalty, and that's their prerogative.

Because the state has deprived them of their liberties in order to promote a social good. It's generally agreed by reasonable people that there is a limit to state power: that is, the state is only justified in using sufficient means to acheive a desired goal (whatever that might be, and questions of its justification are a separate issue) and nothing more than that. In the case of preventing people reoffending, the sufficent means exists: its called imprisonment. If you want to go beyond that, you have to find some justification for the state deliberately aiming to cause the death of persons, and that seems an insuperable obstacle for most deat

Once again, you need to provide some justification for going beyond the sufficiency principle.

If you want to say that the state should put them to death to save money, then there are two objections. The first is that the extensive safeguards (appeals and so on) that are required to keep public confidence in the correct application of the death penalty are clearly greater than the costs of keeping a small number of prisoners locked up for life.

The second is that the state is basically saying its OK to kill people if it costs too much to keep them alive.

That's at least a partial fallacy - in California, where the courts drag their feet and favor multiple stages of appeals, even frivolous appeals, yes. In other states, no. The incarceration costs and judicial process costs (and delays which increase incarcerations costs) are separate issues.

It's not a "fallacy" if you understand the correct meaning of that word.

In order to maintain public confidence that the penalty is not being applied to innocent people, you need a virtually failsafe system. That is expensive. If you want to argue for the death penalty, you are going to need to address that problem.. an expensive problem. Otherwise, you won't be doing enough to prevent innocent people being executed, and I don't know of anyone who would stand for that.

So you're a moral absolutist now? Where did those morals come from, and who defines them?

So you resort to puerile relativism. I thought it would take you longer. I guess you realize you are losing.

I know a few people who would prefer the death penalty to being imprisoned themselves, but I have never heard the same people say that they would make that decision for other persons. How many people do you know that campaign against life imprisonment in favour of the death penalty on the grounds that it is more humane? I've seen some nutty penal reform campaigns in my time, but nothing approaching that.

It's not moral absolutism... just common sense.

That's why you need a responsive and effective judicial system to work prior to carrying out punishment, or you need to limit the DP to cases in which the evidence is absolutely clear that there is no mistake.

I'm too old to believe in that any more. As a matter of practicality we already give the state the ability to incarcerate us, even though we realize it is fallible and prone to fad based decisions. If the state is not infallible, it should not be allowed to make such final and absolutely irrevocable decisions: especially since the means used to the end violate the principle of sufficiency (again, something which all reasonable people agree on).

Why should the criteria be "must do?" as opposed to "must be prohibited from doing more than the minimum?" Who or what exactly defines these supposed "obligations" of society? I'm not advocating that the DP be mandated, but that a state has a right to choose whether it is appropriate for certain offenses, in view of the social mores and reliability of judicial safeguards and due process. You seem to be arguing that some form of moral prohibition exists, so tell me, where does that "moral" prohibition come from, and whose set of "morals" is to be imposed on the state?

Well, I am sure you know that it is generally accepted that the state cannot go beyond the necessary in order to achieve a public good. The death penalty is unnecessary, ergo...

Are you telling me that you believe that the state has the right to do more? For example, if it is agreed that as a public good, the state must build a road that will require the compulsory purchase of 1/10th of your farm, that it is completely fine for them to force you to sell the whole lot? (the NZ government used to pull **** like this, and ended up having to return it all).

All modern democratic societies are based more or less on these principles, which are inherited from the work of people like Mill.

Are you telling me you don't believe this? Do you think it is OK for the state to confiscate millions of dollars worth of public property in order to serve the public good of making JQP pay fifty bucks he owes in back taxes?

You're a weird guy....

And the vast majority of them don't get the DP in the US - even in Texas, a majority of murders don't get the DP. In California, it's about one percent. Some domestic murderers may not be dangerous to the public, but only that portion of the public who might be their next spouse, kid, or whatever.

Scott Peterson? There you have a case of a media circus surrounding a relatively commonplace domestic murder. How many other spouse killers are going to get the death penalty? It's a joke.

But again.. why does the state have the right to take Peterson's life, when this is clearly an excessive means of ensuring public safety.

Intertribal killings in primitive societies are also often "justified" by tradition and social mores. Those situations do not apply to any western industrialized society of which I'm aware, or is your local patch of Canada a bit different?

Because we live in different kinds of societies. Traditions and social mores are the product of the sorts of societies we live in, not the causes. If murder and criminality ceases to be punishable, people will engage in it. A quick look at any recent episode of looting or social breakdown in an advanced country demonstrates that the state of nature is always with us.

You still need to demonstrate why you think the death penalty is required to serve the public good, and why it is not an excessive form of punishment when we can achieve the same goals by doing things that all reasonable people agree are less evil.

[Thorn]

GOD DOES NOT BELIEVE IN THE DEATH PENALTY, IF HE WANTS SOMEONE DEAD THEY'LL BE DEAD.

and yes I know I sound like a fundy, but I actually asked him, and that was the response I got.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
Furthermore, aren't those decades-long stays on death row pretty much proof of lingering doubt, or is it simply some great scam by US lawyers?

More than a bit of the latter, and also scheduling issues in some courts. In California, condemned inmates aren't even assigned counsel for their initial mandatory state court appeals for five years.

The general idea is not to appeal promptly and resolve the legal issues too quickly (else the execution might be hastened), but to wait until late in the process, and then file appeals at the last possible minute.

Another trick of the trade is only to appeal certain issues, and leave others for later without identifying them, so that if state courts deny the latter appeals for non-timely filing, you get another trip to the Federal appellate system via another habeus corpus petition. Get that denied by the Federal District Court, and you have an appeal of the District Court's denial of the habeus petition to the applicable Circuit Court of Appeal. In states like California where some judges on the appellate courts favor that sort of nonsense, you can stay an execution for five or six years (just for that round of habeus petition appeals) without ever leaving the procedural issues and actually addressing the guilt or lack thereof of the condemned or the adequacy of the evidence and judicial process through trial and conviction.

Needless to say, the factually innocent would never want such an approach, in which the only goal is repeated delay, but no real examination of the merits of the case.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Agathon
Because the state has deprived them of their liberties in order to promote a social good. It's generally agreed by reasonable people that there is a limit to state power:

Yes, and that limit is appropriately decided by the democratic process with constitutional constraints and judicial review to prevent abuse of the democratic process and constitutional limits.

that is, the state is only justified in using sufficient means to acheive a desired goal (whatever that might be, and questions of its justification are a separate issue) and nothing more than that.

That's your view of the appropriate limits of state power, at least for this purpose. Do you have similarly narrow constraints on the appropriate limits of state power vis-a-vis regulation of economic activity or other aspects of interest to your revolution?

Once again, you need to provide some justification for going beyond the sufficiency principle.

In what part of the Constitution is the sufficiency principle contained?

If you want to say that the state should put them to death to save money, then there are two objections. The first is that the extensive safeguards (appeals and so on) that are required to keep public confidence in the correct application of the death penalty are clearly greater than the costs of keeping a small number of prisoners locked up for life.

That's only selectively true. If the courts and executive authority (governors) were more aggressive in disposing of marginal capital cases or those in which there is any fundamental question of appropriateness (comparison to other crimes, higher standard of evidence, statistical differences in sentencing due to race, economic status, etc.), then we would have significantly fewer DP appeals to process, and those cases would be resolveable much more easily.

The second is that the state is basically saying its OK to kill people if it costs too much to keep them alive.

Or, the state is saying that certain conduct is so far outside the tolerable extremes of behavior in society that the perpetrator has forfeited any right to live in or be supported by that society.

In order to maintain public confidence that the penalty is not being applied to innocent people, you need a virtually failsafe system. That is expensive.

Not necessarily. If you make clear to prosecutors and police that any sloppy or questionable conduct (even if unintentional or ultimately correct, but raising a question of correctness) will eliminate a capital sentencing option out of the box, then they'll get their act together.

There are basically only two kinds of appeals in capital cases - those trying to delay the inevitable on any grounds possible, no matter how spurious or unsupported, and those which raise real issues about guilt and the adequacy of evidence and process. The Tookie Williams execution just carried out in California is an example of the second type. I think the man was probably, maybe even almost certainly guilty. I don't think ballistics and criminal participant testimony alone should be sufficient to allow a capital sentence.

If you want to argue for the death penalty, you are going to need to address that problem.. an expensive problem. Otherwise, you won't be doing enough to prevent innocent people being executed, and I don't know of anyone who would stand for that.

Of course it needs to be addressed, and at levels of punishment well below the death penalty. It's only "expensive" if you consider the costs in isolation - better procedural and evidentiary practice through trial will create far less grounds for appeal, and far easier disposition of those appeals.

So you resort to puerile relativism. I thought it would take you longer. I guess you realize you are losing.

Just borrowing from the tactics of the left. Since when did you become a religious fundy and start spouting absolutist moral doctrine?

(again, something which all reasonable people agree on).

Since when do you speak for "all reasonable people?"

How do you define who is "reasonable?" By how much they agree with you?

There is nothing of consequence about which all reasonable people agree if described in sufficient detail to have any practical effect. The devil's in the details, just as in your description of the revolution having a gallows on every street corner and a pub opposite.

Well, I am sure you know that it is generally accepted that the state cannot go beyond the necessary in order to achieve a public good. The death penalty is unnecessary, ergo...

And the definition of "necessary" is necessarily arbitrary. That's why we got in a huff about that "consent of the governed" business.

Are you telling me that you believe that the state has the right to do more? For example, if it is agreed that as a public good, the state must build a road that will require the compulsory purchase of 1/10th of your farm, that it is completely fine for them to force you to sell the whole lot? (the NZ government used to pull **** like this, and ended up having to return it all).

In practice, the state can do more. Eminent domain isn't limited to current development needs. The state can take what it needs (with compensation) for an immediate project, and anticipated future needs, even if those are unfunded and not yet approved. As a matter of practice, that's not done commonly, as the less you take, the less you pay, and you can always come back for another bite of the apple.

The state has the right to do what its citizens consent to, within the limits of its original charter as that may evolve over time.

All modern democratic societies are based more or less on these principles, which are inherited from the work of people like Mill.

Are you telling me you don't believe this? Do you think it is OK for the state to confiscate millions of dollars worth of public property in order to serve the public good of making JQP pay fifty bucks he owes in back taxes?

You're a weird guy....

In the case of spending millions to make JQP pay 50 bucks, there is clearly an extreme level of disproportionality. If you're talking about spending a few thousand to collect a few 50 buck tickets, collateral to enforcing the notion not to run stop signs in school zones and not thereby grease the random elementary school kid trying to cross the street, then the intangible public safety goal outweighs the tangible cost/benefit analysis.

Scott Peterson? There you have a case of a media circus surrounding a relatively commonplace domestic murder. How many other spouse killers are going to get the death penalty? It's a joke.

But again.. why does the state have the right to take Peterson's life, when this is clearly an excessive means of ensuring public safety.

Not quite a common domestic murder - he's a rather cold fish who thought nothing of offing his wife and nearly born child because he didn't want to be inconvenienced in ****ing little bimbos on the side, and he figured divorce and child support would cramp his style. He also didn't mind milking a little public sympathy, as long as it didn't take much energy on his part.

Does he rate the DP? IMO, no, the severity of the crime and level of evidence doesn't rate.

Do the husband and wife killers of Ginny Rojas rate the DP? They killed their four year old neice, who they repeatedly tortured for a year before finally scalding her to death by holding her down and pouring hot water on her for nearly an hour until her skin sloughed off, while their own young kids were there and could partly see and hear what was going on?

Hell yes. **** 'em. There is absolutely no doubt of guilt, and the heinousness of the crime rates the ultimate penalty.

Because we live in different kinds of societies. Traditions and social mores are the product of the sorts of societies we live in, not the causes. If murder and criminality ceases to be punishable, people will engage in it. A quick look at any recent episode of looting or social breakdown in an advanced country demonstrates that the state of nature is always with us.

They're symbiotic. And there are more sources of punishment than judicial punishment, and more sources of moral restraint than the law of the state, so there are more disincentives to lower oneself into the state of nature.

You still need to demonstrate why you think the death penalty is required to serve the public good, and why it is not an excessive form of punishment when we can achieve the same goals by doing things that all reasonable people agree are less evil.

I never said it was required. I said it was permissible, with adequate safeguards to prevent abuse. You're arguing the absolutist position that it is never permissible. (although I'm sure you'd make a little exception for "counterrevolutionary" elements among the bourgeoisie. )

[Blake]

I have buddhist leanings and it's difficult to say. It's definitely not compassionate to kill someone as punishment.

I seriously doubt anyone has ever learnt a lesson by being put to death. In fact usually they just die.

The alternative, life in prison, is probably no better either. They do have more options for redemption though, but prehaps not the oppurtunity nor the will.

In my own belief system, putting someone to death could be merciful. If they are so consumed by insanity that they are absolutley driven to inflict suffering then their soul need not be subjected to that incarnation for any longer. However it can only be an act of mercy if it's not an act of punishment.

I do consider it absolutely essential to prevent an offender from hurting more people, both for their own sake and that of those who would be their victims.

To answer the topic of the thread, I don't feel you can be truly good if you don't have compassion for offenders. If you consider others to be evil, you are evil. It's really that simple.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat

Yes, and that limit is appropriately decided by the democratic process with constitutional constraints and judicial review to prevent abuse of the democratic process and constitutional limits.

Sorry... this is like shooting fish in a barrel. It simply is not. That limit is in fact part of the value system that gives these other things their legitimacy. It's a basic principle of a liberal democracy (which along with other principles separates that type of governance from simple mob rule).

One might as well take your line of "argument" and claim that these constraints are just "somebody's values", but that would be silly.

That's your view of the appropriate limits of state power, at least for this purpose. Do you have similarly narrow constraints on the appropriate limits of state power vis-a-vis regulation of economic activity or other aspects of interest to your revolution?

You are mistaken. You have misunderstood my original claim. My claim is this:

Every country like yours and mine is based on a contractarian system, which is a system of principles that are supposed to confer legitimacy on government. One of the principles is that the state, if it deems something to be a public good, may not infringe on the liberties of its citizens beyond what is necessary to secure that good. If you deny that principle, then you are no longer operating within the liberal democratic framework.

One may respect this principle in different ways depending on what is deemed a public good (this is where you made the mistake). In a socialist system, the public good in question may require people to give up a substantial portion of their property in order to secure the desired result (anything that can be counted as "a means of production" if we follow Marx). But anything over and above that is illegitimate because it goes beyond necessary means.

A country like Canada, which is not a Marxist state, will of course have a different set of public goods, and thus require a lot less state action to achieve them. But it is still bound by the same principle: the Canadian government may not extract more from its citizens than is required to secure the goods it deems necessary.

Thus, your interpretation of my argument was fundamentally flawed from the beginning.

If you hold what we call "liberal democracy" to be the governing value system of our societies then you have no alternative but to be committed to the principle.

Now, as it stands, the empirical facts dictate that under present conditions the public good sought by those who support the death penalty (at least the one you defended in a previous post - keeping dangerous people off the street) can be achieved by lesser means (imprisonment). So the death penalty is always immoral as long as a lesser means remains feasible (as it will indefinitely).

That's my argument, and you have failed to address it or even come close to providing a decent counterargument.

In what part of the Constitution is the sufficiency principle contained?

Now you are committing a fallacy: conflating legality with morality. I have no real interest in your antiquated, toilet paper constitution. If there is a legal question about the death penalty, then that is for the courts to decide: it is irrelevant to this debate.

Any attempt to appeal to the law raises the obvious question: why should we pay any attention to your constitution? You can't give legal reasons, because the question is in essence why we should submit to the law. That is a moral question. Unless you are going to appeal to force (in which case there just isn't a debate to be had), you need to acknowledge that morality is prior to legality in that it is required to explain the appeal of the latter (those idiot legal positivists try to ignore this, but they really have no decent answer to it in any case).

That's only selectively true. If the courts and executive authority (governors) were more aggressive in disposing of marginal capital cases or those in which there is any fundamental question of appropriateness (comparison to other crimes, higher standard of evidence, statistical differences in sentencing due to race, economic status, etc.), then we would have significantly fewer DP appeals to process, and those cases would be resolveable much more easily.

You are asking for a utopian justice system, and you seem to think that this would cost less. In any case no standard of any fallible justice system would ever be sufficient to justify an "infallible" standard of punishment. In abolishing the death penalty, the justice system admits that it is not infallible, and it should do so.

Or, the state is saying that certain conduct is so far outside the tolerable extremes of behavior in society that the perpetrator has forfeited any right to live in or be supported by that society.

But that is not your original position, which was that the DP was to keep these people off the street.

If you want to justify this new position, you need an argument. What you have right now is a slogan. Argument please.

Not necessarily. If you make clear to prosecutors and police that any sloppy or questionable conduct (even if unintentional or ultimately correct, but raising a question of correctness) will eliminate a capital sentencing option out of the box, then they'll get their act together.

There are basically only two kinds of appeals in capital cases - those trying to delay the inevitable on any grounds possible, no matter how spurious or unsupported, and those which raise real issues about guilt and the adequacy of evidence and process. The Tookie Williams execution just carried out in California is an example of the second type. I think the man was probably, maybe even almost certainly guilty. I don't think ballistics and criminal participant testimony alone should be sufficient to allow a capital sentence.

You are again wishing for a more utopian justice system than the one we actually have. This will cost money.

But it doesn't make any difference as it stands. On the only argument you have given, the death penalty is illegitimate.

Of course it needs to be addressed, and at levels of punishment well below the death penalty. It's only "expensive" if you consider the costs in isolation - better procedural and evidentiary practice through trial will create far less grounds for appeal, and far easier disposition of those appeals.

That will itself cost money. Stop trying to conjure these things out of thin air.

Just borrowing from the tactics of the left. Since when did you become a religious fundy and start spouting absolutist moral doctrine?

My argument is based on a principle that both mainstream left and right agree on. I guess you find it terribly witty to try to express scepticism about a principle that everyone in our societies actually accepts.

Since when do you speak for "all reasonable people?"

Have you stopped beating your wife?

How do you define who is "reasonable?" By how much they agree with you?

By reasonable I mean people who understand the fundamental moral principles of the sort of society we live in. I'd like to see anyone who is committed to liberal democracy who denies my principle. In fact they can't, because they wouldn't be committed to liberal democracy if they did.

There is nothing of consequence about which all reasonable people agree if described in sufficient detail to have any practical effect. The devil's in the details, just as in your description of the revolution having a gallows on every street corner and a pub opposite.

This is wrong. I am in a much better position than you to know this, since I have spent a large part of my professional life reading and discussing the opinions of people about this matter (people from different social strata, different cultures). There are plenty of minor differences that we have, but most of them agree on the basics. You would be hard put to find many people who did not agree with most of the basic principles of On Liberty for example, which embodies the sort of ideas I have appealed to in my argument. The only reason that people don't realize this is that we all have a habit of focusing on our differences rather than our similarities (because there is nothing to argue about in the case of the latter).

One thing I do when I teach is deliberately attack these shared beliefs in order to get people to think about them and stop taking them for granted (even if in the end I think they are right).

And the definition of "necessary" is necessarily arbitrary. That's why we got in a huff about that "consent of the governed" business.

Same mistake again.

The definition of the word 'necessary" is not arbitrary. It has a well-defined meaning. What you are talking about is not a matter of definition: you mean what things are to be counted as necessary. That is an empirical matter, not a conceptual (or semantic) one.

See above for my refutation of this point.

In practice, the state can do more. Eminent domain isn't limited to current development needs. The state can take what it needs (with compensation) for an immediate project, and anticipated future needs, even if those are unfunded and not yet approved. As a matter of practice, that's not done commonly, as the less you take, the less you pay, and you can always come back for another bite of the apple.

That's not violating my principle. See above.

The state has the right to do what its citizens consent to, within the limits of its original charter as that may evolve over time.

And what gives this such magical value? The answer that everyone who bothers asking this question gives is inevitably a moral justification along contractarian lines. And the contractarian approach as a matter of necessity requires commitment to my principle.

Try again.

In the case of spending millions to make JQP pay 50 bucks, there is clearly an extreme level of disproportionality. If you're talking about spending a few thousand to collect a few 50 buck tickets, collateral to enforcing the notion not to run stop signs in school zones and not thereby grease the random elementary school kid trying to cross the street, then the intangible public safety goal outweighs the tangible cost/benefit analysis.

And this violates my principle how? My argument is that the death penalty is always disproportional when it comes to the only justification you gave for it.

It's amazing how you think that I am somehow confuted by an example that conforms to my own principle.

Not quite a common domestic murder - he's a rather cold fish who thought nothing of offing his wife and nearly born child because he didn't want to be inconvenienced in ****ing little bimbos on the side, and he figured divorce and child support would cramp his style. He also didn't mind milking a little public sympathy, as long as it didn't take much energy on his part.

Does he rate the DP? IMO, no, the severity of the crime and level of evidence doesn't rate.

But he's getting it anyway. This is another reason why we should simply ban it. Out fallible and fad driven justice systems simply cannot be trusted

Do the husband and wife killers of Ginny Rojas rate the DP? They killed their four year old neice, who they repeatedly tortured for a year before finally scalding her to death by holding her down and pouring hot water on her for nearly an hour until her skin sloughed off, while their own young kids were there and could partly see and hear what was going on?

Hell yes. **** 'em. There is absolutely no doubt of guilt, and the heinousness of the crime rates the ultimate penalty.

Again, you are appealing to a slogan. I want to know why it rates the ultimate penalty. This isn't covered by your argument in previous posts, so I want to know what your reasoning is (if you do come up with one, I am sure I have heard it before).

They're symbiotic. And there are more sources of punishment than judicial punishment, and more sources of moral restraint than the law of the state, so there are more disincentives to lower oneself into the state of nature.

This is one of the few places Hobbes was wrong. But in practice, the alternative sources prove of limited use when it comes to the crunch.

I never said it was required. I said it was permissible, with adequate safeguards to prevent abuse. You're arguing the absolutist position that it is never permissible. (although I'm sure you'd make a little exception for "counterrevolutionary" elements among the bourgeoisie. )

I've said it is impermissible as long as there is a lesser alternative to achieve the same goal. In a tribal society that did not have the resources to imprison or otherwise control or exile dangerous offenders, the death penalty would be necessary.

But we don't live in such a society and we have alternatives.

[Sava]

I still don't know what all the fuss is about. Less than 100 people per year are executed in the United States.

Get a new cause to whine about people.

You are kidding yourselves if you think banning the Death Penalty is going to make a difference.

OOOOOH, you are going to stop some murderers from getting put to death so they can live another 10-20 years or so in a prison cell... WOW... YOU GUYS ARE REAL HEROES



The only legitimate argument against the Death Penalty is the moral one... i.e. if you think killing someone as punishment is wrong... PERIOD.

And to be frank... people who feel that way are weak and pussies... a society run by people like that would not survive. There are evil people out there who commit murders that need to be put to death as punishment.

There... I said it... it needs to be said.

I'm done with this thread.

So feel free to run up the post count on this thread so it gets locked... or just stop posting in it and let it die.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
And make no mistake; that's what we need to be talking about if we're discussing the death penalty as making society safer...

Not safer, no.

But, is Clifford Olsen ever going to see the light of day without bars? What is the point of keeping him alive? Even from behind bars he has tried to torture the families of his victims.

Retribution, or punishment, is valid in some cases where the crime is particularly horrid and there is no possible doubt about guilt.

Let the living bury the dead. Olsen should be in one of those graves.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Sava
The only legitimate argument against the Death Penalty is the moral one... i.e. if you think killing someone as punishment is wrong... PERIOD.

Not true. If there could be a doubt about guilt, then the punishment is too extreme.

With the DP a couple of people in Canada, who are free today after being exonerated from convictions sloppily or maliciously obtained, could be dead. That would not be so good.