: MDG and SDF brought up the issue of the death penalty below. What do people on this board feel about it.I feel, very, very strongly about this.
:Personally, I'm in favor of it for the most heinous crimes, although I don't feel strongly one way or the other.
Oh no way man, no way. Take Britain the bombings that killed soldiers and civilians en masse in Birmingham got a family of innocent irish arrested, one of them died in prison, the authorities ignored an IRA man who came forward from custody and amitted he'd done it because it might make judges etc. look bad.
The judicial system is never going to be infallible enough to permit such state power, in the most horrendous cases they deserve punishment rather than an opportunity for reform but that isnt an excuse for state violence and inhumane vengence either.
: I don't think it should be in effect for all murders. But I think that mass murderers; murderers of policemen; murderers of people selected for their race, nationality or sexual orientation; murderers of children; and those killers who demonstrate either a partciular sadism/viciousness or a particularly cold and callous indifference to human life should be given the death penalty. These crimes are so heinous that i don't believe it's fair to treat people who commit them the same as lots of other petty criminals who are in jail for life. You need a particularly severe punishment to punish such crimes. People who do bad thinsg deserve bad outcomes; it's not fair that a mass murderer should merely lose hifs freedom, for teh poor in our soicety are largely without freedom as well; how honorable is it to a poor homeless man if we make him life his life in the same misery as a callous child murderer. To differentiate different degrees of evil is why I think we shoudl have the death penalty.
God NJ say it isnt so, you know that the death penalty in whatever form is a neo-crucifixion?
The outrage and feeling that justice should be served I share with you, I even think that if someone kills in self defense or in the defense of others it's excusable but not the planned execution of an individual on the strength of a less than infallible institutional authority.
: By all means, let's get rid of the gas chamber though. By many accounts it's the most painful and torturuos method of death yet invented (short of crucifixion, still practiced in the Middle East), sometimes taking eleven minutes to bring death.
Humane execution is a myth.
: On a related note, just an interesting observation about race and crime. Conservatives always liek to point out how African Americans commit more crimes and murders proportioante to their population than whites do. That may be, but what they overlook is that the most horrible crimes, at least recently, seem to be committed almost entirely by whites. consider just a few:
: 1) those two white guys in Texas who dragged a black man to death along a highway
: 2) two pederasts who raped and suffocated a young boy
: 3)Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynxki (both right wing terrorists)
: 4) those guys in Wyoming who tortured and killed a homosexual youth
: 5) a restaurant ownet here in Boston about ten years ago who killed his pregnant wife for the life insurance, blamed it on a black man, spurred an infamous police search through the Mission Hill area, and then jumped off a bridge when his criem became public.
Race shouldnt be an issue either the Crime is terrible regardless of the author or the victim's status etc.
: If the death penalty was really applied only to thsoe who woudl deserve it, it's my guess that African Americans would certainly not be represented more than their population warranted.
This is one of those situations where in a perfect world I'd agree with you NJ but we have this imperfect one, I just reflect on the fact that there's one judge criminals, capitalists and statists (nazi or 'communist') can escape and if that doesnt get them God will.
None.
