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

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.

I’m not proud that I had no reserves of compassion for this person but I didn’t. That’s part of why I came to believe that morality needs to be grounded in principles, not feelings.

one time i was googling my dad and found a website dedicated to an attempt to exonerate a man on death row who was quite possibly innocent (it didn't work; the state murdered him a few years later). my dad was a part of the proceedings on the side of law enforcement, which did many questionable things during the investigation and trial. at first i was horrified at the thought that he did something to put an innocent man on death row, but he played a minor role in the entire affair. but in general it made me think of the inevitable mistakes that humans make, "human error", and what that can lead to for people caught on the inconvenient side of the power equation. so many innocent people put to death, either accidentally or otherwise. it's sickening.

In my 20s I was not only pro-death penalty, I was in favor of bringing back public executions. I was pretty right-wing back in those days. Learning more about the shitty representation most death penalty defendants get, and then the rate of wrongful convictions, started to move the needle for me and by the time I read John Grisham's The Innocent Man that pretty much sealed the deal.

I think it should be reserved for war criminals.

Cheney or Kissinger’s heads on spikes? Yes

Sorry that’s gross. Just not feeling charitable towards people with power.

Obviously that’s just a fantasy that would never happen in real life. But the death penalty as part of a regular justice system? 100% against.

Ok, let me amend that to “War Criminals and people who double park

I'd be OK with permanent exile to really inhospitable places. Henry Kissinger living out his life on Bouvet Island would be A-OK with me.

the thing is we obviously allow public executions and mete out death to our own citizens on a frighteningly regular basis, so until we disarm the populace, so that we can disarm the police, completely eradicating the death sentence in judicial contexts seems a little like putting the cart before the horse (see "evolving definitions of 'civilised society'" perhaps).

another thing is how to implement a death penalty in a manner that is not cruel and unusual - currently performed, lawful executions are quite unusual and are apparently often bungled in ways that render them quite cruel, in part because no trained medical professionals will carry them out (see "evolving expectations in a 'civilised society'").

a last thing is that as long as the state is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, killing is one of the activities the state should reserve for itself, albeit in extreme circumstances with extremely rigorous standards applied to proof and argument. I dunno if war crimes even fit the bill, but I'm not sure if I can come up with anything else.

in my 20s I used to buy the argument that the death penalty was okay for criminals who were so dangerous and recidivist that they needed to be euthanized like you would a wild animal that had chosen to prey on humans, but now I think that line of reasoning just gets abused to justify the existing paradigm in the US, with all of its disastrous systemic flaws.

Executing former public officials like Henry Kissinger for crimes in which they weren’t solely complicit—he had help—sounds like banana republic type stuff to me.

You could theoretically try every president for war crimes. There isn’t a good legal standard for this—I don’t know what kind of accountability would work instead though.

“You could theoretically try every president for war crimes.“

It’d be a good place to start

On what authority though? Would these be international tribunals?

i might be ok with the death penalty if someone could figure out how to reanimate the many executed people who are later discovered to be innocent. until that happens, it seems wrong to have a system that ends the lives of innocent people 1 out of 25 times (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/28/death-penalty-study-4-percent-defendants-innocent)

does it seem fair that you can commit every other kind of atrocity possible and still live, as long as you never wave anything resembling a weapon in the general direction of a police officer?

Jesus that is insanely high

Xp

exactly

i can't believe capital punishment is even a debate

Where's Mordy when you need him.

On what authority though? Would these be international tribunals?

― 🦅 (Trϵϵship), Tuesday, September 4, 2018 4:21 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://youtu.be/3H3kiCbq2DY

love too execute violent ppl

i'm the annoying equivalent of a single-issue voter with this. all of the other arguments mean nothing to me when i think about the 4 innocent people out of 100 who are murdered by the state - and the innocent person's family, and the families of the victim of the original crime who went through a capital punishment trial and conviction only to find out that all it led to was an innocent person dying.

whenever a state executes someone, they should load up a 25-bullet russian roulette gun and make someone in the room pull the trigger

“You could theoretically try every president for war crimes.“

It’d be a good place to start

― Perverse Mortgage (latebloomer), Tuesday, September 4, 2018 12:20 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Morbs it's really fucked up that u logged into someone else's account 2 post this

I can't remember ever not being against the death penalty. I don't claim to have been a particularly smart or well-informed adolescent; it just always seemed barbaric to me. Also, whenever I would enter into a debate on the issue with anyone starting with this premise (and I do feel that, even now, I probably know more pro-dp people than anti-), the only thing anyone would ever hit me back with was "why should the state pay to keep these people alive?"

you should hit them back with 'it ends costing more to put people to death than keeping them alive'

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29552692/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/execute-or-not-question-cost/
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/which-is-cheaper-execution-or-life-in-prison-without-parole-31614
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty

problem with using that argument as a counter is that pro-death penalty people have no problem imaging cheaper solutions

yeah, and some of those cheaper solutions - like cutting down some of the legal options that death row inmates have, opportunities to appeal - would lead to even MORE innocent people being executed. not that people who support the death penalty gaf about that

I generally don't trust arguments about the death penalty other than whether you believe it is or isn't morally permissible. arguments around economics and even maybe deterrence feel bad faith mostly.

^ yet another reason not to trust utilitarians

Yes, it's like when people say how much money the Royal Family generates in fucking stupid fucking tourists and whatever - I don't care.

“You could theoretically try every president for war crimes.“

It’d be a good place to start

― Perverse Mortgage (latebloomer), Tuesday, September 4, 2018 12:20 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Morbs it's really fucked up that u logged into someone else's account 2 post this

― fuck the NRA (Neanderthal), Tuesday, September 4, 2018 4:57 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You either log off a hero or post long enough to see yourself become a Morbs