Do you agree with capital punishment?

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Norsefire, Dec 17, 2007.

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Do you agree with capital punishment?

  1. Yes, criminals asked for it

    32.7%
  2. No, no one deserves execution, no matter what their crimes

    49.1%
  3. Yes, but only for murder

    18.2%
  1. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

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    11,529
    Seeing as some people (won't say names) seem to believe that pedophiles and child molesters should just walk the streets free, or get a few measly years in prison, I want to know what YOUR opinion is (I mean you, {insert name here})
     
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  3. draqon Banned Banned

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    No one deserves an execution, jail however is a solution...but it is merely hiding a problem.
     
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  5. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

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    11,529
    Not even if they murdered twenty people, tortured countless others, and raped innocent children?

    Of course, execution alone isn't enough punishment; death is more of an escape to alot of criminals. I would say, give them what they gave to others. Not torture, but what they did to others.
     
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  7. draqon Banned Banned

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    No...that is wrong...they must serve a part to the community. Any crime, unless it is political is to be handled without executions.
     
  8. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

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    11,529
    Okay........what about slavery? Criminals of course. If they murdered and raped......they deserve to be stripped of their freedom. By the Lord, you're a Genius! Let's help them contribute to society by giving them the nastiest, most labor-intensive jobs existing, and not paying them a dime! Give them the worst, I say, but let them live through it. Pure genius, Dragon! It's that Russian in you.....

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  9. draqon Banned Banned

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    35,006
    thats not what I meant Norsefire

    I meant that the ultimate goal is to change their mind in the process and live normally and peacifully as we all do
     
  10. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    11,529
    And what of the familieis who have suffered? Perhaps, perhaps after punishment your idea may come into play, but firstly and foremost they cannot walk free, now can they?
     
  11. draqon Banned Banned

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    35,006
    anyone...families or not
     
  12. Norsefire Salam Shalom Salom Registered Senior Member

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    11,529
    "anyone.....families or not" what?
     
  13. Kadark Banned Banned

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    3,724
    What the hell has jail ever solved?
     
  14. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    It gets us nothing

    Depends on who you are. Some people have made good after getting out of jail.

    From the Mark Steel Solution (#103, 23 October, 1992, "Judges")

    From the New York Times, December 16, 2007:

    In the end, all the death penalty is about is bloodlust and satisfaction. It is an excuse to sanction homicide and feel righteous about killing another human being. In other words, it lowers society to the level of the murderer. While some folks are happy to place themselves in such company, it is a curious quirk of humanity that, while we scramble away from nature and insulate ourselves as something separate, death—our ultimate and unconquerable fear—is the one component of nature so many human beings revel in. As murderers demonstrate, you can always find a reason to kill someone. And as they also demonstrate, the presence of the death penalty doesn't do much to stop people from killing one another. No "legal" infliction of death by a state apparatus has brought humanity an escape from its frailty or fear. We will continue to die; this is certain. Despite what advances we might make against death itself, we will still continue to seek to kill. This, too, seems certain. Let us do away with at least this celebration of our brutality. We may have little hope of e'er transcending the whole of human savagery, but there is no reason to pretend that joining in the bloody bacchanal under the auspices of a righteous state is any better, or any more civilized, than those who would kill for other illusions of propriety.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Steel, Mark. "Judges". The Mark Steel Lectures. Ep. 103. BBC Radio. October 23, 1992.

    New York Times Editorial Board. "A Long Time Coming". New York Times. December 16, 2007. See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/opinion/15sat1.html
     
  15. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    25,817
    If an adult rapes a child under a certain age, I want them dead. (lets say birth-11) Rape more than one child aged 12-15, I want them dead.
    I don't care if it makes sense, I don't care if its revenge and not justice, I don't care. If you can't be a celibate pedophile, than you can be a dead pedophile.
     
  16. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    33,264
    I'd ask the family of the person what they wanted to do with the guilty

    party. I'd also let the family throw the switch if they wanted the guilty

    party dead. This would have to be a case in which there wasn't any chance

    any other person could have done the crime.
     
  17. Kadark Banned Banned

    Messages:
    3,724
    Tiassa: Jails are one of the worst "solutions" to stopping crime ever imagined. It rarely solves anything, as the increasing crime rate would bluntly indicate. Slashing a man's freedom of a large percentage of his life over a crime that never deliberately hurt others (stealing, drugs, etc.) is barbaric, and yet doesn't work all at the same time.

    Look at this cycle of crime: a man is charged with a crime, and is sentenced to, let's say, ten years in prison. At this point, his family is without a father figure, and likely their only source of income has been halted. The family struggles with little or no money, and the kids are not appropriately raised due to lacking a second parent. The man, finally after ten years, is released, and his wife has likely divorced him. He tries to get a job, but with his criminal record and absence from the work force for a decade, he is unemployed. In order to obtain the money to function a half-decent living, the man must do what he first did - crime! And then he's caught, and thrown in jail. What's solved? Absolutely nothing. Only more serious problems are established through this backward system.

    Look at today's prisons, for example: they cost hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain, they're overcrowed, demand new facilities, and they simply don't get the job done. With all the money, time, and space that prisons cost, it's really amazing that we haven't brainstormed a better option to preventing and dealing with crime.
     
    Last edited: Dec 17, 2007
  18. draqon Banned Banned

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    35,006
    it allowed them to age and become wiser...slower...weaker...human life span decreasing.
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Execution does not punish the criminal because he is now dead and cannot feel bad. It punishes those who love him. It leads to the kind of insanity than now prevails in the Middle East: Your daddy killed my daddy so I'm gonna kill your whole family.

    If you put a father in prison, every time his children visit they are reminded of his crime and they see what it did to him. If you kill their father, all they remember is that you're the asshole who killed their daddy.

    The fundamental principle of civilization is that you don't get to kill anybody, ever, for any reason, unless they lapsed into uncivilized behavior first and you have no other way to defend yourself against a direct threat.

    So if somebody breaks into your house and tries to kill your wife and you don't have a taser or telepathy or a paralyzer ray-gun but you do have a pistol, then of course you can shoot him.

    Even if you come home and he's already killed your wife, I can forgive you for being overcome with grief and rage and killing him in the heat of the moment. No one can be expected to be quite that civilized under the circumstances.

    But if you overpower him, tie him to a chair, dial 911, talk to the cops through your tears, and endure months and months of humiliation as the legal system drags you through the mud, he's finally convicted...

    And then after all that trouble the bloody damn GOVERNMENT kills him? WTF? They're supposed to enforce civilization and rationality! Why should the government be in the business of taking revenge? That's sure setting a crappy example for the citizenry.

    Of course every principle has exceptions. We've learned that if you put a terrorist in prison his buddies back in Crapistan will kidnap twenty of your people and threaten to kill them if you don't send him home. And if you send him home he'll just go out and kill twenty of your people anyway. So terrorists have to be executed. But the average murderer doesn't have a cell of devoted buddies who will commit mass murder to get him out of jail. Even if a "bleeding-heart" judge lets him out some day, most murders are crimes of passion that are very unlikely to be repeated. You and I are more likely to lose our heads and murder someone we hate, than a guy who strangled his wife's lover and has been haunted by the memory of watching him die and seeing his family weep, every day of his life.

    Hell, I feel terrible every time somebody dies and I see his poor little DOG grieving. I can't imagine what it would feel like to be personally RESPONSIBLE for taking the life of somebody's FATHER or SON or HUSBAND. No matter how much I might be grieving over whatever the guy did, I don't see how it's going to make me feel any better to watch his family feel the same way I do.

    How absolutely sick does a person have to be to get solace out of something so downright MEAN?

    As a practical matter, we've seen far too many innocent men convicted of capital crimes. There's certainly got to be a break-even point somewhere, where it's okay to take the risk of jailing ONE innocent man in order to avoid letting a THOUSAND guilty men walk the streets. But it's not okay to take the risk of KILLING that one innocent man when you can just as effectively end the careers of those thousand guilty men by putting them in prison and letting the one innocent guy out twenty years from now when a new technology exonerates him.

    Execution is forever. You can never apologize to a kid for killing his innocent father. That kid will hate you forever. For that matter, so will I. There's no excuse for killing people in cold blood. Not ever. It's not civilized.
     
  20. USS Exeter unamerican american Registered Senior Member

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    2,482
    No No No, and NO! It is expensive and it kills innocent people. Oh right, did I mention? NO!!!
     
  21. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    37,884
    Nathaniel Hawthorne famously noted that there are two necessities in any human society, cemeteries and jails. People will always be dying, and people will always be committing crimes.

    The problem with prisons right now is that they are designed and operated in a manner that fashions and elevates criminals. Send a person to prison for simple possession, they will come out hardened, and more willing to commit actual crimes against people.

    Despite fancy words like "corrections" and "rehabilitation", people are so easily swayed by political concerns and self-righteous sentiment that American society, for instance, is unwilling to build and operate prisons with the intention of correcting behavior or rehabilitating individuals.

    Let's pretend I tried to perform an emergency tracheotomy with a chainsaw. Quite obviously, I would fail. Does this mean tracheotomies are one of the worst solutions to solving critically-obstructed airflow? What if I tried heart surgery with a circular saw, a bellows, and two D-cell batteries? Would that failure mean we should not perform open-heart surgery? Quite obviously, once we figure out how to do something—well, for the most part—right, we can profit by it as a species or society.

    Prisons are no different. Obviously, there are some people who cannot be corrected or rehabilitated. At present, however, we presume a broader range than reality determines simply because we think it is easier.

    Yes, the prisons cost a lot, and no, they're not getting the job done. Crime and punishment is a lot more complicated than simply punishing crimes. Trying to economize the prison system for political purposes only adds to the problem. Exploiting rehabilitation as being "soft on crime" only adds to the problem. Many of the same people who are so outraged about crime and criminals are working very hard to ensure that society will face an ever-increasing crime problem.
     
  22. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    25,817
    I think with the advent of DNA as evidence, those days are hopefully behind us.
     
  23. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    33,264
    Many murderers today leave no DNA behind.
     

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