The Death Penalty - Should it be abolished?

Once more I state that if you apply the death penalty that person cannot kill again. A person who has killed once can most certainly kill again. If I was a murderer I would most certainly be in favor of life in prison. It would give me a chance to get out in one way or another. Just because you send someone to prison for life dosent mean that they will be there for the rest of thier life.
Edger
I dident call anyone names. I simplely stated what it seems to me to be the attitude of most of the posters on this site. I have no sympathy for people who can take life in order to keep themselves from haveing to face the consequences of thier actions (rape, robbery, ect). And the money argument shouldent enter into this at all. If we want to save money lets cut the wages and insurance of the state and federal government people. The death penalty is usually administered in a just manner. With the new forensic tools we have we can as never before be sure when we convict murderers and rapeists that they are guilty. Very few people are sentenanced to death when the evidence is circumstantial. Acording to the attitude here one would think the death penalty is automatic in any murder trial. It is not.

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rabel22 wrote:

Once more I state that if you apply the death penalty that person cannot kill again.

Quite true. I'd also add that applying the death penalty would likewise prevent people from committing robberies again, or counterfeiting again, or passing bad checks again, or double-parking in loading zones again. Indeed, by applying the death penalty to all crimes, we could solve the recidivism problem and the prison problem in one stroke.

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Joe
You are usually an intelligent seeming person so im going to assume that someone other than you posted this and used your name.

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Quote:

I'd also add that applying the death penalty would likewise prevent people from committing robberies again, or counterfeiting again, or passing bad checks again, or double-parking in loading zones again. Indeed, by applying the death penalty to all crimes, we could solve the recidivism problem and the prison problem in one stroke.

Acknowledging that the quoted comment is tongue-in-cheek, but in all due respect, the consequences of robbery, counterfeiting, double-parking etc. are temporal and reversible. The consequences of a brutal rape and murder are unbearable suffering/torture for the victim and a death that cannot be reversed.

What do you do with the trucker who kidnapped a young girl, brutally raped her several times, cut off her arms at the elbows and threw her naked to bleed to death on the highway?

What do you do with the man who broke into a home, tied up the husband, stripped and castrated him, stuffed his testicles in his mouth, and forced him to watch while he raped and tortured the wife to death?

What do you do with those men in Texas who tied a man to the back of their pickup and dragged him to death?

What do you do with a Willie Horton shown 'compassion' by a liberal governor resulting in him cutting, burning, and torturing his next victim for seven hours until he finally died?

As a surviving family member, I would not wish to live the rest of my life in fear that such men might be released or might escape from prison and be able to come after me or mine again.

I fail to see how those who commit crimes like that should have more rights than their victims. Maybe the jury should convict and the family have the option to pass sentence?
.

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Willy Horton!!! Whoda thunk he might get mentioned again here?

On a similar thread several weeks ago, a few of us were presented with a novel understanding of the 'eye for an eye' tradition (I've forgotten now who forwarded this notion)...that this tradition sought not to apply retribution equal to some crime, but rather it sought to hold down excesses in punishment. A subtle important difference that acknowledges how happy humans can be to draw and quarter or terminate the existence of some sodomist by insertion of a fireplace poker up the anus.

The "criminals have more rights than victims" argument appearing above is simply an empty and non-sensical cliche designed to get folks emotionally geared in a particular direction. That direction doesn't have much of an affinity for mercy, or correction...bad equals kill em.

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And you again Blatham missed the point altogether.

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rabel22 wrote:

Joe
You are usually an intelligent seeming person so im going to assume that someone other than you posted this and used your name.

After such kind sentiments, rabel it pains me to note that you are wrong: there has, to my knowledge, been no hijacking of my moniker.

Foxfyre wrote:

Acknowledging that the quoted comment is tongue-in-cheek, but in all due respect, the consequences of robbery, counterfeiting, double-parking etc. are temporal and reversible. The consequences of a brutal rape and murder are unbearable suffering/torture for the victim and a death that cannot be reversed.

Well, that was my intent, Foxfyre: to make the pro-death penalty folks divulge the rationale for limiting capital punishment only to murder. The "anti-recidivism" argument is baseless, since it can be applied equally to all crimes that we do not wish to see repeated. Thus, it is little more than a red herring in this debate. Thanks for bringing us back to the main tenets of pro-death advocacy.

Foxfyre wrote:

What do you do with the trucker who kidnapped a young girl, brutally raped her several times, cut off her arms at the elbows and threw her naked to bleed to death on the highway?

The same thing I would have done with Hitler (that's usually the trump card played by the pro-death camp -- I thought I'd cut to the chase here): put him in prison for the rest of his life with no possibility of parole or early release.

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If one innocent man is killed by the state, that's too many.

I don't have an issue with the death-penalty in a clear-cut case...it would probably save everyone some money and put peoples' minds at ease.

By clear-cut I don't mean "beyond a reasonable doubt", I mean "he did it and we saw him do it."

Multiple life sentences can keep men behind bars for their entire lives. If, as you say Rabel, "With the new forensic tools we have we can as never before be sure when we convict murderers and rapeists that they are guilty" - then we should have enough modern tools to be able to keep people squarely behind bars forever, with very little fear that they will escape.

One state-sanctioned killing of an innocent person is too many. So in order to use a death penalty - you've gotta be sure.

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I agree, you gotta be sure.

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Foxfyre,

You'd agree that kind of certainty is extremely rare, no?

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Not anymore Jer. With eye witnesses and DNA evidence, one can be reasonably sure. As somebody earlier posted, the death penalty is almost never imposed on circumstantial evidence.

The argument continues to be that the chance that an innocent person might be executed is reason enough to not impose a death penalty. Could not the converse argument be made; i.e. the chance that a viscious killer might have opportunity to kill one or more additional innocent victims is reason enough to not allow him to live.

In my previous post that man lived after watching his wife tortured to death. The murderer had been convicted of a previous murder, had been sentenced to life in prison, and had recently escaped. So what should be the consequences of the more recent murder? He had already received the ultimate according to what some would feel to be just.

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I would rather be certain that I could never be wrongly killed by my government (as an innocent man) and worry about the potential escape of a convicted killer than being in the opposite situation.

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Circular arguments. Nothing new to add.

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There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain. Mark Twain.

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Agreeing with Jer, I would also add that there are surely more those that were killed innocent - then those that were sentenced to death or to life in prison because of terrible crimes and then escaped prison

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Again, if a viscious murderer has been sentenced to life imprisonment with no hope of parole and manages to kill again, inside or outside the prison, there should be no consequence for that?

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mesquite wrote:

There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain. Mark Twain.

mesquite...that's a lovely quote I'd not seen before. The America I think so kindly and respectfully of is represented perhaps as well by Twain's independence of mind as that of anything else upon the horizon.

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Foxfyre wrote:

Again, if a viscious murderer has been sentenced to life imprisonment with no hope of parole and manages to kill again, inside or outside the prison, there should be no consequence for that?

The concern displayed by death-penalty advocates for the lives of incarcerated criminals is truly touching, albeit bewildering. True, if a murderer, imprisoned for life, kills another inmate, there are limited means available to punish him further. But then, if a murderer on death row kills another inmate, what are we supposed to do? Execute him twice? As long as inmates spend any time in prison, outside of solitary confinement, they are capable of killing again -- whether they are sentenced to life or to death. Unless you are prepared to advocate a murderer's execution immediately after he is sentenced, foxfyre, this is yet another red herring argument.

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Maintenance of cosmic order...it's REALLY important*

*(see Lear)

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blatham wrote:

mesquite wrote:
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain. Mark Twain.

mesquite...that's a lovely quote I'd not seen before. The America I think so kindly and respectfully of is represented perhaps as well by Twain's independence of mind as that of anything else upon the horizon.

Blatham ,
That quote was pruned from a larger work Bible Teaching and Religious Practice. He is one of my favorites also.

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The Death Penalty - Should it be abolished?

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