[Caduceus]

[Paracelsus]

(10-17-2018 01:54 PM)Pride male Wrote:  

How is it possible that the same people who dont support death penalty for criminals fully support abortion?

Most of the time, this in fact is not the position.

On those two issues, the Catholic Church's position is morally unimpeachable: no abortion, no death penalty, no euthanasia.

As for this issue, there are two things I think are significant:

(1) Lex talionis -- eye for eye, life for life -- is or was a legal system that puts a person's skin in the game. It is the one brutal, ethical rule that makes Godless, secular-minded people behave themselves to an acceptable extent, nothing else short of a potent religious system has ever proven to work. It is the Silver Rule: don't do to others what you would not have done to yourself.

But:

(2) The legal system fucks up too often for the death penalty to be seriously countenanced as punishment. "Beyond reasonable doubt" is not scientific proof of guilt (indeed guilt of something isn't something that can be proven scientifically, it comes down to an estimate of probability of guilt in reality) and indeed most courts are forbidden to actually say to a jury what that phrase means, the jury is expected to just know what it means on common sense.

And we keep finding new things about human observation, human persuasion, and even human biology that keep overturning court cases. Scientists and prosecutors mislead juries about DNA, about forensics, about every topic imaginable because a guilty verdict matters more than the truth. Witnesses certain enough to convince a jury of their credibility are frequently wrong, especially when it comes to identification and memory. Women lie, or lie enough about rape in particular, to make it dangerous to kill someone. Even if 5% of rapes are false accusations, were you to impose a death penalty that's one in twenty men dying for nothing.

In short, if you had seen what I have seen in how our Great And Deliberative Legal System works, you would never countenance the death penalty, ever.

There is really only one situation where you could even countenance the death penalty if you were prepared to take the risk of someone being wrongly convicted, and again it's lex talionis: that if it's wrongly visited upon a person, the accuser, the judge, the executioner, and the jury are all subject to the same penalty. Skin in the game is the only way, in our shitty, immoral, careless world, to force people to be ethical.

[66Scorpio]

Against.

Let them rot in jail. Let them out if new evidence comes forward. Save all the money from 20 years of lawyers, judges and court expenses that are spent on appeals.

However, the prison experience has to be meaningfully austere.

[Parras]

Against.

I read a study where they found that about 4-5% of of people on Death Row in the U.S. are innocent.

https://www.innocenceproject.org/nationa...-innocent/

^^^ I don't care what people say, but 5% is a high enough number to me, for being against the death penalty.

Most of the modern nations, if not all do not have the death penalty. In Europe they don't have it either. That's only a thing third world countries have. Its an archaic style of punishment in my view. I say just let him rot in jail for the rest of their lives.

The 8th amendment literally states "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

I would say putting people to death is cruel punishment.

Killing people using cocktail drugs is also "unusual" punishment, since the majority of the world does not use these methods. Only U.S. think this is a good idea.

The Death Penalty is unconstitutional.

We go to stop man, the year is 2018, this makes no sense, this is not part of the enlightenment of the west, this is not part of progression of human history.

[deerhunter]

The whole U.S. is colored red as though the whole place has the death penalty, that is not the case, many states don't have it. Feds might but many states, including republican voting ones such as Alaska do not have it.

[Syberpunk]

(10-17-2018 01:54 PM)Pride male Wrote:  

How is it possible that the same people who dont support death penalty for criminals fully support abortion?

Especially considering the child never had a chance to fuck up his or anyone else lives for that matter, but the criminal did. (aside from the inconvenience to the would be mother having to pay for it)

[RoastBeefCurtains4Me]

(10-17-2018 08:50 PM)Parras Wrote:  

Against.

I read a study where they found that about 4-5% of of people on Death Row in the U.S. are innocent.

https://www.innocenceproject.org/nationa...-innocent/

^^^ I don't care what people say, but 5% is a high enough number to me, for being against the death penalty.

Most of the modern nations, if not all do not have the death penalty. In Europe they don't have it either. That's only a thing third world countries have. Its an archaic style of punishment in my view. I say just let him rot in jail for the rest of their lives.

The 8th amendment literally states "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

I would say putting people to death is cruel punishment.

Killing people using cocktail drugs is also "unusual" punishment, since the majority of the world does not use these methods. Only U.S. think this is a good idea.

The Death Penalty is unconstitutional.

We go to stop man, the year is 2018, this makes no sense, this is not part of the enlightenment of the west, this is not part of progression of human history.

The first part of your post had some good arguments, but you took a turn into SJW logic right there at the end.

It's the current year! Things I disagree with are illegal and unconstitutional! Who cares what the written laws or written constitution or centuries of precedent say!

I think instead of saying the death penalty IS unconstitutional, you mean that you think it should become unconstitutional, by getting a constitutional amendment. A Supreme Court ruling would not be a viable alternative, unless they just make shit up, like they did with abortion and gay marriage. It would be possible legally to have the Congress pass a law outlawing the death penalty, but this is not politically doable. The constitutional amendment would not be politically viable either.

[ilostabet]

«whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man is his blood shed: for in the image of God hath He made man.» (Genesis 9:6)

Completely for the death penalty.

Some crimes are indication that the criminal is beyond earthly redemption. And I don't see the point in having large prison systems to keep all these people locked up.

[Pride male]

^The tax payers money going to waste housing scum.

[Rossi]

I think death penalty should be enforced, but only for crimes that are %100 proven. Such as from camera's and so on. Nowadays, a lot of crimes are caught by cameras anyway. I would rather rely on camera footage's than some shady dna evidences.

[Longshanks]

I think people deserved to die for many crimes but very scared of the state using it as a weapon. Tough one.

[66Scorpio]

Quote:

Feds might but many states, including republican voting ones such as Alaska do not have it.

Is that The Canada Factor at play?

[Richard Turpin]

For. But only for certain crimes such as Murder. And only then, it should not be automatically enforced by the state, but rather be an 'option' to be instigated by the victims family if they so wish. I think 'just retribution' is a very important, natural and often overlooked part of the Justice process.

Twenty years in a soft jail (reduced by half more often than not) just isn't cutting it vengeance-wise for most people who lose a loved one to violent crime.

I don't buy the 'current year' arguments at all, not one bit. I happen to think that a truly civilised society would be one that did not allow it's child-murderers to live.

[RIslander]

Mandatory reading : Starship Troopers, Chapter 8. You can jump right in without reading the entire book. You've probably heard of the cheeseball film but the book goes pretty deep.

TLDR version: The chapter is based in a high school classroom setting on Moral Philsophy some time in the future. They discuss how previously (in today's western world) criminals were sent to prison for their crimes. The argument is that incarceration of a criminal is futile, it only serves as a sort of criminal college as cons are able to share ideas and strategy.

Furthermore, incarceration is similar to locking a disobedient dog in a cage... It doesn't compute. It circumvents the natural evolution of pain and how that is the only way to change behavior. In this futuristic world there are no prisons; only the whipping post and if one cannot be rehabilitated, the gallows.

My own personal opinion: I am against punishment for the majority of violent criminals. Take the pedophile. Most likely, they were victims of pedophilia in their youth. Obviously they cannot rejoin society... No level of rehabilitation can fix that. Extermination is a better and more humane option than locking them in a cage at ~$50,000 a year.

[RIslander]

https://archive.org/stream/StarshipTroop...n_djvu.txt

[bigswingingdick]

100% against death penalty. In theory i´m in favor. In a perfect world. Some people should be put to sleep. But there´s no perfect system. Killing an innocent person is something I cannot agree upon. Getting life I can agree. But limited to blood crimes and caught in the act (red handed). If somebody get sentenced to life and he´s innocent you can probably fight for truth. But death it´s over. There´s no coming back.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-l...-death-row

Also the state should never have the power to kill it´s citizens. Government is evil.

[jeffreyjerpp]

(10-18-2018 07:08 AM)Rossi Wrote:  

I think death penalty should be enforced, but only for crimes that are %100 proven. Such as from camera's and so on. Nowadays, a lot of crimes are caught by cameras anyway. I would rather rely on camera footage's than some shady dna evidences.

^Exactly right.

This is the specific crime that shaped my opinion of this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire,_Connecticut,_home_invasion_murders

The guy interviewed broke into a home, brutalized every family member (the father was so badly beaten that people didn't recognize him after), raped an eleven year old girl and the mother, and then burned them alive. There is a legitimate public interest in executing people like this.

But "beyond a reasonable doubt" is NOT an adequate standard to sentence someone to death.

If 1) the crime is heinous (murder, serial child raping, etc) and 2) It can be proven beyond any doubt whatsoever, then the death penalty should be available.

"Beyond any doubt whatsoever" would include definitive video or photographic evidence, a confession supported by multiple witnesses and genetic material, etc.

[Richard Turpin]

I recently came across this funny quote by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (French critic and novelist) which I love;

On the proposal to abolish capital punishment, "je veux bien que messieurs les assassins commencent"

—"let the gentlemen who do the murders take the first step".

Tongue-in-cheek maybe, but pithy and memorable.

[saner]

I am against it. Simply because there have been way too many exoneration after the fact.

One safeguard would help,

If the accused is killed and later exonerated, due to corrupt prosecution or withheld exculpatory evidence, the prosecutor (or anyone found to have hidden exculpatory evidence) is the next in the chair.

edit: I see Paracelsus already said similar. Though the Jury getting the axe seems wrong. They are basically conscripts, only allowed to see what the court lets them. Easy to be manipulated into a verdict if they don't see all the evidence.