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

Like if they both carry life in prison then there's no real reason not to kill the guard when robbing a bank.

No reason they should both carry life in prison. On the other hand, if you've already killed someone, having the death penalty means you have no incentive not to kill witnesses / police. The possibility of parole somewhere down the line might be more of an effective deterrent to the intensification of criminal acts in that way.

80% was an exaggeration but I think that the % of Americans who actually oppose the death penalty is somewhere in the 20-30% range. Somewhere in the teens for protestants. I don't know a single protestant that doesn't actively support the death penalty, though I do live in Georgia.

ah well if a load of people support something yo democracy

I think more people oppose the death penalty in America than you think. Don't know what the Protestant part has to do with it.

My point isn't that the deterrent effect definitely exists,but that it's a complicated debate, not just something to hand wave away (in fact, just yesterday I was debating to my coworker why I think the deterrent effect is overrated using much the same arguments you guys are using above). BTW, when planning the armed robbery, I think absolutely a cost/benefit analysis gets into it. In the heat of the moment, sure who knows what will happen, but in the planning stages.

ha nv i was being serious with unfortunate lapses into my norm, sorry.

I was just pointing out that 'deterren'ce is an irrelevancy after the fact. Went through this with kev k and others last month, struggling to go into it all again- just dislike the characterisations like that come from either side on heated issues like this, and on ilx that's by nature weighted on the liberal side.

Source for opposition numbers, they do look a little higher than I thought: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/files/gallup.gif

I don't know a single protestant that doesn't actively support the death penalty, though I do live in Georgia.

I was raised Lutheran and I don't know a single person that actively supports the death penalty, but then I'm not from Georgia.

iirc support for the death penalty fluctuates depending on various factors like when wrongful conviction is brought in and people are more willing to let it go if they can be assured true life w/o parol is on the table

ah well if a load of people support something yo democracy

This has to be a deliberate misstatement of my point, which is that the numbers of supporters are too large to just say they are all evil fucks and move on.

evil confused southern fucks

LOL you're not helping matters here

Man lex had one of the biggest points that bugged me about this whole thing 100% otm on his Twitter feed. The idea that all of the elected officials involved in this chose to completely disregard public opinion here, which seems to me the antithesis of democracy.

I suppose you can argue that public opinion should set the wider agenda but shouldn't be listened to in specific cases.

well democracy is abt more than public opinion, its also abt institutions

I'm not saying that public opinion should be the sole guidepost, but the level to which it was completely ignored is what disgusts me. It should be a part of the dialog, not ignored.

not in individual cases jon

but individual cases such as this reflect a larger issue

don't forget "why should we THE TAXPAYERS keep shelling out to keep these people alive"

― lex pretend, Thursday, 22 September 2011 12:58 (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well of course
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg/200px-EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg

if only there was someone here to solve our problem

When Obama comes out with his pardon list at the end of his term he should add Troy Davis just to stick it in these fucking peoples' eyes.

ha my point was more that all the people that this decision went through disregarded basic morality. public opinion is not a useful road to go down, thinking about what polls show the UK public believes about the death penalty - most of our politicians' default position is, unusually, to disregard public opinion on this matter

xps

Obama? I know the name from somewhere...

When Obama comes out with his pardon list at the end of his term he should add Troy Davis just to stick it in these fucking peoples' eyes.

― Woolen Scjarfs (Phil D.), Thursday, September 22, 2011 8:38 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

what

if i were president on my last day in office i would pardon everyone in the world

yeah, that makes sense, i think the wording of "public opinion" didn't quite capture what i was trying to get across; public opinion relates more to the larger issue of death penalty than wrt to this specific case

anyway, i'm equally horrified and appalled by the way this case went, so i'm certainly not trying to stir up any shit itt

(xpost to lex)

The public opinion argument doesn't make much sense. The public opinion was very strongly in favor of executing the dude in Texas yesterday, so are you saying it would have been irresponsible and disgusting to pardon him?

not at all what i was trying to say, read my last post

Whoops, that one got xposted into irrelevancy, sorry.

but yeah really thinking about ALL THE PEOPLE who had a say in troy davis being killed last night is infuriating. not one of them - and these are meant to be intelligent human beings - was willing to prevent it? really?

I know it's easy to be all "LOL racist southern people", and there may be a little bit of truth in that argument, but I think far more than a black/white thing it's a cop/civilian thing. Cops exist in a different world, not quite the same different world as the rich who just buy their way around the law, but a different world nonetheless. By definition they are right.

Absolutely lex, that's the crazy thing. And the people that blindly trust the system should be forced to read about some of the just complete blind luck that's gotten innocent people off death row over the years.

Number of executions in the US in 2010: 46
Number of executions in all of Africa in 2010 (including Libya, Somalia, and Sudan): 41

^^^needs a citation (pulled it from FB), but, like, dang.

(nb - some vaguely racialist undertones to even creating that datum: even AFRICA doesn't execute as many ppl, etc. and obv somalia isn't a place where something like an official 'execution' could even happen. and the scores of ppl killed by the sudanese govt were executed by proxy and hardly likely to show up in that stat, but ANYWAY USA IS A MONSTER etc)

Given that the death penalty rarely seems absolutely guaranteed, and even then you typically have at least a couple of decades in jail to look forward to it, I can't imagine it works as a more effective deterrent than just being sent to jail. Which isn't much of a deterrent at all these days. The dif I guess is that if you commit a capital offense, you might understand you're not getting out of jail ever, unlike the average criminal. But again, don't see that as much of a deterrent. Are capital offense rates plummeting? Don't imagine so.

Number of executions in all of Africa in 2010 (including Libya, Somalia, and Sudan): 41

I call total bullshit, unless you're only including official, post-trial state executions. But I'd put the US rate of fair trials well over that of Libya, Somalia, Sudan, etc. And the rate of mass executions on the street and number of disappeared much lower.

i think prob why the death penalty isnt a bigger issue is 46 just isnt v many as far as dead people go

Number of executions in the US in 2010: 46
Number of executions in all of Africa in 2010 (including Libya, Somalia, and Sudan): 41

Yeah, there's way more black guys to execute in Africa too

China and Iran really blow all of the other countries away in terms of number of executions (at least 2000 last year in China!)

And those are just the official executions. Which means the state picked some arbitrary high number to reveal, when we all know the number of people who get vanished in those countries must be considerable.

I call total bullshit, unless you're only including official, post-trial state executions. But I'd put the US rate of fair trials well over that of Libya, Somalia, Sudan, etc. And the rate of mass executions on the street and number of disappeared much lower.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, September 22, 2011 8:50 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

well tbf i kinda alluded to all that right below the part with the numbers, but yeah, otm.

Only six African states executed anyone in 2010.

US was the only country in the Americas to do so, apparently.

i think prob why the death penalty isnt a bigger issue is 46 just isnt v many as far as dead people go

Absolutely. Compare to the number of people who die each year due to lack of access to medication or due to plenty of other equally evil and preventable reasons.

were the u.s. executing 50k people a year i imagine opposition to it would be more popular

depends on the ppl, if they were teapartyers would ilx oppose?

if they were ilxors would the tea party people oppose?

the small number, in add'n to shoving it way down the priority list for some ppl, also lends superficial credibility to the ppl that claim that anyone getting the death penalty really "deserves it"

prevailing ilx opinion seems to be that you can't do anything to 'deserve it'

which would be where there's a large disconnect from 'the man in the street with the pint of harp'

Not really

Would ignore the opinion of anyone drinking Harp anyway.