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Capital punishment

'Doesn't deserve to live' is an odd though often used phrase. Who does deserve to live?
There's also plenty of murderers who do 'deserve to live' according to the majority, soldiers, armed police, those who kill their tormentor after years of abuse, in self-defence or defence of another etc.
There is also a big difference in not feeling remorse that someone is dead and actively condoning their execution. I personally find that my emotions are a very poor guide to ethical complexity.

Rasmus also has a very good point - it is easy in hindsight to point at a particular example but very difficult to design a system that produces consistent and fair results. Any system of judgement is problematic because no matter how well thought out it is there will also be circumstances that aren't covered and grey areas, blurred lines, unclear events etc. But without such a system all you have is someone pointing at someone else and saying "they should die"
 
the best argument for capital punishment for me, is the fact that the taxpayers will have to pay for the rest of the life of a criminal when he gets life long instead death penalty. But i think we as a society have the moral obligation to do it. they should however earn money as far possible to cover the costs they create for society. (but not taking away jobs from free people, licke ticket sales etc)

and when i say life long prison, i mean life long like in the USA. Not the European stile a few years = life long.
 
DC said:
the best argument for capital punishment for me, is the fact that the taxpayers will have to pay for the rest of the life of a criminal when he gets life long instead death penalty. But i think we as a society have the moral obligation to do it. they should however earn money as far possible to cover the costs they create for society. (but not taking away jobs from free people, licke ticket sales etc)

and when i say life long prison, i mean life long like in the USA. Not the European stile a few years = life long.
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I think you will find that executions cost more (at least in the USA) when you factor the extremely lenghty and costly appeals processes.
 
lionking said:
I think you will find that executions cost more (at least in the USA) when you factor the extremely lenghty and costly appeals processes.
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while that is indeed a factor i didnt think of, i doubt that is enough to come even with the cost if the same guy would sit in jail for the rest of his live. am i misstaken here?
 
I'm in favour if you give the sentencee a fighting chance:

1. if they're gonna be shot. give them a frying pan to shield them from the bullets
2. if they're gonna be hanged, hand them a rusty razor blade to try and cut the rope
3. if they're gonna be gassed, a set of bellows to blow away the fumes
 
Life with no parole for a person who murdered another human being is sufficient punishment. Serial killers like Dennis rader have to be segragated from the rest of the prisoners in a closet sized room. There they will stay for the rest of their lives. This is worse than death to me.
 
DC said:
while that is indeed a factor i didnt think of, i doubt that is enough to come even with the cost if the same guy would sit in jail for the rest of his live. am i misstaken here?
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Have a look at this:

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty

Using conservative rough projections, the Commission estimates the annual costs of the present (death penalty) system to be $137 million per year.
The cost of a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty would be $11.5 million per year.
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Her Dark Star said:
'Doesn't deserve to live' is an odd though often used phrase. Who does deserve to live?
There's also plenty of murderers who do 'deserve to live' according to the majority, soldiers, armed police, those who kill their tormentor after years of abuse, in self-defence or defence of another etc.
There is also a big difference in not feeling remorse that someone is dead and actively condoning their execution. I personally find that my emotions are a very poor guide to ethical complexity.

Rasmus also has a very good point - it is easy in hindsight to point at a particular example but very difficult to design a system that produces consistent and fair results. Any system of judgement is problematic because no matter how well thought out it is there will also be circumstances that aren't covered and grey areas, blurred lines, unclear events etc. But without such a system all you have is someone pointing at someone else and saying "they should die"
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Soldiers who fight for their country and kill enemy soldiers are only doing their job as are armed police who are protecting society from criminals. If you don't see the difference between these men and women and so cold blooded murder then I don't know how to explain it to you.
 
DC said:
while that is indeed a factor i didnt think of, i doubt that is enough to come even with the cost if the same guy would sit in jail for the rest of his live. am i misstaken here?
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It appears that you may be. This site suggests that it's 6x more expensive to administer the death penalty than life in prison.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty
I can't vouch for the veracity of the info contained therein.
 
Her Dark Star said:
This is something that I've been thinking about a fair bit recently. I always used to be on the far left, rehabilitation not punishment, education rather than incarceration etc. However after becoming a police officer a few years ago I've found that position harder to maintain.
I'm not a fan of capital punishment at all and doing it less painfully is better than torturing to death but the end result is still the same, however I have met a number of people for which it would seem to be the logical route. People who refuse any of kind of help or change, who appear fundamentally incapable of seeing themselves as having done anything wrong. In one particular case I was, for the first time, genuinely afraid of another human being. He was rarely out of of jail for more than a few weeks before being sent back, condoned violence as an answer to anything and I think its only a matter of time before he kills someone. He will, at best, spend his life in and out of jail being a danger to everyone around him. The cost of dealing with him in this manner is huge, resources that could be better used else where and I believe him to genuinely sociopathic and incapable of being anything other than a threat.
The libertarian in me suggests that we should do everything in our power to try to change him, or at worst isolate him from everyone else. Another part of me revolts at the idea of spending such huge resources on someone who already committed many offences and will undoubtedly commit more while people who have done nothing wrong suffer. The practical answer would be to execute him, but the ethical question is much harder. For the greater good is a very slippery path.
Apologies for the rambling, I think that capital punishment is a bad idea, I don't trust humankind and its social systems to implement it fairly or ethically but I have begun to question my stance more.

edit: wow thought I was going to be the first response but in the time it took me type I'm at the bottom of the page!
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Some people should never be released from prison. The Larry Singleton case is a good example. He cut a hitchhikers arms off after he raped her and then after he was released from prison eight years later he stabbed a woman to death. Why was he released?
 
Well DC and Eeney I have feeling you’re gone a love my opine.
All VIOLENT felons
Let me make this clear
ALL (murders, rapists, child molesters, violent assaulters, so on)
VIOLENT
FELONS
Should be put to death!

Now now calm down, let your heart bleed a little bit, hug a tree, sniff a flower.

The worst thing about the death penalty as it is now it does not protect society, there are to many half-wits that care more about looking humane than they do about protecting people from the invariably bad individuals that will always crop up.

And don’t give me the “weeeell just keep them in prison for life” BS, a lot of “lifers” get out because of the sympathetic attitudes of those who hearts bleed.

The guy that sucker punches a grandma to steal her social security check is at least as big a danger to society as the clown that kills his wife in a drunken rage.
Do a web search on child murders, a large fraction of those could have been prevented if those perpetrators were permanently dealt with the first time they molest.
 
Cainkane1 said:
Soldiers who fight for their country and kill enemy soldiers are only doing their job as are armed police who are protecting society from criminals. If you don't see the difference between these men and women and so cold blooded murder then I don't know how to explain it to you.
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It was made in reference to the question about whether a murderer might be allowed to live, in these cases murder can be justified but it is still murder. If the murder of an individual by a police officer can be justified (which most people wouldn't argue with) then why can't the state's murder of an individual be justified?

Those costing figure's are interesting but don't actually surprise me, court cases are very expensive things and obviously the death row appeals can go on for a very long time. So long in some cases that the inmates life expectancy is actually increased by being sentenced to death! However what the figures mostly prove is that the government is inefficient, no shock there. Would it matter if it actually was cheaper though? Should it matter? Does the practicality of it change the ethics at all?

And please note that I am trying to further an interesting discussion, not proclaim a rigid stance. In reference to the police and armed services I am not disrespecting them at all, on the contrary I am a police officer and most of my friends are either police or armed services.
 
kedo1981 said:
...snip...

All VIOLENT felons
Let me make this clear
ALL (murders, rapists, child molesters, violent assaulters, so on)
VIOLENT
FELONS
Should be put to death!

...snip...
Click to expand...

OK lets say we implement this approach, we know there will be some people who will be wrongly executed because they were wrongly convicted. (We know this because we know justice systems are not perfect because we have plenty of evidence to show they aren't.)

Are you willing to take your chances of not being one of those wrongly executed?

And is there a sort of cut-off line at which you would no longer consider your execution policy workable? For instance if it was say 1 out of ten that was wrongfully executed or 1 out of 5 or any other figure?
 
dtugg said:
Why is the state allowed to take away people's freedom and confine them to a small room for years when an individual is not?
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That's actually a good question and one I was starting to hint at earlier. Taken as a standalone issue I'm not entirely sure that it is OK for the state to lock people up in prison for years simply because they didn't follow the rules.

However, for society to work the way most people seem to want it to there seems to be a practical element of having to do 'something' with people who not only don't function in that society but seem to work actively against it. Is locking them up right? I don't know if it really is, but is there a better alternative? Executions seem to fall clearly into a category of things to which there are workable alternatives. There is no great need to execute people and nothing is achieved by it that simply locking them up wouldn't achieve.
 
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