Capital Punishment?

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I've heard convincing arguments for and against it, so as far as whether or not it should be the "norm" within a particular jurisdiction, I would leave it up to individual communities to determine whether or not it's fitting based on practical factors like the cost of incarceration, the success rate of rehabilitation for serious crimes, etc.

I don't know, I've been for it in the past and on still do support it in certain situations but less trusting of there being a system that can A) get the right guy and B)dole it out fairly and equally

My brother is on death row. He's not my biological brother but he and his two biological brothers were my closest family growing up. He's probably not going to be executed, there are plenty of courts to go through but eventually he's probably going to end up in some kind of mental health facility for dangerous psychotics with varying degrees of mental illness. That's why they keep going through the motions, he's only useful as an object of study. He's so far gone that I don't really have an opinion on what should or shouldn't be done with his case. The man I once knew was gone well before he committed the crimes that put him on death row. We couldn't do anything, we'd take him to the emergency room to try and get him admitted to a psychiatric hospital(because we knew he thought a God was telling him to kill people and mutilate their corpses) but he didn't have insurance and the only ER we could take him to didn't follow proper procedures. We tried every which way we could and he never denied what was going on in his head but in this horrible county, in this horrible state, we couldn't get help for him unless we could pay for it. And without insurance, even when we got him to a psychiatrist, the medications were more than two thousand dollars per 30 day period.

Anyway you cut it, he didn't have an option about being mentally... I hesitate to call it mental illness, he became psychotic very suddenly, he no longer seemed to know who he was or where he was or what earth was or human life, he didn't recognize his own family, his partner, their children, he didn't know who we were and we no longer knew who he was. He still doesn't. He pulled out one of his eyes before his conviction, then after the trial, in prison, he pulled his other eye out and ate it. That was when they'd heavily sedated him and supposedly had him on proper medications to "treat his condition"...

The most painful thing about losing my brother isn't that he murdered people I loved, it's not that he's never going to be "here" again or that I can never say goodbye to him or the people he killed, it's not even the social stigma attached in this town and in this county... it's my other two brothers. And their dad. We're punished alongside him. It's not meant to bring justice to the dead, but to their families, they're supposed to see justice in the execution of a person who murdered someone they loved and cared about. But it's us, me, my brothers, their dad, we are punished by being told he'll be killed, how he'll be killed, and made aware that after more legal procedures a date will be set, knowing full well that if he were put to death, it'd be ten or fifteen years away if we're lucky. Our pain and our loss and the grief we experience is not going to be somehow lesser than that of ANY other person who loses a loved one to an untimely death. For us, we've been notified that he will be killed, and we're supposed to sit and wait for it, and if anything our pain and suffering is drawn out over a long period of time and if by chance he is actually executed someday, I know it's going to hit my brothers just as hard as it hits anyone else to lose someone.

I don't think there's even the slightest possibility he's aware that he's on death row, facing impending execution. He was far gone before he ever got to the point of killing people. Before then he'd already lost any physical reaction to hunger, thirst, pain, cold, etc. I don't see how he's being punished, I don't think he can be punished. I don't think it's anything short of torture for death row inmates to go through that, but with him I find some peace in knowing he's not even there inside his head, I don't think he's suffering. I want to say that the State of Texas shouldn't be allowed to execute the severely mentally ill but we do, and we execute the severely mentally ret*d.

It doesn't matter to me what horrible things a person has done, I will never agree that the state should have authority to put any man or woman in a cell for a decade to rot and wait to be killed, with the knowledge that they will be killed, the knowledge of how they will be killed etc. That's not justice, it's a perverse form of revenge rarely effecting only the person sentenced to death, and it hasn't been shown to reduce the incidence of homicide or violent crime in the state of Texas. Or any state that actually uses the death penalty.

And as for the accuracy of our criminal justice system, the Innocence Project has exonerated seventeen people who were sentenced to death in the U.S., that's since 1989. So before then, and for all the cases they can't take on, it seems quite probable we've executed innocent people. The problem is, after someone has been executed the case is sealed and it can't be investigated by anyone who would have the authority to make the judgement that an innocent person had been executed. So it's legally impossible to prove we've executed an innocent person. That doesn't make it impossible for us to execute an innocent person.

I feel ethically and morally bound to the belief that unless acting directly in self-defense or protection of another human life, no person can have legitimate authority to end the life of another human being. That's why I don't stand in support of the death penalty.

I am absolutely against the death penalty. I don't trust human beings to kill one another with legal protection unless it is for immediate self defense.

Actually capital punishment for the mental retardation was outlawed in 2002. But that doesn't cover people who have an IQ of 71 or above. Teresa Lewis was executed in Virginia in September 2010 for the murder of her husband and step son. She had an IQ of 72. People she hired got life sentences while she got the death penalty.

I oppose capital punishment.

I have a very simple reason for opposing it. I don't like the idea of treating symptoms of a problem (so some people can sleep better at night) than treating the cause of the problem itself. It's a foolish approach to everything from medicine to engineering. It's no less foolish when discussing penal systems.