Should The U.S. Abolish the Death Penalty ?

reply to post by KILL_DOGG


WOW! your gonna do just great on this forum with that attitude.

reply to post by KILL_DOGG


sure it does, you have to transport them somehow from court to a location, then have other people kill the killer, it would still cost something, maybe not as much but it would cost you a dime, people do not work for free.

is killing people wrong? yes or no? because on one hand people think it is, but then say it is o.k. as a punishment.
it's a bit like telling a kid not to hit people and then slapping them around the ear, a total contridiction.

Originally posted by roughycannon
reply to post by elevatedone

 

but what if your not guilty and dead? your just interested in money I assume?

I hate the stance "our tax money" etc. its a small percentage probably less than 0.00000001% but you rather not pay that and have innocent people fried in an electric chair is what your basically saying...

Thats just it, those found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt are executed more swiftly, rather than sitting in jail for months or years.

If there's reasonable doubt of one's guilt, then they get the jail time for appeals, etc.

Of course I'm interested in money, I want nothing more than the U.S. to have a balanced budget and of course it's wishful thinking, but to be able to feed everyone, help the poor and prosper as a nation.

Not only should the U.S keep it, Australia should adopt it. Murderers, rapists, child molesters should not be injected, fried or hung but stood against a wall and shot..it makes me sick that any portion of MY money is going to providing a better living standard than some people I know..bollocks.

However, I am conscious of executing the wrongly accused, especially when it's no secret that there are flaws and loopholes in the legal system...that throws a spanner in the works.

Originally posted by Rockdisjoint
Yes.

Abolish the death penalty, the concept of prison and the police.

I don't know.....I'm starting to think that wouldn't be a bad idea.

reply to post by SLAYER69

Each State decides if they want it or not. Each criminal in each State that has the Death penalty should think twice..

But they don't....and that is the point. The death penalty is not an effective deterrent against murder. If a person has the propensity to kill, the death penalty is not going to stop him.

America is supposedly founded upon Christian principles. I disagree. Very obvious it was not.

Thou shall not kill. One of the ten commandments that we most certainly don't follow.

When Perry spoke about the death penalty and people cheered, I was dismayed to say the least.

Apparently we are not of Christian values. We are of the ancient Colosseum times. Blood and more blood!

Execution is wrong on all levels. Are we cretins? How many people have been executed that are innocent?

Christian nation my arse. We are no better than Iran. Pathetic.

Originally posted by NightGypsy
reply to post by SLAYER69

 

Each State decides if they want it or not. Each criminal in each State that has the Death penalty should think twice..

But they don't....and that is the point. The death penalty is not an effective deterrent against murder. If a person has the propensity to kill, the death penalty is not going to stop him.

Repeat offenders won't have much of a chance "Repeating" if they're Six feet under.

That'll stop em butt cold.

Keep them alive as long as possible in bleak, barren, darkness with nothing but their own conscience to eat at them until they're 100 years old. Bland, minimal food, no communications with anything or anyone, no books, no electronic anything, no windows, no doors, no faces or voices. Always offer suicide means. The last voice they hear in their life is telling them, it is the last sound they will hear on Earth, and they should kill themselves.

Only for those that are convicted of a death penalty level felony.

Yes i believe we should. Here in California, we rarely used it. i mean how many we executed compare to Texas?

Originally posted by elevatedone
reply to post by roughycannon

 

If you're guilty and dead then you're not costing the tax payers millions of dollars to keep you clothed and fed.

Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.

-Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., 1994

Putting aside, for the moment, the sanctity of life issue, let's just address this idea that "taxpayers" have some sort of special authority to destroy other human beings if it means saving a few bucks. "Taxpayers" - the "Taxpayers Bill of Rights" notwithstanding - do not have special rights above and beyond any other person. All people have rights, regardless of their tax liabilities or other dubious debt used to establish some credentials of authority. A "Taxpayer" is someone who has incurred a tax liability and has a debt with the government agency of which they incurred this liability. That is all that needs to be known about "taxpayers", and their compliance with tax collectors does not mean they've earned some sort of magical powers of wisdom, or divine right to destroy others.

Now, to the issue of the sanctity of life. It makes no sense at all to establish acts of legislation, codifying this legislation of murder and the various degrees by which it is charged and prosecuted only to turn around and impose a sentence that commits the very crime that has been codified as illegal. The death penalty is necessarily a premeditated murder, and the mens rea (mindset of the murder(s)) is quite clearly and undeniably that of murder. Call it execution, call it justice, call it whatever you want. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and the death penalty by any other name is still murder.

It is most imprudent to grant governments the legal authority to execute the People they serve, and there is far too much evidence that the death penalty systems execute innocent People.

Consider this report by Richard C. Dieter from The Death Penalty Information Center

The danger that innocent people will be executed because of errors in the criminal justice system is getting worse. A total of 69 people have been released from death row since 1973 after evidence of their innocence emerged. Twenty-one condemned inmates have been released since 1993, including seven from the state of Illinois alone. Many of these cases were discovered not because of the normal appeals process, but rather as a result of new scientific techniques, investigations by journalists, and the dedicated work of expert attorneys, not available to the typical death row inmate.

...

The current emphasis on faster executions, less resources for the defense, and an expansion in the number of death cases mean that the execution of innocent people is inevitable. The increasing number of innocent defendants being found on death row is a clear sign that our process for sentencing people to death is fraught with fundamental errors--errors which cannot be remedied once an execution occurs.

...

The problem of innocent people facing execution because of errors in the criminal justice process has in no way diminished since 1993. For example, in the summer of 1996, the state of Illinois dropped all charges against four men who had been convicted of a 1978 murder. Two of the men had been sentenced to death. The investigation which led to the discovery that the wrong men had been convicted was conducted by three journalism students who had been assigned the case in class. These releases came on the heels of the release from death row of two other men in Illinois, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez. Three former prosecutors have been indicted for obstruction of justice in that case. Although the public may have learned something about these dramatic reversals, they probably have heard little about the continuous string of mistakes in capital cases which throws doubt on the reliability of the entire death penalty process.

That report was written in 1997, but the sites more updated page puts the total exonerated after spending time on death row at 138 People.

Now consider this:

I would quote this page, but I have a limited amount of characters, for some reason, to use. Let those characters offer up one more link:

www.innocenceproject.org...

And this caveat; If a government cannot be trusted to protect its own borders, or to protect the individual rights of the People it has been tasked to protect, what makes you think they can get the death penalty right?

I will respond without reading any replies to this thread....why should I? Because it's a personal question that should not be tainted by others responses.

Should The U.S. Abolish the Death Penalty ?

Of course we should. Killing another human being (outside of self defense) is wrong; period. No excuses, no exceptions, it's wrong. The death penalty is not much more than self gratification, vengeance, judgement and hypocrisy.

Should those condemned to life in prison be given the option? Sure, give them the option to die for a good cause, in the name of science....to help mankind better investigate and understand the human anatomy, the body's tolerances and to aid in the search for cures modern medical mysteries.

Otherwise, let give the victim's family the option: (1) the murderer will live as your slave until their death, (2) the victim's family foots the bill for imprisonment, (3) tag the murder, let them free and be tracked for eternity as they perform community service until they die.

Let's not kill the condemned, let's put them to use (at our discretion ) and get a positive $ value out of them; rather than spending millions while we drag them through the death penalty process.

Is my belief popular? No. When I die will feel like I took the proper path? Yes. To the rest of you....shame...shame...shame. I can only hope you folks are atheist like me; otherwise, your god will judge you for judging...and if your religious beliefs are right and I am wrong, then I hope you enjoy your eternal hell.

The death penalty is absolutely barbaric. It should be abolished. Two wrongs can never make a right and as one of the world's most advanced nations, it's unfathomable that the United States doesn't recognize this simple fact.

reply to post by elevatedone


to be honest, I believe that the death penalty should be used more. If you make enough examples that end with the example, the idiots will begin to understand.

reply to post by elevatedone

If there's reasonable doubt of one's guilt, then they get the jail time for appeals, etc.

If there is reasonable doubt then there shouldn't be a conviction at all. That is the deal in American justice, the state, or prosecution must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty of the crime he or she has been charged with, failing that, a jury should not be convicting someone based upon reasonable doubt. All the appeals, "etc." are a product of a jury who failed to acquit the accused based upon the reasonable doubt of the case.

reply to post by elevatedone


My thoughts? Eye-Witness testimony is barely 25% accurate, and hundreds of people on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence over the past 15 years or so.

We are not civilized or educated enough to execute people. This isn't the middle ages.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


True, but has been stated, it's not a perfect system, which is very unfortunate.

reply to post by brilab45


America is supposedly founded on a lot of things. It's mostly BS. For example: testimony gleaned from witnesses under hypnosis is inadmissible in most jurisdictions, but testimony given after placing one's hand on a Bible and "swearing to tell the truth" is the norm.

This in a world where eye-witness testimony is widely known to be inaccurate up to 75% of the time. Hilarity is sure to follow....

Originally posted by elevatedone
reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux

 

True, but has been stated, it's not a perfect system, which is very unfortunate.

It's one thing for a tax collector to shrug his shoulders over a mistaken liability and declare "it's not a perfect system", and its one more thing for a clerk at the DMV to shrug his or her shoulders over a clerical error and declare "it's not a perfect system"...it's another thing entirely to execute an innocent man or woman and smugly shrug ones shoulders and rely on sad little emoticons to declare; "it's not a perfect system".

I hold my ground and the death penalty remains murder. Is this what you lament is not perfected? State sanctioned murder?

Too many innocent people get executed.
Interesting map in Wiki showing the countries that still use the penalty of death

en.wikipedia.org...

2010 - The following 23 countries carried out executions in 2010: Bahrain (1), Bangladesh (9+), Belarus (2), Botswana (1), China (2000+), Egypt (4), Equatorial Guinea (4), Iran (252+), Iraq (1+), Japan (2), Libya (18+), Malaysia (1+), North Korea (60+), Palestinian Authority (5), Saudi Arabia (27+), Singapore (1+), Somalia (8+), Sudan (6+), Syria (17+), Taiwan (4), USA (46+), Vietnam (1+), Yemen (53+).

Most other so called civilized countries have abolished it.

Interesting to see the company the US is with, in still executing people