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

:D

the amount of sunday lunch discussions in my youth where my mum's husband would be all "no, but what if your mum was raped and murdered, you wouldn't want the death penalty then? what sort of son are you?"...

I think this fellow met an appropriate fate.

The comments on that article are revolting.

But yeah, re "evil" I think some crimes are so horrifying, reveal such a lack of empathy on the part of the perpetrators, that my humanism can't account for it, like no amount of rehabilitation would most likely help. Clearly, my answer is for them to be treated with dignity but removed from society -- that's clear enough -- but still their existence is troubling, and I'm not sure circumstances can account for it. Some countries have max sentences though, which I think is interesting that that can work. What does Denmark do about serial killers?

I am not aware of any European countries that don't have the option of indefinite detention for people who are thought to pose an ongoing threat to the public.

Denmark doesn't really have serial killers. It can keep people in psychiatric treatments indefinitely, but otherwise the largest punishment is 'prison for life', but always with posibility of parole. The medium length of that is 17 years, the record is 33.

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

― bi-polar uncle (its OK-he's dead) (Phil D.), Wednesday, April 30, 2014 8:18 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_country
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_in_the_United_States

The US gets its own page! How special!

Denmark apparently has had 2 serial killers, Dagmar Overbye who was sentenced to death but was reprieved and ended up dying in prison. The other, Bjarne Skounborg, lived in the US for most of his life until being sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released from prison for capacity reasons, and was deported to Denmark. He ended up killing again, and in 2001 was sentenced to life imprisonment in Denmark.

Sounds like US prison overcrowding is a bigger problem.

Also, Dagmar Overbye was sentenced in 1921. My guess is there was probably more serial killers back then, I've heard of feared bandits roaming the periphery and killing pretty indescretely. Peter Lundin - as Bjarne Skounborg is known over here - is the boogeyman. This is a famous picture, that I think every Dane knows about, unless they were too young:

http://a.bimg.dk/node-images/13/620x411-c/13410-lundin-griner-i-fngslet--.jpg

But the people he killed were his own mother and his mistress and her sons. It isn't really John Wayne Gacy Jr territory. He is a psychopath, though. The bodies from his last murder were never found, but he's admitted to dismembering them.

But it's not as if I doubt that horrendous crimes can exist in a society like Denmark. I remember Utøya quite well, have a lot of Norwegian friends.

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

You being 'soft' here depends on the axiom that

there are people in the world who don't deserve compassion?

if this is not true then you can't be 'soft'. Your interlocutor needs to defend his argument that some people don't deserve compassion for his argument that treeship is soft to hold up

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?

But until you are victimised you don't know what your response would be and neither does your interlocutor, they're assuming that your positions on law are determined by your own feelings and experiences

I think my feelings were at issue more than my positions. My instinct is to be kind of naively trusting -- in Thailand my brother was horrified I wasn't phased when the unmarked cab started taking us off course to "different sights" (we got out of it, thanks to him) -- and this person thinks that has to do with male privilege, and never being forced to consider myself as a potential victim of violence. They then connected this to my belief in a rehabilitative, rather than punitive justice system, like it's just too easy for a person like me to have these attitudes of universal compassion. I think there's something to this, even though I would never even entertain the idea of entertaining the idea of capital punishment. But whatever, I like my way of being in the world.

i would think that there is some basic human capacity--even inclination, in certain circumstances--for bloodlust and revenge. it helps to explain why revenge narratives are effectively cultural universals. but the fact that i would likely want blood if a loved one were harmed in some horrible way doesn't change the fact that as a civilization we would be better served by abolishing the death penalty.

treeship, a lot of poor (= not "privileged") people are opposed to capital punishment, often because they have inherited belief systems that oppose it.

Yeah you're right about the second thing. These were just sophistries I encountered I guess.

If we are talking "priveleged" then we at least need to consider a complete restructuring of our national justice system because the law is stacked against minorities. I suppose you could weigh the benefits of killing a potentially innocent person vs. being called "soft on crime" or "a hippie" but that would make you just as much a monster as a murderer imo.

The law does not apply to everyone equally.

Why does "compassion" allow us to put someone in a horrific prison for life but not execute them? What is so particularly anathema to "compassion" about death, vs. a lifetime of suffering?

That last question sounds exactly like something a movie villain would say to justify blowing up a city.

If there were a law where the victim or victim's kin could wreak vengeance on the killer, I could see that.

Between my posts about "boston strong" and that, I guess I must be in a particularly villainous mood today.

Xpost adam's first post. Oh yeah. Our prison system is more than a disgrace. But I kind of think the potential innocent victim is irrelevant: the death penalty is still unconscionable when imposed on the guilty, in my opinion, and this is what this person objected to. Forgiveness is a key virtue for me.

Hurting: the answer is that prisons shouldn't be horrific. They should be bout removing people from society, not making their lives hellish.

Treeship: ok, but then how do you deter crime?

How do you make prison bad enough that people don't want to go there, or at least aren't indifferent about going there, if the point is partly a deterrent?

Between my posts about "boston strong" and that, I guess I must be in a particularly villainous mood today.

nah

Yeah, in prison they can live, they can work, I don't know, make license plates, do manufacturing jobs, something productive. The cost of killing a person is way higher than a lifetime imprisonment.

I wonder, have there been cases where the survivors didn't want the death penalty yet it was given anyways? That would be a tremendous guilt to lay on someone without their consent.

I don't know much about that considering my profession, but I imagine that if the survivors actively told the prosecutors and/or judge that they didn't want the death penalty, it would at least carry some weight. Still, there's a reason criminal cases are styled as "People vs. X" or "State vs. X" and not "Victims vs. X."

The cost of killing a person is way higher than a lifetime imprisonment. This is kind of a red herring wrt whether you philosophically support the death penalty, fwiw.

BTW I'm not 100% sure of my own position on the death penalty. I used to be 100% against it, now I feel just slightly less than 100% against it, but I'm not sure what my parameters are.

your parameters are you're a spineless yuppie.

capital punishment is not a deterrent. the end.

I didn't say it was a deterrent, I said prison was a deterrent.

asshole

btw, who are you?

Prison is p clearly not a deterrent

i...think it is, or else we'd probably be seeing a few more murders

Laws aren't a deterrent either.

If by deterrent you mean 100% success rate.

Yeah how is prison not a deterrent?

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/images/PewPollRace.png

This makes sense, considering the demographic makeup of the national prison population.

We execute more people than the country that hosted Osama Bin Laden for almost decade.

I think destroying poverty is the real deterrent. Make sure life on the outside isn't hopeless. That's why Denmark has such nice prisons (I toured one once, the cell block was way nicer than my dorm) and so few violent crimes.

I mean there's probably some point at which making prison even MORE bad doesn't make it even MORE deterrent, I'm not fucking Sherriff Joe Arpaio here, I'm not saying "torture the fuckers, they're criminals," I'm just trying to get a handle on what a penal system should hypothetically do and whether death should be absolutely excluded from it. Although the best argument for excluding it is probably that you never get a "hypothetical penal system," you get a real one where execution decisions are going to be made on fucked up grounds by people with the wrong motives or flawed judgment.

I guess they could start by freeing all the nonviolent drug offenders in states where that drug is now legal.

Freeing all nonviolent drug offenders period

I said my piece upthread, where I start by saying:

Putting emotions aside (always difficult in this debate), the death penalty does not serve any interest of the state that could not be better served through other means.

I still stand by that post.

Yep

Yeah, in prison they can live, they can work, I don't know, make license plates, do manufacturing jobs, something productive.

The result of this outlook is pretty much slave labor, so no. Prisoners aren't in there to turn an additional profit for the private commercial prison system OR the state. Doing time IS the punishment; enforced hard labor is not.

I just fundamentally find life-sentence with no parole = ok, death penalty = not ok a little bit philosophically hard to grasp and a little hard to reconcile with the idea that it's about "compassion."