General News Conservative State of Nebraska Repeals Capital Punishment

I believe the death penalty should be legal for special certain people. There's way too many scum out there who just really need to banish off the face of the earth. I really don't see the point of seeing certain individuals being kept alive and still being fed and bathed and living off of the taxpayer's money.

 

I think it should be illegal in all cases. Yes there are horrible offenders out there who we all rather see dead but a fact is many people are held responsible for crimes they did not commit and are later found innocent. The risk of ending the life of a potentially innocent victim is far too great i think and we need to protect those in prison no matter how horrible they maybe.

 

The death penalty is not a proven deterrent to crime, so it really comes to down to society being incredibly vengeful and the 'eye for an eye' belief - take a life, lose your life. There is very little else to it. People want to see them strung up by the bollocks so they can feel a little better about themselves.

Personally, I don't think any government should be the arbiter of who lives or who dies. That is not their decision to make (or it shouldn't be).

 

Actually, capital punishment costs way more than life in prison without parole. If I were to choose how inmates could leech off my tax money, it would be the latter.

Also, prisoners do have morals too. People who hurt/kill women, babies, and young babies are seen as scum and are at the bottom of the prison hierarchy. Capital punishment is quick and painless most of the time. I would like to have the prisoners deal with them anyways.

Besides, an eye for an eye is Sharia Law.

 

Good. I hope the US gets rid of the death penalty altogether but I don't see Texas going along with it....

 

Frankly, as someone who opposes capital punishment, I never put much stock in this argument. If it suddenly cost less to kill people than to imprison them for life then should we start doing it? Of course not...

But I'll follow that up with something for those who support the death penalty: why exactly? Death row inmates aren't the reason our prisons are crowded. They're a very small percentage of the incarcerated population. In fact we'd have tons of extra room if we stopped incarcerating people for nonviolent drug offenses. Is the cost or risk of keeping a few extra irredeemable people around really worse than the cost of killing the occasional innocent person for a crime they didn't commit? I'm very skeptical it is.

 

Hope more states follow, including my more-liberal-than-Nebraska state...

I read a piece in Time last night that basically suggested that capital punishment may sooner or later end. This piece is currently on the Internet at: Capital Punishment: The end of the death penalty.

---------- Post added 3rd Jun 2015 at 03:30 PM ----------

Interestingly, the Time piece I mentioned above mentioned Texas:

Although I wouldn't be personally surprised if they aren't the last state to discontinue capital punishment.

 

I am adamantly opposed to the death penalty. In my opinion, the death penalty needs to be abolished nationwide here in the U.S. Most countries are moving towards abolition. The death penalty is costly, racially biased, inhumane, and there is also the chance you could execute an innocent person. Many innocent people have been exonerated from death row through DNA evidence showing they did not commit the crime. Since 1973, 150 individuals have been exonerated--that is, found to be innocent and set free. If you execute even one innocent person that is one person too many. There is no way you can ever give them their life back, and it is just not worth it. I say give murderers life without parole. The death penalty needs to be done away with. I don't think it is something that should be used in the 21st century. The death penalty is a barbaric and archaic punishment. 103 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Here are the 36 countries that still retain the death penalty in both law and practice: China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, United States, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, Kuwait, Zimbabwe, Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia, Cuba, Belarus, Vietnam, Pakistan, Sudan, Congo, Chad, Thailand, Yemen, Malaysia, Guinea, United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, Oman, India, Lebanon, Japan, Nigeria, Uganda, Botswana, Indonesia, and Jordan. 6 countries retain the death penalty only for exceptional circumstances (times of war), and 50 permit its use but have not used it for at least ten years( there is either a moratorium or the practice is not being carried out in those countries.

 

the death penalty is a deterrent, I cant think of one murderer that became a repeat offender after he was dead.
Now, although I am for it in certain cases, as in extreme cases, like, someone that goes into a school and shoots the kids while they sit in their classroom.
there would have to be no doubt at all in the least that the person being executed was the right person.

then I think of one thing. If we kill to show that killing is wrong, shouldn't we be killed next for killing the one that did wrong?
My support is out of revenge, and out of the knowledge that whoever it is will not kill again.

 

I can support the death penalty in certain circumstances where the crime is heinous and disgusting enough, and there's no possibility that anyone else could have committed the crime. However I strongly oppose the death penalty the way Texas uses it, which is just "An eye for an eye." My home state of Michigan was the first English-speaking jurisdiction in the world to abolish capital punishment back in 1846, and every now and again some politician brings up the subject. If it came up for a vote, whether or not to reinstate the death penalty in the Wolverine State, I would cast my ballot to keep capital punishment illegal.

 

I'm against the death penalty because the justice system itself is faulty, leaving the door wide open for us to kill an innocent person (which we have done before, as well as removed over 130 people from death row since the 70s because their charges were dropped or the evidence was in their favor) and in some cases, the manner in which they were executed violates the 8th amendment.

I say it's great that states are working on revising their methods or just getting rid of the system all together. Besides, it's way more expensive to execute someone than keep them away for life.

---------- Post added 4th Jun 2015 at 09:26 PM ----------

But the deterrent rate doesn't affect much at all. In fact, states that have the death penalty have higher crime rates than those who don't. Sure, a murderer won't do it again if they're dead, but what does that do? It doesn't set an example for criminals out there, because people are still committing acts of violence. It's pointless.

Revenge shouldn't be a reason to carry out something like this. The whole "eye for an eye" thing just serves as a paradoxical cycle. If we execute someone, then who executes those who carried it out? I mean, after all, it's going to happen again, so doesn't the executioner deserve to do for their crimes? At the end of the day, we're talking about if it's ever ethically or morally okay to kill another person. We have killed innocent people before, so where are people demanding the deaths of the people who carried it out?

 

Having to live with the fact of you killing someome and a decade of jail time is punishment enough.

 

That's because the death penalty is proven not to be a deterrent