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

agreed. i'm not philosophically against the death-penalty, but i don't think it can be administered justly.

given America's history (& in particular of the American south), that "sickening inequity" is precisely why the death penalty remains popular.

yep

i think amateurist is confusing the death penalty with health care
― zvookster, Thursday, September 22, 2011 11:56 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

that was the joke

In my experience you'll get nowhere saying, "But blacks suffer disproportionately!" Listeners will reply, "Well, so? They commit more crime!"

well yeah and you're just never going to get anywhere with those idiots, unfortunately, not today, not in 30 years - the death penalty shouldn't be a democratic issue in the first place but the only way you're ever gonna make a dent, terrible to say, is to have high-profile tragedies like this and have the media do their best to help. ideally you'd remove the democracy entirely - in the US via the supreme court or like with europe and the EU

many governments seem to have lost the knack for not letting bigots dictate things.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/22/justice/texas-last-meal/index.html

"It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege. One which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim," Whitmire wrote.

lol

i'm sure out of everyone texas executes in a year, one of them probably did give their victim/s a last meal, just statistically speaking

but for real fuck texas

"It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege. One which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim," Whitmire wrote.

lol

― witchho (zachlyon), Thursday, September 22, 2011 11:10 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

but what about that movie hannibal amirite?

What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

this camus quote was bouncing around amid the tray davis discussion & seems a more valuable lens through which to look at the death penalty than OMG A LAST MEAL

thx for the valuable lens

orwell said once that even ppl who support the death penalty can't actually watch an execution without feeling a vague sense that something 'unspeakably wrong' is being committed. i wish i could believe that were still the case.

http://beingwrongbook.com/blog/memory-troy-davis

kinda sympathetic, mostly horrifying article about wrongful convictions and the lengths some people will go to deny the truth.

not gonna load all the new answers, but have you seen P4reene's post from yesterday? Most gung ho supporters don't care about dicey convictions.

suspect a lot of the death penalty fans are of the "they're all guilty of something" persuasion

FACT: it costs more for the state to execute a person than it does to house them for life in prison

― I saw Mike Love walk by a computer once (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, September 22, 2011 11:48 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

can't be said enough, and ime this is the only argument death penalty supporters even pay any attention to, like they've already got the "accidentally killing an innocent person" thing figured out

Yeah but as mentioned above that's only because of the length appeals process, and a lot of pro-death penalty people would like to see that gone or shortened as well.

Nope, in my experience, saying that results in an instant retort of, "That's because we let them file appeal after appeal and let it drag on and on instead of just getting it over with."

xp

In re: that "last meal" story posted above, obviously the offender here was a horrible human being of the highest order, but this is some A+ trolling right here:

The Democrat, who represents Houston and parts of north Harris County, said "enough is enough" after Lawrence Russell Brewer ordered two chicken fried steaks smothered in gravy with sliced onions, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelet with other ingredients, a large bowl of fried okra with ketchup, three fajitas, a pint of Blue Bell ice cream and a pound of barbecue with a half-loaf of white bread.

The meal request also included a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts, a pizza and three root beers.

i once tried to pass a death penalty moratorium in tennessee youth legislature. after my floor speech in support of the bill, which in my mind was on par with some of the better speeches of the young john f. kennedy, i noticed that no one was even listening to me. i shuffled back to my seat.

(i think a total of like 6 people supported it. which was my first clue that politics is not really about speeches)

are you allowed alcohol?

instead of the death penalty we should just feed all inmates lard and sugar and possibly arsenic

and cheese

xps i've honestly never heard anyone argue that the only problem with execution is that it's not streamlined enough, but i guess it would be naive to think nobody's saying that. jesus...

Jesus was against the death penalty, I think

rong, he is for the enemies of god being slaughtered in such quantities that their blood reaches the shoulder of his white horse

friend posted this on FB, kinda want to shove it in the face of every DP supporter i encounter:

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored–indeed, I have struggled–along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. The basic question–does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants “deserve” to die?–cannot be answered in the affirmative. It is not simply that this Court has allowed vague aggravating circumstances to be employed, relevant mitigating evidence to be disregarded, and vital judicial review to be blocked. The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.

–Harry Blackmun

;_; can we stop calling it DP plz, feeling a little unloved (altho also feeling a little lethal)

they're called withers, tracer

the shoulder of his white whither

Jesus is a splendid example of streamlining! The appeal to Pilate was over in one night!

it is seemingly odd and contradictory that so many of the people who contend the government is inherently inept and untrustworthy can't bring themselves to believe that the court system sometimes gets it wrong (except if the defendant is OJ simpson of course)

that was the joke

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Thursday, September 22, 2011

yes it was the joke so unfunny & stupidly off-topic that i had to explain it to ppl

In re: that "last meal" story posted above, obviously the offender here was a horrible human being of the highest order, but this is some A+ trolling right here:

The Democrat, who represents Houston and parts of north Harris County, said "enough is enough" after Lawrence Russell Brewer ordered two chicken fried steaks smothered in gravy with sliced onions, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelet with other ingredients, a large bowl of fried okra with ketchup, three fajitas, a pint of Blue Bell ice cream and a pound of barbecue with a half-loaf of white bread.

The meal request also included a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts, a pizza and three root beers.

― Woolen Scjarfs (Phil D.), Friday, September 23, 2011 10:52 AM (57 minutes ago)

yeah i nearly stood up and applauded when i first read that

this is terrifying

McGrath entered the deposition with one unshakable conviction: that Jimmy Ray Bromgard was still the prime suspect in the Billings rape. Maybe, the attorney general proposed, Bromgard raped the little girl but left no biological evidence behind, and the semen and hair in her underwear had come from somewhere else. Like where, asked Neufeld – and here’s where things get so disturbing and bizarre that it’s worth quoting from the transcript at some length:

McGrath: The semen could have come from multiple different sources.
Neufeld: Why don’t you tell me what those multiple sources are.
McGrath: It’s potentially possible that [the victim] was sexually active with somebody else.

The victim, you will recall, was eight years old.

McGrath. (Or) it’s possible that her sister was sexually active with somebody else.

The victim’s sister was eleven at the time of the rape.

McGrath: It’s possible that a third person could have been in the room. It’s possible. It’s possible that the father could have left that stain in a myriad of different ways.
Neufeld: What other different ways?
McGrath: He could have masturbated in that room in those underwear. …. The father and the mother could have had sex in that room in that bed, or somehow transferred a stain to those underwear. … [The father] could have had a wet dream; could have been sleeping in that bed; he could have had an incestual relationship with one of the daughters.

So we have four possibilities: the eight-year-old was sexually active; her eleven-year-old sister was sexually active while wearing her sister’s underpants; a third party was in the room (even though the victim had testified to a single intruder); or the father had deposited the semen in one perverse way or another. Neufeld, clearly somewhat nonplussed, concedes that all these scenarios are hypothetically possible – but, he says:

Neufeld: You have no basis to believe that happened here, do you?
McGrath: Other than I was a prosecutor for eighteen years, and I’ve been in the criminal justice system for twenty-five years. I think it’s a very definite possibility.
Neufeld: That’s the sole source of it?
McGrath: Which is a pretty significant source.

Moving from the biological evidence to the eyewitness testimony, Neufeld and the attorney general discuss the child’s identification of her assailant:

McGrath: I thought it was quite significant identification testimony.
Neufeld: You thought that when a victim says on direct examination that, “I was 60 to 65 percent sure,” and then when asked by the prosecutor, “Putting aside the percentages, how sure are you that it’s Jimmy Ray Bromgard?,” and she says, “Not very sure,” you consider that to be very powerful ID testimony?
McGrath: Yes.

what the

it's from the link ledge posted above

http://beingwrongbook.com/blog/memory-troy-davis

basically: people really, really, really hate being wrong

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22067139@N05/5251556905/

I know this is just 'flickr' but pretty sure the text is from an AP article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stinney

great now i'm just going to cry

Just read this: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all

I hate the idea that someone actually has to die when innocent, to acknowledge the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person”, rather than just admitting that it could theoretically happen.

http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-death-penalty-vote-0405-20120404,0,402342.story

malloy is OK

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/yes-america-we-have-executed-an-innocent-man/257106/

shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone

only one?

relevant: http://www.salon.com/2012/05/15/why_do_conservatives_hate_freedom/

If American conservatives really believed their talk about the threat of government tyranny and government incompetence, they would unanimously oppose the death penalty. Nothing could illustrate arbitrary, despotic government power more than the possibility that execution might depend on the vagaries of jury selection or the incompetence of state-appointed legal counsel. And yet when it comes to the death penalty, American conservatives abruptly forget their qualms about state power in its most lethal form. The same conservative movement that claims that government cannot be trusted to run the postal system or administer Social Security insists that wise and flawless government never applies the death penalty to the guilty inconsistently and never executes an innocent person by mistake.

well, it's the first one where the evidence is completely unequivocal xxp