Death Penalty?

Sounds like a barrel of fun!

What's interesting about that to me is that states without the death penalty have a lower murder rate, and probably a lower crime rate in general. So, nice job deterring crime there, Texas. All that executing is really paying off.

 

^Lol, I didn't even mean the terrible pun, which I didn't notice until afterwards but was too damn lazy to edit out. I just like that saying. XD I'd apologize for making you cry, but I don't really care that much.

Every person is different. Some people would prefer death to life in prison (I think I would), and some people would prefer to continue living no matter what. The theory behind the death penalty would be that people wouldn't want to die, and so they'd think twice before commiting capital crimes. But it doesn't seem to work that way.

 

The major arguments for capital punishment seem to be:

1) Cost effectiveness- cheaper to kill 'em than feed 'em
2) Safety- of society in general, and of the other prisoners and prison employees who would have to deal with the capital offenders
3) Revenge or vengeance because of the heinousness of the crimes commited.
4) Crime deterrent

I think that with the cost of appeals, it ends up being around the same cost whether a person is given the death penalty or life in prison.

If a person is so dangerous that people think they should be executed, they shouldn't be getting out on parole, so society wouldn't be at any more of a risk if the person were locked up than if they are dead. And likewise, if the person is so dangerous, he or she probably shouldn't be in the general population where they can potentially kill their fellow inmates. Guards should be trained so that they have an idea how to handle the prisoners.

Like Zerieth and others have said before, executing someone doesn't undo the crime. And as I've said before, I don't think it will really make the victims, or their loved ones, feel any better.

I've seen statistics both ways (I suppose you can find a statistic to prove just about anything if you look hard enough), but I don't think that capital punishment deters crime any more than prison does. And neither of them seem to work, really. People don't think that they'll be caught, so they aren't going to care about what the consequences would be.

And I think that poor people are much more likely to end up with the death penalty than rich ones who've commited the same crimes, because the rich will pay a high quality attorney to get them a deal, and the poor will be stuck with an overworked public defender. How's that fair?

 

^That's not justice. And commiting the exact same crime against the person you're punishing makes you just as guilty, in my opinion. How can you say "See, it's not okay to rape!" while that person is being raped? Hypocritical much?

I'm not sure what you're talking about here, but I guess you're addressing the last sentence of my post. Are you saying that the system works, when poor people are more likely to get the death penalty than richer people who commit the same crime? I've also seen that the race of the victim plays a role in whether or not the criminal gets the death penalty- the murderer of a white person is more likely to receive it than the murderer of a person of another race. Since 1976, 15 white people were executed for murdering a black person or people. 245 black people have been executed for killing a white person or people. (Source). Somehow I doubt it's just that black people kill so much more than whites do. How is our capital punishment system a good thing when it works so unequally?

 

^^If you would type properly, it'd make it a lot easier to figure out what you're supporting and when you're playing devil's advocate.

The fact is that you're being judged by people, and your sentence is granted by a person, or people. There are guidelines for sentencing, but it's ultimately up to the judge, or in the case of the death penalty, the jury. If you come in acting like a fool, people aren't going to have sympathy for you, and of course you're not going to get the lightest possible sentence. I don't think that has to do with "acting black" or not, it's about whether or not you can show the court some remorse for your behavior and seem respectful. If you're in that much trouble, you should know that now might be a good time to shut up and look innocent.

I think the biggest inequality has to do with wealth, though race plays a part in that as well. Public defenders are seriously overworked, and even if they would like to, you know they aren't going to be able to give 100% to your death penalty case. And if that's the representation you're stuck with, you're probably not going to have a whole lot of luck pleading for clemency. You get the best defense you can pay for, not the best available. Studies have shown that if you can hire an attorney for the whole trial, you are much more likely to avoid the death penalty, and even get acquitted.

The population in prison or the population of the world in general? A better way to lower the population in prison than executing capital offenses would be making some drug use legal. I'd wager that a lot more people are imprisoned for possession of marijuana than they are for murder.

 

Extremely unlikely in this case, I'd say. The FBI's website gives the number of white and black murderers as about equal, though the data was last updated in 2006.

Agreed. I'd be slightly more open to the pros of the death penalty if it was handled better. I still wouldn't support it, but I could understand more why some people do. As it is now, it seems totally ineffectual. It doesn't prevent crime, it doesn't cost less, and there are other ways to keep the criminals from hurting others.

I don't believe that would be effective. The number of people convicted of capital offenses is small compared to the population of the world. The US only had 52 executions in 2009. A lot of countries don't even use the death penalty anymore. Even if every single person who commited murder was executed (the number was around 16,000 in the US in 2004, according to the FBI), and throw in the rest of the capital offenses, it wouldn't make much of a difference, I don't think.

 

I think there are probably more efficient methods for dealing with overpopulation. It makes slightly more sense if you were just talking about a prison population, since the starting population is smaller, so the loss would make more of an impact, but even there, I don't think it'd be a loss worth mentioning. And for the world at large, the number would be so miniscule that I think someone using decreasing the population as a viable argument for capital punishment would look rather foolish.