I agree and that’s why I tend to not support the death penalty. If even one person is wrongfully executed, that is too many.
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The same person, 5 minutes apart?
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How strange that the entire civilized world does not have that problem, despite not having capital punishment.
It certainly couldn’t be that shooting a demon because it’s trying to eat your heart after breaking the prison bars with its bare hands would count as self-defense rather than execution, or that such supernatural creatures are never found in the first place. No, we’d better keep up our barbaric practices just in case.
At least it explains why you need specific compounds. Can you imagine trying to send one of these things back to hell, and not having a toxin with sulfur in it? I doubt even a priest could help.
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Now you’re just being silly. No-one said ANYTHING about demons. I mean, we’re all rational people here, amirite? We’re just talking about, like, a super murderer or something. You know, like on the TV?
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Aside from it being wrong to begin with, one other thing that bothers me - there are special safeguards and guaranteed appeals for death penalty cases, and they aren’t enough to keep innocent people from being convicted, sometimes cleared later, but sometimes executed - why aren’t there better safeguards for all cases, including death penalty cases, but also all other cases? or to begin with all cases that might put anyone in prison?
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Well, quite. Fuck, our coppers & judiciary fit enough people up, but your justice system scares the bejesus out of me…
Probably just send in Professor Xavier, because clearly this hypothetical person who cannot be contained by mere walls of steel and concrete is a supervillain beyond anything we mere humans can deal with.
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Seems pretty self-explanatory to me, but since you aren’t grasping the distinction, here’s the easy version:
I only said that I’m not in favor of it because of the risk of executing innocent people. This guy had 20 years of appeals since he committed the crime and from what I’ve read, he didn’t claim to be innocent. So he deserved what he got. I’m not laughing at the killing of a “precious human being”, I’m laughing at the irony of him dying in a somewhat similar way to his victim, whose throat he slit.
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Neither “20 years of appeals” nor “admitting to the crime” are proof positive of guilt. Ever read through the list of wrongfully convicted people exonerated by the Innocence Project or other groups? If you support the death penalty, you’re going to have to accept that you’re handing power over life and death to a fallible system. Get used to it.
Besides, I find capital punishment barbaric whether the subject is guilty or not. I wouldn’t support a system that tortured torturers or raped rapists, because I don’t want my government to engage in torture and rape. Why should killing killers be any different?
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I know this might logically confuse you, but the moral burden of putting the people to death is the people who actually DO IT, not the people who withhold the instrument of doing it. Crazy but true dude. Meditate on it.
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There’s also the desire not to inflict PTSD on the person tasked with the shooting (hence firing squads).
@OP: It’s heartwarming to see the creative crowd come up with so many constructive ideas how to murder people efficiently.
Yeah I didn’t want to be the first to say it, but if the US has one thing in ample supply it’s guns and ammo. Time to bring back the firing squad.
You might want to look into the work that they do, as well as their board and supporters. This really is not the case. The message they send is pretty clear, even without an official stance.
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Actually I think the strategy is: “You want to put people to death but have a requirement to do it humanely. If I take away your means of doing it humanely, you won’t be able to do it.”
If the system followed its own rules that might actually work. But in real life the system will do what it wants regardless of the rules. In the US, “legal” means “what the authorities wish to do”. “Illegal” means “what you do when the authorities decide to put you away”.
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I think the real issue this highlights is that there is no civilized way to murder someone. Sorry. Too bad. So sad. Can’t be done.
It is by definition a gruesome and barbaric thing to do. In fact, we tend to have laws against it. I’m against the death penalty because it’s not a penalty. As I’ve said time and time again: Everybody dies. Literally everybody. And unlike superstitious types, I don’t think you’re “sending” them anywhere. Although, when I was religious, even I knew that God was capable of forgiving just about anything if you were sorry enough- that’s the whole fucking point of salvationism.
All the death penalty accomplishes is conferring onto society at large guilt for a crime that is otherwise condemned.
@wrecksdart: The fact that judicial review is more costly than room and board has been well established for a long time now. Some of us, crazily enough, see the issue of killing someone as something more than a cost consideration.
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I’m more along the lines of how the EU is dealing with the problem: Ban it, and don’t deal economically with countries that don’t.
edit: it reminds me of people that say they are personally pro-life … but you can go have your abortion. That just doesn’t compute … and either does taking a non-stand. Not to me at least.
On second thought, thank you for the information.
The obvious problem being that we’ll never reach zero, death penalty case or otherwise. The system is run by humans, humans are filthy, opinionated, biased, etc. etc., so that’s an enviable standard but not one we will ever reach. Doesn’t mean we can’t try, and I understand the argument that we’re talking about death/end-of-story and as such it shouldn’t be an option.
I guess I see imprisonment for life as the easy way out to removing someone from society who has perpetrated heinous things to the people of that society and is in no way able to redeem themselves in the face of that society. I think that’s my sticking point.
Thanks to many replies and some research of my own, it does appear that the costs are much higher for death penalty cases (although my argumentative (i.e. pedantic) side feels the need to point out that many of those costs come from baked-in “protections” to capital murder cases, so if we were to try a capital murder case using the same legal processes as a life without parole case, I’m curious how the numbers would shake out). But all the evidence does point to it being a costly and time-consuming thing, more so than any other type of criminal case.
In the end, I have a hard time justifying to myself the need to show any sort of kindness for people who have murdered other people in cold blood and with malice aforethought. And specifically, I think it should be reserved for the Hitlers and the Breiviks and OBLs of the world in that it’s a dusty and unused thing that needs to be pulled out from the deepest recesses of the legal system when the time presents itself.
People that violent get sent to super-max.
