Death Penalty

hey comrades what is your opinion to that subject pro or contra
(in civil right of course)

 

When proven beyond a doubt that a subject is guilty of a crime heinous enough to warrant the death penalty, it should be administered after one appeal.

 

I agree. If the accused is granted due process as required by the Constitution and he is convicted by a jury of a heinous crime for which society has determined that one may be subject to the ultimate penalty then it is just that he be executed. Society can make the determination that some crimes warrant forefiture of your life just as they can require you to forfeit your freedom or material belongings.

 

I agree with Tom and Grieg.

 

Three responses, and all in favor?

Oh, boy, it's gonna hit the fan, real soon!

 

against - it's barbaric and a slur on our civilisation.

It should not be used under any circumstance or for any reason in any form

FNG

 

Okay, I basically understand the barbaric thought.

But what do you say when a murderer/rapist/pedophile/all-the-above gets paroled or released, and does it again? Execution would have prevented that.

Failing execution, is it not barbaric to keep such a person locked in a cage the rest of his life? Is it right that the taxpayers should provide room and board, virtually free medical care, cable TV and other amenities for the rest of his life, when many people who work can't afford some of those niceties? What about the costs of the guards and facilities to keep these subjects? Thirty cents for a bullet seems a small price to pay.

 

Well, who says they should get cable TV?

 

Legislatures, responding to liberals who feel prisoners should have so many rights.

 

But in my ideal society, if you break the law, you have voided your social contract, and therefore have none of the more frivolous rights. You still get the right to exist, to worship who/what you like, and that's about it

Not quite as harsh as the good old days, where severe breaches of the law, or failure to take your punishment resulted in being made an outlaw - which literally meant being outside the law (that is, outside the protection of the law). Anybody could do anything they liked to you, no questions asked.

 

i'm pro, the reasons are already given. i don't want to see a serial killer back on the streets again.

take belgium. our number one public enemy (a french speaking guy called Dutroux) kidnapped little children, abused them, locked the in a celler and when he was tired of them he killed them brutally. he is going to be in jail for the rest of his facking freaking life but he has one hell of a luxery (TV, swimming pool, radio, all the books he want, ....) and he has free acces to his file (more then 100.000 ,pages) so when he finds one little mistake, one error in a procedure, he can just walk the streets. i say, put him in his own cellar, seal it with concrete and let him die slowly of hunger (witch is still a better treatment then he gave to those little girls. :angry:

PS: no need to mention that he already escaped once (for five hours the country was in the highest state of allert. children were picked up immediatly from their schools by their parents, every cop was sended to the area where he escaped, helikopters searched all belgium, the amry was almost deployed to seal of the border), they also found recently a key in his cell for his handcuffs.

 

Against, in order to warrant taking another human's life in this manner you must be 100% sure of guilt, and I don't think there can ever be 100% certainty. Look at the Birmingham bombers, those men would have all been executed if Britain had the death penalty because at the time the courts and jury that convicted them were sure they did it.

No posthumous pardon can ever replace a wrongly executed loved one. "Life meaning life" and a much less luxurious prison system is a far better solution, since if it turns out after 20 years that an individual was wrongly convicted they can be freed and compensated, not posthumously pardoned.

 

The cost of jail is not that great when taken as part of the whole cost of society. It's about £18k per person per year in the uk. The prison budget is nothing compared to our health, education and military.

Releasing people is not the arguement and not a justification for murdering them. You can't say we have to x becuase if we don't he will be released in 30 years. Why not just hold him indefinitly? Whats the cut off? Any sentance over 25 years the government can't be bothered paying for so you get killed? Why not 20 or 15 years?

I object becuase it is wrong to kill someone becuase society has decided that they have no right to live.

FNG

 

our prisons cost a lot, and the doors doesn't have locks (ironicly speaking off course) it's very easy to escape from a belgium prison cell so our new prisons look like a three star hotel in the hope that criminals would stay (and thats the thruth)

why can't we have something like alcatraz, just put all the criminals on one island, let the navy patrol the island and shoot everyone who is escaping

 

We are all going to die. It's just a matter of when, where and how.
If some few people willfully threaten the safety of their neighbors and take it upon themselves to terrorize and kill innocents then society has a duty to protect those unable to protect themselves. Society then has a right to determine the unknowns, the matter of when, where and how those criminals will depart this life.
You can call that barbarism if you like however many disagree. Order is the essence of civilization..chaos is the province of barbarism. Chaos is what exists, for example, in undeveloped countries where there is no rule of law and the strong can victimize the weak. That's barbarism.

As a Randian/ Libertarian I belive that the death penalty should be reserved for only the most heinous crimes because there is a risk of it being misused for political repression. It's important that it be a tool of the people to maintain order and not a tool of the state to oppress the people. That requires extraordinary safeguards to be in place that guarantee due process and a jury. We have that in the US, in fact the pendelum has swung too far so as to make it too difficult to implement the death penalty and it has lost it's deterrent value (except for those who experience it..in that case deterrence is 100% effective)

ps..as a side note( rather than a philosophical justification for the ultimate penalty) it is also true that the same people who fight zealously for the rights of criminals aided by judges legislating from the bench have made it extremely expensive in the US to keep someone locked up and nearly impossible to lock someone for their natural life. In the US a life sentence typically equals 12 years imprisonment.

It's ironic that many people who claim the death penalty is barbaric and that the state has no right to take human life also support the draft. The state sending unwilling people to another country to take human life..imagine that

 

yeh nice nice but i am defenetly against it is a barbaric and ancient punishment and a dark heritage of our ancestors of the middleage and long befor. As simon said there were so many inocent people executet by this murderos sytem that were not guilty can you imagine to sit in jail waiting for your execution for a crime you didnt commit and even if they were guilty its still cruel
1. humans change and get mature
2. if there is no cure for some phsychos they should be locked till the end of time but no executions

no body has the right to take someones life ESPECALIY not the state his mission is to protect his citisens if they are old grannis or rob murders
and you can protect your citisens by locking these felons up instead of killing them

and to tell you in advance dont come up with but wat if when your children been raped and killed sure i want to see him dead and thats exactly the point do you want to live in a country were the blood rage feelings of the relatives count more than the values of a educated societyin the court house defenetly not. All countries that i consider as western and educated had banned this state cruelity for decades only the u.s. still executes human beeing in texas even teenage boys and girls were killed what does that tell us about this state that it handels his murders by killing them

and when you take a close look on the death canditates they mostly belong to a poor minority from poor families with a low education

they were defended by incompetent lawyers with poor chances of gettin out of this murdrous machinery called justice

 

Al amin wrote:

So you are a pacifist then? If a person wishes to argue that they think that the death penalty is immoral and barbaric and they are philosophically consistent i.e. a true pacifist then more power to you brother. When some non-pacifist killer threatens a pacifist though doubtless they then expect violent, non pacifist citizens to protect them from the bad guys.

I don't advocate revenge or blood fueds. Society must be dispassionate and even handed in the application of force, either to protect, in an immediate sense, like a policeman shooting a bank robber who is threatening the lives of the bank employees, or to protect society as a whole from violent criminals that often commit many violent acts against others in their lifetime.

Murderous machinery? Would you prefer vigilanteism?

As to how poor or uneducated that is debateable. As to more minorties then why shouldn't they? If 12% of the population is responsible for 60% of the violent crime then one shouldn't complain when they also suffer a disproportionate share of the penalties for crime.

 

I'd be against a death penalty. Without doubt there are crimes that warrant it but the problem is that even the best justice systems occasionally make mistakes. The risk that even one innocent person might be executed is to high a price to pay.


However


Prisons should not be holiday camps. By all means provide education facilities for short termers but on the whole they should be dank pits of despair.

Oh and bring back flogging.

On the whole lets go down the Singapore route, which from what I've heard is a lot closer to a crime free society than the west has even managed.

 

I'm against it , it's a sign of a regressive society.

 

Pithy phrase but what does it really mean? Regressing to what? From what?
The US has had the death penalty throughout it's history so it's not regressive in our case