It's pretty easy for me to agree with the decision since I don't agree with the use of the death penalty to begin with.

But if we're going to use it, I generally think it's a good idea to circumscribe its use to only cases of murder.

Um, "generally" robbed my sentence of any meaning. What I meant was that my gut-feeling/bias is to circumscribe the use of the death penalty to only murder cases, but I'm open to hearing good arguments.

What if they were locked up without any other human contact for the rest of their lives?

I agree with mullacc. Especially since I've moved to a state that gleefully (and I mean fucking gleefully) sentences pretty much anyone they can to the death penalty.

What if they were locked up without any other human contact for the rest of their lives?

It seems like that would break the "cruel and unusual punishment" proscription, brujita. May as well just toss 'em down the oubliette.

Life with no chance of parole sounds about right to me.

Nope, the justice system in the US, as good as it is, still is not good enough for the death penalty to ever be an option.

I agree that such a sentence is disproportionate to the crime, vile and heinous though it is. In the UK nonces (sex offenders against children) have to be segregated from the rest of the prison population, but they still have a very hard time and are constantly at risk of attack from other prisoners should they come into contact with them.

I would imagine that 'life imprisonment' for a child rapist in an American prison would be very , very unpleasant, and highly likely to come to a premature end.

Mark me down on the "murderers, rabid dogs, and predatory child rapists should all be put down after a fair trial" side of the argument. Consistantly fair trials being the obvious stumbling block.

Imprisonment for one of those people is a very bad punishment. The general inmate population takes a dim view of child molesters/rapists, and it would not go well for someone convicted and imprisoned for such a crime.

I am not in favor of the death penalty either, so it's an easy call for me to make. But, like most people, I am of two minds, and when it gets personal (relating to me) I very easily take a convincing "let them fry" attitude.

Atom Eyes - the oubliette in the dungeon at Warwick Castle is one of the most horrific things I've ever seen. It's the little square grille in the floor.

I was in IRFH's camp, but have now changed to being anti-death penalty under any circumstances (and my view on this changed after I moved to the state that gleefully executes prisoners second only to China and Saudi Arabia).

Offenders of heinous crimes should be locked up and never, ever be freed. I don't care if they are 80 and served 60 years in prison and found Jesus or Allah and have health issue. They should be locked up and never be free. Ever.

By killing them, the state does them a favor and the offender doesn't have to spend the rest of their lives thinking about what they did and the consequences.

As essexjan suggests, prisoners tend not allow child rapist/murders/etc to live long in the general population. Fucking with a kid is a universal wrong and even hardened criminals and guys who wouldn't think twice about killing or fucking with an adult agree.

I don't believe the convicted child rapist should get killed in prison by other prisoners either. I can understand it, but I can't condone it.

The fact that Anthony Kennedy has been as of late painted as a "liberal" is indeed quite amusing. More liberal than Clarence Thomas, yes. I guess the political center in the US must be quiote close to Scalia. So Thomas is a conservative, Kennedy a liberal and poor John Paul Stevens a dangerous radical.

Makes you think, really.

Anyway, most executions per year, by country:

#1 China
#2 Iran
#3 Saudi Arabia
#4 Pakistan
#5 United States
#6 Iraq
#7 Vietnam
#8 Afghanistan

The company one keeps, etc.

Nope, the justice system in the US, as good as it is, still is not good enough for the death penalty to ever be an option.

Agreed.

Can't agree with the death penalty either. Life though, hell yeah, please give them life in prison because that has to really suck, for a long time. Death simply means and end to their life, and to me that also means they get away with it un-punished (Since I do not believe in any form of after life). Death is the easy way out. Living locked up is the hard long road toward the way out.

Also, what if the courts were wrong? It's not like that never happens. Eight year old girl looses both her innocence and the life of father. That would be really messed up if it turned out they were wrong later. "Sorry we took your dad away and killed him around the time you were eight"

I'm also anti-death penalty for all the good reasons others have mentioned (in addition to the fact that it doesn't do anything to function as a deterrent), so this decision is all right by me.

The rationale given on NPR was that the death penalty should only be applied in cases in which a life was taken, and as long as we are allowing a national death penalty, that's a line I think we should hold.

I find it interesting how many people who are anti-death penalty nevertheless seem far more focused on punishing the perps than I am. To me, you don't lock somebody up to punish them, you lock them up for the safety of those on the outside. If you take the death penalty off the table, there is nothing to keep a predatory prisoner from killing guards, staff, other prisoners, etc., other than 24 hour complete restraint in the presence of others. Once you've gone that far, you've basically already killed them, without just standing up and doing it. A pointless exercise in trying to avoid the hard moral consequences of deciding to choose ourselves over those who would prey on us. And despite Miko's claim, the death penalty is a 100% deterant. Horror movies to the contrary, no one who has been executed has ever come back to kill again.

Issues of fairness in trial and conviction I can understand. There's a real debate to be had on those grounds, and I totally respect the argument that the death penalty requires a standard of equal application and evidentiary quality we seem incapable of handling.

But choosing to hide these dangerous assholes away and make them somebody else's problem simply because it makes us uncomfortable to get our hands dirty by actually ridding ourselves of the threat I have a harder time with.

When the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven and the Guildford Four were released, senior members of the judiciary expressed dismay, the inference being that if they'd only been executed in the first place, there wouldn't now be this embarrassment of them having to be released from prison and apologised to for crimes they hadn't committed in the first place. Lord Denning actually said that the Guildford Four were probably guilty anyway.

I recall the day I bunked off law school with an Irish classmate and went down to the Old Bailey to see the Guildford Four released. It was as if every Irishman and woman in London was there. I will never, ever forget the site of Gerry Conlon leaving the Old Bailey, stunned at the crowds waiting for him.

That is why I oppose the death penalty. Because mistakes are made.

Just figured out a pithier way to make my point:

I have no moral issue with the killing of evil men.

But I have serious practical concerns when it comes to giving anyone the power to determine who those evil men are.

If you take the death penalty off the table, there is nothing to keep a predatory prisoner from killing guards, staff, other prisoners, etc., other than 24 hour complete restraint in the presence of others.

What evidence do you have for that? We have many states in which the death penalty is not allowed, and somehow these debacles you fear are not occurring.

And despite Miko's claim, the death penalty is a 100% deterant...no one who has been executed has ever come back to kill again.

Of course not, but that's not what "deterrent" means in the criminal-law context.

The idea that the death penalty acts as a deterrent, an argument often made by people who favor the penalty, does not mean that it prevents a dead person from killing again. One hopes that's an obious result. What is meant by "deterrent" here is that the severity of the penalty is supposed to deter others from committing similar crimes. Evidence indicates that it doesn't, though. The death penalty seems to be no more effective in curtailing behavior than a life sentence in jail.

There's an interesting line of thought which suggests that our insistence on the death penalty is actually a cop-out, which directs attention away from poor policing, law enforcement, and social conditions that contribute to crime in the first place.

Q: Doesn't the Death Penalty deter crime, especially murder?
A: No, there is no credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than long terms of imprisonment. States that have death penalty laws do not have lower crime rates or murder rates than states without such laws. And states that have abolished capital punishment show no significant changes in either crime or murder rates.

The death penalty has no deterrent effect. Claims that each execution deters a certain number of murders have been thoroughly discredited by social science research. People commit murders largely in the heat of passion, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or because they are mentally ill, giving little or no thought to the possible consequences of their acts. The few murderers who plan their crimes beforehand -- for example, professional executioners -- intend and expect to avoid punishment altogether by not getting caught. Some self-destructive individuals may even hope they will be caught and executed.

Death penalty laws falsely convince the public that government has taken effective measures to combat crime and homicide. In reality, such laws do nothing to protect us or our communities from the acts of dangerous criminals.

I'm not sure why anyone would buy such an expensive, mistake-laden, and ineffective government program.

I'm not sure why anyone would buy such an expensive, mistake-laden, and ineffective government program

Oh, I know why- something about it feels so good. Someone does something unconscionable, like rape their 7 year old child to the point where they have hire cleaners to get her blood off the floor, and the thought that they get anything less than the worst possible punishment seems wrong. And our worst possible punishment is death, or so we think.

I find it quite depressing that the primary reason many people have for opposing the death penalty is that it's 'easier' on the offender than some other method of punishment.

It's not really fair to consider the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven and the Guildford Four a mistake. They weren't framed accidentally.

IRFH - I actually sort agree with you, in that if there was some way to prove, absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt in anyone's mind, that a particular person was irreversibly evil, and that such a person could never, ever be integrated into any sort of society, even if that society is in the context of the penal system, and that such a person would continue to kill, kill, kill for the sake of killing, then yes, I believe that sort of person should be put to death, for the sake of our prison system.

But, that is such a burden of proof on the prosecution. An impossibly high one.

Of course, I think my problem with the death penalty is just an extreme example of my problem with the US judicial system as a whole.

What evidence do you have for that? We have many states in which the death penalty is not allowed, and somehow these debacles you fear are not occurring.

You can't possibly be claiming that prisoners don't kill other prisoners and occasionally guards in prison, so I can only assume that your real point is not what you said - "somehow these debacles you fear are not occurring" - but what you meant to say - "do you have any evidence that these incidents occur at a different rate in death penalty states than in non-death penalty states?"

No. I don't. I could be wrong. The likelihood of being killed in prison by other prisoners that have been allowed to live may be exactly the same in both cases. The likelihood of being killed in prison by other prisoners that have been executed remains zero.

The idea that the death penalty acts as a deterrent, an argument often made by people who favor the penalty

Meet the anti-death penalty crowd's favorite straw man. I have never met a real death penalty proponent who argues that position. I've never even read of a modern day death penalty proponent who takes that position. I will concede for the sake of argument that there must at some point in time have been armies of social scientists pushing this agenda, and I'll even concede that there are probably chuckleheads out there who believe this now. There are people out there who will believe anything. But I seriously doubt that most death penalty proponents expect any given execution to stop more than exactly one person from committing another crime. From your own article, "No, there is no credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than long terms of imprisonment." Now reverse that. "There is no credible evidence that long terms of imprisonment deters crime more effectively than the death penalty." Except, of course, that no executed prisoner has ever escaped or repeat offended.

I'm not sure why anyone would buy such an expensive, mistake-laden, and ineffective government program.

You're going to have to narrow it down a bit. Sounds like pretty much every government program to me.

###

Okay - I'm going to have to bale on this discussion and get some work done. I'll check back in later. And as always, Miko, despite our difference of opinion, you have my utmost respect.

I'm opposed to the death penalty.

something about it feels so good.

And this is why I think we need to be very, very wary of employing such a punishment. Humans, especially personally wronged ones, have a natural desire for vengeance.

IRFH, I'm not planning to continue this, but wanted to point out that you yourself just argued that the DP is a deterrent, because you are saying that without it, nothing would discourage (deter) prisoners from rioting and killing guards and one another.

The pro-penalty arguments just don't add up rationally. I don't think they are rational, since we don't have conclusive evidence that they do anything for anybody, and the costs are great. They come down to vengeance, and hatred for evil. I hate evil, too. All sane people hate evil. Murderers and rapists are the worst of humanity. But the reason we have a justice system at all is so we can act thoughtfully, wisely, rather than out of vengeance. We could scrap the whole thing and let whoever would defend victims go slaughter those they suspect did the crime, but when we've tried that, we called it lynching, and it wasn't such a great system. Taking a case to the capital level is wasteful and inefficient, and doesn't really materially protect anyone - someone up for a capital charge is already in the hands of law enforcement and facing the strictest penalties in this land. In the absence of that penalty, they'd still be in the hands of the law enduring the strictest penalties (life in prison without parole). Either way, they're not going to do more damage, and it's a lot cheaper not to be pursuing a capital charge. So it's not a kill-'em-or-let-murderers-run-free choice - that's a false choice. Once they're facing charges, the threat is already nullified.

I think capital trials are a show, a drama, something that allows some sort of catharsis or satisfaction that our system is just, something that gives an illusion of firmness and an ordered society -- but without really providing one. What about our other policies? For every death penalty actually levied, how many rapists, murderers, and other heinous folks get paroled and walk - just because no one pressed a capital charge?

Beyond that, it's damn expensive and time-consuming to maintain a death penalty, drawing resources away from things lawyers, wardens, guards, police, and witnesses could be doing to make the world better.

"I'm not sure why anyone would buy such an expensive, mistake-laden, and ineffective government program."

Because that is what politicians do. As an example, in November we will decide whether we want McCain's "expensive, mistake-laden, and ineffective government programs" or Obama's "expensive, mistake-laden, and ineffective government programs".

Because that is what politicians do.

Kill people? Oh, I forgot we were talking about abstractions and taking pot-shots at organized government. Carry on.

For me, I focus those of us who are not criminals. Who do we want to be? I want us to be better than criminals. This means that I cannot support the death penalty for anyone, no matter the crime. Not because I don't think it isn't "deserved" by some/many, but because I don't want us to participate in killing.

Re sentencing: Most inmates, at least in California, already get incredibly long prison sentences with virtually no chance of parole even after decades of time. (Hence our overcrowding crisis.) I don't think there's any need to increase the length of sentences. People are already getting years and years and years, and many get LWOP (life without parole). I believe that most (not all) inmates should have a shot at parole, and that most (not all) sentences are too long.

you yourself just argued that the DP is a deterrent, because you are saying that without it, nothing would discourage (deter) prisoners from rioting and killing guards and one another.

I never said any such thing. You are still arguing straw man arguments that no one here is making. I have repeatedly said that I have no interest in hypothetical deterrence. Please read my actual words again:

If you take the death penalty off the table, there is nothing to keep a predatory prisoner from killing guards, staff, other prisoners, etc., other than 24 hour complete restraint in the presence of others.

I did not say "once you take the threat of the death penalty off the table." I did not say anything about persuading prisoners to behave. I am saying that once you have a predatory prisoner who has already killed other prisoners and/or guards, other than 24-hour restraint, there is one and only one guaranteed method to keep it from happening again. Not the threat of death. Actual death.

I'm not trying to persuade you, you understand. I wouldn't expect you to be more sympathetic to actually implementing the death penalty than to threatening people with it. I just want to not be misrepresented. I have freely granted that the threat of the death penalty is not a deterrence. The application of the death penalty, however, is.

Not because I don't think it isn't "deserved" by some/many, but because I don't want us to participate in killing.

What do you think protects us from them, though? Other people, well-armed, being willing to sacrifice themselves for us body and soul up to and including participating in killing on our behalf. Our freedom to not have to participate in the daily life-or-death decisions is dependant on making others take those risks and make those decisions for us.

Make no mistake about it - our safety is still dependant on men and women with guns. That we, ourselves, don't have to shoot some serial rapist if he tries to climb the fence doesn't mean we aren't responsible. It's like eating a burger and calling ourselves vegetarians because we didn't kill the cow ourselves. If you want to consider yourself better than a violent criminal, all you have to do is realize that there is a very real ethical difference between choosing to prey on others and choosing to protect yourself from those predators.

I am saying that once you have a predatory prisoner who has already killed other prisoners and/or guards, other than 24-hour restraint, there is one and only one guaranteed method to keep it from happening again. Not the threat of death. Actual death.

I, for one, am pretty comfortable with the risk involved in forgoing the guaranteed solution. We have various levels of prison security, which attempt to protect both prisoner and guard, and guards are compensated at a rate determined by the market (and for the most part, represented by unions, yes? Not sure if that's the case with privately-operated prisons). The price we pay--the cost of hiring someone willing to take the physical risk and of developing facilities to handle dangerous prisoners--seems commensurate with the moral gratification the comes from forgoing the death penalty.

Most of my discomfort with the death penalty stems from my gut feeling that it's usually undertaken for the sake of the victim, rather than for the good of society. I like the idea that a criminal act is not committed against an individual, but rather against the state or the rule of law itself. The victim has no right to revenge, but the state can take measures to uphold the rule of law and protect its citizens.

I would be in favor of the death penalty if I had any faith whatsoever in the US justice system, but I do not.

I do think one should be able to opt in to the death penalty. I find a life sentence infinitely worse than being put to death, (especially if the manner of death weren't one of the new fangled ones like the gas chamber or lethal injection.)

For me, I focus those of us who are not criminals. Who do we want to be? I want us to be better than criminals.

I believe that becoming a prison guard damages one's humanity, and that hiding away a large percentage of the population indefinitely doesn't make us better than criminals- it just makes it easier for a certain class of us to forget. There is no part of this system that doesn't degrade both individuals and society, no matter what side of the bars you're on.

What small_ruminant said.

Sounds like a good argument for prison reform. Even if we used the death penalty for a dramatically wider range of crimes, we're still talking a tiny percentage of the prison population. It won't solve the problem of dehumanization through the prison system.

True story.

What do you think protects us from them, though?

Cops; judges; juries; prisons; laws. To me there's a big a difference between using force against someone resisting arrest/in the commission of a felony/escaping, and having the state stick a needle into some asshole's arm.

Yes, politicians kill people. "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

Oops, wrong generation.

To me there's a big a difference between using force against someone resisting arrest/in the commission of a felony/escaping, and having the state stick a needle into some asshole's arm.

To you and me, there is a big difference, because we have that luxury. To the dead guy who made the wrong choice and the guy who had to kill him, I'm guessing the difference is cold comfort.

Matteo : Death Penalty Olympics is a song which discusses this issue. Maybe with older figures because they put the US in 3rd place.

While risking looking like a complete idiot and/or arsehole (like it would be the first time), I have no faith whatsoever in the "justice" system anywhere to be certain enough that only guilty people are found guilty to truly support the death penalty.

However, I believe that, if you could be safe in the knowledge that there was no doubt of the guilt of the perpetrator, I'm all for it for very serious offenses (murder, rape, any child sexual offense etc). Rehabilitation be damned - prisons more or less never rehabilitate any one and, more often than not, make them worse. Punishment be damned - what point is there in that? These people care not one bit for our puny punishment. Think of it more as pruning - just as you would prune a diseased (but still living) branch from a tree to save the tree, we should be prepared to prune diseased parts of society when they clearly have nothing to contribute but misery.

Any punishment you care to name has little or no deterrent value for the simple reason that criminals don't expect to get caught. If they didn't think they had at least a reasonable chance of getting away with it, they wouldn't even commit the crime in the first place.

Yeah, I'm being to simplistic, I know.

Also, yes, I would be prepared to pull the switch personally. If you wouldn't be prepared to do so, you should think about how much you really believe in capital punishment.

did not say "once you take the threat of the death penalty off the table." I did not say anything about persuading prisoners to behave. I am saying that once you have a predatory prisoner who has already killed other prisoners and/or guards, other than 24-hour restraint, there is one and only one guaranteed method to keep it from happening again. Not the threat of death. Actual death

I guess I'm at a loss to understand what scenario you are describing. Are you saying that a prisoner who kills guards should get the death penalty so they're unable to kill guards? That seems like closing the barn door after the horse is out. Are you instead saying that killing all violent criminals prophylactally is the best way to prevent the rather rare occurrence of prison attacks? Even then, the death penalty as we know it is not going to be effective. How many prison riots associated with murder are led by capital criminals only? I suspect it's actually very few, since they are the ones most tightly secured. I suspect prison uprisings occur more often in slightly lower-security environments, where prisoners are able to talk to one another and have some opportunity to move around inside the buildings. In most cases, people with those freedoms are not usually convicted murderers, but other kinds of felons for whom the death penalty couldn't have been pursued anyway. So it just doesn't seem to make sense.

Oh, I know why- something about it feels so good

then public executions must be the way to go, to spread the goodness.

Rehabilitation be damned - prisons more or less never rehabilitate any one and, more often than not, make them worse.

"Never" is too strong here.

Before I started volunteering at San Quentin I thought the same, but I have met a few people who have been rehabilitated in prison, if by rehabilitated you don't mind including:

-getting off drugs (and this was their personal choice- from what I hear there are even more drugs inside prison than were in high school.)
- learning to read, write, and do basic math
- getting their GED and competency -certificates in a number of useful skills (car mechanic, upholstery, etc.), and even AAs and BAs.
- discovering there are alternatives to the 10 block square gang-saturated neighborhood life they'd known before.
- getting basic (and I mean BASIC) health care, like glasses, and rotten teeth pulled.
- getting basic nutrition training.
- learning basic life skills that help them get along with people. (They seem basic to me, but I guess that's just one of the reasons I'm on the outside. If you want to, you can take clases on anger management, relationships, parenting, yoga, etc.)

This stuff doesn't apply to everyone, and probably not even the majority, but for some minority... well, in order to appreciate what rehabilitation means you have to appreciate just how horrible their lives on the outside could be.

Wow, sr.

I actually know one person who's now a professor of criminal justice, who got his start on this education while in prison for armed robbery. So, you know.

Okay, um, how many people here would be advocating the death penalty if they were to be the ones who had to manually penalize the convicted person?

Why is the death penalty okay if someone else does the killing?

Why don't we all just vote to have legal citizenship include yearly participation in murdering convicted rapists with our bare hands?

Or make it part of getting a driver's license? Or a gun license? Or the right to vote in this country?

It's always okay to think murderous thoughts and approve them legally when it ain't never gonna be you that pulls the lever/administers the injections/fires the gun into the wall.

Christ.

LT, you might be overestimating the humanity of some of us.

If I was really, really certain that someone was a threat to society in the mad-dog kind of way, I would have no problem putting a bullet in that person's head. I wouldn't like doing it, in the same way I never liked putting down injured or mad animals. It was just something that needed doing.

However, I have no faith in our current justice system to be able to make that determination. I may not have that much faith in any of them, really.

To quote Raymond Chandler:

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

Why is the death penalty okay if someone else does the killing?
It's not - that's why I think that a lot of people who advocate capital punishment are not that serious, because they are only in favour of it as long as they don't have to do the icky stuff. Like small_ruminant, I would be prepared to do so, although I would lose a lot of sleep over it. I also don't have enough faith in what passes for a justice system anywhere to be prepared to support the death penalty in general, though.

Thanks for your thoughts, all.

I've skimmed through the reading, and I think I can support the main point of the ruling:

As it relates to crimes against individuals, though, the deathpenalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim’s life was not taken.

I do support the use of the death penalty. I'm not certain that it is always used correctly, but I do think it can be appropriate in some cases.

Why is the death penalty okay if someone else does the killing?

The death penalty is a punishment for a crime, and is handled in a routine way as part of a larger system. To suggest that it's the same thing as having all our citizens lynch people in the streets is a devaluation of that system, and is not something I can take very seriously.

Responding to Miko:

Are you saying that a prisoner who kills guards should get the death penalty so they're unable to kill guards?

So they're unable to kill more guards.

Yes. Absolutely. Are you saying a lifer who kills a guard should be... what, exactly? Given a time out? 30 days in the hole? Atomic wedgie?

But I'm not just talking about guards, I'm also talking about other inmates, which is far more common. If you're already a murderer locked up for life and you are convicted of another murder, that should be the end of it.

That seems like closing the barn door after the horse is out.

There are thousands of horses in there. Do you really advocate leaving the barn door open so all the rest can escape, too?

Are you instead saying that killing all violent criminals prophylactally is the best way to prevent the rather rare occurrence of prison attacks?

I don't know that it is necessarily the best way, but it is certainly an effective way. It is also the best way to prevent escaped murderers from killing civilians. Also rare, but also impossible post-execution.

Even then, the death penalty as we know it is not going to be effective. How many prison riots associated with murder are led by capital criminals only?

You keep bringing up prison riots as if that's the only time anyone ever gets killed in prison. I'm just spitballing here, but I'd say riot-killings are probably the least common type. At any rate, I certainly didn't bring them up.

Responding to LT:

Why is the death penalty okay if someone else does the killing?

Why don't we all just vote to have legal citizenship include yearly participation in murdering convicted rapists with our bare hands?

Or make it part of getting a driver's license? Or a gun license? Or the right to vote in this country?

It's always okay to think murderous thoughts and approve them legally when it ain't never gonna be you that pulls the lever/administers the injections/fires the gun into the wall.

I would do it. But let's deconstruct your reasoning, because this argument always makes me laugh:

How many people here would be advocating life sentences only if they were to be the ones who had to manually guard the convicted person for the next 20 years? Why don't we all just vote to have legal citizenship include housing convicted rapists in our back rooms? Or make it part of getting a deed? You have to personally house a serial killer in your basement to get a building permit. Or the right to vote in this country? And after he kills your SO or one of your children trying to escape? Be sure to give him a stern talking to.

IRFH, you're reasoning from extremes in your defense of the death penalty. Life in solitary is a severe enough punishment for whoever screws up while already in prison. Thing is, I'm not concerned with people already in prison. Our job is to prevent them from harming others, and that's easily done without the expense, misuse of resources, unfairness and bias in the justice system, wongful convictions, and moral concerns that are all inherent in imposing a death penalty.

Aside from the other salient concerns, my main beef with the death penalty is that it does absolutely nothing useful.

It doesn't prevent prison murders or uprisings. (It would be impossible to prove that it did - the only evidence you can offer is conjecture or reasoning from the negative).

It doesn't prevent child rape.

It doesn't prevent murder ("

(continued)
It doesn't prevent murder "Eighteen of the twenty states with the highest murder rates today have the death penalty...Federal Bureau of Investigation reports for 1992 show that murder rates in states that have abolished the death penalty average 4.9 murders per 100,000 people, while states using the death penalty average 9.1 murders per 100,000 people."

It doesn't make us a better society.

It doesn't give us standing among the world's first-world nations.

It doesn't save money (it is "one-sixth as expensive as the over $3 million cost to execute someone through the exhaustion of all legal appeals...the New York State Department of Corrections determined that New York State could hire an additional 250 police officers and build prison space for an additional 6,000 more inmates for the amount that it would cost the state to reimpose the death penalty in a similar five-year period. "It is always more expensive to have and use the death penalty than it is not to have it, for the very reason that lawyers are more expensive than prison guards...It's that simple."").

It doesn't make us more secure, just creates a false sense of security.

Since the evidence seems to indicate that net lives lost are fewer without than with the death penalty, and net savings is greater without than with the death penalty, it's hard to see any merit in arguments for the penalty. It's just not useful; it doesn't do anything other than satisfy an atavistic desire to enact a symbolic revenge that can never, in the end, do anything for the victim or the victim's family anyway.

There are ways to reduce crime, to help drastically reduce the frequency of child rape and rape and torture and murder, even while recognizing that they always have and probably always will occur in human societies. But yes, they can be reduced. The death penalty doesn't do it, though.

So I'm glad I live in a state that doesn't have it, will always argue against it, will vote for reps who oppose it, and hope to see it one day relegated to our history along with other ineffective and morally questionable ideas. And that's all I have to say about that.

Miko, I've always been 100% against capital punishment, but I never enter to debates about it because I've never had specific info like what you have posted in this thread. I'm totally bookmarking this for future reference. Thank you.

Since the evidence seems to indicate that net lives lost are fewer without than with the death penalty

Sorry, but the evidence you offered doesn't actually indicate that. It indicates a correlation between violent populations and use of the death penalty. Causation isn't addressed, let alone established. I could just as easily use the very same "evidence" to indicate that the states that choose the death penalty do so because they are more at risk, and so don't have the luxury to coddle murderers... but of course that would be cherry-picking, too (and I certainly don't actually believe anything so simple).

Anyway - I gotta go. Despite all of the above, we're still on the same side, since, as I've said repeatedly, I don't believe we have a criminal justice system capable of implementing the death penalty with the degree of competance that could justify its use even using my loose standards of humanity. So.

the New York State Department of Corrections determined that New York State could hire an additional 250 police officers and build prison space for an additional 6,000 more inmates for the amount that it would cost the state to reimpose the death penalty in a similar five-year period.

Does using this as a metric creep anyone else out? Jeez!

Sorry, Miko- It probably seems like I'm dogging on your stats, and I didn't mean it that way. More cops and prison space as the alternative to death penalty appeals just seems like an peculiar way to frame things.

How about "Could hire 300 more DECENT defense attorneys" or "could start up 300 more Good Nutrition in Schools programs," or, or, or...