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Why I oppose capital punishment

1. However framed, capital punishment is an act of homocide. It is a simple demonstration of how viciously polluted the human mind is with violence. It is despicable that anyone wants our concept of justice to remain one of bloody revenge, which is deprived of all admirable emotions that makes humanity human. "What says the law? Not to kill. How does it say it? By killing."

2. The application of capital punishment is seemingly arbitrary. Rarely does it have anything to do with the nature of the crime. Instead as it is often pointed out, who dies for their crime lies almost entirely on the personal inclinations and aspirations of the prosecutors, the quality of the defense attorneys and the mental stability and economic status of the defendant.

3. The survivors of the victim have had a life taken from them, but in which fantasy does killing another person for his/her crime contribute to their mental health? I have never seen the argument for the betterment of mental health by slapping a person who's inconvenienced you, or shooting a person who's hurt you. Yet watching another person die is both healthy and rational?

4. There has been 62 post-conviction exonerations between 2000 and 2014, the list which is available here. As a comparison there were 761 executions. That is an error rate.

5. It costs more to execute a criminal than to seek life imprisonment. Capital punishment is a wanton waste of the taxpayer dollar and the gov'ts services.

"In terms of dollars spent behind bars, the California Commission found that “the additional cost of confining an inmate to death row, as compared to the maximum security prisons where those sentenced to life without possibility of parole ordinarily serve their sentences, is $90,000 per year per inmate. With California’s current death row population of 670, that accounts for $63.3 million annually.” Since that statement, California’s death row has grown to 721, the largest in the country. The story is the same in North Carolina. A 2010 Duke University study found that taxpayers in the Tarheel State could save $11 million a year by substituting life in prison for the death penalty." - Death and Taxes: The Real Cost of the Death Penalty, from Forbes.

6. The USA and pro-death penalty advocates have the honor of joining reputable and sophisticated countries like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan in using homocide as a punishment; as compared to 97 countries that have abolished capital punishment in all cases.

7. It's barbaric.
 
1: Justifide homicide.

2: Actually not that arbritrary. CP is really only used in murder and rape cases. And most of them have to do with multiple violations. The ones that aren't multiple violations are heinous in the way those crimes were conducted. So heinous that the person that committed the crime deserves nothing more than to be put down like a rabid dog.

3: It gives them 1: a sense of satisfaction which can help the healing process. 2: gives relief as the surviving victims and loved ones no longer have to fear that person escaping or getting paroled for good behavior or simply getting released due to a clerical error. Whether you believe it helps or not is really irrelevent to the fact that it does.

4: :shrug: No system is perfect. But you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Is that cold and callous? Yes. Sometimes you have to be to do what is right.

5: Actually it doesn't. It costs the price of the injection and thats it and the executioners pay. What costs is all the appeals. Something that EVERY prisoner gets regardless of being on Death Row or not. So unless you want to add all the other appeals that are done by inmates not on death row to that expense then all you're doing is argueing for stopping the appeals process. Which I'm not inclined to do. Besides, as far as I am concerned...and eye for an eye works rather well. You destroy one persons life then your life gets destroyed also. Fair is fair after all.

6: Wah. Even broken clocks are right twice a day. Or even once if you have your clock to display 24 hours instead of 12. :shrug:

7: So is what those criminals did. :shrug: Yet you're willing to show them more mercy than the victims. Which is more barbaric? Wanting to save the murderer/child rapist? Or killing the murderer/child rapist?

Just my 2 cents.
 
Kal'Stang;bt2627 said:
1: Justifide homicide.

2: Actually not that arbritrary. CP is really only used in murder and rape cases. And most of them have to do with multiple violations. The ones that aren't multiple violations are heinous in the way those crimes were conducted. So heinous that the person that committed the crime deserves nothing more than to be put down like a rabid dog.
Haven't you just said it is arbitrary? What defines "heinous," other than the whim of the jury? Besides the process reveals it as is.

There's any number of capital eligible offenses committed in the United States, and only a minority percentage of them (~2%) are sentenced. These cases go through a number of reviews and appeals -- which is why capital punishment cases are more costly than life imprisonment -- which is simply a process which comes at the decision of the prosecutor.

Thus we have the statics as we do, where (for example) capital punishment sentences stem from only a few counties in the entire country. Or that men overwhelmingly make up death row (+99%). One county line and a gender switch can drastically change the prospect of a sentencing, however "heinous" the crime may be.

Kal'Stang;bt2627 said:
3: It gives them 1: a sense of satisfaction which can help the healing process. 2: gives relief as the surviving victims and loved ones no longer have to fear that person escaping or getting paroled for good behavior or simply getting released due to a clerical error. Whether you believe it helps or not is really irrelevent to the fact that it does.
That's not justice; that's retribution. It's not surprising that those who are wronged may find satisfaction watching the breathe ripped out of a lifeless body, but when has that become the ideal of justice? We have established courts for a number of reasons, Kal'Stang, and one of them is the impartiality that is granted by the involvement of a judge or your peers.

Kal'Stang;bt2627 said:
4: :shrug: No system is perfect. But you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Is that cold and callous? Yes. Sometimes you have to be to do what is right.
It's sociopathic.

Kal'Stang;bt2627 said:
5: Actually it doesn't. It costs the price of the injection and thats it and the executioners pay. What costs is all the appeals. Something that EVERY prisoner gets regardless of being on Death Row or not. So unless you want to add all the other appeals that are done by inmates not on death row to that expense then all you're doing is argueing for stopping the appeals process. Which I'm not inclined to do. Besides, as far as I am concerned...and eye for an eye works rather well. You destroy one persons life then your life gets destroyed also. Fair is fair after all.

6: Wah. Even broken clocks are right twice a day. Or even once if you have your clock to display 24 hours instead of 12. :shrug:

7: So is what those criminals did. :shrug: Yet you're willing to show them more mercy than the victims. Which is more barbaric? Wanting to save the murderer/child rapist? Or killing the murderer/child rapist?

Just my 2 cents.
I'm trying really hard not to offend you here or imply anything horrible about you, but the overall observation is that societies that are autocratic, illiterate, experiencing current ongoing conflicts, have high rates of extreme poverty, have a government that sponsors terrorism and all the most wonderful things -- they execute people.

By them the "eye for an eye" is sound moral policy, because violence and the consequences of evil is all that they can comprehend. Do you really believe the same?
 
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The reason people oppose capital punishment is that they see the victims as irrelevant.
 
1: It is not deprived of all admirable emotions. There is a chasm of a difference between rage and Fury. You have certainly felt just anger (Fury) before. This happens when someone does something iniquitous, and this emotion does not shun thoughts of Conscience and Morality as does rage; it is derived from them. I know you know the feeling and you cannnot deny to yourself the difference between an emotion that says "this person should suffer because I'm in a bad mood", and one that says "this person should suffer because they have done what is evil." Retribution is beautiful, it is not inhumane.

2: Even if this were so, we cannot argue that capital punishment is wrong in principle because it is often administered to the wrong targets.

3: How is anyone's "mental health" relevant? If you mean it is psychologically damaging to the punisher, then you are again assuming that Fury is rage.

4: Again, this is a matter of how it is uncautiously administered and not of an actual moral principle.

5: Huh? No it doesn't. You just shoot the guy and it's over, no cost involved (save the negligible price of a bullet). Let's calculate the cost of preserving a criminal in life imprisonment. To be generous to your side, I'll assume that each meal of three per day costs a single dollar. That makes three dollars a day, and, times 365, 1,095 dollars a year. if the criminal commits his crime at age 40 and dies at 70 (both pretty unlikely), this costs over 30,000 dollars, even granted all thegenerous assumptions I made in your favor, so probably more like $100,000. That's a lot more that what it takes to just kill a person.

6: You can not make a moral judgement on a practice because other countries do or don't adopt it.

7: For the above six reasons, no it isn't.
 
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