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

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)

xpost

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.

My justification, which you are welcome to disagree with:

* if wrongly convicted, it would be a crime in turn to have them killed -- Marcello's point holds, there are many other examples

* if rightly convicted, death is almost too easy a release -- maybe some would thrive on it, but to my mind, no form of better mental torment could be imagined than to live out a huge amount of time, if not the rest of your life, in such a state. It is the type of fate I would wish for someone like Saddam Hussein, used to power and control of a country and now reduced to a room somewhere. It may be roomier than the hole he was found in, but that doesn't change the basic dynamic any.

It's quite worrying how blase people are about 'A BULLET doesn't cost more than keeping them in jail does it?' type attitudes.

The problem with the justice system all along has been the uncertainty of conviction and the possibility that someone could be wrongly convicted or unfairly punished. There comes a point however when constantly providing for the possibility of someone's innocence reaches the point of total absurdity, if you find a person irredeemable enough to let them die in prison, why not just kill them anyway?

The fallibility of our forensic apparatus should be accounted for but it should not be used as an excuse to completely limit the powers of the people and the state (which exercises the will of the PEOPLE, you cannot be sentenced to death by a judge, and legislation is the product of representational democracy, whether you like it or not) to dispose of convicted/confessed criminals as they see fit.

I'm still just confused as to why premeditated murderers and rapists are ever given the option to walk? Parole what? Mercy who?

xpost Fergal: Well they DON'T!

in the real world, it has been estimated that at least ten per cent of executions in the last thirty years in america have been of innocent people. the racial breakdown is absurd. the inconsistencies between what warrants prison or execution are appalling. and the physical act of execution is hardly surgical in its precision. far far better to abolish capital punishment than to make any of these mistakes.

I'd be disappointed, I think, to believe that we eventually reached a point where we were so unsure of ourselves and our ability to reach a sound conclusion in a court of law that we had to just let the worst criminals of our society continue to live and breathe out of sheer uncertainty. A civilized society doesn't bother itself by keeping scum like Gacy, Brisbon or Fourniret alive, penned up or not.

And then there's Sally Clark and all the other supposed baby-killers jailed on the hearsay evidence of a quack paediatrician with a Moral Majority axe to grind. Clearly it would have been far cheaper and a far better use of taxpayers' money just to string them up and have done with it.

And of COURSE morality comes into it. Trying to look at positive/negative effects to society and the death penalty's economic viability are red herrings of the highest order - it's upside-down thinking, at least to my mind.

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