Death Penalty

[Wyrd of Gawd]

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The whole secret of being a criminal is to know where to commit your crimes with the least risk to yourself. So if you kill someone in a State that has the death penalty you might get it if you get convicted. That Norwegian who killed all of those people a few years ago in Norway only got 20 some years in a nice prison. He would have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia. He would have been facing the death penalty in Texas. He would have gotten life in Minnesota.

Think before you act.

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And less than a decade ago, if he had done this in Nebraska and gotten the DP for it, the mandatory mode would have been the electric chair. I realize all jurisdictions in the USA default to lethal injection, now, but it wasn't always that way. I always found that weird about the USA DP.

The criminal justice system is controlled by psychopaths. They take great delight in having control over others. However, someone has to do society's dirty work and it might as well be them.

The bottom line is that the typical criminal is stupid, almost to the point of absurdity. Most people are in prison because they did stupid things and were easily caught and convicted. In America today over 70 million people have criminal records of some type. The interesting thing is that even in States with the death penalty only a handful of people actually get the death penalty if they simply kill someone. The death penalty is imposed if the killer does another act against the victim, such as robbing or raping her. A clean kill simply gets a long prison term.

The problem with the death penalty is that it's mainly racist and is sought primarily against minorities. The average white killer very seldom gets the death penalty unless he went far over the line. There is no equal justice in America.

Having said all of that I lean toward the death penalty as a concept. Some people commit horrendous crimes and they should have to pay with their own lives. In the Bible Cain wasn't punished at all for killing his brother Abel and concealing his body. Jesus got crucified for being a pain in the butt for the local bigwigs. John the Baptist lost his head because he pissed off the king. There was no equal justice in the Bible either.

As far as the method of execution is concerned if I was being executed a bullet in the back of my head would be the preferred method. But if you're executing a person does the method really matter? In the Babylonian Talmud the Jews boast about how they killed Jesus using five different methods. The State should just use one and stop whining about it even if it's burning the convicted person alive at the stake. Or they could give the condemned person enough alcohol so that he could drink himself to death.