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capital punishment

Discussion in 'Chit Chat' started by redstormrising, Jan 15, 2013.

  1. redstormrising

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    since the death penalty became a side issue in the abortion thread, rather than respond there, i thought i'd give it its own thread. what are your views?

    i used to be in favor of the death penalty until i started working in the judicial system and saw how many errors get made, even when people are diligently putting forth their best efforts. the system is run by humans, and humans are fallible. i still believe that some people have committed crimes so heinous that they deserve to be put to death, but i do not believe we have the ability to identify those people with 100% accuracy. if the punishment is going to be death, i cannot find anything greater than a 0% wrongful conviction rate acceptable.
     
  2. MerBear

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    i'm not for the death penalty.

    i feel like a lot of murderers get misjudged easily for a crime they may or may not have comitted
     
  3. Calico

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    The judicial system is far too faulty. There are people in this system who care more about their own success than the search for truth. They just want to find a suspect who fits or close the case and be done with it. As long as there is the chance of one innocent death, the death penalty is a no go for me.

    You should never counter evil with evil, no matter how much you think they deserve it. Everyone, criminal or no, has a right to live, because they are human just as we are. They all have people who love them, people they love, people who are good and try their best to get by. We all might have met such people, never guessing that they had a loved one in jail. The death penalty would hurt so many lovely people, and the government and the law are supposed to be there to protect the people, to keep them safe from harm. That's not always possible. But the death penalty is a cold blooded decision, as cold as any major crime.
     
  4. RueBea85

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    I'm Canadian eh?
    I used to be completely 100% for the death penalty. Now I'm not so black and white because like you said I have read stories and heard about innocent people being wrongly convicted. What if someone was put to death and 5 years later new evidence came out to say they were innocent, you could never get that person back.
     
  5. Dalmatian

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    Judicial decision should do what's good for the guilty, what's fair for the victim and what's best for society. Any punishment is just a new wrongdoing, however it's looked at and no matter how small it is. Fining the guilty, locking him up or killing him, all three make him the new victim. So it has to be done with measure. And murder is such a horrible deed that it can never be justified.

    Punishing for the sake of punishing just works for creation of a nation of victims. I think it's completely insane that for example US has such a high rate of imprisonment. Other than for the slave work, that situation does nothing good for the country as a whole, actually quite the opposite.
     
  6. Linthras

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    3 Reasons:
    1. Fallability of the justice system.
    2. Hypocricy.
    3. It's not a deterrent.

    Also in most cases it comes down to vengeance not justice.
     
  7. vyvance

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    The spiteful part of me would love to see every rapist and pedophile, in particular, get the death penalty.

    That said, the risk of an innocent person dying makes me against the death penalty in the end.
     
  8. Daydreamer1

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    It's a faulty system with innocent people being taken off DR every year and it's scary to think we may have executed innocent people, like Troy Davis. Plus, I don't see a justification in executing others to prove that murder is wrong. Someone said something along the lines of "if even one innocent person is executed, we're all murderers" and "if one is executed, their executor must be executed too"; as in the death penalty is a paradox.

    But hey, anything else I could say would just be me repeating what was on that Penn and Teller BS! episode.
     
  9. jargon

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    I'm opposite of most of the people who have posted - I used to be 100% against it, but lately I'm not so sure.

    So devil's advocate to all those who've brought up problems in the jury system and possiblu killing innocents: what if we somehow had perfect certainty about a person's guilt (e.g. 20 reliable witnesses and security camera footage) - would the death penalty be acceptable then?
     
  10. Argentwing

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    I'd only be for the death penalty if an individual would doubtless spend the rest of their life in prison otherwise, and it would make financial sense to dispose of them. As it stands, death row is mired with countless appeals that make it just as, if not more expensive than simple life in prison.

    For how morally shaky it is to execute another human, it's safe to say I'm generally against it. But our overcrowded, over-budget justice system appears to need a streamlined way to reduce its inmate population.
     
  11. Dalmatian

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    No. It's wrong in it's essence. It's murder.
     
  12. Linthras

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    ^this^
    Like I said, it's hypocritical.
     
  13. Shiny Espeon

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    I'm not against the death penalty, but like others have said, there'd need to be infallible proof that the person was guilty before I'd vote for a death sentence.
     
  14. Iamthewalrus

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    I would only be for the death penalty if the person's guilt is beyond even a speck of doubt and they have proven themselves to be so dangerous that keeping them in prison would be impossible due to their threat to prison staff and other inmates. I can't imagine a situation where that would be the case though.

    Otherwise I am against it for various reasons which have already been touched on above.
     
  15. Mogget

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    It's a really bad idea to base laws off of incredibly rare and improbable events.
     
  16. castle walls

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    I am against the death penalty for reasons that have already been detailed in this thread. It is not a deterrent for criminal behavior, it is expensive, and there is a chance that an innocent person could be killed. Not to mention the criminal justice system in America is also racist.

    I would still say no because the entire point of the criminal justice system is to keep dangerous members of society away from the general population (which can be accomplished by life in prison) and to act as a deterrent to prevent crime.

    It would be incredibly rare for us to be perfectly certain about a person's guilt. As for the security camera footage, it can be incredibly difficult to identify a person that way. The camera would have to be of good quality, in a good location, fully functioning, there would have to be good lighting, and the suspect would have to make little or no effort to conceal his or her identity. I question the chances of all of that coming together in the real world. It is possible but how often would that really happen?

    I would also like to add that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable and has led to the conviction of perfectly innocent people (Ronald Cotton for one example). It could be unreliable for several reasons including a mistake on the witness' part, the presence of a weapon, too much time passing since the crime, or the police influencing a witness to identify a particular individual. Although 20 witnesses would be an impressive number of witnesses, that does not necessarily make them infallible.

    This is from the Innocence Project
     
  17. Hexagon

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    The death penalty is wrong.

    No one has the right to take the life of another. Executing someone who has taken another life is no different. Yes, society must be protected from being murdered, that is why we imprison people. But killing them doesn't bring anyone back, and it robs them of whatever life they have left in prison, which they should have the right to live if they want to.

    I would say this even if it was a family member or close friend who'd been murdered.

    And that, of course, doesn't even take into account mistaken convictions.

    @jargon No, absolute certainty wouldn't make it right. This whole concept of killing murders is only an extended form of the 'eye for an eye' mentality. Death should not lead to death.