Bring Back Death Penalty

[AJS-]

I know, tons of polls recently, but I find them interesting.

How would you vote if there was a referendum tomorrow on introducing the death penalty (as humanely as possible) for crimes carrying over 25 year sentences on current guidelines.

[AJS-]

TheHeretic said:

Ah, so only those where there is absolute proof? If there was any doubt, they would not be in prison in the first place, surely? The assumption that you have extra special cases where the death penalty is fine, but only for those special cases is absurd. Everyone in prison has been found guilty. If there was doubt, they would not be there.

Those currently in prison are proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. I don't see why you couldn't introduce a higher standard of evidence specifically for the death penalty of beyond shadow of a doubt. This could restrict it's use to cases where there is either video footage, an admission or some other irrefutable evidence pinning the crime on the defendent.

[AJS-]

Phil1 said:

There's quite lot of people convicted prior to modern investigative techniques. I wouldn't compare exonerations of those found guilty in the past with the same weight as those found since techniques have improved.

Would be interesting to see how the rate of miscarriages has fared over the years.

Technologies are only as good as the people using them. In cases where evidence is tampered with to a certain end then it only serves to make people more certain of the wrong result.

[AJS-]

TheHeretic said:

Well, assuming you only use irrefutable evidence, that would somewhat put the rest of evidence used as a bit dodgy, would it not?

Will not work, I am afraid, and the moment we find out that anyone innocent had been put to death based on your irrefutable evidence, well, what then? Blood on your hands?

Not really. A man walking out of the woods with blood on his shirt killed the woman lying in the woods stabbed to death, beyond reasonable doubt. The man seen on CCTV kicking someone's head against the pavement until they die killed him beyond a shadow of a doubt. Of course every case introduces new variables, but I think judges and juries are sophisticated enough to make the distinction.

[AJS-]

The possibility of miscarriages of justice is a lousy argument against it in my view anyway. If we already lock people up for life then we ought to be very sure of our ground. If we don't have faith in the justice system to be right as often as humanly possible then we should be looking at changing and improving the system.

The fundamental issue is whether or not the state and the justice system ought to have the authority to impose the ultimate sanction in the most extreme cases.

[AJS-]

Digga said:

Again, I'd bring the Anuj Bidve killing as a case in point. The killer did it, no question and showed no remorse - in fact showed contempt, laughing during sentencing. really, what's the point of keeping this sort of individual?

Would he have behaved the same knowing that he would face death if convicted though? Knowing such behaviour would be practically suicide. As things currently stand he got a 30 year sentence, no joke but part of his gangster identity, almost a lifestyle choice by the sounds of it.

[AJS-]

CDP said:

AJS- said:

Digga said:

Again, I'd bring the Anuj Bidve killing as a case in point. The killer did it, no question and showed no remorse - in fact showed contempt, laughing during sentencing. really, what's the point of keeping this sort of individual?

Would he have behaved the same knowing that he would face death if convicted though? Knowing such behaviour would be practically suicide. As things currently stand he got a 30 year sentence, no joke but part of his gangster identity, almost a lifestyle choice by the sounds of it.

Will he be appreciating that "lifestyle choice" 5 years (weeks) into that sentence?

I hope not, and I hope he deeply regrets what he did.

I'm not massively in favour of the death penalty, and can see many flaws in it's application and a philosophical problem with allowing the state such power, but a part of me still wishes Stapleton and a few others like him were facing the rope rather than even a lifetime in prison.

[AJS-]

TwigtheWonderkid said:

AJS- said:

A man walking out of the woods with blood on his shirt killed the woman lying in the woods stabbed to death, beyond reasonable doubt.

That's right. Because no one who ever intervened to try and stop someone stabbing someone else ever got the victims blood on them. And no one who ever tried to revive someone who they found stabbed in the woods ever got the victims blood on them.

Christ on a bike. The idiocy of some posts never ceases to amaze me.

Calm down, it was an off the cuff example, not a key piece of evidence in murder trial.

[AJS-]

davepoth said:

And that's why we can't have the death penalty. If one innocent person dies due to a miscarriage of justice, we (all of us) are no better than the murderers.

While that is a somewhat convincing argument I don't like it because it implies that we're quite happy to lock the wrong person up for 25+ years of their life, with a good chance of them dying in prison, which amounts to just about the same thing.

[AJS-]

TheHeretic said:

But like the case mentioned, they at least have the chance to be set free upon new evidence, and so on. Hard to do when they are 6 feet under.

Agreed but if it's 25 years later then their life as they knew it and hoped it might turn out is gone forever.

Plus, these are the cases we hear about. How many people serve their sentence ane are never exonerated even if they are innocent? Or die in custody without ever clearing their name?

Not that this really strengthens the case for the death penalty but to my mind at least it does not make a very satisfactory argument against it.

[AJS-]

drivin_me_nuts said:

So, you don't like it because the prisoner might die? So what about the ones who live? What about those imprisoned when in their late teens, early twenties... in fact even in their mid forties? 'Sorry mate, we'll kill you now as you're likely to die inside anyway'.

Can you actually imagine that though? Can you imagine where you were 25 years ago, and if you had missed everything in between because you were locked in a prison for a crime you didn't commit? And being released in your mid 40s with no career and no qualifications, no friends, family who might not want to know you?

True enough that it isn't as final as death, and hopefully in many cases it would be corrected much earlier than that. But the argument that we can't have the death penalty because it will result in killing the wrong people betrays a real lack of faith in our justice system, warranted or not, and puts us in the uncomfortable position of accepting that people may be wrongly convicted, imprisoned and have their life ruined, but it's somehow OK because at least we didn't kill them.

[AJS-]

I don't claim to have all the answers, and I tend to change my mind on the matter quite regularly too.

I do believe that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for certain crimes so the idealistic solution is to improve the legal system to the point that we have sufficient faith in it to alow it to hand down the ultimate sanction for the most heinous of crimes.

The realist in me says that no justice system administered by human beings can ever be perfect. Thus the choice becomes at what level of error do we say it's good enough? Which gives us the distasteful task of deciding how many innocent people we are prepared to kill by mistake.

It would be nice to say none. It even seems like a basic requirement of common decency. However innocent people do die in the course of justice in wars, in policing and in custody whether at the hands of another inmate or by suicide or old age. It's incredibly sad, but we don't dispense with the military or with police or prisons to avoid this.

If it's simply a matter of the degree of horriblenesss of consequences then it's understandable, but why at that point? If there's something more fundamental than that, something that makes ruining a life more acceptable than ending one then it's something I don't very well understand.

[AJS-]

Chimune said:

So the next 40 years is write off ? Not worth anything ? Nothing positive can be retrieved from the situation?

It's always possible, but very, very difficult.