Death Penalty

SCoates, im constantly under attack for my opinions on this forum so forgive me if i dont get a joke when u pretend to attack me.

Montana,

torture is doing something with the intent to cause suffering. you were talking about specifically intending to cause them suffering. what was it, "i dont want them to be put out of their misery...i want them to rot in jail for the end of their days" or something like that?

honey, this IS torture...

Yeah, well, maybe you're right there, so we're even.

do you mean even or square?

Whatever floats your boat ;-)

I can assure you people in prison in New Mexico aren't being tortured except for torturing each other now and then. And I'm thinking. Life in prison versus certain death by lethal injection? I think as long as intense pain was not involved, most Americans would choose life under any circumstances over certain immediate death.

I once supported the death penalty 100%. Today I realize how wrong I was. So long as the offending party is incarcerated he/she is effectively removed from society. That is the end result I always wanted. The difference between killing them and keeping them alive is, if you find you've made a mistake, you still have the option to turn the living ones loose.

I agree Edgar.

I look at it that you can't undo the death of an innocent victim when one of the conscienceless unredeemable ones gets loose and kills again. It has happened in New Mexico more than once. I bet any of you can dig around and find out it has happened in your state too.

So make sure they can't get loose? These escapees were in maximum security prisons. And there's always the chance you'll get a governor who believes anyone can be rehabilitated. One of the worst was committed by a creep who escaped under one of our governor's lenient policies.

Or Michael Dukakis who signed off on a new policy allowing 'home visits'. One of his results was Willie Horton and we all know what Willie did to his next victim.

The trucker who kidnapped, brutally raped, cut the forearms off a young girl and threw her naked on the highway to bleed to death was a prison escapee. (She lived)

Some say the death penalty doesn't deter and maybe it wouldn't have detered these terrible crimes. But if they're dead they can't do it. I don't know anybody who has escaped from death row.

And there are cases where robbers, etc. have not harmed their victims to avoid being subject to the death penalty if they get caught. We have no way of knowing how many lives the threat of the death penalty has saved.

Again the evidence has to be absolutely conclusive with no margin for error for the death penalty to be ordered. But for the most heinous crimes, there simply must be an ultimate penalty.

That is no fault of the anti-death penalty crowd, foxfire. That's ineptitude on the part of officials. Not to confuse the two.

That's no comfort to the innocent victims Edgar. THey're just as dead.

Well, our law here in Europe - both, the Roman Law as well as the Common Law - is a "offender/act criminal law", and not focused on the victim primarily.

foxfire
Then blame the ones who let them loose. That has nothing at all to do with the death penalty, but in how they run the prisons.

Without even having met the woman referenced above; I say without hesitation that her life was more valuable than Odom's. No?

Click here, read and imagine what it were like to be these two victims of escaped convicts. Might get your blood pumping in the right direction. I can't imagine how or why anyone would consider granting this appeal.

Even Alcatraz was proven vulnerable to escape. Why protect the guilty at the risk to the innocent?

why sustain the guilty at the cost of the innocent?

yeah, i know its sometimes cheaper to lock them up then kill them...but this is a separate problem.

Perhaps you should abolish prisons (and certainly probation): either innocent or death.

perhaps that is meant as a sarcastic joke, or perhaps you forgot that not all crimes are worthy of execution?

personally, i would like to see prisons eliminated completely. if the crime isn't worthy of punishment by death, then instead of being incarcerated for no use, they should still be kept under lock and key but with the clear purpose of community service or free labor. i wouldn't mind seeing them in sweat shops.

IMHO:

Even if it were only applied to murder, and every person given the death penalty were truly guilty (a stretch), I would still be against it.

For whatever reason, the offender felt that killing someone could solve a problem. Then the state proves him right by solving its problem the same way. Doesn't send the right message.

Anybody wanting a death penalty badly enough will always find excuses for it. The prisons are badly run; it's the fault of not enough executions. A person gets murdered; it's because there aren't enough executions. Woman raped; too few executions. Disagree with the government; increase the number of executions. Abatoir America confirmed necessity for a progressive 21st Century.

Come on... this isn't some philosophical fluff. It is the realization of a simple ugly truth. Dead people can't kill more people. Prisons can't be perfect. Not even Alcatraz was escape proof.
In the case I sited above; mercy for a convicted murderer, resulted in an elderly lady's murder.
The inescapable fact is:
Had the Guilty Odom been executed, the Innocent elderly woman wouldn't have been. I'd would have preferred that Odom was the one executed.