The Death Penalty Thread

Post Reply New Topic

I see you have stopped thinking.

No, I do think but in a more practical way than you do. Like it or not we live in a hostile world and the solutions and methods for keeping the wolf at bay aren't always nice and flowery.

And shooting your grandmother because some jerk raped a little girl may satisfy your hunger for vengeance but it does nothing for little girls.

Have any of you read 'A prison diary' by Jeffery Archer?

I went through all the pages of this thread, and none of you have even attempted to understand the mindset of a convict. How can you enforce a punishment without understanding the psychological impact?

For example, in the book, Archer makes it quite clear that most of the murderers he met, are very nice people. They are well mannered, well dressed, and cultured, compared to the other prisoners. Most of them regretted committing murder, and were attempting to change themselves - like doing a correspondence degree, work (D category prisoners in the UK are essentially allowed to work outside, and return in the evening to the prison), etc. They are only waiting for their parole, so that they could begin a new life once released. The serial killers, however, are hopeless, as far as Archer is concerned. I personally interpreted this as implying that these individuals deserve the death penalty rather than eat taxpayers money.

Regarding sex offenders, Archer did not meet any of them as they were housed in a different block. He was, however, concerned that they were given better treatment than those caught in possession of drugs. Nearly 70% of convicts in prison have been caught with possession of drugs, and many pot smokers leave prison as heroin addicts, as heroin is easier to score in prison than 'on the out'. In fact, heroin abuse is the biggest theme in the series, apart from Archer's rants on being innocent.

I think we should give murderers and rapists a fair trial before we hang them.

ruveyn

Was that supposed to make any sense at all or was it just a desparate attempt to have the last word?

No, it was an attempt to make you understand that shoving anyone into the death chamber (including, perhaps, your grandmother) may satisfy a district attorney who wants to get a case off his books but it doesn't find out who actually committed the crime and does not get a dangerous criminal off the streets.Mistaken convictions do happen and one cannot casually dismiss innocent people being executed while a dangerous man is free.

I'll agree that lawyers in general arent interested in justice. The defense attourney is only interested in getting his client off no matter how guilty he is and the prosecutor just wants to put someone behind bars. Both are driven just for the sake of winning.
Lawyers are a necessary evil but I think we'd be better off if we could winnow their herd down by about 90%.

Now back to throwing Grandma in the gas chamber for someone else's crime. Your example is a bit extreme. The road to the death penalty is a lot longer than one miss-trial. The legal process takes damn near forever to execute someone.

I threw your grandmother into the mix to get some impact on you on how it must feel to have someone you love get ground up in a dumb legal system. Enough people have been freed from execution through DNA evidence to create doubts about the nature of the current justice system and those doubts cannot be airily dismissed. A miscarriage of justice not only is a crime against an innocent. it is a crime against the many innocents who are damaged by not incarcerating the right person.

i think the only crime that should attract the death penalty is the crime of attempted suicide.

or it may be better to sentence then to life. who knows.

There was no impact on me. I lack that kind of sensitivity. I only repeated it as part of my reply.
Anyyhow, I still support the death penalty.
Now come back with something, anything, no matter how silly or off the wall just to get the last word in since that's so important to you.
I'm done with this thread. It has become pointless.

Do you mean that they no longer execute through the electric chair? Because I know they still use it in some of the states in the U.S.

Very few, if any. It is mostly lethal injection now. Ten out of thirty seven states offer electrocution as an alternative. Electrocution is rather barbarous. Essentially it is a form of cooking the executee. All of the 37 states that have capital punishment provide lethal injection as a choice. Some of the states offer electrocution, hanging or gas as alternatives. The supreme court of Nebraska found electrocution to be cruel and unusual so Nebraska, which has no alternative method, is essentially a non-capital punishment state by default.

See http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/methods.htm

ruveyn

Fixed your quote there, those long nested ones can get confusing. Me personally, though I really don't care for the whole situation I do sometimes wonder why we went away from the good old firing squad. It was quick, cheap, and even had elements of drama and romance with the whole cigarette and the offer of the blindfold, to me modern executions are almost as horrible for their detached clinical feel as for their existence in the first place.

It is for the benefit of the executioners. That job can have great negative impacts on mental and social quality.

Well traditionally with a firing squad, only one gun was actually loaded with a live round, the others were all blanks for that very reason. I suppose the idea could be modernized with fixed pressure barrels mounted to a machine rest and locked in for instant and painless death, there is a region of the brain that will guarantee that result with a gunshot wound with at least the same degree of success that modern methods achieve. Perhaps the executioners could all throw switches simultaneously with no one knowing who actually pulled the fatal lever, but personally if we must have a death penalty I want the people involved to realize exactly what they are doing, hence my objection to the clinical methods used today.