Capital Punishment: Should the Death Penalty Still Exist In A 'Civilised Society'?

Plus, as a system, it's 'racist,' etc etc etc

this is one of the scariest things that i've read. look around the next time you're out in public.

Putting emotions aside (always difficult in this debate), the death penalty does not serve any interest of the state that could not be better served through other means.

The state has an interest in preventing heinous criminals from continuing to commit crimes. But that interest can be equally well served through life imprisonment. The death of the criminal provides no added benefit.

The state has an interest in promoting justice. No system can ensure perfect justice. Given that we know our justice must necessarily be imperfect, the best remedy requires that all mistakes, when discovered, must be corrected. The very nature of the death penalty thwarts this requirement.

The state does not have an interest in promoting revenge. Revenge does not provide any tangible benefits to the state or anyone else. The fact that certain people connected to the crime declare a sense of satisfaction or relief at the death of the criminal is of very doubtful benefit, even to those who seek it, and a sense of satisfaction or relief are not sufficient ends to justify taking life.

x-post

"The death of the criminal provides no added benefit."

except financial. Just playing Devil's advocate here, but it costs taxpayers a lot of money to keep a 19 year old prisoner alive for that long.

some people deserve it

especially very fat people

ugh, they're so gross

One nice thing about money is that it can be measured with great accuracy. It should therefore be possible to compare average costs per inmate between death penalty states and non-death penalty states to get a handle on which approach is more expensive and by how much. Just guessing is not a good approach.

If mere cost-effectiveness turns out to be the strongest and best reason for the state to execute certain prisoners, I think that would be a good indicator of just how weak the practical argument in favour of capital punishment is.

Then how come every European government is still in charge of things? In Finland the death penalty isn't lawful even during wartime.

Why is there the death penalty in USA but not UK? Does mainland Europe have it?

The EU regulations say that a member state cannot have the death penalty, so none of the EU countries have it. I'm pretty sure it's same with most of the non-EU countries, though some Eastern European countries, like Belarussia, probably still have it.

are you being funny?

It doesn't?

maybe im being a bit too Hobbsian, but since i think anarchy is untenable there needs to be strong (read: effective) means for enforcing order. what means are "moral" (by what definition?) or reasonable is i suppose what the death penalty debate is all about. i dont think the death penalty really meets any needs that U.S. in particular has, and should therefore be abolished.

I find it slightly disturbing that you rate the threat to order over the threat to human life.

and i tend to see the threat to order as a threat to human life.

I'm pessemistic too. We'll more than likely blow ourselves up/iredeemibly poison our environment/regress to a new dark age before we achieve a post-scarcity anarchistic society. But that doesn't mean it's untenable, and that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to strive for it.

As for the order/human life thing, it's very easy for a government to justify an atrocity by saying it was to maintain order. Remember Tianiman Square.

It's the end of the world, I tell you!

doesnt capital punishment work against the criminal justice system anyways, at least in principle? crimes are against the state. feelings, except when they speak towards the motive and intent of the accussed, shouldnt factor at all. that is what allows the system to be relatively fair and universal. capital punishment is often justified on emotional terms ("so what if they raped your daughter, what then? wouldnt you want death?") but the idea of "victim's rights" is sort of ludicrous insofar as there is no "right" to revenge or "closure". in fact, revenge, if committed by the victim's family, usually ends up being illegal in its own right, so to reinsert it as a sentencing option is a bit odd isnt it?

(my diction sux but you get it i hope)

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Yet in the states it does seem to be a vote winner.

Why is this?

Not only a 12 year old state, but the biggest 12 year old state in the goddamn playground.

Refer to my earlier statement regarding the end of the world.

Reminds me of one of my service-industry friend's rules: "If a commissary can't afford to feed its employees, it's a failure."

See Fahrenheit 9/11 kthxby

By MIKE BRANOM
Associated Press Writer
Published August 8, 2004, 9:31 PM CDT

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- An ex-convict who blamed a young woman for taking his video game system and clothes recruited three teenagers to stab and beat her and five others to death, investigators said Sunday.

The 22-year-old woman was singled out for an attack so vicious that even dental records were useless in trying to identify her. Some of the victims were attacked in their sleep, according to authorities.

The victims' bodies were found Friday in a blood-spattered home.

All four suspects have been charged with first-degree murder and armed burglary, the Volusia County sheriff's department said.

Suspected ringleader Troy Victorino, 27, of Deltona, was "very guarded" during questioning, Sheriff Ben Johnson said. Three 18-year-olds were also arrested Saturday: Robert Cannon of Orange City and Jerone Hunter and Michael Salas, both of Deltona.

All four were jailed in Daytona Beach while awaiting bail hearings Monday. Johnson wants prosecutors to seek the death penalty, saying, "These families will never get over this."

Police said the attack was the culmination of events revolving around a nearby vacant home owned by one of the victims' grandparents and used by Victorino and other squatters as a party house. The four men and two women who were slain had reported being harassed by the alleged assailants.

"Officials struggling to come up with a motive for the crime believe the killings were committed over the theft of some clothes and an Xbox game system owned by Victorino," a statement from the sheriff's office said.

All four suspects were armed with aluminum bats when Victorino kicked in the locked front door, according to arrest records. The group, who wore black clothes and had scarves on their faces, grabbed knives inside and attacked victims in different rooms of the three-bedroom house, authorities said.

The victims, some of whom were sleeping, did not put up a fight or try to escape, Johnson said. All had been stabbed, but autopsies determined the cause of death was the beating injuries.

Victorino has spent eight of the last 11 years in prison and was arrested Saturday for a probation violation. His first arrest was in an auto theft when he was 15, according to state records. He has prior convictions for battery, arson, burglary, auto theft and theft.

Hunter, who was with Victorino when he was arrested Saturday, agreed to accompany investigators for questioning. Police said he admitted his role in the slayings and identified the other two suspects.

All four suspects appeared before a judge Saturday without attorneys. They will have a chance to ask for court-appointed lawyers on Monday.

Hunter, a high school wrestler, moved out of his family's house in May but recently agreed to return home for his senior year.

"He never seemed to be that type ... that was violent," his father Dan Washington said. "He was a good kid, he just got with the wrong crowd."

The sheriff's office has identified five of the victims as Michelle Ann Nathan, 19; Anthony Vega, 34; Roberto "Tito" Gonzalez, 28, who recently moved from New York; Francisco Ayo Roman, 30; and Jonathan Gleason, 18.

The sixth victim was believed to be Erin Belanger, 22, whose grandparents own the vacant home and spent the summer in Maine.

Joe Abshire, Belanger's brother-in-law, said she described heading to the vacant house to go swimming one day and finding about six people living there. The squatters were kicked out, but deputies were called to the grandparents' house six times in 10 days before the killings. The victims reported a tire-slashing at their home and a threat.

The squatters warned Belanger that "they were going to come back there and beat her with a baseball bat when she was sleeping," Abshire, who is married to Erin's sister Jennifer, told The Sun of Lowell, Mass., for Sunday editions.

Victorino complained that his belongings were removed from the grandparents' house while he was in jail following a July 29 arrest for battery, Johnson said. He said Victorino found his things boxed up at the victims' house and took them after the killings.

The bodies were discovered in the rental home in the working-class community about 25 miles north of Orlando after one of Nathan's co-workers at a Burger King asked someone to visit the house because she had not arrived for work.

Wow

Going back, I see that Mordy's support of the death penalty was based on his conviction that:

it's more humane because imprisoning someone for life is dehumanizing, horrific, and never-ending torment. if we're going to end someone's life, maybe we should be honest and do it for real. not lock them in some kind of existential state of nothingness.

This is quite different than the Just Retribution argument and I did Mordy a disservice by lumping him into that category. However, I do not agree with his view of life imprisonment as a state of never-ending torture. It is too simplistic to account for the wide variations in both human psychology and conditions of imprisonment. If Trappist monks voluntarily enter and remain in monasteries then a life of strict confinement is not necessarily to be viewed as a form of torture. This is just Mordy projecting his own imagined response to something he has not experienced.

If Trappist monks voluntarily enter and remain in monasteries then a life of strict confinement is not necessarily to be viewed as a form of torture.

hmm

(xp) There was a lot more to it than that.

hmm

well, if one wishes to argue that a life of strict confinement must necessarily to be viewed as a form of torture, then one must plausibly account for such instances, because... they exist.

there's the aspect of consent.

yes. and consent is important to the overall experience of confinement and I would never describe involuntary confinement as anything but a punishment. But as I read Mordy's description ("horrific, and never-ending torment"), it seems necessary to explain why anyone would view a similar state of confinement differently enough to consent to it. iow, if one accepts one's existential condition as confinement, then that condition may not necessarily be experienced as horrific, and never-ending torment.

As I understand it, very long term prisoners (25 years or more) who are finally released often feel less comfortable in their newfound freedom than they did in prison, largely because they adapted to and accepted what Mordy believes must always be a horrific, and never-ending torment.

Disgraced spiritual teacher Bo Lozoff, who taught meditation in prisons, alluded to this idea of existential confinement in the title of his book We're All Doing Time.

I had to look to see how Lozoff disgraced himself. It doesn't seem like his idea of existential confinement was connected to it, unless his book advocated sexual and psychological abuse as a concomitant to the proper running of a halfway house.

yes. and consent is important to the overall experience of confinement and I would never describe involuntary confinement as anything but a punishment. But as I read Mordy's description ("horrific, and never-ending torment"), it seems necessary to explain why anyone would view a similar state of confinement differently enough to consent to it. iow, if one accepts one's existential condition as confinement, then that condition may not necessarily be experienced as horrific, and never-ending torment.

― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Friday, December 11, 2020 1:21 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think it's fairly plain that the consensual aspect completely alters the nature of confinement, so you're no longer talking about the same experience, even if they are superficially similar. it may be added that the superficial similarity is heavy on the superficial. the atmosphere in a monastery is a lot more congenial than that of a maximum security prison's death row, the access to the outside less limited - I am picturing the cistercians frolicking in the alpine snow in the documentary "into great silence", the labour often satisfyingly artisan. not a lot of solitary confinement, violence, 1 hour in the yard per day, beating by guards, rape, etc. going on in abbeys.

more congenial than that of a maximum security prison's death row, the access to the outside less limited

I agree. But neither Mordy nor I have stipulated such lifetime confinement occurring on death row. If there is no death penalty, there is no death row. Nor have we included maximum security, solitary confinement, or other such qualifications in the discussion of life sentences. Mordy's position was that life sentence was in itself enough to merit the description of "some kind of existential state of nothingness" that was a torture worse than death. I disagreed with that.

The inhumanity of the various deprivations that are currently practiced in our prison system should each be considered according to their own lack of merit and I think most of them should be abolished, along with many other features of our penal system. But just as it is possible to eliminate the death penalty as part of that overhaul, many of those practices ought to be abolished or curtailed and the prison populations reduced by more than half, too.

Mordy's argument in favor of death as being the more humane and less cruel alternative to life imprisonment just doesn't convince me.

So when he said he was in favour of executing Dylann Roof you think he was being humane?

He thought so. Not me.

I agree. But neither Mordy nor I have stipulated such lifetime confinement occurring on death row. If there is no death penalty, there is no death row. Nor have we included maximum security, solitary confinement, or other such qualifications in the discussion of life sentences. Mordy's position was that life sentence was in itself enough to merit the description of "some kind of existential state of nothingness" that was a torture worse than death. I disagreed with that.

I goofed by mentioning death row - obviously not relevant to the discussion - but if we're talking about theoretical jail that doesn't exist and isn't as shitty as the actual maximum security jails murderers and the like inhabit in North America then that obviously changes the conversation and I would assume that it is unlikely that any interlocutor on the subject would have been considering a platonic ideal of humane imprisonment when weighing the two things.

(xp) I don't believe he did.

Or if he did that was only part of the reason why he supported his execution.

Just to clarify, jiv, would you consider life imprisonment, even in the current wretched and cruel USA prison system to be less humane and therefore less preferable than swift execution by whatever means you might name? Or does working to eliminate the death penalty and then to improve the prison system in the direction of that elusive "platonic ideal of humane imprisonment" sound like the more humane alternative to you?

to be clear I think the death penalty is bad. but it does have to be judged on the actual merits of the current alternative that society offers, which is also "inhumane"

Or if he did that was only part of the reason why he supported his execution.

Fine. But if it was "part of the reason", then you are saying he thought it was more humane, which is also what I said. More to the point, Mordy directly said this was his position I quoted him saying it just a bit further upthread, though the quoted post was not directly in reference to Dylann Roof.

to be clear I think the death penalty is bad. but it does have to be judged on the actual merits of the current alternative that society offers, which is also "inhumane"

that is clear in one sense, but "it is bad" doesn't quite answer the question I asked, which is about relative merits, not absolute merit. but it's fine if you'd prefer not to take a position on that.

It's bad and I am against it. I've never lived anywhere with the death penalty (technically it was still on the books for treason in the uk until 1998 but no one had been tried for treason during my lifetime) or where it may have a chance of being reintroduced, so it's not something I tend to think i need to be clear on my objection to, sort of like being against witch trials

i think of the witch trials as a relatively enlightened time

people of various theories faced off against each other, each being expected to provide evidence and logic. the evidence and logic was corrupted, of course, but the overall expectation of its soundness was still there. plus, no one brushed their teeth. it was better

in the end, we all get the death penalty

https://myhero.com/content/images/thumbs/0038187_bob-marley.jpeg

maybe the point of living is...to make your death penalty unjust?

:D

Oklahoma governor actually commuted a death sentence for a man who was scheduled to die today.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/18/1056753071/activists-call-on-oklahoma-governor-to-stop-julius-jones-execution