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

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.

you consider yrself a centrist tom?

What I mean is I don't think there's such a large disconnect.

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.

ehh idk, like obviously frequency is going to dictate coverage etc etc, but i think it flatters our rationality & reflection to think of the debate as a sensitive evaluation of what's happening in our country. i think it remains an almost theoretical moral issue, even if corporal punishment is a construct, & one that there'll probably be proponents on both sides of forever, but i don't think that its infrequency explains much of people's attitude towards it. we pin our opinions on these extremes; look how big an issue late-term abortions are/were in proportion to the marginal numbers involved. i feel like to make an argument that "if there were executions on a mass scale we'd consider it more thoroughly" is sort of true, in that we'd be compelled to by it impinging on our consciousness more, but i think it would take like ... say one hundred million executions a year for people to actually start interrogating their beliefs on it. there was that book, iirc 'the republic of suffering'?, which studied the civil war & the sea change it brought in attitudes towards death & religion & life, just because no-one had been affected by those things on such a scale before, had had to be bombarded by their realities. and i think it's probably the same here.

ah well i'll not fall out with anyone over it, it's hardly life or death

I don't know what it's like in Ireland but there's only a small majority of people support the death penalty in the UK these days

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.

& yeah but here we're back onto that weird plain of cigarettes versus heroin or whatever - all of which i agree with!, but with which it's not hard to understand the human logic for perceiving that way. also slightly cynical about gaining solace from comparing with the sad outrage over lack of access to medication, which though widespread, & though totally the righteous cause of many, did not set about profound redirection in healthcare legislation debate, etc. i don't know what it would take to get people to switch sides on this kind of debate (i guess greater visibility or impact of the execution of innocents), but i don't think it's just a matter of volume.

I don't know what it's like in Ireland but there's only a small majority of people support the death penalty in the UK these days

would be curious for stats on this, the phone was ringing off the hook during the petition debate iirc.

link upthread sez

...British support for capital punishment has dropped since 1995. A MORI poll of residents in the United Kingdom found that, even in the wake of revelations about the recent murder of two young girls, public support for the death penalty remains low. In 1995, when the issue of reinstating the death penalty was debated and subsequently defeated in Parliament, 76% of British respondents supported the death penalty. A poll taken after the highly-publicized child murders found only 56% support for capital punishment. (The Guardian, August 21, 2002).