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

I get tired of ppl justifying the expense of execution

Now where are we

would love to meet somebody whose actual reason for being pro/anti capital punishment was expense-based

I know a few of them! More pro than anti but the "why should OUR tax dollars support a killer getting 3 meals a day".

Few people oppose it FOR the expense, that's usually just an organic retort re: the futility of that argument.

we should eliminate the NEA to offset the costs of executing people

Bring in pre-crime IMO

Clearly the response to not wanting to feed a killer forever is to shorten his sentence. It works in most of the rest of the world.

'works'

Clearly the way to avoid paying for a killer to eat from public funds for too long is to remove the requirement for him to eat.

No, no, no! I have it on good authority the best way is to teach him to fish.

I decided the other day that we should just pay people to stop doing crimes

Universal Basic Income has its own thread

Problem is, if you pay them specifically to stop doing crimes, then pretty soon they'll start demanding better pay.

"Last month's check was for not murdering. Now I need one for not raping either."

Fuck Kevin k imo

i'm generally against summary executions but people who do this deserve much worse

― k3vin k., Monday, 5 June 2017 12:19 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Man u kno I could idk ~respect~ u before man u kno

what's the thing in question?

Raping babies?
Systematic Female Genital Mutilation?
Starting new threads about The Beatles?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/opinion/capital-punishment-death-penalty.html?_r=0

appreciated this editorial

there's some value in ILX having over a decade of stuff that can be readily revived at any time just so I can see what a dick I was in my twenties. I'm still arrogant as all hell but wow

Pope Francis says no

top lad

Can you imagine the Catholic Church positioning itself as the greatest global force of social justice? That seems to be the gameplan

they could start by paying the costs for child abuse tribunals worldwide

until then he can keep his mouth shut on any and every other topic afaic

eh, he's pope. take what you can get.

deems otm

xp

i like the guy from what i can tell of him as a guy

but if he was just a guy as a guy id never have heard of him

ive heard of him because hes the pope

im sure hes a grand fella, for a pope

but the moral debt owed for that one issue alone worldwide would have anyone actually worthy of the mantle of representative of god on earth addressing it as an absolute priority without reference to the protection of the infrastructure of the organisation

he has no other business as pope

amen.

i thought this was already the Church position

Paul VI moved it in that direction; the Polish guy not so much

dmac totally otm

your scorn, valid as it is, does not touch him. he's going to be pope until he dies. if he does one thing worthy of praise, it's ok to praise him for that thing and scorn him for all else he doesn't do. this will not diminish you.

Nah, fuck anybody who takes the job and doesn’t do the thing like darraghmac said

https://i.imgur.com/bwvy01f.png

looks like a legitimate concern

if the death cultist had succeeded in releasing all the oxygen and killing everyone, wouldn't their death already have been accomplished?

Feel like maybe have a "are you a death cultist y/n?" question on the spaceship application form

good to see Lolico has been doing some quality reading watching US garbage series The 100.

i would've gone with "donald trump" for the counterargument myself

Nah, fuck anybody who takes the job and doesn’t do the thing like darraghmac said

― El Tomboto, Friday, August 3, 2018 6:32 AM (sixteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait till you guys get a load of the rest of the world leaders

do you think that the mandated elected and answerable leader of a country who has to get shit done all day every day is comparable in this regard to the pope

genuine q noe

thats setting aside that one role is explicitly and almost totally a moral leader figurehead

lol no

read up on the curia

lol no

the corridors one must tread to get there does not change the claimed and claimed again basis for the role

it's 9:35 central united states of america time on a monday, the perfect time to bump this and ask the most important questions?

have any of you ever changed your mind about the death penalty? why?

i changed my mind about it when i was in college. i was pro-death penalty before, anti afterward. i changed my mind because i took a course in criminology and learned about the death penalty

bumped after learning about this exchange during a bush/dukakis debate, 1988:

SACRAMENTO, CALIF. — Kitty Dukakis hated the first question posed to her husband, the one that made the audience gasp.

``It was theater and inappropriate,`` said the governor`s wife, not concealing her anger over the personalized question as she chatted with reporters on the campaign plane.

``Governor,`` Bernard Shaw had asked, ``if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?``

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-10-15/news/8802070550_1_kitty-dukakis-mrs-dukakis-death-penalty

The post I made far upthread which begins: "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", still reflects my best thinking on this issue.

but did you ever think otherwise? for me, the death penalty was just one more thing that i realized i was completely wrong about in my early 20s, so it was easy for me to change my opinion. but i'm curious about people who change their mind about it after the age of, say, 30, and why that happened.

it's a slightly cynical take, but in my experience people over the age of 30 typically don't change their minds about anything at all of any importance, which is why they shouldn't be listened to. i'm sure you knew the deal about the death penalty early on, aimless. but i do wonder about the breaking point for people who finally changed their minds about it in adulthood

i guess i have now defined 'adulthood' as > age 30, makes sense

My admittedly unreliable memory (at my age this is merely an unsurprising fact) tells me that through much of my life before roughly age fifty, I held opinions that were only slightly leaning against the death penalty as distasteful and of questionable utility.

What shifted my view to being fully and completely against it was reading a large number of stories about how capriciously it was applied, with racial bias being the foremost factor in that equation, coupled with stories about some half dozen egregiously bad convictions being overturned after witnesses recanted, DNA samples proved innocence, and various other miscarriages of justice. That settled me on the side that, no matter how heinous the crime, one's revulsion against it should not be transferred to the point of killing the convicted culprit, because convictions are in no way 100% conclusive of guilt, however much we hate to recognize that fact. Once you face that, executions become abhorrent.

I have always been fiercely against the death penalty. As a legal issue, as a moral issue, I believe the death penalty is indefensible and always have. Always will.

However, there was a time when someone I knew (not well) was murdered by someone else I knew, also not well. And prosecutors apparently initially sought the death penalty—I forget the details—and when I heard this I was surprised to feel indifferent about it. faced with what he had done—taken a life—the consequence didn’t seem as barbaric as it usually would. I can imagine someone, faced with a tragedy like this but that touched their life more closely, might be pushed to change their view altogether.

But they would be wrong.