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-- The Death Penalty
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quote:

Originally posted by Juricimo DEATH PENALTY!!! anybody that murders anyone else in cold blooded murder does not deserve to live themselves. Society should get rid of such ills by none other means than execution. >JM<

ok, i quoted this one, because i already have formed an opinion on this subject, and i could expect the next 4 pages of responses to be very much the same as the ones i saw on this one.

i think we, as a society, have placed too much emphasis on the value of human life. if we must stop and consider the value of a cold blooded killer's life, there is certainly something wrong with our own moral values. life is precious, that is certain. but when we already face a population crisis all over the world, what good can come of spending millions of tax dollars on a killer? i don't want to feed him, or shelter him, or even think of the fact that he is living off my dollar, as well as yours and everyone else's. we need people that will work for a better tomorrow, people that respect others, their property, and the world itself. we could benefit so much from ridding the world of the trash that pollutes it. not only our waste, but our human trash. i mean human trash in the literal sense, naturally. these views may be extreme, but can you give me a reason why we need to keep a killer like geoffry dahlmer alive (i am aware that he is dead, murdered in jail <--that's the kind of justice i like)? their life isn't worth the tax dollars we spend to keep them alive. we rarely flinch at the death of a deer at the side of the road, or the one that your daddy killed when he went out hunting. that life essence is found in every living thing on this earth. just because we can rationalize death does not mean we are better than the animals.

peace.

bse

only two questios are asked to the jury durign the punishment phase of a capital murder trial, after the conviction. Is the accused still a continuing threat to society and are there any mitigating factors?

those are the only two questions that matter when deciding whether to imose the death penalty or not. if the accused is still a threat to society there is not doubt he/she should be put to death.

quote:

Originally posted by Excite those are the only two questions that matter when deciding whether to imose the death penalty or not. if the accused is still a threat to society there is not doubt he/she should be put to death.

Ah yes, but there is a difference between these two things:

1. The accused is a continuing threat to society.
2. A jury thinks the accused is a continuing threat to society.

Giving the jury the benefit of the doubt may be ok in most situations, but it's an awful big leap of faith when you're using it to decide whether or not to kill someone.

meh, i think you should only have a chance at life. fuck reforming. why have those sort of people hanging out on the fringe of our society? when someone goes to jail, the possibility of rehabilitation is so menial it isn't worth my tax dollar. who cares if a child molestor says he won't touch a little boy or girl again? i am a firm believer in street justice. the police shouldn't waste their time or effort trying to solve gang murders in Edmonton, that shit takes care of itself. then again, you may consider the victim's family. but the kid did it to himself. there are always alternatives in any situation. meh, whatever, i'm just going to stop.

quote:

Originally posted by big dave justice good old mafia style but if not then solitary confinement for the rest of their life should do the trick

hehe sounds good to me... i like the idea of solitary confinement - it's worse than a painless execution! of course you better be damn well sure that you're not doing anything bad to an innocent person.

quote:

i think we, as a society, have placed too much emphasis on the value of human life.

Really? what should we value above human life???

quote:

if we must stop and consider the value of a cold blooded killer's life, there is certainly something wrong with our own moral values.

We must consider the value of human life, no matter the source of the challenge.

quote:

life is precious, that is certain. but when we already face a population crisis all over the world, what good can come of spending millions of tax dollars on a killer?

Oh, OK, so capital punishment is a tool for population control?? If life is precious, should we put people to death knowing that in many cases of the death penalty we face racism and unjust rulings??

quote:

i don't want to feed him, or shelter him, or even think of the fact that he is living off my dollar, as well as yours and everyone else's.

Oh good, out of mind, out of peace. Lets just focus on this theory with everyting... I heard the Rainforest is a problem, well lets just not talk about it and everything is going to be OK. Well sadly this way of thinking won't work, see we HAVE to deal with these problems... You have to accept that criminals will exist withing our societies, so if paying for prisons bothers you, maybe we should consider removing LAW to avoid this unfortunate financial burden upon you.

quote:

we need people that will work for a better tomorrow, people that respect others, their property, and the world itself. we could benefit so much from ridding the world of the trash that pollutes it. not only our waste, but our human trash.

1000's of years into the future we will still face these problems. So in your utopia we should kill those who don't live in it, and then pretend we are all superior to those who have mental predispostions to violence, and even those who are brought up in violent and anti-sociatal communities?

quote:

i mean human trash in the literal sense, naturally. these views may be extreme, but can you give me a reason why we need to keep a killer like geoffry dahlmer alive (i am aware that he is dead, murdered in jail <--that's the kind of justice i like)?

Are you always 100% sure of everyone on death row deserving to die? Eye for an eye? Well I don't feel that anyone should face death, no matter what the crime.. How are we any better if we commit the same crime as anyone who murders? State sponsored crime is no better than individual sponsored crime. Who makes the distictnion? Are we always certain that people convicted of capital punsishment are guilty? Are you OK with some innocent people being executed out of those who are truly guilty?? Are you saying we should support capital punishment even thought there are NO statistics that prove it has ANY impact on crime rates???

quote:

their life isn't worth the tax dollars we spend to keep them alive.

Glad you mentioned this, we spend more money on death row inmates than we do on life terms... So its actually cheaper to put people on life imprisonment than to put them on death row.. If it was so simple as financial importance we would abolish the death penalty since its so expensive for each death row inmate......

quote:

we rarely flinch at the death of a deer at the side of the road, or the one that your daddy killed when he went out hunting. that life essence is found in every living thing on this earth.

Yet you are eagerly for execution of human life, even though considering the recent events in the USA that has released over 90 inmates on death row after DNA evidence proved them innocent... So we should continue to pursue this racially biased system that has been proven to put innocents to death?? Even though no evidence has been put forth to show any significant deterance to crime using the death penatly????

quote:

just because we can rationalize death does not mean we are better than the animals. peace. bse

Exactly.. How are we better than criminals if we condone the execution of criminals???? Does anybody actually think that a lifetime of imprisonment is somehow an easy way out?? Fuck no! Its much worse than a death penalty! Its much easier to be put to death, its much more painfull to have to suffer the long and painfull experience of living in jail without possibility of parol.

Think simply of this, the US joins these following nations with its use of the death penatly:

[b]AFGHANISTAN, ALGERIA, ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA, ARMENIA, BAHAMAS, BAHRAIN, BANGLADESH, BARBADOS, BELARUS, BELIZE, BENIN, BOTSWANA, BURUNDI, CAMEROON, CHAD, CHINA, COMOROS, CONGO (Democratic Republic), CUBA, DOMINICA, EGYPT, EQUATORIAL GUINEA, ERITREA, ETHIOPIA, GABON, GHANA, GUATEMALA, GUINEA, GUYANA, INDIA, INDONESIA, IRAN, IRAQ, JAMAICA, JAPAN, JORDAN, KAZAKSTAN, KENYA, KUWAIT, KYRGYZSTAN, LAOS, LEBANON, LESOTHO, LIBERIA, LIBYA, MALAWI, MALAYSIA, MAURITANIA, MONGOLIA, MOROCCO, MYANMAR, NIGERIA, NORTH KOREA, OMAN, PAKISTAN, PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY, PHILIPPINES, QATAR, RWANDA, SAINT CHRISTOPHER & NEVIS, SAINT LUCIA, SAINT VINCENT & GRENADINES, SAUDI ARABIA, SIERRA LEONE, SINGAPORE, SOMALIA, SOUTH KOREA, SUDAN, SWAZILAND, SYRIA, TAIWAN, TAJIKISTAN, TANZANIA, THAILAND, TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO, TUNISIA, UGANDA, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, UZBEKISTAN, VIET NAM, YEMEN, ZAMBIA, ZIMBABWE[/quote]

Take away the anger and illogic of your support of violence towards violent criminals, you may just perhaps join the logical and modern countries who see the fallacy of an eye for an eye.

Can this be moved to the Political forum???

quote:

Originally posted by Thor Can this be moved to the Political forum???

I was just making my move to do it

Death penalty doesn't work. Secondly, why have a death penalty if you let the people on death-row sit in jail for 15 years before executing them? It doesn't make sense.

quote:

Originally posted by Izzy this is the case in america, you have had to be convicted of a pretty foul stint of murders for the death penality to be considered.

I really wish that were the case...for just one illustration of a *very* questionable execution, of (not surprisingly) a black man take a look at the following:

Spencer Corey Goodman, 31, 00-01-18, Texas

Spencer Corey Goodman was executed by injection Tuesday night for snapping the neck of a Houston woman after knocking her unconscious and stealing her car.
Minutes before the execution, a witness turned to the victim's husband, Bill Ham, manager of rock group ZZ Top, and asked how he was doing.

"Great," Ham replied.

Goodman, meanwhile, strapped to the death chamber gurney, expressed love for his family and a woman named Kami in a final statement. Then he said, "That's it, warden. Thank you, chaplain."

Goodman gulped 3 times, sputtered loudly about a half dozen times and then fell into unconsciousness. He was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m., 9 minutes after the flow of lethal drugs began.

Goodman, 31, was the 2nd Texas death row inmate executed this year and the 201st since capital punishment resumed in the state in 1982. Texas has 5 more executions scheduled this month.

8 years ago, Goodman was 23 years old, a twice-convicted felon and footsore from a long walk without a destination. He was just a day out of a San Antonio parole center on July 2, 1991, and already overdue at a Houston halfway house when he decided to steal Ham's car.

After being dropped off in Houston along with a busload of other parolees, Goodman headed west on Interstate 10 and spent a restless night by the train tracks. He walked throughout the next hot and rainy day until he came upon Ham's Cadillac parked at a pharmacy in west Houston.
"I was going to get out of Houston and say, `I'm starting over,' just get away from Houston," Goodman said recently. "Like a dummy, I didn't think about reporting again."

When the 48-year-old Ham returned to her car and stepped into the driver's seat, Goodman slammed his fist into her neck, knocked her unconscious and pushed her limp body to the floor.

After driving a few miles, Goodman later told investigators, he "used martial arts and broke the lady's neck."

His victim's body in the trunk and her credit cards in his wallet, Goodman took off for a month before police captured him in Colorado on Aug. 7, 1991, and solved what had been until then a missing person's case.

A Fort Bend County jury convicted him and sentenced him to death on June 1, 1992. While testifying, Goodman admitted knocking out Ham, but denied breaking her neck or planning to kill her.
"He broke a woman's neck with his bare hands because he didn't feel like walking," said Fred Felcman, an assistant district attorney who helped prosecute Goodman.

"And then he stuffs her into the trunk, and drives away and visits friends, gives away the presents that she had bought that day, uses her credit cards."
Goodman headed back toward San Antonio, leaving behind a trail of nearly 60 credit card transactions for detectives to follow.

Deputies in Eagle County, Colo., arrested Goodman after a 32-mile chase that climaxed when he drove the Cadillac over a low cliff. Soon afterward, Goodman told police he killed Ham and dumped her body in a field near Pearsall, south of San Antonio.

"People make mistakes, and I made a bad one," Goodman said recently. "I don't blame nobody."

(source: Houston Chronicle)

This is just one example that I dug up in a matter of minutes...here you have a man committing a single murder (pretty far from your claim that a "foul string" is neccessary), by his claim on accident (which given the story, I'd say was quite plausible) and seemingly because he's

A) Black
B) A poor guy killing the wife of a semi-well-off white guy

he got executed.

This is a *clear* example of someone who was killed who could have been rehabilitated, and become a successful member of society again, and just one of many.

It's situations like this that make me *very* apprehensive about the death penalty, with a highly accurate justice system it'd be a *possible* option, but I certainly don't lend much creedance to the adversary system that exists today, which encourages the twisting of facts, and outright lies to get a conviction or acquittal.

Edit:
I think it's important to note here that I'm not saying the case is completely clear cut; but that's exactly my point, a lot of people who're killed aren't clearly "evil" enough to deserve death.

In one end of things Goodman is saying that he "used martial arts to break the woman's neck" but it's not clear from that quote how it came about, if he was admitting intent, or if he was just explaining what happened in the context of what the police had told him during the interrogation,

i.e.: Such a statement could have come up if the police told him that the second hit he threw at the woman had actually broken her neck and killed her, and then later asked him to tell what happened, which would lead to him answering like that, explaining his understanding from what happened, and from what the investigators told him.

Given that he later denied any intent, I think it's a little fuzzy, but in any case, the main point I was trying to make was that:

1) People don't need to commit more than 1 murder to be executed.

2) A lot of the cases that end in the death penalty are at least questionable, as per this one.

quote:

Originally posted by CortexBomb I think it's important to note here that I'm not saying the case is completely clear cut; but that's exactly my point, a lot of people who're killed aren't clearly "evil" enough to deserve death.

Let me get this straight ... this guy just up and hijacks this woman's car, knocks her uncouncious, and then kills her later while she's unconscious. Proceeds to drive her car around, gives out the presents that she bought and uses her credit cards, then dumps her body in the desert. Then afterwards, he says he "made a few mistakes" (what he made a mistake in getting caught?) rather than expressing regret or remorse over what he has done? So this isn't evil? Somebody needs to kill at least 2-3 people before they are considered evil? The only claim you're making in his defense is that he's a)black and b) he killed a semi-rich white woman and c) the claims of him using martial arts to kill her is semi-dubious. Don't you think these arguments are examples of reverse discrimination? He admitted to killing this woman. It was not an accident. There was malice involved. Are we supposed to exempt him from the death penalty just because he's black and he killed a rich woman? That's the basic argument you're making about why we should believe his claims of "innocence".

Haha by the way ... if he just got out of prison for burglarly and escalated to murder after he got out what possibly makes you think he could ever have the chance for rehabilitation? It didn't work in the past. The remorseless bastard deserved what he got.

quote:

Originally posted by occrider Let me get this straight ... this guy just up and hijacks this woman's car, knocks her uncouncious, and then kills her later while she's unconscious. Proceeds to drive her car around, gives out the presents that she bought and uses her credit cards, then dumps her body in the desert. Then afterwards, he says he "made a few mistakes" (what he made a mistake in getting caught?) rather than expressing regret or remorse over what he has done? So this isn't evil? Somebody needs to kill at least 2-3 people before they are considered evil? The only claim you're making in his defense is that he's a)black and b) he killed a semi-rich white woman and c) the claims of him using martial arts to kill her is semi-dubious. Don't you think these arguments are examples of reverse discrimination? He admitted to killing this woman. It was not an accident. There was malice involved. Are we supposed to exempt him from the death penalty just because he's black and he killed a rich woman? That's the basic argument you're making about why we should believe his claims of "innocence".

My point is that the only thing you can definitively accuse him of having intent on is hijacking a car and knocking a woman out.

I don't think it's clear that he had intent to kill the woman, and though hijacking is far from virtuous behaviour, it's not exactly death penalty material for most people, even most proponents of the death penalty.

Yes, he had intent to hijack, but intent to hijack is far from intent to murder IMHO. You say he admits to murdering her, while yes, he *did* admit to murdering her, but as I said, it's not clear when and how that statement came about. If the inspectors told him he'd killed the woman then it isn't exactly an admission of intent to say that, yeah, I killed her with that hit, it's just a statement of the facts.

And my point on him being black, and having attacked a rich woman is that these are the people who are disproportianately getting killed, and it makes *me* stop and pause for a moment and consider the ramifications of the death penalty being applied *far* more regularly to a minority group in our country.

Basically what's going on when something like that is happening is that you're either forced to believe that:

A) Black people are more vicious by nature, and they commit more crimes.

or

B) The system is unfairly targetting black people for execution.

Now call me a liberal, but I'm inclined to lean B...and because of that I think it's a valid thing to bring up that this was just another in a long line of black people being executed in Texas for doing something to a white person while a white person, with similar charges, would be much less statistically likely to be executed, make of that what you will I suppose...

quote:

Originally posted by occrider Haha by the way ... if he just got out of prison for burglarly and escalated to murder after he got out what possibly makes you think he could ever have the chance for rehabilitation? It didn't work in the past. The remorseless bastard deserved what he got.

And wouldn't you say that that fact is more an idictment of the jail system than it is of the individual who gets put into it?

I agree, our jails need to be vigorously rethought, and new, more effective methods need to be used so people are able to function effectively when they get outside.

Look at the scenario, guy gets out of jail, has no car, has no home, has no job, so he starts wandering down the road in the miserable heat. After a while he snaps, jacks a car, and kills a woman.

Now tell me if you think this would have happened if you had jails that had trained him for a new job while he was inside, had a job set up for him when he got out, along with a home near said job that was subsidized so he could afford it with the money he was making at the new job.

You could have something like that set up for a 3-5 year window after people get out so that they could readjust to "normal" life, and this is just one easy example, I'm sure if the "experts" took a few days out of their busy calenders they could come up with numerous other, and likely even more effective methods.

In short, I think when you have people regularly having issues with re-offending after getting out of jail then it's clearly the system that's at fault, and not just a few vagrants. Jails are supposed to be for more than punishment, but they're clearly not doing what they should be, preparing people to re-enter the world at the end of their sentences.

quote:

Originally posted by CortexBomb Look at the scenario, guy gets out of jail, has no car, has no home, has no job, so he starts wandering down the road in the miserable heat. After a while he snaps, jacks a car, and kills a woman.

i know you dont think thats an excuse but still that is no reason to go and try to help set up jobs/housing and such for criminals who get out. thats such a cop out. if the guy/gal doesnt want to change themselves no one else can help them. they have got to want a job and house, and honestly there probably is already enough they can do in jail to ensure that by the time they get out. i know for a fact, criminals in jails are allowed to take college courses and earn degrees of all kinds, they can surf the web and try to find some decent living areas... i mean sheesh in jail they probably have plenty of free time as it is. jails also offer anger managment and other classes to help the inmates but the inmate themselves has to volunteer to go to them, no one forces them... coming back to the original point, if that guy from texas really wanted to better his life he could have done that but instead threw it out the window, he was given a chance to change his life and he didnt.

hehe (this thought just popped into my mind) its kinda like africa, you can help and flood them with money all you want, but if they themselves arent willing to straighten themselves out all the extra help is meaningless.

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