Capital Punishment

Why do you (or why don't you) agree with enforcing the Death Penalty?

 

capital punishment makes absolutely no sense, i never understood how so many religious people (christians) could agree with it.

 

Of course it makes sense.

How can murder, the worst type of crime that man can commit be taken seriously if the penalty isn’t equally as serious? A crime is only as severe as the punishment that follows it. As former mayor of New York City, Edward Koch once eloquently related: “It is by exacting the highest penalty for the taking of human life, that we affirm the highest value of human life.” It's because I have so much regard for human life that I favor capital punishment, not the opposite. Murder is the most terrible crime there is. Anything less than the death penalty is an insult to the victim and society. It says that we don't value the victim's life enough to punish the killer fully.

Let us consider the tragic death of Rosa Velez, who happened to be home when a man named Luis Vera burglarized her apartment in Brooklyn. She was shot and killed simply for being in her apartment. "Yeah, I shot her, ...and I knew I wouldn't go to the chair," were his exact words. Now, if New York had consistently and deliberately utilized the death penalty, the burglar openly admits that he would have turned around and left. Instead, an innocent woman was killed.

 

Notice the striking correlation between executions and murders. The more executions, the fewer murders. The fewer executions, the more murders. Just look at when the time period the brief suspension of the death penalty in the U.S. from 1972-1976, the murder rate doubled. Then look at the rise of executions during the 1990s. Notice how this is inversely proportional to the murders occurring during the same time. This is just too obvious to ignore. The death penalty works, and the proof is right in front of your eyes.

 

Capital punishment isn't a deterrent, it is punishment.

 

I think it's a punishment that can potentially deter certain criminals from committing pre-meditated murders.

 

Capital punishment is muder--a government program but nonetheless murder. What happens when an innocent individal dies through this sysystem? Who should be "blamed" or punished for that.

I don't get that mentality: you kiled! you did bad! now it is time for us to killl you!

Besides its more expensive than life imprisonment.

 

Sorry, calling a thing by a name doesn't make that thing what you call it. Murder is defined as one human being taking it upon him or herself to kill another human being. Capital punishment doesn't fit that description no matter how hard you try and spin it.

Capital punishment is punishment duely carried out in accordance with out legal system and calling it murder is no more than liberal hand wringing.

And more important than the possibility of an innocent individual being executed after exhausting the full appeals process built into the legal system is the very real number of innocent people who have been killed by killers who were released from the system only to kill more people. Had they been executed, they would not have found a loophole or a hand wringing liberal to let them out into society again.

 

Despite that graph (excellent bit of support USMC) and your and palerider's arguments, I'm going to have to join the opposing camp on this one. I just can't make the idea of government-sponsored killing fit with my mind. Call me squeamish if you'd like but I just don't approve of killing for any reason besides self-defense, and even then only as a last resort. Maybe it costs more to imprison criminals for life, maybe it doesn't discourage potential criminals from committing crimes, but I have to say that I believe both of those points to be well-worth keeping the country's conscience clean.

I can already hear all the "well you pay for it then" arguments.

 

Humans are not infallible--why should we negate the right for someone to "punish" someone else when the government is allowed to do this and get away with it? You are not God, you dont have the right to kill me as I do not have the right to kill another. No matter how well you try to pamper this you know quite well that deep down, NO ONE has the right to decide who lives or who dies. You brush off the whole punishing" of an innocent men so easily? Is the "conservative rhetoric" that "sh*t happens"?

I don't know why you assume I am some crazy liberal... I just stand by what seems just and you thinking "government sponsored killing" is something to support is somthing I don't undertand.... you the palerider who claims government has too much power.... guess what? This is one more thing they have power over.. the minute your life ends.



I am not religious, but I am quite surprised by the hypocrisy I can see in this thread. Please indicate where you are granted the right to "punish" someone because they "punished" someone else?

 

I myself don't like capital punishment. Premeditated murder requires a certain type of person. The problem is punitive justice systems. Corrective justice would be more serving than punitive. Deterrence won't stop someone who is bent on committing crime, if it did there would be miraculously no crime. There is no proving a negative statement, one cannot show any data that can be accurate in saying, "this system deterred those who would have commited crime {X}" it simply isn't possible to prove or disprove, it's pure speculation and quite superlative. Corrective justice however can be proven, Criminal enters system (which has deterrent effects as well since it's still imprisonment) and is helped with specific programs tailored to their mental deficit that causes their criminal behaviors. Sociopathic behaviors tend to lend to murder/abuse/etc someone being imprisoned for abuse / assault / battery etc who is worked with psychological to help with his- let's say he's been determined to suffer from a generic sociopathic behavior disorder, this could be graphed to show number of a&b/abuse etc statistically align with the murder rate - increased or median results so no real help in this application or decrease would show it does work. Unfortunately we're more content with just locking them away, institutionalizing them or killing them, I know it may seem I've veered off topic but the fact remains VERY few murderers had a clean criminal record when they first committed the murder. They've previously been picked up, incarcerated, and so on. So if you can catch these behaviors early perhaps help a percentage even just small number, then perhaps the downhill path to murderous intent can be stifled early. I'm no psychologist so I can't really make any claims to the validity of this ideology however it just seems most logical to me, and logic is where it's at in my book.

 

Im gonna keep this short and to the point for the most part. Firstly it is up the the individual states whether or not they have the death penalty. Although it is usable under federal guidelines it is rarely used(I believe Tim McVeigh was the last one). My issue with the death penalty is not whether it exsists or not, it is how it is carried out in an arbitrary manner. Minorities are much more likely to be sentanced to death, and the wealthy vs. poor is even more alarming. So if your going to have a death penalty, everyone should get it if they commit and are convicted of the capital crime. Once there is irrefutable evidence that person X did commit the capital crime, the execution should be handed down within a much, much shorter period of time, lets say a week. You kill someone and are convicted of 1st degree murder, they shoot the criminal within the week, no questions asked. If the government is not willing to apply the same standards of capital punishment to all, then it shouldnt be applied to any.

 

My view is that you shouldn't have the death penatly, but life in prison. And by that I mean life in prison, not a life sentence (e.g. 30 years). At least then no innocent people will be killed as a punishment, and they have to live with what they did in god awful conditions (bread and water).

 

I oppose the death penalty for a variety of reasons.

For one - it is not a deterrant. In most cases the death penalty is not a deterrent in that most murders involve spur-of-the-moment passion. I honestly don't think most murderers think about the death penalty before they pull the trigger.

I tend to agree with Clarence Darrow (in the Leopold-Loeb Murder Trial of the late 1920's): "...it's better to lock the murderer up for life and study him in the hope of understanding ,and thereby preventing, some future murder."

In addition, states without the death penalty have much lower murder rates. The South accounts for 80% of US executions and has the highest regional murder rate.





This leads me to think that the death penalty has little effect on murder rates and more likely something else is driving that.


The other reason I totally disagree with the death penalty is that it is inequitable. If the death penalty were fairly applied across race and class and crime I might in theory support it. But the reality of it is that isn't and probably never will be.

Race, sex and ethnicity is a factor - whether it is the race of the victim, or the race or sex of the perpretrator. Statistics show that a black person is much more likely to have his case remanded to the death penalty phaze then a white person and a black person committing a crime on a white person is much more likely then a black on black crime. Likewise men are many more times likely to face the death penalty then women.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=5&did=184

Class plays a role in who gets the death penalty and who gets life. Poor people are much more likely to recieve the death penalty for the same crime as rich people.

Lastly - the question of executing an innocent person. More and more death row cases are being challanged with new evidence and exonerated. Of course, once their dead there is no longer much push to prove innocence so we have no idea how many innocent people might have been executed. Dead is dead. As long as there is any question whatsoever of innocence, I can not support the death penalty.

Frankly, why not life in prison - no parole - in reality, not theory?