WHAT IS YOUR VIEW ON THE DEATH PENALTY?

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No, I am sorry but all checks and balances do in this case is gunge up the system and the problem of innocents being killed would not just go away. The USA already has a very strong appeals system and to be honest there have been scandals as of late, of innnocents dying still. Come on, Techstep.

I'm also being polite enough to entertain your hypotheticals as if they're truth and answer them. They're still hypotheticals and I think badly overinflated ones. You make it sound as if at least 5 or 10% of people on death row are innocent.

I have a better proposition; lets just take this back to the root. Do you believe that execution is unacceptable under any circumstance on its face? If so lets discuss this rather than arguing back and forth on our wild guesses.

I never suggested such a thing about how much! Don't you dare put words in my mouth!

Unlike anyone else who has put it clearly I don't think an innocent life, one innocent life, should be wasted from a Death Penalty. I am not entertaining any hypotheticals at all, unless you think speaking the truth is somehow a synonym for a hypothetical. Is saying that the US has a strong appeals system a hypothetical? Is saying that people have died innocently in the USA a hypothetical?

You are the one making hypotheticals, about how if people make cases watertight then they will all actually be guilty. That's naive.

But Now I will make make a link about the proportion given the death penalty falsely:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/06/ ... 4759.shtml

And here I shall actually give a well-sourced explanation of all that is wrong with the basis of the death penalty in the USA in relation to the punishment of innocents:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/523#Part II: The Cases of Innocence

I would be in favor of tightening the requirements.


I don't want to go into tangent examples but, the notion of '100% purity' as a requirement in almost any area is paralyzing. If we as adults thought this way on a broader basis we wouldn't be able to accomplish anything.

That is not a valuation of someone who sounds like they actually understood or indeed read what was said there.


I said use LIFE SENTENCES as an alternative. If anything you are the one who is stopping anything from getting done by requiring another layer of bureaucracy to be added to what is or is not considered a death penalty.

Doesn't necessarily even need more bureaucracy, just crisp definition of what the minimum requirements are on the collection of evidence, amount and quality of evidence, as well as the type of act to verify whether a case qualifies for death penalty if guilty vs. life in prison.

i am not sure i understand what you are talking about.

i said
.

up to date, not many people get the underlying meanings in what i say "day by day" in real life, but some may understand an aspect about what i say and comment about it, and sometimes i am disappointed, and i say "whatever".

i will try to explain the underlying meaning of what i said (which was a joke).

synopsis: i am asked a question about what i think of the death penalty, and i answer in the guise of a calm and collected, but nevertheless, a camouflaged evil person, and what i suggest would result in the annihilation of the entire population of the earth if it was globally adopted (there is an element of absurdity)

because:

if those that were already on death row were legally required to be executed, and if those that were involved with the carrying out of the execution were also given the death penalty for murder, then they would also be legally required to be executed by a new team of executioners, who in turn, would be found guilty of murder, and the cycle would perpetuate, and eventually there would would be an exponential rise in executions, and that would be facilitative to my real desire of not having to wait in queues.

that was my joke, and i am still not confident i have explained it properly. i think the "absurd" element in it would make it hard to understand to other people.

i was not sure that who i said "ho hum" to was understanding all that, and i was also tired and unconcerned about anyone.

i am sorry.
i will try to improve my judgement of when and how to post.

To be honest if this were any other forum both sides would have given up and walked away from each other quite angrily. I think your heart's in the right place though. S'just he was making fun of the whole thing with you. That's all.

But as I already put before you can't ensure perfection, and to be honest it is naive to expect that the law can be put to crisp definitions. It's the law. That isn't how it works. People have already tried that. Look at the links. There are many more reasons there why the Death Penalty creates death sentences where not needed.

In my view that is a very unrealistic view of how the criminal justice system works.

No amount of wordsmithing can ever create a "crisp definition." Words are, by their very nature, abstractions. Thus, no concept reduced to words can ever be a precise definition of the underlying concept.

The law is a dynamic, artificial framework that is designed to be applied to disputes in which the fact patterns are always, perforce, different. Any attempt to create a perfect system is doomed, immediately, to failure.

What keeps getting blurred for me is this: are we talking about perfection of guilt to execution or are we talking about there being an exhorbitant number of people on death row being innocent? I don't care about the first part or whether some non-premeditated murders end up on death row by accident, but if there's enough to show that a sizeable minority of people on death row who are straight away innocent and - say - incarcerated on appearance/color without corroborating DNA, that's a different story.

There's a difference between what's absolutely pristine 100% perfect vs. what will pass a reasonable person's inspection. The later is what our legal system is built on and I think it should suffice in this case as well.

I do not think we need to differentiate, because by principle there are absolutely acceptable methods of punishment without recourse to a system that kills people and has killed people by mistake.

In fact it doesn't make sense saying that these are somehow different because the first point you said explains why the second point you made occurs. Since we live in a world where all systems of justice are imperfect, they cause the deaths of innocents when the death penalty is a punishment, QED.
The death of innocents cannot be justified, thus since the systems of justice are imperfect, and have thus caused the deaths of innocents where the death penalty is used, the death penalty is unjustified.



If one does not care about detail then they lose all right to talk seriously about any judicial matter, since most important evidence IS detail. It is exactly that kind of logic that has caused innocents to die on death row before and indeed very recently.

Its the same process that has loads of innocents in jail for life as well by that token.

If you have the outlook that the death penalty is just barbaric and wrong on its face though just say it. It saves us all the word salad and musical goalposts.

Ohoho, but the important factor is that whilst I can actually exonerate people from prison sentences, and it happens more than you'd think, I can't do the same with a person on death row because they're already dead.

I never said that. People have already tried to accuse me of saying that, and they were always wrong when they said it. I don't live in a fairyland. I live in a hardcore world of reason.
What I think about the death penalty is not that it's 'barbaric' and 'wrong', or anything so stuffy.

My problem is that it's weak and cheap, because the natural fallibility of Humans means that innocent people will be executed, even though there is a sensible alternative that avoids this and is easily available when properly prepared for: Life imprisonment.

When I think of something that is weak, I think the death penalty, because it means ignoring the one major issue of the death penalty that curdles the soul nearly always when that terrible thing arisis: that of innocents being killed. When I think of something that is cheap, I think the death penalty, because all it does is throws away lives whilst not giving the option for further work to be made after the sentence is carried out, whereas with a life sentence a reprieve is still in reach.

If you're up for finding a way that they can economically work off the costs they're incurring on the state and tax payers that's fine; though it is incredibly expensive either keeping these people around or killing them due to the appeals process. As it is right now though we've reached the point where we're starting to get independent contractors and 'corporate prisons'' from the difference in what the states can cover - that part, for-profit prisons, is truly chilling.

If you had looked at one of the links I gave you, you would find that the appeals process, not to mention the amount of money wasted on death penalty cases is already exorbitant, not that I actually think money should be a consideration when talking about saving innocent lives...

I'd like to see the article.