1) Any human pure in heart could measure felling of guilt. 2) The same. 3) You could be proven guilty in a month, not a year latter. Most of prisoners change themselves but some of them become crazier than before they went to jail, because freedom was taken from them. Only strong ones survive like Tookie Williams who even wrote some books. Believe me or not he become smarter than a regular human. In jail you become a perfect thinker.
You use God with a capital so I imagine you might be a christian like so many americans for instance who support the death penalty. It clearly states in the commandments that you are not allowed to kill someone. And obviously God will punish a murderer in the afterlife since like you say God-knows-what-all. Hence I don't think Christians are allowed to use this kind of pro-argument. After all you condem the people involved with putting the inmate to death also to an eternal life in hell. Some might even argue that you sentence yourself to an eternal life in hell for supporting the death penalty. As for the rational viewpoint: there is no way we can be sure only guilty people are sentenced to death. Murder rates are not lowest in countries with death penalty. Indeed other factors seem more important. Conclusion: death penalty is immoral and therefore unacceptable.
Actually, that is a myth propagated by the anti-DP crowd. What figures they are comparing are actually the costs of trials of people who are tried for the death penalty vs. people who are tried for life. It has nothing to do with the actual imprisonment, and they don't quote those figures because it is much more expensive to keep someone locked up for life than for 8.7 years (average time someone spends on death row). In total, if you add the trials and the costs of incarceration on average the figure is about 280,000 more expensive to keep them for life. Negligible amount really, when you are trying to put a number figure on someone's life. So it's the trials for the death penalty that are more expensive. Almost 4 times the cost actually, but lets really break that down... We spend more on deciding whether or not someone should be put to death. We spend less on people who are going to end up costing the system more. The number of people actually exonerated later by evidence or testimony, or by incorrect court procedures are .06% on death row inmates. The number of people exonerated later by evidence or testimony or by incorrect court procedures are 13% on murder convictions not including those who are given the death penalty. So where is the real problem when we put murderers to trial? Are we spending too much on death penalty cases, or are we spending far too little on murder cases that are not eligible for the death penalty? Given the wide error margin, I think we spend far too little on murder trials. Their punishment isn't less severe... they still spend the rest of their life locked away. Be very wary of what the anti-dp and pro-dp websites tell you. They both skew the numbers to fit their purpose. If you take a step back and analyze all the numbers, you'll find the truth hidden in there somewhere.
Dude, it's just a turn of phrase. I'm an atheist. I also capitalize "Jesus," "Buddha" and "Allah," and celebrate Christmas, but so what? There are plenty of issues with some of the pro-death-penalty arguments coming from some of the Christian groups in America, but I don't subscribe to any of them, so... There is no way we can be sure only guilty people are sentenced to *anything*. Perhaps those countries instituted the death penalty because their murder rates were out of control. Perhaps the countries with low murder rates don't need strong deterrents, as they already have peaceful, harmonious societies. You need further evidence explaining the causational relationship between the two statistics (i.e., a control group; one could examine countries that changed their death penalty policies and compare murder rates before and after). But the above statistic, on its own, doesn't seem to me to have a clear-cut application to death penalty policy. I don't see how that would follow from your arguments. Your second argument relates to the *effectiveness* of the death penalty, which is a very different issue from the morality of it. There are plenty of very effective punishments that are immoral (collective punishment, for example), and plenty of moral ones that may not be effective. Your first point has more bearing on the conclusion, but you need to flesh it out. Why is the possibility of executing innocent people unacceptable while life imprisonment for those same people is okay? What is the ethical principle that distinguishes the two?
So why murder people? Ironically you wrote down the solution without noticing it: Build a peaceful, harmonious society. Obviously this is not done by murdering people. What makes a peaceful society. Look around. Guns for everybody, individualism, inequality etc aren't usually very effective ingredients.
So why put people in jail? Obviously any real penal system is going to have to cope with uncertainty; that fact on its own doesn't say much about the death penalty. You need an additional argument showing why the death penalty is incompatible with uncertainty, but life imprisonment is not. I think everyone is aware that the ultimate purpose of any penal system is to contribute to a peaceful, harmonious society. But that's not a "solution" to any of the practical problems faced by said penal system. Also, your usage of the word "murder" here is needlessly inflamatory. The word usually connotes not just any homicide, but a criminal homicide carried out with malice. Which doesn't really apply to an application of the death penalty. A better word would be "killing." A good editorial appeared yesterday in the Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1214/p09s01-coop.html It's by Joanna Shephard, a law professor and researcher in the area of death penalty policy, and discusses both deterrence and brutalization (meaning the effect on society of a government that solves problems through killing). Please note that I am not a Christian Scientist nor, as far as I know, is Joanna Shephard. Her conclusions (and she's run multiple studies on the topic) is that the deterrent effects can outweigh the brutalization effects, but only when a sufficient number of convicts are executed per year. So it turns out that California, which hands out a lot of death sentences but carries out very few, doesn't get much deterrent effect, in contrast to, say, Texas.
That's very simple. If you sentence sombody to life imprisonment, then discover they are actually innocent, you can free them, hopefully with some compensation for lost time. But if you've killed a person for a crime they didn't commit... If the death penalty is so effective as a deterrent in Texas, why is the rate of imprisonment and the rate of sentencing to death still so high there? Do you expect the deterrent effect to show up in the statistics at some unspecified future time?
Yeah, hypothetically, you have the chance to fix the mistake, should you detect it. But that's a very rare occurance. More often, the wrongly accused man ends up serving a life sentence and dying in jail. Even the ones that end up being freed are often held for decades; how can you possibly compensate them for that? You can't give them back their youth, or their health (which inevitably suffers in the penal system). What dollar figure would you place on the next 20 years of your life? The death penalty is certainly irrevocable, but I think people are too glib about the reversability of decades in prison. You're destroying people's lives in either case; I think the difference is fairly minor. The effects have shown up. The rates of capital offenses have gone down since the death penalty was re-instituted. Just because it hasn't turned Texas into Switzerland doesn't mean it's not working as a deterrent. Texas had a very high rate of capital crimes back when the death penalty was outlawed, which was a big factor motivating people to bring it back. Now they have a lower rate of capital crimes; what exactly is the problem again?
The solution is improving our forensic and judicial system, so that accidental executions of innocent people do not take place, not to completely end the death penalty. We need to improve our criminal/forensic science capabilities to eliminate error which would lead to the death of innocent people, based on circumstantial evidence. Ending the death penalty would not solve anything, it would not lower our fatalities, society cannot afford to keep these killers in perpetual care of the government.
Why not just put the convict in a small rubber raft far offshore? Why do we have life in prison, and the death penalty, but no option for banishment?
Hmm, isn't that like sending our "un-sociables" to some other country where they can murder and commit other violent crimes against THOSE people? That wouldn't be very nice, would it? Baron Max
As I understand it, there were few, if any, violent criminals in the groups that were banned to Australia. Most were simple and common thieves, but not murderers or violent rapists or serial killers, etc. Those types were hanged or executed, not sent to the Land of Oz! And just to be controversial ....how well do you think the native Aborigines liked all those criminals thrust upon their land and societies? Baron Max
Right, right, I was only joking. And we all know that America received far more convicts from the Old World than Australia ever did anyway...
Perhaps, but it's an occurrence which is becoming more and more common. Hundreds of people on death row have been proven innocent in recent years. In fact, only last week I was talking to somebody who was about to head over to America (from Australia) to assist a legal team with exactly these kinds of cases. Nelson Mandela was held in prison for years, but look what he did with his life when he was finally released. If he'd just been killed, where would South Africa be now? I completely disagree. Would you personally rather be alive and in prison, or dead? I assume you'd rather be dead, but I imagine most people would opt for prison.
It's true that there have been a lot of false convictions, but I'd wager there are even more false convictions for non-capital offenses. I say this because huge amounts of effort are directed towards ensuring the fairness of death penalty convictions (mandatory appeals, etc.). Likewise, there's something about death convictions that motivates third party groups to lend a hand and search for wrongful convictions. What I'm getting at is that for every wrongful death penalty conviction, there are probably 20 people serving long sentences for crimes they didn't commit. Keep in mind that America has like 3 Million people in prison, so a few hundred isn't actually all that significant... Well, that's something of an exceptional case. Hardly the sort of thing one bases policy on. Do you really think that the vast majority of long-term convicts don't have their lives and families torn apart by it? I'm not saying that there isn't a qualitative difference between the two, and I'd probably go for life in prison as well. Indeed, there would be no deterrent value to the death penalty if a majority of people didn't feel the same way. But it's still not clear to me that it's any more tolerable to hand out wrongful 20-year sentences than it is to hand out wrongful death sentences. In both cases your taking things from people that can never be returned. The point this leads to is that a better response to the phenomenon of wrongful conviction is not to avoid giving out strong penalties (when justified), but to build a better trial process to prevent wrongful convictions. Let's come at it from another direction. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the death penalty has a deterrent value, what rate of wrongful executions would be acceptable? Presumably, a really low rate (1 in a billion, say) would be acceptable, provided it would prevent, say, 100 murders. On the other hand, it's obviously a bad idea to execute 100 innocent people in the name of preventing 100 murders. It follows that the acceptable rate of wrongful life sentences would be higher; it might be okay to wrongfully imprison, say, 25 people to prevent 100 murders. But I don't see where it's unacceptable to execute even one innocent man to save hundreds, but okay to send him to prison for his entire life. There is a qualitative difference between death and life in prison, but I don't think the "he could be exhonerated years later" argument really encapsulates it. If we could assume that, given enough time, all wrongful convictions would be overturned, then that would translate into a good policy argument. But it seems to me that the majority of wrongful convictions are never overturned. Thus, I think the possibility of eventual exhoneration is a side-issue. In the vast majority of cases, the convict is either guilty or will never be exhonerated. So the salient ethical issue from a policy standpoint is balancing the inevitable wrongful convictions against the deterrent value of the punishment in question. The only way that the "one wrongful execution is too many" argument stands on its own is if one also believes that the death penalty has zero deterrent value. However, it seems to me to be well established that it does have measurable deterrent value in most of the places that it's used today. It could certainly be argued that states/countries that don't have a sufficiently low false conviction rate should refrain from using the death penalty, as it will not justify the deterrent value. But this is, again, an argument for improving the reliability of trial processes, not against the death penalty as such. It would likewise apply to life sentences to a lesser degree.
I oppose the death penalty for a number of reasons. But even more than that, I oppose the use of the death penalty for crimes other than murder with every fiber in my body.
