The Death Penalty - are you for or against it and why?

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

A moral relativist, I neither support nor oppose capital punishment as an absolute principle.


I'm unaware of any convincing moral justification of capital punishment within traditional Judaeo-Christian values. I do find the practice barbaric and wasteful.The eye for an eye argument is tu quoque. I favour compensation over revenge. I also have a practical objection: In the US,development in DNA has indicated a significant risk of error. It has been shown that quite a few capital convictions are unsafe.


The practice becomes more pragmatic if you do not have an appeals process which can last a decade and cost millions of dollars.


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The PRC have a very different legal system:

Above all,the Chinese see crime as anti social and parasitic.They have a long list of capital crimes,and execute thousands of people a year. Execution is usually by a bullet to the back of the neck. The organs are often harvested and sold.

There is no presumption of innocence (like France) No adversarial legal system and no trial by jury. Usually one judge.The role of the defence lawyer is NOT to prove innocence,but to plead mitigation and remorse. The conviction rate in the PRC is about 98%. This is probably because a guilty plea will often avoid the death penalty.

[downbeatplumb]

Theoretical situation here.

There is a man in your custody who has commited dozens of atrocities, has a loyal following, eager to release him to commit more atrocities but who have no other leader and would most likely dissipate if he was killed.

What then.

[Ashendant]

Theoretical situation here.

There is a man in your custody who has commited dozens of atrocities, has a loyal following, eager to release him to commit more atrocities but who have no other leader and would most likely dissipate if he was killed.

What then.

Imprison in solitary and don't allow any type of communication, the group will eventually will die out because they don't have a leader

[Autumnlicious]

Theoretical situation here.

There is a man in your custody who has commited dozens of atrocities, has a loyal following, eager to release him to commit more atrocities but who have no other leader and would most likely dissipate if he was killed.

What then.

Imprison in solitary and don't allow any type of communication, the group will eventually will die out because they don't have a leader

Ideally, yes. The group will die in the most complete way possible if they have no martyr to deify.

[HeyItsZeus]

I oppose it, but not for any moral reason really. Some people who have been killed by the law end up being found innocent in the future (It happens.)

I can understand why people would favor it but it's a sad day in society when we need to kill people to prove a point, not to mention that the death penalty never actually stopped people from committing crimes....... it's pointless.

I PROPOSE A NEW IDEA! Criminals should be put to supervised community service so they actually get something done instead of sitting around in a jail wasting tax payers' money.

[Ashendant]

Ideally, yes. The group will die in the most complete way possible if they have no martyr to deify.

Usually that happens when they are killed

[Ubermensch]

My feelings are that murderers, among other kinds of criminal, sacrifice a number of their human rights for a certain stretch of time, when they commit their crimes. And I'm not necessarily for lobotomy, I just consider it acceptable to perform on a murderous sociopath who refuses to cooperate and nothing else will work. Either that or have him publically shot in the middle of the gulag where every other prisoner can see what happens when you misbehave badly enough.

So you would sink to their level of inhumanity, just to spite them?

Impressive.

I don't do things by half-measures. Naturally of course, these sorts of facilities would house only the worst of the worst, with a sliding scale of brutallity and leniency based on a number of factors.

[Violet]

Perhaps I could recommend to Ubermensch the Stanford Prison Experiment? The outcome strongly changed how I viewed prisons.

[Ubermensch]

Please do, I love to learn.

[Violet]

http://www.prisonexp.org/

Official site of the experiment.