Are you pro-death penalty

Over here, the Govt is rearing to go to implement it. It's been stymied for years. The death penalty over here is by hanging.

If you're the one on the trapdoor, you've been weighed and are probably weighed down with sandbags. When someone works the lever that drops the trapdoor, you have a short fall which pops your neck. Law stipulates you have to be left hanging for 45 minutes, which means if you shit your pants there's gonna be a stink in the air especially if it runs down your leg.

Yes, I've seen it (not an executed victim, but a suicide one)....not a pretty sight. The noose tends to cut through a significant part of the neck and the eyes and tongue are often bulging out. Executed victims get to wear a hood. Quite bloody and messy.

But yes, I support it, and fuck Amnesty International.

I don't support the death penalty. It's no deterrent, it's barbaric, innocent people could be killed through miscarriages of justice, and it's in any case much less of a punishment than life in prison.

There are probably a few other good arguments against the death penalty, but, basically, no, I don't support it.

I support it.

Some people are just so savage that they don't deserve to associate with the rest of humanity. Plus, it saves a bit of tax payers' dollars (after we feed them for umpteen years, of course, while they await an appeal).

Mr. Brown wrote:

Some people are just so savage that they don't deserve to associate with the rest of humanity.

Bang 'em up for life, then.

Loomis wrote:

It's no deterrent

Of course it's a deterrent. If the criminal is dead, they have been permanently deterred from ever committing another crime.

Quote :

it's barbaric, innocent people could be killed through miscarriages of justice, and it's in any case much less of a punishment than life in prison.

I don't think it's barbaric, and in fact, it's usually a lot more humane than the way they killed their victims. However, I agree that there's a possibility for innocent people to be put to death, but I consider that a challenge to make the death penalty system better and more exacting and deserving of a higher standard of proof, not simply abandoning the system altogether.

Some men simply don't deserve to live.

I support it

gotta rid the world of garbage some how, and to me letting this scum sit in a prison for god knows how long is not going to do shit.

Don't support it.

Largerly for the big what if: what if you got it wrong?

I am conflicted about it, as the religious tradition with which I identify myself offers tensions, rather than clear-cut guidelines.

The one thing that does not seem at all allowable is self-righteous bloodthirstiness. In whatever sense the Christian tradition could allow for the state the use of violence in its defense of the law, it is not there to satisfy personal desires. It's eliminated as soon as you get to the passage where Jesus says, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." The Christian tradition is also uniform in its horror at any miscarriage of justice, and fully acknowledges the inevitable brokenness of any human efforts to enact anything resembling justice. (Indeed, at the very center of the Christian tradition is the wrongful execution of Jesus as a criminal.)

That doesn't quite get us away from the death penalty, though. There is also the sense in Christian tradition in which the state is understood to have been entrusted as executors of the Law. The servants of the state are "ministers of God," to borrow the language of the apostle Paul, and their function in that capacity appears to be to execute the death penalty, in all its messiness, as the proper sign of the severity of certain human acts (and we must note that the death penalty applied to far more crimes than most would consider applying it today). There never seems to be a window through which the historical, orthodox Christian tradition can completely revoke execution without seemingly cutting itself off from its foundations (nevertheless, some minority Christian traditions, such as the Anabaptists, retreat from any of the world's violence, period, and deny themselves any post in the government).

Dostoevsky was thinking of these tensions in this excerpt from THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, which I find very compelling:

"Remember especially, that you cannot be the judge of anyone. For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he, too, is a criminal, exactly the same as the one who stands before him, and that he is perhaps most guilty of all for the crime of the one standing before him. When he understands this, then he will be able to judge. However mad that may seem, it is true. For if I myself were righteous, perhaps there would be no criminal standing before me now."

Perhaps in some circumstances such as treason.

CJB wrote:

Perhaps in some circumstances such as treason.

Well, I'd go much, much further. I'd expand the circumstances for the death penalty to include rape, child molestation and attempted murder.

If a man (or woman) attempts to kill people but fails, why should their failure be rewarded with only life imprisonment (or in California 3-6 months in a minimum security facility)?

Most states have adopted lethal injection because activist groups opposed to the death penalty kept claiming that hanging, firing squad, and the electric chair were 'cruel and unusual punishment', and now we've got activist groups objecting to lethal injection. I don't know how much easier we can make their deaths, but I think these groups are more opposed in general to the death penalty than the means in which it is carried out.

The 8 year old boy who was kidnapped, raped and dismembered up in Brooklyn earlier in the summer....his killer ought to be dismembered in the same way. I think if we had more people being sentenced to die in the manner in which they killed their victims, we might deter a few killings from ever occurring.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

CJB wrote:

Perhaps in some circumstances such as treason.

Well, I'd go much, much further. I'd expand the circumstances for the death penalty to include rape, child molestation and attempted murder.

That's still a little lax IMO. I'd add
-tax evasion (all others have to pay more then, thus it's large scale theft on a whole country and its law-abiding taxpayers)
-mental cruelty (another form of abuse, rape or even murder, depending on the outcome)
-neglect of infants (see the above)

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

Most states have adopted lethal injection because activist groups opposed to the death penalty kept claiming that hanging, firing squad, and the electric chair were 'cruel and unusual punishment', and now we've got activist groups objecting to lethal injection. I don't know how much easier we can make their deaths, but I think these groups are more opposed in general to the death penalty than the means in which it is carried out.

The 8 year old boy who was kidnapped, raped and dismembered up in Brooklyn earlier in the summer....his killer ought to be dismembered in the same way. I think if we had more people being sentenced to die in the manner in which they killed their victims, we might deter a few killings from ever occurring.

Completely agree. We should build activist groups fighting for a much more restrictive law system and far crueller forms of the death penalty. We should train people to inflict as bestial pain as possible, in the most repulsive manner. For added deterrence we should force all prison inmates to attend these execution marathons. I think public broadcasting of the most spectacular events could also go a long way to make society work as it should. The most gifted executioners could compete in a kind of National Headmen League and the audience could make suggestions for especially horrid methods to kill the doomed, perhaps with added refinements such as The Bloodiest Execution, The Longest Execution, The Execution Where The Shit Splashed The Walls, The Execution Where The Condemned Pleaded For His Life The Most Amusingly, The Execution Where The Condemned Begged To Let Him Die or simply The Most Piercing Death Scream. That would teach them.

Countless people would discover entirely new and profitable talents they didn't knew they had before. And I think I can already see a few people lining up here.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

I don't think it's barbaric, and in fact, it's usually a lot more humane than the way they killed their victims. However, I agree that there's a possibility for innocent people to be put to death, but I consider that a challenge to make the death penalty system better and more exacting and deserving of a higher standard of proof, not simply abandoning the system altogether.

Some men simply don't deserve to live.

Very well said! Finally someone who speaks his mind and isn't afraid to address the problem!

As long as we are the ones who decide who those not deserving are. Better act before they do, build a few camps and be prepared, could come in handy one day.

No one's mentioned climate change skeptics yet? Hang the bastards!

CJB wrote:

No one's mentioned climate change skeptics yet? Hang the bastards!

Not really worth the effort, melanoma usually gets them in their own time. And a lot of those who don't flatter themselves with a 'skeptic' monicker.

Kennon wrote:

CJB wrote:

No one's mentioned climate change skeptics yet? Hang the bastards!

Not really worth the effort, melanoma usually gets them in their own time. And a lot of those who don't flatter themselves with a 'skeptic' monicker.

A straw man worthy of Sir Paul Nurse.

Sharky wrote:

Kennon wrote:

CJB wrote:

No one's mentioned climate change skeptics yet? Hang the bastards!

Not really worth the effort, melanoma usually gets them in their own time. And a lot of those who don't flatter themselves with a 'skeptic' monicker.

A straw man worthy of Sir Paul Nurse.

I'm skeptic of skeptics. Look who's calling themselves 'skeptic' today, like a plague, an army of firm believers in their skepticism, not to be reasoned with, and certainly not doubted, lest their semi-religion is deeply offended.

That's why I'm a believer. I believe in reason and sanity, that keeps me occupied most of my waking hours.

By the way, how about death by melanoma? I hear it's a horrible fate and would surely have a sobering effect on the odd perpetrator.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

The 8 year old boy who was kidnapped, raped and dismembered up in Brooklyn earlier in the summer....his killer ought to be dismembered in the same way.

"An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind." -- Gandhi.

Sharky wrote:

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

The 8 year old boy who was kidnapped, raped and dismembered up in Brooklyn earlier in the summer....his killer ought to be dismembered in the same way.

"An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind." -- Gandhi.

But what a just place that blind world would be then.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

The 8 year old boy who was kidnapped, raped and dismembered up in Brooklyn earlier in the summer....his killer ought to be dismembered in the same way. I think if we had more people being sentenced to die in the manner in which they killed their victims, we might deter a few killings from ever occurring.

So where does it end? Should convicted terrorists be put on planes* and flown into buildings?**

*With the pilot bailing out shortly before impact.

**That are scheduled to be demolished anyway.

And how about the point that society is supposed to have the moral high ground? A society that dismembers killers in the same way that those killers killed their victims cannot claim to be any better than those killers.

I'm reminded of that great monologue from Robert Bolt's A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS:

"What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

Sharky wrote:

I'm reminded of that great monologue from Robert Bolt's A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS:

"What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

QFT

CJB wrote:

No one's mentioned climate change skeptics yet? Hang the bastards!

Nor would I, because then I'd be hanging my self.

I've voted yes, but I'm rather conflicted on the issue. On one hand, I try to respect life as much as I can. I'm vegetarian, and I'm also pro-life. But I also value personal responsibility, and I buy into the notion that there are consequences for the choices we make and the actions we commit. In the case of someone who has committed pre-meditated murder, my gut tells me that the only appropriate and proportionate punishment is death. They have knowingly acted to take the life of another human being, and that lack of respect for life should be reciprocated.

Oh, and the reoffending rates are excellent.

Loomis wrote:

I don't support the death penalty. It's no deterrent, it's barbaric, ...and it's in any case much less of a punishment than life in prison.

I find something pretty flawed in the reasoning that the death penalty is bad because it is barbaric, and also bad because it is less harsh and cruel than other forms of punishment. I'd also like to see a serious argument put forth to explain how the death penalty doesn't act as a deterrent, rather than assertions.

HJackson wrote:

I find something pretty flawed in the reasoning that the death penalty is bad because it is barbaric, and also bad because it is less harsh and cruel than other forms of punishment.

Not really. When did I ever say I was against harsh punishment? The worst, most sadistic offenders in society deserve to be punished harshly, e.g. life in prison for murder and other very brutal violent offences.

But, yes, I'm against barbarism, and I say that the death penalty is barbaric because murder is barbaric. The death penalty is nothing less than murder by the state.

HJackson wrote:

I'd also like to see a serious argument put forth to explain how the death penalty doesn't act as a deterrent, rather than assertions.

Do people still commit murder in those countries and those American states that still have the death penalty? They do? In that case, the death penalty doesn't seem much of a deterrent.

Loomis wrote:

But, yes, I'm against barbarism, and I say that the death penalty is barbaric because murder is barbaric. The death penalty is nothing less than murder by the state.

I respect your point of view, just don't agree with it. I don't think state-sanctioned execution is "murder". I believe it is justice. Societies retain the right to punish a killer whose crimes were so heinous and despicable that that person simply does not deserve life. It's a concept that has been found among almost every tribe, culture, race and ethnicity since the beginning of mankind.

Loomis wrote:

Do people still commit murder in those countries and those American states that still have the death penalty? They do? In that case, the death penalty doesn't seem much of a deterrent.

Using that logic, fines and jail-time are also not deterrents because people still get fined and jailed. And yet they are still implemented.