What do you think about the death penalty

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I'm against the dath penalty for ALL cases (even for the likes of Che Guevara, Anders Breivik or Osama Bin Laden), but life in prison should really mean life. Killing someone to make a statement about how murder is wrong is irony at its best.

Taking another life is the most authocratic thing a government can do. The life of another person does not belong to anyone but the said person.

What about the lives that the killer took? They had no choice and did no thing to bring upon their murder. The convicted offender did.

Nobody said that the killer had the right to take these lives. With that being said, an average death row inmate waits for ten years before his execution; this is psychological torture.

Let's say a guy sets a building or a car on fire. Is the best punishment in this case to light his house on fire for revenge?

While it's tempting to hang or shoot child molesting killers, what you feel about someone gives you no right to kill them.

Last edited by Kurgan on 09 Sep 2012, 9:38 am, edited 2 times in total.

there's no statistical relationship between the death penalty and deterrence, it can't restore anything, and it's significantly more expensive to deal with the appeals process and then the actual execution itself in a legal way than it is to just keep someone in prison for life.

there was a movie a while back called "The Interpreter" in which one of the characters says "Vengeance is a lazy form of grief." I agree wholeheartedly.

I don't see why being anyone should be punished for being a paedophile by itself. In fact, I think they should be helped as much as possible. Imagine having a toxic sexuality like that that you can't fix. It would be nearly as bad as not being able to breathe.

People who molest children however is another story.

Maybe I articulated that wrong. I ment child molesting killers.

Actually Kurgan, it's not psychological torture at all. Many killers PREFER to be on death row for at least 10 years so that they can come to terms with their fate and then be humanely executed.

It's far more torturous for them to be placed in the general population and live in constant fear for their lives and their safety. That's why I strongly advocate jailhouse justice over capital punishment.

The reason I have a problem with "Jailhouse Justice" is that sometimes the people on the receiving end of it do not deserve a punishment that severe. It would only work if you housed all of the heinous offenders together. Then I'd say let them have at it. Honestly, I find it impossible to find even the smallest amount of compassion for the worst of the violent offenders. And I tend toward being an overly compassionate person.

That's EXACTLY what I've been proposing for years now! There should be designated prisons that are intended to house both violent felons AND sex offenders in the same facility. The state of New York ended parole for violent felons and sex offenders, causing violent crime to drop by nearly 50%.

In the meantime, I think it should be standard practice for prison guards to deliberately arrange for the most brutal killers to be subjected to jailhouse justice: By putting them in multi-person cells with inmates who are inclined to kill each other.

We have no free will. Our decisions are made by neurons in our brain firing due to genetic and environmental factors interacting in a complicated way.

Punishment and reward are two environmental factors that affect the likelihood of people committing crimes or whatever you may want to incentivise or deter them from doing.

I think InThisTogether overestimates the reliability of witness evidence.

AspieRogue's views on Jailhouse Justice continue to sicken me. Inmates are renowned for their excellent sense of morality, taking into account the strength of evidence and carefully considering every aggravating and mitigating factor.

I see that you are from Norway, I once read about in the newspaper Breivik psycho, very sorry for Norwegians because of the crime, but did not think that the lack of the death penalty, does not that such psychopaths as Bravik think they can do anything to be born in their sick minds?

In Poland it was once a death penalty , but at the end of the 80 introduced a moratorium on the death penalty, and in the early 90s has been abolished. This manifestation of pseudo-humanitarianism that led to a dangerous serial pedophile murderer escaped the death penalty, the sentence was changed to life imprisonment. Bastard who raped and murdered 10 boys, is still alive and his victim is not,.
Does this it is fair, because it seems to me that certainly damn it is not.

An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind.

By keeping him incarcerated forever, we take the moral highground over him rather than sinking to his level. Also, he has to put up with a terrible standard of living and the guilt of his crime for much longer than if he was simply killed.

For me there is only one fair punishment for children murdering beast, DEATH

OK:
http://economics.fundamentalfinance.com ... ycrime.php
http://www.poverties.org/poverty-and-crime.html
http://www.medicinenet.com/child_abuse/page3.htm
http://www.pcar.org/poverty-and-sexual-violence-0
http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/ar ... in-chicago

It was not fair that the boys were raped and murdered in the first place; killing another person will not make things 'more fair.' It will not bring the boys back. It may be the case that this man really did committ these heinous crimes, and in that case it may be that it is better to wash our hands of him and move on, forgetting him and everything he did... but trying to make things 'fair' by killing him is an exercise in futility.

I think the risk of wrongly executing someone makes the death penalty impractical in most cases.

However, some criminals, such as gang leaders, can maintain a great deal of their power and can be a threat to the law-abiding population even behind bars. The death penalty might be prudent in such cases, if we were absolutely certain we had the right villain. But would we have that certainty? I fear a paranoid jury may convict someone in haste, or, worse yet, a criminal mastermind will frame people as being the head of their evil empire to get rid of them. That would be scary. Thus it's tough to say wether the death penalty would be better than life imprisonment in the case of a gang leader in practice.