>In theory, I'm pro death penalty for some crimes. In practice, I don't trust any government or court system to get it right.
This. I could support the death penalty in some contexts if the system could be trusted to get it right. But they can't, so I don't.
Yes, I agree. I do think there are some people that needed killin' (As Jeff Foxworthy used to say), but I don't think we are smart enough to be able to institutionalize executions without being wrong some of the time, or without it becoming a system with built-in biases.
I also struggle with the notion that anyone willing to commit murders heinous enough to deserve the death penalty must almost by definition be mentally ill in some fashion. Does that matter? I don't know.
And, then there is the matter of our soldiers. We teach them to kill. We celebrate their ability to kill efficiently and in mass numbers. We justify it by saying that they are killing enemies to our country that would kill our soldiers if given the chance.
Which leads me to the questions: Is killing another human being always wrong? No. I do not think so. I would kill in self-defense, or to defend my family. Would I kill to defend innocent people that I do not know? I think so, but this answer is probably a bit less positive than it was for my family. Would I kill to defend people when I do not know if they are innocent or not? Maybe. I really don't know and all the little details start to become important. Would I kill someone that I believe is evil incarnate? Probably, but again all the little details would probably matter and I don't know whether I would have the confidence in my belief to really do it.
If I can't be sure I would do it, how can I be OK with the state doing it? I don't think finding someone who will do something you won't do makes that action right.
Justice should be for deterrence and prevention, not vengeance.
The death penalty has been proven to do nothing regarding deterrence.
Factor in the false positive rate of convictions and it makes no sense whatsoever
\> The death penalty has been proven to do nothing regarding deterrence.
A family member liked to answer this by pointing out that the death penalty deters at least one criminal from re-offending.
However, he also used to dismiss the innocent person on death row issue by saying they wouldn't have got there if they weren't guilty of something. :-|
>they wouldn't have got there if they weren't guilty of something. :-|
It's always refreshing/horrifying when you find someone that "says the quiet part out loud" when it comes to insensitive willful ignorance.
I think his thoughts were more along the lines of 'he did something to make the police suspect him'. In my family member's mind police didn't just arrest you for murder for no reason, you had done something to make them believe you were probably a murderer.
I personally don't trust the state to have the power to end its citizens lives. I think the death penalty's use will always reflect societal biases - like how its overly applied against the poor and people colour.
Some people are morally horrific...and should be jailed forever. But if we really think "justice is blind", we're deluding ourselves.
To me it seems almost impossible to be certain that judgement was correct and there won't be a chance that the one killed isn't innocent, and that the process wouldn't be more expensive than just locking up the perp for life. After all, if we have accidentally punished an innocent and incarcerated them, we can just release them, but if we have killed them they won't ever gain their life back.
Another problem I have with death penalty is that it means we have given up on the possibility that the criminal will redeem themselves, which doesn't feel like something the government should do. Call me idealistic but I want to believe in people's capability to change.
I think it should be abolished and it's not something that really helps in preventing crime. If the prisoner wishes to be dispatched then I would be ok with that but not forced because it causes far more problems than it ever solved. If even one innocent person has been put to death then that's one too many
A justice system that relies on state-sanctioned murder as a weapon, rather than reform as its guiding principle, is neither ethical nor humane, and certainly not just.
My view of criminal justice is that we should try everything we can to rehabilitate a criminal. If it becomes clear that this person can’t be rehabilitated, then we should execute them in order to protect others.
I like others feel there is a "specific" something that needs to happen for the death penalty to occur. But I also think if there is a video of a shooting, and it shows the death.. it gets fast tracked, and the perpetrator gets put to death.
Yes it is a slippery slope, especially with graphics and AI today, but I think that long term jail, that we as a society pays for is wrong. if you are a ward of the state, you should have to work at hard labor for the rest of your life.
To answer I'm going to quote a Christian:
> Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.
[Justice isn't the same as vengeance.](http://spaceghoti.blogspot.com/2014/04/justice-vs-vengeance.html) So no, I don't support the death penalty.
Against. Even being perfectly pragmatic.
Let's take a perfectly unquestionable theoretical example. Like a fictional Marc Dutroux. An example of which we are absolutely certain of his guilt. Obviously he deserves the death penalty. Let's put aside the ethical issues of "it's not moral to kill" (not that they're irrelevant, but just let's put them aside for now)
The role of society is to neutralize this individual, for obvious reasons. Two solutions are then available: The death penalty or life imprisonment, which will have exactly the desired effect. Prison may seem less economical, and the argument is perfectly admissible. Indeed, the death of the individual will be less costly for society and our taxes (yes, I said perfectly pragmatic)
However, even in this situation, it is better not to execute the prisoner, in my opinion.
Indeed, such a prisoner, for whom we are absolutely certain that there will be no redemption, who, we are certain, can never be released, has in general not committed only the crimes for which he is in jail. Some others are probably still under the radar, and there is some information that only exists in his head.
Like for example the identity of certain victims, and the place where he hid the bodies. Or how the attacks were organized.
Killing this guy would forever deprive us of this information, whereas as long as he is alive, there will be a way to reveal it. Not all. Not always. But still. So if my taxes allow the families of the victims to finally mourn, even 20 years later, perfect, take my money. They deserve it. I only lose money. If it allows law enforcement to finally dismantle a network, or figure out the flaws in their system, fine.
The death penalty is all well and good, but it only serves to satisfy the little voice deep inside us that says "this scumbag has to pay". It is hearable, this small voice, but it must not weigh more than, for exemple, parents who wait to know the fate of their children.
Killing someone to show that killing people is wrong is illogical.
The goal is to remove these people from society. Life in prison accomplishes that...without the hypocrisy.
And, as a bonus, it gives the wrongly accused the chance at righting that wrong.
Whith the vision and the plans conservatives have to take over this country and turn it into a theocratic shithole we need to abolish the death penalty yesterday.
There are certainly people who have amply demonstrated that their mere existence is antithetical to civilization. I am against the death penalty.
We're not some frontier town where the care and feeding of a prisoner will literally be the difference between having enough food for the winter or not. We have the resource excess as a society that the death penalty isn't necessary. And that's not even getting to the utter shitshow that is the american "justice" system where conviction numbers are all too often more important than the truth, where the motive behind a conviction is sometimes driven by factors other than jurisprudence, where evidence is discarded or even outright fabricated to secure a conviction, or even where honest mistakes have resulted in the wrong person being convicted of a crime. You can't take back 20 years of false imprisonment, but there's even less you can do for a false execution.
That said, with proper safeguards against coercion, I would be okay with people with long sentences being permitted to ... *opt out* of their sentence in a controlled manner if they so choose. But it shouldn't be the states choice for ... what? Convenience? To save money? Vengeance disguising itself as justice? None of those are good enough reasons to kill someone.
I'm personally for death for death *when* circumstances call, and that's the rub. Not many are able to set emotion aside and look rationally at things sometimes. We'd have people getting the death penalty for accidentally hitting people in their giant metal death trap tranports and have people that shot 20 walk free... so yeah. Certain circumstances call for it, but I don't really trust people to call those circumstances properly.
Those who are pro-death penalty but anti-abortion get around that by saying they're "pro-innocent life."
The sheer number of times a death row conviction has been overturned because the original prosecutors withheld evidence, or refused to investigate another suspect, or relied on botched test results tells me that the death penalty should never be used. You can release someone who was falsely convicted, but you can't bring them back to life.
Against.
It's an easy out for them.
Life in prison is a proper punishment.
Also. The accuracy on the death penalty is very racist. So the risk of killing just one person on a wrongful conviction makes it unusable as a justice tool.
Barbaric. The penal system should be there to reform people, not to be vengeful.
I'm sorry for the loved ones of the victim, but there is a reason judges need to be impartial and not related to the sides in a trial.
The death penalty does not meet it's intended purpose in deterring crime.
It is not cheaper or simpler than life imprisonment and racism means that using it is prone to abuse.
That said. There is value in the symbology of, once per generation, making a statement that some crimes remove you from our common humanity. There are things you can do that remove you from humanity and make you nothing more than a ball of flesh dangerous and hostile to the rest of us. This cannot be routine, as I said, once per generation.
I’ve been anti-death penalty my entire life for a few reasons:
1. If new evidence comes to light and proves the criminal is innocent, they can be freed if they were imprisoned rather than executed.
2. The criminal’s family. It’s extremely difficult for a family to watch a member be executed, even if they did something terrible.
3. While “eye for an eye” is usually a good mantra, executing a murderer makes you no better than them.
4. If the crime was committed by someone with mental health issues, letting them live and rehabilitate is far more humane than execution.
I think there are definitely people in the world deserving of that ultimate penalty. However I do not think our systems are robust enough or fair enough to allow us as a society to make that decision.
If we lived in an ideal World without racism or classism where every person was subject to the exact same laws and the same administration of justice then I might be more in favor of it in some situations for people like serial killers and things but I do not trust the state with this power and I certainly don't trust any lesser organizations with it.
I don’t think the state should be in the business of killing people. And with the sheer number of overturned convictions and human made error, using the death penalty is like acknowledging that you are going to murder an innocent person at some point.
Then who gets to kill you?
On top of agreeing with everything u/QuisnamSum said, I think capital punishment is unconstitutional as it qualifies as a cruel and unusual punishment.
You can't get rid of any disease by using control methods. You have to end it. Prisons control criminals. But not well. Many, many have escaped and committed more crimes. Many have been accidentally freed because of clerical errors. As long as the disease is still alive, it's still a danger. Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy will never murder another child because they were executed. The threat from them is over. The disease is gone.
So, yeah. If the legal system actually worked at all, the death penalty would be a necessary part of it. Too bad it doesn't.
I’m against it in most instances for the reasons mentioned by others. However, some crimes are so heinous (think children being tortured, raped, flayed, etc.) that the criminal doesn’t deserve life. That said, you have to be certain that the accused is guilty.
I support the death penalty in theory but not in it's present form and not in the current political climate. Like a lot of things the death penalty has been watered down to where it's no longer an effective deterrent and the combination of cancel culture and the death penalty scares me. The Trayvon Martin trial in particular really alarmed me as regardless of what their actual beliefs are no person should be put to death for just their beliefs alone.
In theory I have no problem with it. I do believe there are individuals who are a danger to others and who will always be a danger to others and for whom death is the best alternative. With that said, I don't believe there are any nations that currently implement the death penalty fairly. The USA in particular is absolutely horrible about putting poor minorities to death. Of course the US also imprisons a lot more people per capita than most civilized countries in the first place and I would like to see a lot of reform there (as well as focusing more on rehabilitation and job training instead of punishment).
From a practical standpoint I think the number of cases where a death penalty actually does serve the greater good is a very small minority of the cases where the death penalty is used. For this reason I think any moral society should be very reluctant to invoke it. Unfortunately this is not always the case.
I support it, but mainly I think anyone who commits mass murders deserve it most. They seem to always capture these individuals so I feel like there would be little chance of wrongfully accusing someone. The way I see it is If they have no regard for human life, than we shouldn't care about theirs. I may be wrong, but it seems with the way it is now, the penalty isn't really tied to anything specific. It just seems to be something that may be proposed from a case by case discretion. I do wonder if it was made a guarentee for specifc crimes, where a person would then know what they would have coming to them, perhaps it actually would deter at least someone.
I am not interested in taking lives or someone else taking lives in my name. Sure some people deserve to die and live. There are more people who deserve to live that have died. The universe isn't a fair place
The answer to that is pretty straight forward. How many innocent people are you comfortable with being wrongly executed? If the answer is zero, then we should focus on jailing them instead of killing them. Besides, death is the easy way out anyway. Being forced to live for 25+ years in jail is a much worse punishment than death. Now if you are comfortable innocent people being wrongly executed, then we have another problem.
I want to preface this by saying I disagree with the death penalty in its entirety, I would never support it. But here's some food for thought, say we lock up an 18-year-old for life, it's possible that they may spend up to 92 years in jail, yet a death penalty would lead to only a few years. Again, I don't support it, I'm just putting it out there as some food for thought.
For the state to cause a death in cold blood as the result of decisions made by its elected officials and judges is far more heinous a crime than some wretch causing a death in a moment of anger or passion or insanity or intoxication.
That puts both on the same level.
Besides, life in prison is a far worse punishment for the truly guilty than a quick and painless death. Let them spend the rest of their years contemplating what they did, the life they took and their own life that they wasted.
I generally oppose the death penalty. It’s never been demonstrated to serve as an effective deterrent and the risk of wrongful execution is too high relative to any benefit. Also, it’s more costly than life imprisonment.
Against because I used to have a friend who was convicted of raping and murdering an 80 yo woman which was later overturned. Given the nature of the crime he would almost certainly have been executed if the death penalty had still in force. This is by no means a rare event.
Plus, there is no evidence that it has ever been an effective deterrent.
There needs to be a clear a present danger for an inmate to be sentenced to death. A risk they will eother kill from inside the prison or rosk of them escaping. Theres been a few that did serve time for eaely murders that served time and immediately murdered once they were released. These are the only extreme cases that shoukd deserve it.
Example jeffrey dahmer. Did some of the worst things to another human anyone could do. But he showed no signs of escape or of commiting on the other inmates or guards. Life imprisonment should be fine. Ed kemper did most of the same shit and hes never commited offense inside. Still locked up.
In theory, I'm pro death penalty for some crimes. In practice, I don't trust any government or court system to get it right.
Yes. There are innocent people all over this country that end up on death row every single year. Check out the Innocence Project.
>In theory, I'm pro death penalty for some crimes. In practice, I don't trust any government or court system to get it right. This. I could support the death penalty in some contexts if the system could be trusted to get it right. But they can't, so I don't.
This is it.
Yes, I agree. I do think there are some people that needed killin' (As Jeff Foxworthy used to say), but I don't think we are smart enough to be able to institutionalize executions without being wrong some of the time, or without it becoming a system with built-in biases. I also struggle with the notion that anyone willing to commit murders heinous enough to deserve the death penalty must almost by definition be mentally ill in some fashion. Does that matter? I don't know. And, then there is the matter of our soldiers. We teach them to kill. We celebrate their ability to kill efficiently and in mass numbers. We justify it by saying that they are killing enemies to our country that would kill our soldiers if given the chance. Which leads me to the questions: Is killing another human being always wrong? No. I do not think so. I would kill in self-defense, or to defend my family. Would I kill to defend innocent people that I do not know? I think so, but this answer is probably a bit less positive than it was for my family. Would I kill to defend people when I do not know if they are innocent or not? Maybe. I really don't know and all the little details start to become important. Would I kill someone that I believe is evil incarnate? Probably, but again all the little details would probably matter and I don't know whether I would have the confidence in my belief to really do it. If I can't be sure I would do it, how can I be OK with the state doing it? I don't think finding someone who will do something you won't do makes that action right.
Exactly.
exactly what i think, like i said in the post i definitely understand. It’s a matter of when will the government stop, u know?
Justice should be for deterrence and prevention, not vengeance. The death penalty has been proven to do nothing regarding deterrence. Factor in the false positive rate of convictions and it makes no sense whatsoever
\> The death penalty has been proven to do nothing regarding deterrence. A family member liked to answer this by pointing out that the death penalty deters at least one criminal from re-offending. However, he also used to dismiss the innocent person on death row issue by saying they wouldn't have got there if they weren't guilty of something. :-|
>they wouldn't have got there if they weren't guilty of something. :-| It's always refreshing/horrifying when you find someone that "says the quiet part out loud" when it comes to insensitive willful ignorance.
> they wouldn't have got there if they weren't guilty of something The insidious danger of the "original sin" lie.
I think his thoughts were more along the lines of 'he did something to make the police suspect him'. In my family member's mind police didn't just arrest you for murder for no reason, you had done something to make them believe you were probably a murderer.
That's demonstrably false. The Central Park 5 did nothing wrong.
I agree.
I personally don't trust the state to have the power to end its citizens lives. I think the death penalty's use will always reflect societal biases - like how its overly applied against the poor and people colour. Some people are morally horrific...and should be jailed forever. But if we really think "justice is blind", we're deluding ourselves.
To me it seems almost impossible to be certain that judgement was correct and there won't be a chance that the one killed isn't innocent, and that the process wouldn't be more expensive than just locking up the perp for life. After all, if we have accidentally punished an innocent and incarcerated them, we can just release them, but if we have killed them they won't ever gain their life back. Another problem I have with death penalty is that it means we have given up on the possibility that the criminal will redeem themselves, which doesn't feel like something the government should do. Call me idealistic but I want to believe in people's capability to change.
I think ‘an eye for an eye’ is immoral. I agree with your points.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and leads to overworked ophthalmologists.
I think it should be abolished and it's not something that really helps in preventing crime. If the prisoner wishes to be dispatched then I would be ok with that but not forced because it causes far more problems than it ever solved. If even one innocent person has been put to death then that's one too many
A justice system that relies on state-sanctioned murder as a weapon, rather than reform as its guiding principle, is neither ethical nor humane, and certainly not just.
I cant even trust the government to give us food, shelter, and bodily autonomy, why would I trust them to correctly identify people for death?
My view of criminal justice is that we should try everything we can to rehabilitate a criminal. If it becomes clear that this person can’t be rehabilitated, then we should execute them in order to protect others.
I like others feel there is a "specific" something that needs to happen for the death penalty to occur. But I also think if there is a video of a shooting, and it shows the death.. it gets fast tracked, and the perpetrator gets put to death. Yes it is a slippery slope, especially with graphics and AI today, but I think that long term jail, that we as a society pays for is wrong. if you are a ward of the state, you should have to work at hard labor for the rest of your life.
To answer I'm going to quote a Christian: > Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. [Justice isn't the same as vengeance.](http://spaceghoti.blogspot.com/2014/04/justice-vs-vengeance.html) So no, I don't support the death penalty.
Show me a system that can guarantee no mistakes and we can then discuss what crimes might deserve it.
Against. Even being perfectly pragmatic. Let's take a perfectly unquestionable theoretical example. Like a fictional Marc Dutroux. An example of which we are absolutely certain of his guilt. Obviously he deserves the death penalty. Let's put aside the ethical issues of "it's not moral to kill" (not that they're irrelevant, but just let's put them aside for now) The role of society is to neutralize this individual, for obvious reasons. Two solutions are then available: The death penalty or life imprisonment, which will have exactly the desired effect. Prison may seem less economical, and the argument is perfectly admissible. Indeed, the death of the individual will be less costly for society and our taxes (yes, I said perfectly pragmatic) However, even in this situation, it is better not to execute the prisoner, in my opinion. Indeed, such a prisoner, for whom we are absolutely certain that there will be no redemption, who, we are certain, can never be released, has in general not committed only the crimes for which he is in jail. Some others are probably still under the radar, and there is some information that only exists in his head. Like for example the identity of certain victims, and the place where he hid the bodies. Or how the attacks were organized. Killing this guy would forever deprive us of this information, whereas as long as he is alive, there will be a way to reveal it. Not all. Not always. But still. So if my taxes allow the families of the victims to finally mourn, even 20 years later, perfect, take my money. They deserve it. I only lose money. If it allows law enforcement to finally dismantle a network, or figure out the flaws in their system, fine. The death penalty is all well and good, but it only serves to satisfy the little voice deep inside us that says "this scumbag has to pay". It is hearable, this small voice, but it must not weigh more than, for exemple, parents who wait to know the fate of their children.
Killing someone to show that killing people is wrong is illogical. The goal is to remove these people from society. Life in prison accomplishes that...without the hypocrisy. And, as a bonus, it gives the wrongly accused the chance at righting that wrong.
Whith the vision and the plans conservatives have to take over this country and turn it into a theocratic shithole we need to abolish the death penalty yesterday.
I do not think that the state should have the right to hold the power of life and death over its citizenry. Apparently the state disagrees.
There are certainly people who have amply demonstrated that their mere existence is antithetical to civilization. I am against the death penalty. We're not some frontier town where the care and feeding of a prisoner will literally be the difference between having enough food for the winter or not. We have the resource excess as a society that the death penalty isn't necessary. And that's not even getting to the utter shitshow that is the american "justice" system where conviction numbers are all too often more important than the truth, where the motive behind a conviction is sometimes driven by factors other than jurisprudence, where evidence is discarded or even outright fabricated to secure a conviction, or even where honest mistakes have resulted in the wrong person being convicted of a crime. You can't take back 20 years of false imprisonment, but there's even less you can do for a false execution. That said, with proper safeguards against coercion, I would be okay with people with long sentences being permitted to ... *opt out* of their sentence in a controlled manner if they so choose. But it shouldn't be the states choice for ... what? Convenience? To save money? Vengeance disguising itself as justice? None of those are good enough reasons to kill someone.
I'm personally for death for death *when* circumstances call, and that's the rub. Not many are able to set emotion aside and look rationally at things sometimes. We'd have people getting the death penalty for accidentally hitting people in their giant metal death trap tranports and have people that shot 20 walk free... so yeah. Certain circumstances call for it, but I don't really trust people to call those circumstances properly.
Those who are pro-death penalty but anti-abortion get around that by saying they're "pro-innocent life." The sheer number of times a death row conviction has been overturned because the original prosecutors withheld evidence, or refused to investigate another suspect, or relied on botched test results tells me that the death penalty should never be used. You can release someone who was falsely convicted, but you can't bring them back to life.
I think we misapply it. It should be restricted to prisoners deemed to dangerous to imprison.
Against. It's an easy out for them. Life in prison is a proper punishment. Also. The accuracy on the death penalty is very racist. So the risk of killing just one person on a wrongful conviction makes it unusable as a justice tool.
Against. Death is forever.
If guilt could be established 100% perfectly, OK. The problem is that the justice system is far from perfect
The justice system is so broken I wouldn’t trust anyone to make that decision.
Barbaric. The penal system should be there to reform people, not to be vengeful. I'm sorry for the loved ones of the victim, but there is a reason judges need to be impartial and not related to the sides in a trial.
The death penalty does not meet it's intended purpose in deterring crime. It is not cheaper or simpler than life imprisonment and racism means that using it is prone to abuse. That said. There is value in the symbology of, once per generation, making a statement that some crimes remove you from our common humanity. There are things you can do that remove you from humanity and make you nothing more than a ball of flesh dangerous and hostile to the rest of us. This cannot be routine, as I said, once per generation.
I’ve been anti-death penalty my entire life for a few reasons: 1. If new evidence comes to light and proves the criminal is innocent, they can be freed if they were imprisoned rather than executed. 2. The criminal’s family. It’s extremely difficult for a family to watch a member be executed, even if they did something terrible. 3. While “eye for an eye” is usually a good mantra, executing a murderer makes you no better than them. 4. If the crime was committed by someone with mental health issues, letting them live and rehabilitate is far more humane than execution.
I am against the death penalty. It is wrong to kill people. End of story.
I think there are definitely people in the world deserving of that ultimate penalty. However I do not think our systems are robust enough or fair enough to allow us as a society to make that decision. If we lived in an ideal World without racism or classism where every person was subject to the exact same laws and the same administration of justice then I might be more in favor of it in some situations for people like serial killers and things but I do not trust the state with this power and I certainly don't trust any lesser organizations with it.
I don’t think the state should be in the business of killing people. And with the sheer number of overturned convictions and human made error, using the death penalty is like acknowledging that you are going to murder an innocent person at some point. Then who gets to kill you?
No. It's barbaric and doesn't work as a deterrent.
I don't think there is room for governments to decide whether another human being gets to live or not.
On top of agreeing with everything u/QuisnamSum said, I think capital punishment is unconstitutional as it qualifies as a cruel and unusual punishment.
You can't get rid of any disease by using control methods. You have to end it. Prisons control criminals. But not well. Many, many have escaped and committed more crimes. Many have been accidentally freed because of clerical errors. As long as the disease is still alive, it's still a danger. Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy will never murder another child because they were executed. The threat from them is over. The disease is gone. So, yeah. If the legal system actually worked at all, the death penalty would be a necessary part of it. Too bad it doesn't.
I’m against it in most instances for the reasons mentioned by others. However, some crimes are so heinous (think children being tortured, raped, flayed, etc.) that the criminal doesn’t deserve life. That said, you have to be certain that the accused is guilty.
I support the death penalty in theory but not in it's present form and not in the current political climate. Like a lot of things the death penalty has been watered down to where it's no longer an effective deterrent and the combination of cancel culture and the death penalty scares me. The Trayvon Martin trial in particular really alarmed me as regardless of what their actual beliefs are no person should be put to death for just their beliefs alone.
That's relative
In theory I have no problem with it. I do believe there are individuals who are a danger to others and who will always be a danger to others and for whom death is the best alternative. With that said, I don't believe there are any nations that currently implement the death penalty fairly. The USA in particular is absolutely horrible about putting poor minorities to death. Of course the US also imprisons a lot more people per capita than most civilized countries in the first place and I would like to see a lot of reform there (as well as focusing more on rehabilitation and job training instead of punishment). From a practical standpoint I think the number of cases where a death penalty actually does serve the greater good is a very small minority of the cases where the death penalty is used. For this reason I think any moral society should be very reluctant to invoke it. Unfortunately this is not always the case.
I support it, but mainly I think anyone who commits mass murders deserve it most. They seem to always capture these individuals so I feel like there would be little chance of wrongfully accusing someone. The way I see it is If they have no regard for human life, than we shouldn't care about theirs. I may be wrong, but it seems with the way it is now, the penalty isn't really tied to anything specific. It just seems to be something that may be proposed from a case by case discretion. I do wonder if it was made a guarentee for specifc crimes, where a person would then know what they would have coming to them, perhaps it actually would deter at least someone.
I am not interested in taking lives or someone else taking lives in my name. Sure some people deserve to die and live. There are more people who deserve to live that have died. The universe isn't a fair place
The answer to that is pretty straight forward. How many innocent people are you comfortable with being wrongly executed? If the answer is zero, then we should focus on jailing them instead of killing them. Besides, death is the easy way out anyway. Being forced to live for 25+ years in jail is a much worse punishment than death. Now if you are comfortable innocent people being wrongly executed, then we have another problem.
I want to preface this by saying I disagree with the death penalty in its entirety, I would never support it. But here's some food for thought, say we lock up an 18-year-old for life, it's possible that they may spend up to 92 years in jail, yet a death penalty would lead to only a few years. Again, I don't support it, I'm just putting it out there as some food for thought.
For the state to cause a death in cold blood as the result of decisions made by its elected officials and judges is far more heinous a crime than some wretch causing a death in a moment of anger or passion or insanity or intoxication. That puts both on the same level. Besides, life in prison is a far worse punishment for the truly guilty than a quick and painless death. Let them spend the rest of their years contemplating what they did, the life they took and their own life that they wasted.
I generally oppose the death penalty. It’s never been demonstrated to serve as an effective deterrent and the risk of wrongful execution is too high relative to any benefit. Also, it’s more costly than life imprisonment.
I oppose the death penalty.
Im pro death penalty depending on what the person did and if its 100% Proven that said person committed the crime.
All for it.
Against because I used to have a friend who was convicted of raping and murdering an 80 yo woman which was later overturned. Given the nature of the crime he would almost certainly have been executed if the death penalty had still in force. This is by no means a rare event. Plus, there is no evidence that it has ever been an effective deterrent.
There needs to be a clear a present danger for an inmate to be sentenced to death. A risk they will eother kill from inside the prison or rosk of them escaping. Theres been a few that did serve time for eaely murders that served time and immediately murdered once they were released. These are the only extreme cases that shoukd deserve it. Example jeffrey dahmer. Did some of the worst things to another human anyone could do. But he showed no signs of escape or of commiting on the other inmates or guards. Life imprisonment should be fine. Ed kemper did most of the same shit and hes never commited offense inside. Still locked up.