The Death Penalty
 

The more I look at today's society the more I start to become in favor for instating the death penalty. Apparently the idea of morals have completely faded away with generations and it's now a normal thing to rob a store when you're 20 and shoot the owner when he's calling the police. People who do this simply don't change, no matter what you do. You can throw them in jail and 10 years later he's exactly the same or worse.

And "everyone makes mistakes"? Well I'm sorry but I know the consequences for robbing a bank and shooting two police officers. I still choose to do it then yeah that's one hell of a mistake. Does that mean I should just walk away? Because I made a bad choice? Because I was such a retard and shot those two policemen full knowing what would happen? I call bullshit. Anyone who willingly, knowingly and predetermined hurts or causes damage to others should be shot on sight.

I'm getting sick of today's society where violence is normal and is two inches away from being fucking rewarded. Your thoughts?

I know what you mean, i live in England and i'm sick of hearing about all the violance.
All the stabbings, shootings and general shit. The death penalty is a deterant, it stops people from commiting a crime by letting them know what will happen to them if they do.

We do not have it here, and yet people complain about overcrowded prisons and no discipline?

By rights most people on a 10 - 25 year sentance should be swinging right about now.

I have this same issue in my school. On a much smaller scale, but the same problem. There's no discipline left in the world. I beleive there should be a death penalty.

My thoughts of course.:D

If i didn't know better i would say you just implied that your school employs capital punishment. :)

I disagree. Villains must not be killed. They should be enslaved and made useful. If they're going to take from society, the fuckers are going to give what they took back.

True. but lets think about murder, how much community service can make up for the value of a human life? ...

I didn't have average community service in mind. I was think more along the lines of hard labour. That doesn't make up, but I had a bit of a slave thing in mind. A don't let them stop 'til they drop kind of thing. They're no use to us dead.

i get your point.

see that its done ;)

I guess it depends on what your reasoning is. If you are using the death penalty as a deterrent, well...you're shit out of luck. It doesn't work. It never has. The people that commit these crimes are

A. Completely reckless with no understanding of consequences.

B. Idiots who think they are going to get away with it.

C. Megalomaniacs who think they are too smart to get caught. (Some B are C. Some B are not non-C. Some B are not C.)

It just doesn't work as a deterrent. However, if you wish to be honest with yourself and call righteous vengeance then I have few problems with your attitude towards these people. However, the justice system isn't perfect and occasionally we get the wrong man, only to discover this ten years later. So, I can support the feeling but not the policy.

This.

Also this.

Look up Capital Punishment, there was a thread about it in June and my thoughts on it have not changed since then.

Oh and it should be noted that by prevention I mean that you never see any man in ol' sparky twice.

I've wanted the death penalty to come to England for a long time. And what's this shite about 'life sentence'? Murderers are put in jail for what, 15 or 20 years? That isn't LIFE, it's just some long years and then they get back out? Life should mean forever, until they die. I know it sounds kinda evil, but if someone is cruel enough to go around stabbing and taking people's lives, they ought to be tortured for their whole life, and after a certain amount of years they should be shoved into a cell to rot.

I'm only for the death penalty if it's against someone who has killed more than one person with intent.

Why MORE then one person?

Statistics show most murderers will never do it again, crime of passion etc.

Because people who "lose it" probably won't do it again. Depending on circumstances, their punishment will vary from person to person based on mental stability, reason, et cetera et cetera.

You are all the media's bitches, stoked up into a rage by experts and loosed onto the opinion columns and public forums with the precision of an arrow.

"The normal thing"? "All the violence and general shit"? Just how prevalent do you think this stuff is? Don't you realise that news shows and papers never represent accurate samples of society? They have a catchment zone of the entire country to filter all the most sales worthy news from, and it is downright naive to think this stuff is common or everywhere or getting steadily worse. Moral decline is a myth inadvertently created then deliberately propagated by improved reporting ability (if not quality). You are not using your heads when they exploit you this way, they are gunning for your most basic, primitive emotions, leading us to our most basic, primitive conclusions. This is what sells, after all.

Do not be suckered into it. It is a cheap trick that you should all be above.

I was merely discussing the death penalty and am fully aware that we are nowhere near as bad off as the alarmists would like us to think. I run into this a lot with Christians who like to talk about how we are in the "end times". The fact is, people have a seriously difficult time taking anything but a short term memory look at the world. In Roman times it was fashionable to have sex with young boys, for fucks' sake. We are not worse off.

However, rape and murder are still terrible things and the desire to punish those who have committed these crimes is perfectly understandable from an emotional point of view. The conversation is a valid one is what I mean.

Yeah, I was going to get on to the death penalty later, but I find that any and all discourse is futile without getting everyone on the same page in terms of pure sampling bias.

Says you.







I'm not joking.

Ah, yes. The pedophiles must be quite disappointed.

Another moronic point argument is that because "life" sentences turn out to only be 15-20 years, that means we should use the death penalty. Where does this polarised notion that people against the death penalty must automatically support current judicial practices come from? 15-20 is not life, and is not acceptable. This makes actual life an actual alternative to support that is not the death penalty.

Calm down BM, not all posters in this thread are Havoc.

It's not Havoc, it's a global population of armchair pundits.

i agree with BM, life should not be 15 - 20 years...

i think murderers are capable of living longer than that.

KILL 'EM ALL, LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT.

You seem to be missing a point. Someone who goes to jail for life stays in jail for life. That's why it's called a life sentence.

Someone who went to jail for 15-20 years was only ever sentenced to 20 years with possible parole at 15. If you think that they should have been given life instead, take that up with your judges but don't decry life sentences as being insufficient just because you've misunderstood what it means.

In any case, jail doesn't work as a deterrent any better than the death penalty does, for all the same reasons that OANST gave.

Yup, I was going to make the same point rather less well as BM has.


And, in addition, I want to add that in the USA it costs far, far more to sentence someone to death than to keep them in jail for the rest of their life. The reason is that anyone given the death penalty always appeals as many times as is possible, which puts huge cost on the justice system.

If i was in charge, and we had a problem with murders, I would just order the cops to shoot dozens of time until something screams in pains and dies and ask questions later, if they are still somewhat alive. What i'm saying is, BANG kill every murderer that exists. It's not like people have to be a ruthless dictator or evil crime lord to get killed. I wish the watchmen were real, and all the other heroes, so they could protect us. :D

No one let stonetooth be in charge.

How often do you think cops actually catch murderers in the act?

Alrighty, this should be a fun topic.

The Death Penalty is a big deal for a lot of people. It's the government taking the life of one of it's citizens for a crime that is perceived to be bad enough to justify said taking of life. So of course it will always cause controversy.

But as for me, I beleive the death penalty should, as Nemo said, be used when said person murders more than one person while knowing what they were doing. I understand this is a very general opinion, but I do not wish to get into the technicalities, only to say that while sometimes things do happen like vengeance or passion, you can say that 99% of the time you're not going to kill someone out of emotion twice in your life unless you're already a threat to society. Once you take out that second person, that's when you become a danger to those around you due to your murderous personality. But the first time, that should be when they take a sizeable chunk of your life away for killing someone else, no matter if they deserved it or not. But things do happen, and rage or fear or hate can make you pull that trigger, which dosen't entirely make you accountable for your actions. I mean, you did it, but your feelings played a major role in making you do it.

tl;dr Death Penalty when they plan it out more than once; otherwise jail time.

Isn't it probable that the uptick in violence is our response to the unevolving mode of accepted 'social norm'? Doesn't it seem that persecuting the individual for an act that they have likely made out of desperation and a feeling that they have no other option only lend to perpetuating a system that is already broken? Do we really understand why these acts are commited; ourselves sitting pretty not putting ourselves in their shoes and thus not truly understanding the reasoning behind their actions? Instead do we stay with unmoving minds and hearts and judge them?

Doesn't it seem more reasonable to tackle these fragments of a broken society rather than the people who are caught within it?

EDIT

I think it poignant to mention that society is the sum of its individuals, and a problem arises when we try to 'sweep' these problems/people under the rug. Just kill them.

I still can't see how everyone has distinguished an actual uptick in violence from a mere increase in the reporting of such crimes, and ultimately better information distribution.

Good point, I think that some percentage of the 'increase in violence' is a perception as you say based on better information distribution.

It does remain though that our prisons are fuller then ever. What's wrong with this picture?

Well put it this way, nowdays we'd have caught Jack the Ripper.

Because it shows that you're willing to kill yet again.


Unless it was an accident, right?

That's deemed manslaughter by the law, and while you still can receive jail time, it's significantly reduced since you didn't actually mean to kill the guy.

We should have a small chemical release module implanted in us early in our lives so that if we feel the combination of chemicals in the brain that says "Kill dis sumbitch." the module releases something that puts us into catatonia until someone can revive us.

Will elaborate a bit more later.

I thought accidental death was where you caused someone's death purely through just that, an accident that is out of your control, while manslaughter is meant to be when you intended to cause harm/could have avoided causing harm by acting differently but didnt mean to kill the person? I may be wrong but that was how I understood it to be.

I'd perhaps have thought death sentencing is more a deterrent than jailing for life, because jails are rather cushy these days, since they are obliged to fit in with human rights and all. And often life sentences are in fact cut short for various reasons, such as 'good behaviour' or any excuse to get them out of the jail to fit more people in (so as was said, life sentence practically DOES only mean 15-20 years). But death penalties have problems, such as if a proposed 'murderer' is killed, and the real one is caught or gives themselves up, then someone else's life has totally unlawfully been ended. These cases of misidentification still happen with our supposedly advanced age and tech. This is why death row exists, but then they go for trial as their human rights allow since they have nothing to lose, and their substantial food and living quarters are being paid for until they are executed, also.

Also, financial related crimes tend to get much worse sentences than anything like rape, abuse etc. because in our society, money is worth more than a human life, and through the history of society that is how our law has developed, to keep the wealth of the people with lots of it under their posession, and to brutally punish anyone who tries to take it and thus deterr others. These rich people can easily escape prison themselves and likely win any legal battle against someone of lower class, so they can avoid such rape etc., while if the lower classes do that to each other, the rich don't care. Maybe it's not a 'conscious' thing each individual wealthy person thinks per-se, but that does appear to be the case, hence the term "posession is nine-tenths of the law".

It doesn't help that each case on often have vastly varying reasons, and so a death sentence might not always be fair, even if two separate people have murdered two each for vastly different reasons.

Yeah I know it's Wikipedia, but there you go. Voluntary is when you have intent to hurt or damage someone, but it gets out of hand and it kills them instead.