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Originally Posted by Sachita
There is certainly no doubt our governmental system is corrupt and doesnt work. IMO. So I wouldn't be surprised if it worked elsewhere or that it would here IF we didnt have criminals running our country.
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I have often maintained that I don't have a problem with a *civilized* country exercising the death penalty option. But a civilized country doesn't have citizens throwing tailgate parties outside prisons where an execution is taking place. The United States does.
If a nation behaves as it if understands what it means to exercise the death penalty and treats it as a somber, solemn affair and not something to celebrate, then sure that nation can be trusted with this ultimate power over the life and death of the citizenry. Since my undergrad days, when I hit on my idiosyncratic reading of what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution, I have maintained the following: the government should not be trusted with the power of life or death over the citizenry any more than is *absolutely* necessary to maintain a legitimate state. This informs my thoughts on two hot button issues--the death penalty and abortion being legal.
In both instances, I do not think that the State has any vested interest in either killing any given criminal or in forcing any given woman to have any given child. I have not yet seen a compelling argument describing how executing any given criminal helps the state preserve itself. We already concede to the State a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. We empower police to carry deadly weapons and we empower the military to have weapons of unfathomable destructive power. I think that is quite a bit of power already.
My concern with the death penalty orbits around the problem of mistakes in conviction, the disparity between what a man of color can expect in a courtroom and what a white man can expect in a courtroom, the disparity between what a poor person can expect in a courtroom and what a rich person can expect, and lastly, the temptation to use the death penalty, ultimately, as a *political* tool. It would be insanely suicidal to presume that because we're talking about the United States that it could never come to pass that a future administration might use the death penalty for political ends.
I'm unconvinced that the death penalty has any deterrent value. Sure, the death penalty is going to deter law-abiding citizens like all of us here, but then so is the prospect of a prison sentence. Someone who is going to commit some heinous crime isn't going to be deterred by the prospect of execution any more than a prison sentence will. So it serves to make the law-abiding afraid but not the criminal. It seems to me more about revenge than justice. I don't think I want the State to be in the business of revenge.
Lastly, on this issue of how prisoners are treated. Do we want prisons to be 15th century snake pits? Another insight the West finally got around to was that loss of liberty is quite a punishment. I don't believe prisons are or should be resorts. However, there are plenty of examples that we can look to if we want to make our prisons more horrible than they already are--the thing is, every one of those examples is not in a country that could be called democratic in any meaningful sense. I'm sure that Chinese, Russian and North Korean prisons are all little slices of hell--do we really want to be China, Russia or North Korea?
Cheers
Aj