The Death Penalty

[Ifreann]

Why on Earth would you care about earning pennies when you're going to be in jail for life?

A simple jail cell with nothing but a bed has got to be boring. If prisons had stores where you could buy stuff to add to your jail cell (TV's, Computers, Internet) and all the profits went to the victims, and you could earn $1.00 an hour from working to pay back the victim with bonuses for working hard, there will be a lot of incentive to work really hard, buy real hard, and then rest/entertain yourself hard. It will also mean the victims will get more compensation.
At first of course they will try to protest about the 1 dollar pay and having to work hard for more, but hours sitting in a room has to change that.

I also think working hard to buy things also gives people some sort work ethic and moral backbone.

I thought you hard-on-crime types were supposed to flip your shit at the idea of prisoners not suffering every moment of their sentence. How about that.

[Volnotova]

What do people think about the issue of capital punishment?

While I do acknowledge and feel disappointment over the fact that there are indeed cases in which innocent people are wrongly tried, convicted and executed for crimes they didn't commit, I'm well and truly not convinced at all about the statement that "capital punishment doesn't deter crime". Well, if it doesn't deter crime, then what can it possibly do?

I do think that homocidal madmen like Anders Breivik and Nidal Hasan obviously wouldn't be deterred by something like the death penalty because, figuratively speaking, they're "beyond the point of no return" in terms of their mental health. But really? How can people say that capital punishment doesn't deter crime, full stop? What if there existed a hypothetical situation where even the most minor of crimes such as stealing a piece of cake or calling someone an "asshole" in the streets was punishable by the death penalty? Will the death penalty not deter crime in that case?

In any case, my vote goes to #2. I live in Australia where they don't have the death penalty, so I'm not as well versed in the issue as you guys in the United States. According to http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=42 , California has spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment since its reinstatement in 1978 - $308 million per each of the 13 executions which took place), and spends $184 million on it per year. However, much of it is clogged up in judiciary costs.

Now, I can't help but wonder..."Why?" Breivik is obviously guilty, with so many eyewitnesses who have given direct accounts of his actions in court. Nidal Hasan has had eyewitnesses speak against him in court. There's no question at all that both men are guilty, so why not just give them a single trial and to the gallows with them? Why is there a need to build up such unnecessary costs? Why must we continue to refrain from what is seen by many as a just punishment for a capital offence for which there is an utterly overwhelming amount of evidence? Are such cases so similar to cases for which false findings or a lack of adequate evidence lead to the execution of an innocent person, that we must remain stagnate and grant murderers such as Breivik and Hasan amnesty through life sentences?

By the way, Breivik's sentence won't even be a life sentence. It'll be 21 years, in accordance to Norwegian law, according to numerous articles published in April.
Twenty. One. Years. For killing 77 people. Go figure.

It is not my nature to seek revenge, I seek reconciliation(I honestly cannot identify with killing people out of vengeance, if anything it just continues the downwards spiral of hate and retribution).

That said, at most I believe that Breivik's world view is seriously warped.

Even if they are definitely guilty, the death penalty isn't the way forward, it is not only more expensive than life imprisonment,...

Judicial costs, prison stay, etc.

It is not the execution it self that is that costly...

but it is also:
Inhumane
Revenge Based - something no civilised society can base their law on
Not a deterrent, in fact the opposite

Most forms of "justice"(And yea, I tend to spit out that word for the dirty thing it is) are vengeance based.

[Moving Forward Inc]

A simple jail cell with nothing but a bed has got to be boring. If prisons had stores where you could buy stuff to add to your jail cell (TV's, Computers, Internet) and all the profits went to the victims, and you could earn $1.00 an hour from working to pay back the victim with bonuses for working hard, there will be a lot of incentive to work really hard, buy real hard, and then rest/entertain yourself hard. It will also mean the victims will get more compensation.
At first of course they will try to protest about the 1 dollar pay and having to work hard for more, but hours sitting in a room has to change that.

I also think working hard to buy things also gives people some sort work ethic and moral backbone.

Yeah. They tried giving people shit wages in the Gilded Age, too, when the average laborer worked for about 16 hours a day.

Nobody really bothered buying things to fancy up the home or entertain themselves, since they basically lived at work and lived paycheck-to-paycheck.

I'm suggesting that the work is optional minus a very small minimum, not "16 hours a day".
Forcing them to work 16 hrs a day means they won't even have time to use the things they buy.

[Moving Forward Inc]

A simple jail cell with nothing but a bed has got to be boring. If prisons had stores where you could buy stuff to add to your jail cell (TV's, Computers, Internet) and all the profits went to the victims, and you could earn $1.00 an hour from working to pay back the victim with bonuses for working hard, there will be a lot of incentive to work really hard, buy real hard, and then rest/entertain yourself hard. It will also mean the victims will get more compensation.
At first of course they will try to protest about the 1 dollar pay and having to work hard for more, but hours sitting in a room has to change that.

I also think working hard to buy things also gives people some sort work ethic and moral backbone.

I thought you hard-on-crime types were supposed to flip your shit at the idea of prisoners not suffering every moment of their sentence. How about that.

I'm not just hard on crime, I also believe in the usefulness of Rehabilitation (although not the belief it can replace punishment), and sympathy/empathy for the victims.

Having a pattern of life which is more normal, having the time when you have to work hard and time to relax, makes you more adjustable to society, and having to work for what you get gives you work ethic and moral backbone, and also I'm sure you would prefer being in a cell than working hard so the point of suffering every moment fails (as well as in the fact that prisoners sleep).
EDIT:
Also, Stereotypes aren't any good (Example: "Hard-on-crime types").

[Northern Dominus]

Okay. So say modern law gets pushed aside and they go straight to the head of the line without so much as a re-trial or hearing. How would they be executed then? What method? Public or private viewing?

Public viewing in the case of terrorists, by hanging, as it used to be before our government abolished the death penalty. Rape is something unforgivable, perhaps more than murder, because the victim's life tends to change drastically after such an assault. Mass murder is similar to terrorism, in my books, because it tends to make people afraid and untrusting of the state, which is not a good thing.

As for the terrorist leader we're holding? He doesn't deserve a re-trial or hearing, at all. If you let him out onto the streets of our capital, I can assure you that citizens would lynch him and hang his corpse on a stick infront of the Grand National Assembly for good measure. So, in his case, a clean death would be cleaner.

Alright, so Turkish law goes in the direction you've just charted. Public execution for certain crimes, and justice via mob mentality.

So with that established, how can that be justified but public floggings for "status" offenses such as adultery or shoplifting be unjust? Or how about going all the way back to Babylonian model and just cutting the hands off of thieves and throwing public nuisance offenders in the stockade for a few days?

[Gravlen]

Ha, Breivik's "Life sentence". 21 years for for 77 people equals less than 3 months in jail per person he killed. Really nice justice system these "people" have.

Your post and use of quotation marks could probably have been seen as rude if it wasn't for the fact that it drowned in its own ignorance and thus made itself irrelevant.

[Moving Forward Inc]

Ha, Breivik's "Life sentence". 21 years for for 77 people equals less than 3 months in jail per person he killed. Really nice justice system these "people" have.

Your post and use of quotation marks could probably have been seen as rude if it wasn't for the fact that it drowned in its own ignorance and thus made itself irrelevant.

If I had to describe your post, I would say it has the ignorance and the irrelevancy you attributed to my post.

See I can make fun of other people's posts without attacking the substance of the argument too

[Mistlight]

I support the death penalty for the case of treason in war time, and nothing else. Even then, it should just be an option, not compulsory. There is too high a chance that whomever you execute could later be exonerated, and in times of peace that is not worth the risk.

[Gravlen]

Your post and use of quotation marks could probably have been seen as rude if it wasn't for the fact that it drowned in its own ignorance and thus made itself irrelevant.

If I had to describe your post

Nobody would care.

[Moving Forward Inc]

If I had to describe your post

Nobody would care.

The trolling competition ends here. You win

[Pancakes Wrath]

It's a load of shit intended to make those running the courts feel better, and does absolutely nothing for the general public.

Historically, it's been used as more of a deterrent than anything else. In the old days a murderer would be publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd. Today, it's done quietly with a small audience sitting behind a two-way mirror as the condemned has poison injected into him. Yeah, that's really a deterrent. And it doesn't help that deterrents don't do shit to stop crime.

Sometimes, it's necessary to put someone down who is at risk of hurting others. If they're in court waiting to hear whether they will live the rest of their natural lives in prison or basically be euthanized, I think it's safe to just lock them up and let them live the rest of their natural lives in prison. Tough on crime does not equal smart on crime, which few in the US seem to understand.

Also, the death penalty costs so much more than life because the people sentenced to it don't want to die. duh. The chemicals and needles don't cost *that* much, it's the appeals of the conviction and sentence.

I agree that Breivik's sentence was too short, but killing him wouldn't do any good, either. For killing to do any good he would have to have been killed by police as he was shooting all those kids on that island. Killing doesn't achieve anything after the fact.

[Gravlen]

Nobody would care.

The trolling competition ends here. You win

Thanks for the admission that you were trolling. Now go get educated, and get some manners while you're at it.

[Gravlen]

I agree that Breivik's sentence was too short, but killing him wouldn't do any good, either.

What sentence?

He has yet to be convicted.

[Moving Forward Inc]

The trolling competition ends here. You win

Thanks for the admission that you were trolling. Now go get educated, and get some manners while you're at it.

Wow, a person who keeps running after finishing the race just to show off, Topping it off brilliantly by entertaining the crowd

[Gravlen]

Thanks for the admission that you were trolling. Now go get educated, and get some manners while you're at it.

Wow, a person who keeps running after finishing the race just to show off, Topping it off brilliantly by entertaining the crowd

Educating is more like it, actually. Showing that Breivik might indeed spend the rest of his life locked up. The very thing you failed to understand before.

[Arkiasis]

Ha, Breivik's "Life sentence". 21 years for for 77 people equals less than 3 months in jail per person he killed. Really nice justice system these "people" have.

That's not how it works. After 21 years Breivik will get another court appearance which will judge whether or not he is still a threat to society, if they decide he still is then he'll get another 5 years and so on until his death. So it's pretty obvious he will never be released.

[Johnslevania]

im good with crucifiction for rape, stoning for murder.
if you dont like it, vote

[Manahakatouki]

I'm not for it personally...

But of course, I've never had a loved one killed by someone either...

[Charlotte Ryberg]

Personally I would restrict it to the worst of the war crimes and crimes against humanity, where evidence may be more tangible, BUT I am still cautious on this because it is not fail-safe from miscarriage of justice as with imprisonment.

I've been considering Norway's prison system where 21 years is the maximum and then public safety is considered. It might be better.

[Pancakes Wrath]

I agree that Breivik's sentence was too short, but killing him wouldn't do any good, either.

What sentence?

He has yet to be convicted.

Shit, the American news would have people believe he was.

That's what I get for watching American news.

Edit: See, locking someone up for 20 years and then seeing if they're still a threat and possibly locking them up again and checking again every 20 years, that makes MUCH more sense.

[No Water No Moon]

No, it is playing God with people's lives, and even though I'm an atheist, I don't think that people should treat each other that way.

Isn't the same true of, say, murder?

[Ifreann]

Ha, Breivik's "Life sentence". 21 years for for 77 people equals less than 3 months in jail per person he killed. Really nice justice system these "people" have.

That's not how it works. After 21 years Breivik will get another court appearance which will judge whether or not he is still a threat to society, if they decide he still is then he'll get another 5 years and so on until his death. So it's pretty obvious he will never be released.

Unless he's found to be insane, in which case I imagine he'll be sent to some class of psychiatric institution until he's sane. Or unless he's found to no longer be a danger to society at one of those court appearances.

[DesAnges]

Isn't killing someone for murder under the guise of 'justice' just a roundabout way of gaining vengeance?

[R Ev0lution]

That's not how it works. After 21 years Breivik will get another court appearance which will judge whether or not he is still a threat to society, if they decide he still is then he'll get another 5 years and so on until his death. So it's pretty obvious he will never be released.

Unless he's found to be insane, in which case I imagine he'll be sent to some class of psychiatric institution until he's sane. Or unless he's found to no longer be a danger to society at one of those court appearances.

Interesting fact; "insanity" is not actually a term that's accepted by the psychology/psychiatry community (see: DSM-IV). It's just a legal term defense attorneys make up to get their clients off the hook.

[Anarcosyndiclic Peons]

First off, executing a person costs more for the state than keeping the same person in a maximum security prison for life. The main reason for it is the cost of the legal proceedings. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Unlike life in prison, we don't get a do-over if we find later that the person was not guilty, so we as a society need to ensure we are right the first time through rigorous means. Anybody claiming that "we ought to just skip the appeals and hang them" doesn't fully understand what justice is.

Justice is not vengeance. Justice is the correction and prevention of wrongs. To this end, I support the death penalty for multiple homicides and multiple homicides only. A murderer cannot murder a specific person a second time, so there is little danger of being a repeat offender. There's also statistics to support that single murder has the one of the lowest repeat offender rates of any crime. However, a person who murders multiple people is likely to murder an additional person in the future if they are capable. There is the case of a man in the New York prison system who, after being jailed, continued to kill inmates and guards. I see no reason to allow such people to continue to live.