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

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.

if they just executed *more* people.....

they aren't executing them early enough

what about if they created some kind of overarching system which would ensure that people who were likely to end up executed would achieve that status

that's the spirit

lol the execution process can never be dignified no matter what your delusion of a pristine needle sliding into the skin and extinguishing life instantly like magic is

the idea that state-sanctioned execution can be dignified and state-sanctioned rape cannot be is so telling, and the focus on "dignity" betrays your own moral qualms

had a think about this on the cycle home.

first to nickb, I agree of course that lots of/all economic&financial decisions have moral implications, I just think that an economic argument /= a moral argument, and if something is unjustifiable the price is irrelevant

to mordy, I don't think authority is a synonym for power, there is a suggestion of moral justification. but having thought about it more I don't think a group or institution can possess or embody moral authority. whatever authority moral arguments have comes from their nature as being commonly intelligible, transparent and, to some extent, self-evident. they operate at the level of the minds of individuals, and that's where they get their legitimacy from

restating my suspicion of stated-authority, I could say that what underpins my objection to the death penalty is my belief in individual over group rights. I could refine this but my instinct is that individual lives are the primary moral unit, because that's where experience and consciousness reside. rights work best on that level and it causes the least issues wrt authority. that personal autonomy is only/primarily manifest through relationships with others and wider communities does not change that imo. an individual has a moral worth that a group can never have, and a group's claim of authority over an individual is ultimately practical rather than moral and concerned with mediating conflicts between individuals and can never extend to the point of killing those individuals. individuals can want to kill people, but groups can't (I would quibble with deemsian notions of cost and incentive here), and through executions groups lay claim to collective authority over an individual's mortality, which I don't believe they can ever have

if you don't think killing people is fundamentally different to imprisoning them though then none of this really applies

dignity imho

if we could find a more dignified way to rape people as punishment would that make it an acceptable eye an eye-style punishment?

that seems odd to me. but you're probably onto something with the dignity thing. i think that people reject rape as a form of punishment because it's so visceral and reprehensible. we can't imagine ourselves carrying out the punishment. there is no dignified way to rape someone. but people accept capital punishment because we have found so many different ways to dignify murder as a form of justice. the socially identified dignified way to kill someone is quickly and without pain, and we have ways to do that (which often fail) but i don't think that there is a dignified way to kill someone. there are ways to make it more palatable but it's still the ultimate penalty. it's been used as a form of punishment since humans became humans so we've all come to accept it as an acceptable component of being human, but that doesn't mean that it's not completely fucked up, and i'm sure we can all think of prominent examples of things that were perceived as common sense since the dawn of time but were later realized to be completely wrong and unacceptable.

as an aside, the fact that the use of the death penalty has killed so many innocent people deserves far more than a "yeah that's the best argument against the death penalty! but..." response from people who support capital punishment. yes, the documented killing of a disturbingly large number of innocent people is a great argument - it is a winning argument. it means that we should not support the death penalty. supporting the death penalty as an option only for clear-cut cases of guilt like dylann roof means that you also support leaving it open as an option for all the innocents that will be executed because it's not banned. i honestly don't understand why this isn't THE winning argument, since supporting it only for clear-cut cases is an idea based on magic, like we have a method to determine only the most clear-cut guilty people, and that we won't occasionally get it wrong and execute an innocent person. we don't have that method. so let's save some lives of innocent people by banning the death penalty.

really interesting post ogmor

disagree fundamentally about the group/individual worth dynamic but its def there where one of the core positions lies imo

xp declaring yr argument the winning argument is a singularly.... unwinning...behaviour

lol, probably true. but hey, following the same logic, we should allow the torture of political prisoners - but only the ones that we know that it'll work on. right?

no, fuck that. no torture, not for anyone, even if occasionally it results in useful information, because it also results in the torture of so many innocent people.

although that, too, seems to be the winning argument to me, but given that so many people are cool with torture and waterboarding, some disagree

torture is another thread were talking about dignified and dispassionate state executions itt please

what kind of a position can be built around only applying capital punishment to (suitably certain) cases of 'crimes against humanity' rather than mundane old top-level felonies? would that be sufficient to admit, say, school shooters and nightclub bombers and breiviks?

The one where, in a fit of Clintonian triangulation, we then go ahead and redefine those top-level felonies as "crimes against humanity." This stuff nearly always ratchets upwards.

develop it from there but fairly safe to include those omes yes

would have to conduct a full audit of victims to ensure they were all "innocent" and their deaths were a net loss to humanity

i mean if you shoot enough school children some of them were bound to grow up to be murderers or something

torture is another thread were talking about dignified and dispassionate state executions itt please

http://i.imgur.com/9US8qej.png
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/some-examples-post-furman-botched-executions

anyway, i'll never understand supporting killing people despite the acknowledgement that the death penalty leads to the deaths of innocent people.

I mean, if a school shooting is a "crime against humanity," isn't being a drug kingpin also a crime against humanity? Aren't hate crimes a crime against humanity?

yep, to nv, but wpuld be willing to forego this is defending legal team didnt pull the piss if they felt their man was guilty

some sort of points-based system like the new UK immigration model