Do atheist belive in capital punishment

[Tonus]

That really depends on how long they've been in jail.

That is a matter of degrees, though. The government may not be able to properly compensate a man who spent decades in prison and is finally found innocent of the crime he was convicted of. But imagine that they had established his innocence just a few months after executing him?

The issue with capital punishment is twofold for me. One, there is the risk of killing an innocent person, though there are many crimes for which this is not an issue. Second, because we have a system in place that is designed to minimize the risk of killing an innocent person, the process for executing a person is excruciatingly time-consuming and very, very expensive. It fails to provide the closure that victims or their loved ones seek and instead drags out their suffering, and does so at a greater economic cost than life imprisonment.

This is not to say that I don't think that many killers don't deserve such a fate. I just don't think it's practical to do it as a policy.

[Raeven]

Yai i'm alive! But what about all the money spent to keep a person in prison for the rest of their life? I assume thats what you want to do rather then release them? Imagine how much money could be saved!

Sorry, missed this before.

Wholly untrue, that it costs less to house someone in prison for a lifetime rather than try them for the death penalty.

The minute a case is declared a death case, the cost to try the defendant goes up astronomically. He/she is automatically entitled to a "death qualified" defense attorney, one who knows the ins and outs of that particular area of the law.

In the last death penalty case in which I participated, the defendant was assigned a total of three defense attorneys, one of whom was death qualified.

The case lasted two and a half years; we were required to change venue because the media coverage was so extreme and we couldn't get an impartial jury in our own county; we ran through something over 1,500 prospective jurors in the OTHER county in order to seat 18 death-qualified jurors (12 regular jurors and 6 alternates).... that's just the tip of the iceberg, and doesn't even take into account the extensive automatic appeals process to which a defendant is entitled once such sentence has been pronounced.

The expense argument doesn't fly. You could literally house a prisoner from age 18 to his death at a ripe old age and spend FAR less than running a death penalty case. If memory serves, the cost for that defendant's trial -- JUST the trial, not anything beyond the trial -- exceeded two million dollars.

Incidentally, that defendant remains on death row, still not executed. The death sentence was pronounced in 2002. He was a serial killer, made full confessions and there was zero doubt that he was the perpetrator of the crimes. He himself expressed a desire to be put to death for his deeds. This is not uncommon.

And I will also add that every single juror wept as I read out his death conviction. People who say it would be easy to impose the death penalty on a guilty defendant have never done it.

[Mister Agenda]

you see iam hear because of my selfish parents act i had no choice to be born. i wish i wasnt but my natural human instincts makes it hard for me to terminate myself.

You won't be a teenager forever, hold out a few more years and you'll be glad you didn't do anything drastic when you were feeling low.

[Ryantology]

Is he gone? He never danced his way into an answer to my question.

[Silver]

Probably doesn't know how to properly dance.

[Tripwire]

There is no official view on capital punishment for atheists.

[KichigaiNeko]

The way the prison system has now become a five star accommodation with learning and physically opportunities to improve oneself so that one is able then the finish ones sentence and go and commit even more horrific crimes ... I am starting to favour the death penalty.... Shit it's working for iSlam.

[No_God]

I have many theories and ideas about the American prison system but I do believe in capital punishment.

[EvolutionKills]

I do not support capitol punishment for a number of reasons. First of all I think it is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and humans are at the best of times tragically fallible creatures. Under our current system (speaking from the perspective of the US), it is simply cheaper to keep someone in prison for life than to bog down the system with appeals against the death sentence. I've also found the argument of Sam Harris and his 'moral landscape' to be very compelling, and I would like to hope that I could remain objective enough to see even the worst criminal as a product of many things simply beyond their conscious control.

[truthBtold]

What does being an atheist have to do with capital punishment.. dumb ? .. atheism is a label.. lack of belief of a god/s.. why dont we ask if atheist perfer chocolate over vanilla cones.. idiot!!