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

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

new salon sucks btw

apparently there was a pretty brutal botched execution just now in oklahoma. the guy got the drugs but i guess there was some extravasation and after 40 minutes he still hadn't died. they rushed him to the hospital after he started seizing; it's being reported that he died en route

http://www.kjrh.com/news/local-news/double-execution-planned-tuesday-night-for-2-oklahoma-inmates-clayton-lockett-and-charles-warner

6:37 p.m. - Lockett sat up and said "something's wrong."

ughhhhh

I understand that doctors do not participate in lethal injections due to their oath.

What do you say when someone claims your utter disgust at the existence of capital punishment in America makes you soft on violent, often sexual criminals and that there are people in the world who don't deserve compassion? Furthermore, how do you respond to the claim that your hippieish pacifistic we're-all-people stance is totally the result of your privilege, having never been victimized by a violent predator? This second part of the argument gets to me and I think there's much validity to it. But I still feel the state shouldn't throw away human lives, even those destined to be lived behind bars.

def make a gimmick sock account based on a bad impression of a celebrity and hide yr true feelings in it

Should I receive a lethal injection because the James Franco sock was only funny to me and very few others?

i'd like the names of the very few others before any decisions are made

I understand that doctors do not participate in lethal injections due to their oath.

― and yo-yos (abanana), Wednesday, April 30, 2014 12:30 AM (21 minutes ago

i don't know if this was meant to be sarcastic, but doctors do participate in executions. it's normally done secretly, since the AMA is strongly against physicians having any role in them

I'd like to have an answer to zachlyon's q, also find out why you kept it up despite everyone knowing it ws you, and also why yr annoying

cool derail guys

Sorry for being a part of it. The story is horrifying, obviously, as is the existence of the death penalty in 21st century America.

*furthermore, how do you respond to the claim that your hippieish pacifistic we're-all-people stance is totally the result of your privilege, having never been victimized by a violent predator? This second part of the argument gets to me and I think there's much validity to it*

there is no validity to it.

I've been victimised a few times and gbx otm

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Furthermore, how do you respond to the claim that your hippieish pacifistic we're-all-people stance is totally the result of your privilege, having never been victimized by a violent predator?

You point to all the families of murder victims who are nevertheless anti-capital punishment activists and say "QED, motherfucker," then drop the mic.

You can also imagine a world where nobody has a hippiesh pacifist stance, and just trying picturing if violent crime in such a society will be a thing of the past.

How do you respond to the claim that your "cars are great" stance is totally the result of never losing a family member to an auto accident?

etc

Good points and I said stuff like that. I was just thrown offguard bc this came during a larger discussion of how my sheltered life has prevented me from really acknowledging the reality of evil etc, wanting to assign blame for social dysfunction on institutions rather than individuals all the time

people who are heavily into punishment, revenge etc will often level accusations of naivety or gullibility to account for others' puzzling lack of bloodlust