Death Penalty - News, Thoughts, Info

[The_Lady_Snow]

Isn't that ironic???


I bet if they find a mate they have the right to marry, we on the other hand do not. Just isn't right.

[Nat]

What about the dispproportionate number of people of color sentenced to death for crimes where white folks are more likely to live?

What about those who are innocent but found guilty?

Death is irreversible and there have been many wrongly convicted who have later been exonerated.

What about the effect of the death penalty on a convicted person's innocent family and friends?

What about the execution of the developmentally disabled? What about the mentally ill?

Juries are filled with every day folks, often desperate to return to work, who have no training regarding racism or xenophobia or other diseases of the overculture. They convict based on "beyond a REASONABLE doubt" but some innocent people look guilty to jurors using their most conscientious reason.

I've served on a capital murder jury. It's not like matlock. The ends are not all neatly tied up. There are holes everywhere. I was not impressed with the process, the lawyers or most of the jurors.

[rlin]

the death penalty bothers me in many ways...
that said... i still believe that if there is no doubt... and i dont mean that a jury of so called peers decided or that someone confessed after grueling interrogation or that it is most likely that it happened... i mean if without a shadow of a doubt that a person committed a heinous crime that we should practice the death penalty....
i actually would like to see the family or friends of the victim get to decide the punishment... and even carry it out if there is no way that the person could be innocent...
our judicial system is so broken that the way we stand now there should be a review of all the cases that are awaiting execution... if there could be doubt then they need to be commuted to life.. if there is none then the execution should be immediate... none of this waiting 10 to 20 years for appeals and such...
yeah... let me be the decider... i know everything... i could fix it all... king blass to the forefront! (yes.. that was jest... i hate the thought of any one person deciding to kill someone... or twelve persons.... just because of a good legal team convinced them!)

[Sparkle]

I do not believe in capital punishment.
I do not believe in an "eye for an eye".
I do not believe in killing killers, raping rapists or abusing abusers.

I do not believe capital punishment is an effective deterrent to violent crime and more importantly I do not believe it brings healing or peace or closure to victims of those crimes.

I do not believe capital punishment is a more cost effective or time efficient method of justice.

And crucially, I do not believe our legal system is robust and/or fair enough to be given this kind of power. Our legal system is deeply flawed and deeply corrupt, it is inherently racist and classist.

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I have lived in countries that have abolished the death penalty. Those were not places overrun with violent criminals. In fact statistics show they have less, far less violent crime than we do.

An interesting & brief piece on a recent forum on the death penalty, members were from law enforcement agencies in the US and Europe.

On October 13, 2010, officials from the U.S. and Europe held what may have been the first international forum of law enforcement officers on the merits of the death penalty in reducing violent crime. The officers discussed whether capital punishment actually helps to keep citizens safe, assists healing for victims, and uses crime-fighting resources efficiently.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/inte...-death-penalty

[Sachita]

Originally Posted by Sparkle

I do not believe in capital punishment.
I do not believe in an "eye for an eye".
I do not believe in killing killers, raping rapists or abusing abusers.

I do not believe capital punishment is an effective deterrent to violent crime and more importantly I do not believe it brings healing or peace or closure to victims of those crimes.

I do not believe capital punishment is a more cost effective or time efficient method of justice.

And crucially, I do not believe our legal system is robust and/or fair enough to be given this kind of power. Our legal system is deeply flawed and deeply corrupt, it is inherently racist and classist.

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I have lived in countries that have abolished the death penalty. Those were not places overrun with violent criminals. In fact statistics show they have less, far less violent crime than we do.

An interesting & brief piece on a recent forum on the death penalty, members were from law enforcement agencies in the US and Europe.

On October 13, 2010, officials from the U.S. and Europe held what may have been the first international forum of law enforcement officers on the merits of the death penalty in reducing violent crime. The officers discussed whether capital punishment actually helps to keep citizens safe, assists healing for victims, and uses crime-fighting resources efficiently.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/inte...-death-penalty

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.

[dreadgeek]

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.

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

[DapperButch]

I voted other because I am so in the middle on this topic. Always have been.

[The_Lady_Snow]

My emotional side over rides any of my logical thinking, I'll be honest. I would not want the person to live if they harmed one of my own. I would want them dead.

[Mitmo01]

For someone like this--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_E._Duncan_III

a north korean or chinese prison is a gift that he doesnt deserve.....his dna should be wiped out of the gene pool permanetly and forever....these are the kinds of people that deserve the death penalty in my opinion...

[LipstickLola]

I'm very uncomfortable with the death penalty, and am against it. I believe in a judgement much higher than that of man. I also believe there are things worse than death, and that if at all possible, criminals of these heinous, horrific, unspeakable crimes should be shown a life in a 10x10 cell. And I don't mean they should be able to "better themselves", or treated to Club Fed.

My human nature wants to run over, hang, shoot, torture those who commit crimes against the elderly, children, the incapacitated, any human life, or even certain crimes against animals, and that is my reason.......I do believe "they'll get theirs", it may not be when we want, or when we can see it, but 'they' will. Prisons are overcrowded, the justice system is more imprefect than it works, or so it seems, criminals walk the street, those who are unable to hire a great defense spend more time behind bars, all of these injustices don't change my mind. Having a very very close friend murdered, testifying, having been a crime victim, I still don't believe it's the right thing to do, for if it were, are we any better than the perpetrators themselves??

This is one of those discussions that can last forever with sooooo many different points of view, I can totally relate to wanting and eye for an eye, I just don't feel competent to actually make that decision regarding human life.

Just my thoughts and feelings. thanks!

[dreadgeek]

This was posted on the Breaking News thread by me. Cross-posting here:

Well, if all of the above offends you we could just go back to a feudal system of crime and punishment where you didn't get a trial (no lawyers), there was no bail (no bail bondsmen), there were dungeons but those were for torture not imprisonment.

You can have a legal system, in which case you have to put up with the fact that the legal system must play by the rules or you can have an ad hoc system of crime and punishment for which there is another name: lynching.

ETA: Let me also point out that even WITH the current system of laws, we routinely execute the wrong person. In Texas a man was executed for killing his three children in an arson fire. Except that when actual fire experts looked at the crime, they determined not only was it NOT arson but it could not have been arson. Several studies have also found that black men are three or four times as likely to be given the death penalty for the *same* crime even if you hold every other relevant detail constant. And a disturbing number (approaching a third) of those death penalties are eventually overturned on DNA evidence. So if we go back to the Old West system of lynching--and once you pull out the legal system, all you're left with is mob justice--do you really think it will be any better? I'll tell you right now, since we've *run* that experiment--it wouldn't be.

In the Deep South, into the middle of the last century, a black man could go from having a nice day to being hung from a tree in an afternoon all because he bumped into a white woman. That was also swift and sure 'justice'. Thank you very much but I'll take the set of problems flowing from having a legal system--even one as flawed as ours--to ad hoc 'we think this person did the crime, so that's the person we'll punish for it' mob justice.

------

Some further thoughts on the matter

It seems as if we have forgotten both *why* we have the legal system we do and how long we struggled to get it. So I thought I'd remind folks that our legal system, flawed as it is, is still better than anything that had existed Western society before. (And by 'our' I am talking about the Western legal systems that are the descendants of British Common Law.)

There was a time when the sovereign could have you picked up and imprisoned for whatever reason he might wish. You had no right to a trial. Perhaps, if you were wealthy, you might be able to buy your way out of trouble but barring that you were going to be shuffled off this veil of tears and if you were lucky, it would be sooner rather than later because later *always* involved horrific tortures on your way out. This was changed by the introduction of habeus corpus which requires that the accused be brought before a court so that the legality of the imprisonment (it's justification) can be examined.

Okay, so you're alright with habeus corpus. Trials are fine as long as guilty verdicts are forthcoming, right? Well, this is where we get to the next great advancement in Western legal thought--the idea of the fair trial by jury. It was once the case that trials were more or less shows. One was highly unlikely to be acquitted. There were no rules for what constituted evidence, nor was there any right to have your accusers cross-examined. You could be compelled to testify against yourself and refusal to do so was considered admission of guilt. All of this was true into the 18th or 19th century in Western civilization. The long arm of the law could reach into your home, at the time of their choosing, and 'search' (read plant) for evidence. All of this began to change when Europe began the long, hard, transition from a Feudal system to democratic nation-states. The fourth and fifth amendments exist for a reason and it's not to provide cover for people who want to be 'soft on crime'.

So now we're a little closer to modern day. One poster has spoken eloquently on how great the legal system--meaning the lynching system--was in the Old West. Keep in mind that most crimes didn't necessarily go to trial. It was more along the lines of "that's the person we think did it, so that's the person who is going to be punished for it". This was usually done in a very ad hoc and quite arbitrary manner. The problem, of course, is that mobs aren't real intelligent and aren't really interested in justice they're interested in punishment. So as long as *someone* paid the price (meaning someone was killed) for the crime that was good enough for the time being.

I won't belabor the point about lynchings of black men.

Lastly, the rules and strictures that modern police forces have to work under. Again, while it might seem that these are just to provide cover for 'soft-hearted liberals' they are actually all there for fairly good reasons. For instance, before the Miranda law the cops could use all manner of dirty tricks to get you to confess to a crime. And they DID use tricks and coercion. So finally the Supreme court decided that the accused had a right to a lawyer and had a right to speak to someone who actually understood the law before having to say word one to the police.

I always find it quite remarkable that people have these romantic ideas that if only the law were not hamstrung by rules, we would have a crime-free society. Nothing could be further from the truth. At present, I'm listening to an audiobook called 'The Third Reich in Power'. In the chapter just finished, there was discussion on the system of denunciation of Germans for crimes against the State. What is germane here is not the particular crimes but how the legal system handled them. Trials in Nazi Germany were pretty pro forma affairs. If you were a Nazi, you would probably walk. If you weren't, you would find yourself either in prison, in a concentration camp, or executed. Evidence didn't really matter, accusation did. Now, I'm not saying anyone is suggesting the Western democracies become Nazi Germany. I am, however, curious as to what the substantive difference is between an arbitrary legal system whose real purpose is to grease the wheels to the executioners block and what is being advocated here?



Cheers
Aj