The Death Penalty

I can't tell you what you should value.

This is exactly what the main issue here is all about. It's not the job of the legal system to "make you happy".

> I can't tell you what you should value.'

Well of course you can't,that is why I asked why in serving justice to her should she be allowed to live when she did not values the lives she traded away?

And to your second,well durr of course the law not exist to make me or anyone else happy,I don't know what else to tell you other then that if the victims are satisfied by the decision of the courts then justice is served

Because the justice system is about justice and doing what's been determined to be objectively right, not having a shifting scale where we lower our standards for bad people because we can be more cruel to them while still maintaining the moral high ground.

She thinks that human lives are just commodities with no intrinsic value, things to be traded and destroyed not due to need but just because it can be done. I don't want the poisonous ideas of people like her to have a grip in our society, certainly not in our justice system.

She dosn't deserve the satisfaction of changing us.

>in the UK she would be serving multiple life sentences with zero chance at parole,but of course we abolished the death penalty a long time ago.

I don't see a difference morally between life in prison without parole and the death penalty. It's just letting time be the executioner so you don't have to get your hands dirty.

Edited by Soban on Apr 10th 2019 at 10:10:19 AM

That time is important, it allows for a chance at correcting any miscarriage of justice and importantly for me it allows for a chance for the convicted to learn that what they did was wrong and try in some small way to make some sort of partial amends for what they did.

Most wont ever accept that they were wrong in what they did, but some do, some realise that their actions were wrong and towards the end try and help either stop others going down the same path as them or simply help catch others who they know from their own time down that path.

We consider a botched execution to be bad, where a prisoner suffers for forty minutes or an hour before they die. However, when we look at life in prison, we make them suffer for decades before they die. If they don't have a chance at parole, they will never enter free society again. I don't feel like that they get more time to realize that they were wrong is that compelling of a argument for why it's more moral. They may or they may not, that's their choice not ours. The fact is that most people are guilty of their crimes. Someone getting exonerated is an edge case, again it's nice we have more time to do it, but I don't feel it makes sentencing someone who is guilty (which should be our presumptions when we are sentencing someone) any more moral.

There's a difference between the agony of a botched execution and the years people spend as lifers.

I'm not sure if anyone has done a comprehensive poll among inmates about whether they would rather have 40 minutes of agony followed by death or 40 years in prison followed by death, but I wouldn't be surprised if most people went with the second one.

My point however was that if it's bad that they suffer for 40 minutes, it's also bad that they suffer for 40 years. There are some people I know who have noted that if they had to choose between getting executed and life without parole, they would pick execution.

But would they pick a botched execution where they linger in agony for nearly an hour?

My point is that you shouldn't try to equate the agony of a failed execution with life in prison.

There's a difference between what is essentially torturing someone to death and locking them up for life.

Edited by M84 on Apr 10th 2019 at 11:44:20 PM

Since this thread is relevant again: the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has banned all religious advisors from the execution chamber after the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Buddhist death row inmate after he was denied his spiritual advisor to be with him in the chamber during his execution.

So basically they are so much against non-Christians getting someone representing their faith (for lack of a better umbrella term) to bring them at least some solace in their last hours or minutes that they forbade everyone from having that opportunity? Why? I mean I'm not religious but if someone would want to have access to, say, a priest who they can talk or (if Catholic) confess to, they should have that right. Regardless of religion.

@ Soban: Prison time doesn't have to (and shouldn't, imo) be equated with suffering.

I'm also against making parole impossible as part of a sentence, rather than it just being very unlikely to happen.

If some lifetime prisoners would still rather choose to die though, then fair enough, let them have that option.

Pretty much, yes.

Edited by Corvidae on Apr 11th 2019 at 4:01:55 PM

I’m not against give life sentence prisoners the right to end their own life, but it should be a choice they make for themselves, not one we make for them.

So for those who don't follow his show, John Oliver did an episode about the death penalty, focusing mainly on how hypocritical our use of lethal injection is. Highlights include how often lethal injections went wrong, several prisoners who requested the electric chair over injections, and which states have broken (or at least bent) federal law to get their lethal chemical mixtures from suspect suppliers overseas. Link in case you want to watch it in another tab. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lTczPEG8iI

You know, the whole "harsh punishments like execution don't actually work as disincentives" argument is frequently cited, but it just occurred to me that nobody explained why and, more importantly, how they're so certain that the methodology used to reach that conclusion is trustworthy. It's basically the same problem with determining the success rate of something like damnatio memoriae: An actual success by definition would be impossible to know about, so we would only know about failures. Likewise, it's highly unlikely that anyone who was actually disincentivized against committing a crime due to the harshness of the punishment would admit to having contemplated the crime, out of the simple fear that this admission would somehow come back to bite them in the ass.

Edited by MarqFJA on May 12th 2019 at 6:23:10 PM

You can measure the rate of offending (while controlling for other factors) and compare the rate when a harsh punishment is in place and when it’s not.

The rate doesn’t change measurably depending on a life prison sentence or a death sentence, people generally don’t care if they’ll die slowly or quickly if they get caught, what matters is if they get caught. Most criminals don’t think about what will happen to them if they get caught, that’s to much forward thinking for them, the most they do is think about if they’ll get caught.

We’ve found what scares criminals into not committing crimes, it’s high rates of arrest and successful prosecution.

It’s not about how harsh the punishment is if they get caught, it’s about how likely they are to get caught.

Well, that's probably because disincentive applies to other criminals so survivorship bias is not in effect here. People who were in jail already for murder and then commit more murders are not a major part of murder statistics.

Also I think that most crimes that would carry the death penalty aren’t ones where someone carefully plans it out, murders tend to be crimes of passion or gang related, rapes are often similar and often the rapist doesn't realise they’re a rapist and thinks they did nothing wrong.

The crimes people carefully plan out and weigh the risks vs rewards aren’t the ones we want to execute people for.

To be fair with murder we do have a legal distinction between it happening as an impulsive crime of passion (2nd degree murder) and it being premeditated (1st degree). The latter does tend to have a harsher punishment.

It would be logical to have 1st degree murderers be executed while 2nd degree murderers are not; in fact I think that's technically on the books already.

An impulse crime and a crime of passion aren’t the same thing, plenty of murders are premeditated but still boil down to passion, I think that most romance related murders are crimes of passion, but plenty of them are premeditated.

Studies have shown that crime rates are more related to the success rate of the police, to the poverty rate in the country in question and the level of gun control. But they have also shown that rehabilitation is a better way to keep people out of prison than simply punishment.

Edited by Swanpride on May 12th 2019 at 12:05:56 PM

The Justice Department has issued an opinion that the FDA cannot regulate drugs used in executions.

"The [Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act] cannot be read as authorizing FDA to effectively ban capital punishment, because that reading would contravene or render moot a host of federal statutes that presuppose the lawfulness of capital punishment," to quote Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/12/26/national/crime-legal/chinese-murderer-executed-japan/#.Xgd-QvxS9PY

I've read the reports on a Chinese man whose sentence was already done in Japan.

The European External Action Service (EEAS) recently called out the recent execution in Taiwan (the second one during Tsai's time in office) since the EU opposes the death penalty. The recently executed guy btw was a man who burned six people to death during the Lunar New Year’s Eve holiday in February 2016. These people were part of his own family.

Death is irreversible, judiciary error is inevitable; humans not being perfect.
Therefore, wherever there is death penalty, the state will send innocents to their death along with the guilty, inevitably, no ifs no buts.
Even one single innocent person executed by the state is, an innocent person executed by the state.

Rarely are moral issues this clear but this one is. Support the death penalty and you put the wish of death for the guilty above that of life for the innocent. No if no buts.
That this describes most of our species says long about who we actually are.