Death penalty - are you for or against?

The Scott Pererson thread got me going...

death penalty for what though?

for shop lifting it could be a bit harsh.

killing is wrong! mmkay.

Where's the don't give a shit option? I have yet to meet a death penalty opponent who wouldn't say, "well if I did believe in the death penalty, he'd be the guy who should get it..." in reference to Pol Pot, Hitler, or Stalin, or much lesser bad dudes like McVeigh or Bundy.

That said, I'm not for it but only because it is an ineffective deterrent, not because I find it morally wrong.

And if you were for it, whats your preferred method of despatch?

Id like an intermediate death penalty option - y'know like where they killed you for a little while then brought you back from the dead and then killed you again if you fucked up twice.

Natural causes...

DHL or UPS although, I admit don't really get the question, sorry.

Hanging, electrocution, injection, stoning, buried alive, dipped in a large vat of acid etc etc

I was just kidding CrispyB

Eh, I'll take Stoning for 10 points please.

if our justice was always perfectly meted out & 100% accurate, i'd be for it. since that's bunk i lean to california's interpretation... they condemn people to death but typically keep em on death row forever.

just watched The Life and Times of David Gale two nights ago... interesting if terribly 'hollywood-ified' portrayal of the system

i'm still bemused by OJ's case.

The number of innocent defendants released from death row has increased in recent years. Between 1973 and October, 1993, an average of 2.75 innocent defendants were released. Since then, the average has increased to 5 releases per year.

The Supreme Court Considers An Appalling Case Where Prosecutors Hid Evidence From the Death Row Defendant, and Knowingly Presented Perjured Testimony Against Him

I'm even against the death penalty for terrorists.
So DW, you've met that person already.

Yeah, but the whole appeals process while they sit there on death row is what costs the taxpayer an arm and a leg...

I'm very much in favour of castrating rapists and child abusers, although the currently preferred method of sending them to prison to be raped by the other inmates also suits me. But if they can't control themselves they should not have anything to control. Some specimens with really bad consciences actually ask to have it done.

I am sick of hearing sheep bleating on about being Christians, and in the very next breath breaking their own Ten Commandments.

EITHER you are, OR you're not - You can't be BOTH

I don't really want to spend my time talking about this awful subject. Revenge is a sweet thing - sure, but it is NO cure, and it it just an excuse for not analysing and discovering the root of the problem and why an event occurred in the first place, and then spending the time, resources and effort to ensure it doesn't occur again. EDUCATION is a key word here, and I see only 'dumbing down' being a priority of the majority western world at the moment.

Then on the other side of the coin we have state terrorism. I am NOT anti-American, but hard facts show that since 1945, successive governments of the USA (and my own government/s in the UK) have been directly responsible for the murders of more innocent lives than Hitler and Stalin put together (Yes, I know many, many other governments are also without blame). If we (the responsible citizens of the world) want to talk about justice and death penalties, how come the likes of Pinochet, Bush Snr., Thatcher, Kissinger, Etc. can walk around free as birds?

Its a bloody stupid distorted argument: You have money and power = you are eternally innocent of any wrongdoing. You are corrupted by the system and commit a crime = kill the son of a bitch.

I'm not even going to bother coming back and reading this thread any longer

I'm for the death penalty against suicide bombers...oh wait a second?

Death Penalty inefective? How so - They're dead, cant kill anyone else. Works for me.

the prosecutors should face the death penalty as what they tried to do is basically murder.

though Sin won't be reading this any longer, maybe someone else can answer - which poster is a sinning sheep bleating on about being a Christian?

but they killed somebody in the first place, so the only way that works is from a revenge point of view.
I'm against it because of my fears of there being an injustice (Birmingham 6 for example would have been strung up) and because I see the justice system as a way of educating, deterring and improving people, not a way of killing them.

...erm, Stalin's purges about 20million, Hitler - around 7 or 8 million

so, where's your 28 million murders coming from or did l miss that story in the papers?

True enough, there have been injustices. As aquatscutum pointed out, those responible for jailing innocent people and covering up their tracks should be held accountable for murder, as you could argue that their intent is pre-meditated.

But with all the DNA and better forensics we have today, those people on death row can now either prove their innocence, or just further compound their guilt.

But once they are dead, they are dead.
Forensic science may well have improved and will keep on improving but it still hasn't managed to bring dead people back to life.

As an aside to 3 Lions, all intent is premeditated (if you meant to do something presumably you thought about it first) and in any case the English system doesn't take that into account in any way shape or form - murder is simply deliberately killing somebody, or committing a violent offence where the death of your victim was foreseeable (i.e. intending to shoot somebody to hurt them won't be manslaughter in most cases as death is a foreseeable result of shooting).

DW didn't mention terrorists

Any semblence of a sense of reality you once had has just gone out the window.

sometimes it's hard not to laugh out loud, isn't it?

Awarding the Death Penalty is a hell of a lot different to a 20 year old than to a 60 year old. (My random 2 cents)

someone earlier put this figure at 28,000,000.
i have exhausted all avenues and i am about 26,900,000 too short.
any thoughts?

C'mon Sin, cough up the numbers. Let's see you back that claim.

Gets popcorn...

@ parnell

Hope you got a lot cuz I don't think Sin is comin' back with his #'s anytime soon

boomtown_rat,
I did mention terrorists. With good reason. DW didn't need to.
Most people here know that my family come from the South West of Scotland. Near Lockerbie.
So despite knowing people who had a burning exploded plane crash onto their homes (some survived, some did not, and many that worked during the recovery and investigation still suffer), I'm still against the death penalty.

@ DW
I'll even put some on for u ma nugga...

right. I still don't really understand how Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler are related to terrorists but if its a sensitive issue then fair enough, I'm not that bothered about pedantry. I suppose I see what you were trying to say now - although PP, Stalin and Hitler were infinitely 'worse' than most terrorists

If killing is wrong, it follows that it's also wrong for the government.

I'm sure he just had to step out for a minute to go on a Zapatista style egg-throwing mission on Koniginstrasse. He'll back after lunch with figures galore, these people always come back with hard facts to back these kinds of claims up...

Not only is it not a deterrent but it also costs the state (i.e. taxpayer) more to execute someone than to keep them in jail for life. Hard to believe but figure all the legal costs the state is forced to incur based on mandatory appeals etc. and it adds up rather quickly.

Good to see the "For death penalty" has droped to 20%

too many miscariages of justice, no one can agree on which cases deserve the death penalty and it is not an effective deterrent anyway

I once read the autobiography of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's top hangman during the forties and fifties, and at the end of the book after describing a career in which he executed roughly four hundred people (about two hundred were Nazi war criminals) he then writes that he doesn't think all the executions he did acheived anything and he hopes no one else will ever be executed and it I thought "oh right okay"

I am surprised though that 76%in this poll are against, I always thought the majority supported the death penalty

notice he said it after he started drawing his pension and not before!

@ acquascutum

quite, and also it did not stop him cashing in with a book

... and dropping: true, almost anyone, incl. yrs truly, might feel positively murderous towards anyone who harmed them or theirs, but I still won't support the death penalty. Execution is an irrevocable measure, and to apply irrevocable measures you have to
a. be 100% certain that your system of justice is foolproof
b. be 100% certain that your system of moral values is absolutely and universally valid

So far as I'm concerned NO system of justice is foolproof. There are enough literally lethal "mistakes" on record in recent history to corroborate that. And once you've mistakenly passed umpteen volts through someone's body there's not much use saying "oops, sorry, dearie, got it wrong" is there?
Equally, the way I see it, no system of moral values has universal validity, whereas the right to life is meant to be universal, i.e. not conditional on the laws of a particular state.

So much for the theory. In practice, even though, admittedly, Sin got carried away with his numbers, I too agree that it all boils down to nothing more sophisticated than power hierarchies: if you have friends in high places, or - even better - are cozily perched in a high place yourself, you're more likely to get away with bad press (see Mrs T, Messrs Bush, Kissinger &Co.) or luxury arrest in a five-star prison (see Pinochet) than end up becoming the executioner's fry up.

An interesting read.

Death Penalty Fact Sheet

and

When executions go wrong.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one.
/Spock's 2 cents
But actually Spock's words refer more to personal duty and honor than to breaking the Prime Directive by forcing his views on others, so my point is that I have none yet.

Ok, here goes.

If we only had WonderWoman's lasso of truth we could impliment that into the court system and just ask the people if they did the crime or not.

Or if we could call Ghost Rider he would give the 'look of pennance' and the person would collapse under their own guilt if there was any.

Or just get the Beyonder to look back in the past to see what happened.

Or get Xavier to read their minds.

Then we could just trap them in a 2 dimensional pane of glass and send them into space...

I say, let them work hard for the rest of their lives building buildings, power plants, liscense plates, farming... stuff to benefit the rest of the world rather than just letting them sit in jail or killing them off. By the way, if Peterson had confessed or plead guilty and his lawyers had made a deal (see WonderWoman's lasso above) he would have gotten off without the death penalty. Strange that it is the way the system works.

Spock also believes in Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. I dont know if this is what he meant, but I like the idea that communities can choose between having a dealth penalty and not having one, and that those communities can accept each others decision.

Of course vulcans (and half vulcans like spock) supress their emotions, but I dont know if the pro-or-anti death penalty decision is as much a matter of logic as it is of personal preference and belief. I suspect most supporters of the death penalty are obliged to support it because of their political or religous affiliations. Which is ok, because I dont know how one could rationally form a preference on such an issue, unless they were personally involved. I.E. either as a perpetrator or a victim of a crime.

He does have emotions. He just chooses not to use them.

And

Methods of Execution.

RE - Spock

Vulcans will also gladly beat someone to death every 7 years if they so much as look sideways at their woman.