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

i wouldn't want to question the State's authority to execute but i think i would want to make protecting all its citizens from violence as an overriding duty of a legitimate state, and extend that duty to the most heinous of criminal citizens

lets get away from "in what way is the state not the same as a citizen?" because cmon

by that rationale anything the state did would be justifiable... xpost to mordy

if we're going to use on the karmic argument, do we get to murder the president or whoever every time an innocent person is executed?

i agree that the State's primary task is protecting all its citizens from violence and even protecting those slated for execution from the violence of the mob. the state should have an exclusive monopoly here.

LG, no, by that rationale we have to find other ways of weighing whether what the state does is justifiable or not. it just makes it more difficult than the superficial conclusion rendered above.

anyway this has been an interesting discussion but i think we all know where we stand on the issue so i'm not sure rehashing this argument every year or so is really helping anyone. NV's follow-up i think got to the heart of why the karmic argument is so false and hollow. ironically according to surveys jews are probably the least likely people in the world to support the death penalty (tho a majority probably still do) and i suspect that deep down mordy is closer to our side than the side he's taking itt for devil's advocate purposes

executive function vs legislative function aha aha

if we're going to use on the karmic argument, do we get to murder the president or whoever every time an innocent person is executed?

i think there's a case to be made that a court that executes an innocent man has blood on their hands. i find the risk of executing the innocent to be one of, if not the most persuasive argument against the death penalty. it's also not an argument that is applicable to eichmann or dylan roof.

lets get away from "in what way is the state not the same as a citizen?" because cmon

it's not about that. it's about the state following the standards it sets for its citizens. using killing as a punishment for killing is a practice that undermines itself.

LG, no, by that rationale we have to find other ways of weighing whether what the state does is justifiable or not. it just makes it more difficult than the superficial conclusion rendered above.

what rationale do you suggest?

why not kill yerman, wolfy shooterson or whatever his name is?

Because if they can just take him out back and shoot him or whatever, then they can take any of the people currently awaiting execution -- some of whom are certainly innocent, and some of whom were convicted via means that constitute a miscarriage of justice -- and shoot them too. And I do not want my government doing that.

what rationale do you suggest?

whether it is just? executing an innocent man is not just. executing a man for stealing bread is not just. executing a man for murdering 9 people in cold blood is just.

there are compelling contextual reasons why that is not so, phil

any rationale i might offer for the wrongness of capital punishment is probably dishonest really, to the extent that my fundamental objection is based on a personal intuition of capital punishment's immorality that i don't believe i can be argued out of

Those reasons exist outside the scope of what law is capable of dealing with.

xp

assuming any kind of shared moral framework is begging the question in a sense but so is appealing to "intuition"

As far as the law is concerned, the guys on death row right now "did it" with exactly the same amount of certainty that we know Dylan Roof did.

On this point we know the law is wrong. Their standard of finding guilt is not sufficient.

whether it is just? executing an innocent man is not just. executing a man for stealing bread is not just. executing a man for murdering 9 people in cold blood is just.

allowing execution means executing innocent people. and justice is subjective. personally i'm not any system of government or state has earned the right through a history of justice to kill people, and i mean that both due to the likelihood of them making mistakes and the awkward morality of trying to decide when to do so.

not sure*

i think people underestimate, as well, how non-negligible the "innocent people being executed" factor is. just looking at the number of people exonerated after years on death row in recent years, or the number of cases like Troy Davis where there were lingering suspicions that they may not have been guilty are enough to give pause.

I often hear the wishy-washy middle ground of "for situations where it is 100% conclusive that the perpetrator was guilty", but that requires a level of proof that frankly even the courts don't require - there's never 100% certainty. and once someone's dead, there are no more appeals.

the scare tactic the right often used was that these people wound up back on the streets duet o 'technicalities' and killed again but there's been no proof to suggest that.

as a crime deterrent, it has never been demonstrated as an effective reducer of violent crime. so that really leaves the State as providing vengeance for the victims, which I don't believe is its responsibility - if someone wants vengeance, let a family member get it (not suggesting it be legal, but the State shouldn't be in the business of "getting even" for civilians).

i'm having trouble following this thread, whose goat do i get to fuck again

if we can all agree that we shouldnt kill innocent ppl by mistake i believe we will have cleared enough space on the table to get our elbows into the actual matter

xp to neanderthal wishy washy appears to mean the opposite of wishy washy now

I mean there's not a fucking evidence fairy that's going to show up and say "HAY GUYZ I LOOKEDED AT THE DNA AND THIS DUDE IS SUPER-DUPER GUILTY, IT'S OK TO KILL 'IM!"

allowing execution does not mean executing innocent people. we can execute eichmann's and dylan roof's and limit it to clear-cut cases where guilt is beyond a shadow of a doubt, substantiated to the highest degree, and not extend it to ppl whose guilt lies in doubt. but if your argument is either a) death penalty is a problem because we might execute innocent people or b) death penalty is a problem because once you give the state the ability to execute people they will abuse it to execute people that they should not, i agree w/ both those arguments and find them compelling.

we should kill innocent people deliberately

fully agree that possibility of wrongful conviction isn't sufficient to outlaw all uses of the death penalty because there obviously are cases where the perpetrator's guilt is not in doubt in any non-trivial way

iow i'm pro executing dylan roof. i think executing eichmann was a good decision. i think 99% of state executions in the US are wrong.

those in favour, how do you propose deciding when a murder must be culled or when they are allowed to live? amount of people they killed, mental state, background, chance of rehabilitation, or just anyone who murders must be killed?

we can execute eichmann's and dylan roof's and limit it to clear-cut cases where guilt is beyond a shadow of a doubt, substantiated to the highest degree, and not extend it to ppl whose guilt lies in doubt.

i don't think we can, practically. and yeah your a and b are my argument.

I think the definition of "beyond a shadow of a doubt" begs more questions than it answers, I mean obv Dylann Roof is known to have done it, but there are many others that some would consider "beyond a shadow of a doubt" where others wouldn't.

It's not my only reason for opposing the death penalty, mind you, but in the current system plenty have been sentenced to death row on tentative evidence

guilt is a problem word tho because it has an epistemological meaning alongside a moral meaning which in no sense are equivalent in their susceptibility to proof

there's never going to be a clear-cut rule to follow in my eyes because justice exists within the particularities of a case. you could prove someone is guilty of murder beyond any doubt but he is repentant, or perhaps it was a crime of passion, etc, and we may decide that execution is not justice in that particular case. by contrast dylan roof and eichmann neither regretted their actions, nor were their actions disputable, so in those particular situations i think execution is just.

rehabilitation is worth dicussing

fuck the rehabilitation argument

gwan

no takebacks

why does nobody on the side of executing people for bantz want to really commit to their position and go full duterte, this execute the 1% (suspect it is less than that btw) is incredibly disappointing

i like to think we'll get there wins but its an art yknow

i think deems is the only person on the side of executing people for bantz

yes

Yeah idk I don't accept any defense ever, even in the case of the Eichmanns etc. partially because of the notion of the state not having the moral authority, partly because "eye for an eye" is an awful dictate, partially because of the abuses that inevitably take place, and partially because killing off the worst of us etc feels like a hollow form of "victory," some kind of fake absolution that absolutely does not and should not absolve

- the spectre of bantz.

Severe assault we can presumably punish w/ corporal punishment which iirc I made a defense of during a previous bump of this thread. The rape question obv intuitively strikes me as a poor deduction tho i can't immediately put my finger on why - sexual perversion should not be met w/ state-sponsored sexual perversion. If you fuck my goat it's not karmic for me to go fuck your goat. In some sense tho I do think that does make the most problematic parallel.

it definitely is a problematic parallel. punishing a rapist with state-sponsored rape is unacceptable to all, but some people find that punishing a rapist with lethal injection is defensible or even the preferred course of action. but why? is it because we all recognize that it's amoral to sexually violate others, regardless of whether or not the state is the one doing it, and regardless of the crimes of the person being punished? but then why not apply that same reasoning to the death penalty? so that can't be it. is punishing rapists with rape wrong because it is pointless since it doesn't serve as a deterrent to other future violent sexual offenders? if that's the case, then why defend capital punishment on the same grounds, when researchers haven't been able to find a link between capital punishment and the reduction of crime? so that can't be it.

so...
why?

to whit

theres lots of ppl, too many

one must allow that not everyone found guilty of murder is indeed so, but you must provide for a healthy motivation to avoid any situation where it might come up so yknow theres that

everything between that and not executing anyone is more than empirically and morally made up for by invoking the bantz imperative

dignity imho xp

we can . . . limit it to clear-cut cases where guilt is beyond a shadow of a doubt, substantiated to the highest degree, and not extend it to ppl whose guilt lies in doubt.

I don't see how legal language could be constructed to do this, but I'm neither a lawyer nor a lawmaker.

(A couple of years ago I read a book by the guy who defended John Wayne Gacy at trial, and he made a surprising and very compelling argument that most of the legal case around him -- despite his very obvious guilt -- arose from a) false testimony by a police officer regarding smelling "distinctly" human remains in Gacy's house and b) evidence seized during a search that was neither described in the search warrant nor in plain sight. (To wit, a receipt from a photo developing place where a missing teen was known to have stopped just before his disappearance. Police dug it out of the garbage.) Again, Gacy was obviously a sexual psychopathic serial killer, but that procedural stuff does matter. )

i'm not convinced that the act of killing can attain dignity however it's theatrically presented, but on the other hand if i were to concede that execution can be dignified then the State could probably find dignified means to inflict any form of punishment

Ok let's not brainstorm that

even when we have to execute someone it should be done w/ as much dignity as can be allowed. it shouldn't be made into a spectacle, the body shouldn't be defaced, the punishment should be as quick and painless as possible. being culpable for the death penalty abrogates human dignity enough that an execution must be performed for justice but not enough that it destroys the humanity of the criminal. i don't see how rape could be performed in such a way that left dignity to the person. (nb that acc to OT justice, tho i don't submit this as an argument for anything just as a curiosity, we do not leave hanged men out over night because they were still created in the image of god and it would be disrespectful to god to leave up a criminal that looked like him - there's a metaphor used that a hanged criminal that looks like the king would be shameful to the king for people to see)

BTW just because I'm bored at work I looked it up. The US states with the 10 lowest homicide rates have executed only 7 people since the Court's Gregg decision in 1976. The states with the 10 highest homicide rates have executed 240 people. So someone is doing something very right or very wrong.

Texas, a runaway leader with 5x as many executions as the next closest contender, sits right in the middle of the pack with a murder rate of 5.0/100,000 population, nicely between New Hampshire's 1.1 and Louisiana's 9.6.