Question of the Day:
Is capital punishment ethical?
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No. Modern justice systems are too susceptible to error, and killing an innocent is the kind of act we deem so bad that it deserves punishment by death in the first place.
Hypothetically, if we had perfect justice and always convicted the right person, capital punishment would still not be ethical. I think restorative justice is the way to go, but I’m not sure how it could be implemented. It makes far more sense to try to help a killer reform and repay his or her debt to society by contributing to it in a meaningful way.
AGREED
I have a question for you.
The present econimic situation make it aslmost impossible for all those prisoners to be housed, fed, given medical attention, exercise equipment, library facilities, TV cable services, telephone services, clothing, etc, etc.
The state of California is presently releasing prisoners at an alarming rate, but only the ones considered non-violent.
What happens when it becomes too expensive to house and otherwise accomodate all the willful, vicious murderers who can then take their revenge on all who contributed to their conviction?
Currently there are just over 2,400,000 people in prison in the US. Approximately half of those are in prison for a non-violent offense. Approximately .5% of violent crimes include murder. I think we can handle six thousand murderers without worrying about the budget.
” 2,400,000 people in prison in the US. Approximately half of those are in prison for a non-violent offense. Approximately .5% of violent crimes include murder.”
Sounds like a conspiracy
Studies of the economics of capital punishment show that it is more expensive for the state to execute a murderer than to house them for life without parole. The extra cost of having a capital punishment system in California is $137M per year. So based on economics alone we should eliminate capital punishment. By eliminating capital punishment, your question is pushed out further into the future before it needs to be answered.
Releasing Non-Violent offenders leads to releasing Violent Offenders how?
In theory, yes. There is nothing wrong with the state killing a person who has already killed, and has done so in such a grievous manner that the only true punishment is death. This also goes for people who have killed multiple times.
In practice, though, I have to say no. I have been a supporter of capital punishment most of my life, until recently. For some reason, that Texas man executed for setting his house on fire and killing his family was the linchpin. Too many arson investigators have recently shown how improbable it was the he set the fire… Absolute surety is needed to ethically execute a criminal, and the death sentence is handed out without that absolute surety too often.
On top of that, there is the racial/class discrepancy, where blacks are more likely to be put to death for killing whites than whites for killing blacks, and where rich seldom (if ever) get the death penalty due to their ability to pay for better legal advice.
No. It has no ethical basis at all.
Agreed.
Agree.
Under what circumstances?
I think it is all circumstances.
I don’t think it would be possible for me to give a one-size-fits-all answer.
No, because you are talking about killing a human being. It is immoral to kill a human being. It is much better to let him live. When he dies his pain will end. If he lives he will need to deal with the fact that he killed a person and that is a much worse punishment in my opinion. Is is also much more expensive to put someone to death for their crimes than to keep them alive in prison.
Bullets cost mere pennies. A HUMANE execution is expensive, but then why do we bother being humane to somebody who does not deserve it and has shown only inhumanity? Sterilizing the needle before it enters the bloodstream? No point.
The death penalty serves various functions, as a punishment. First, it is a deterrent to all others who may be thinking about committing the crime that deserved the penalty. Generally these are the more serious crimes. It’s been shown statistically that the death penalty has little effect on this (comparing occurrances of brutal crimes before and after its establishment in areas). So it’s not a good deterrent for everyone.
The second is so the criminal cannot hurt anyone else in the future. Well, it does accomplish that.
The third may have been to teach the criminal a lesson and hope they become rehabilitated. At least, prison time is designed for that. But nobody hopes to learn from dying, and nobody can be redeemed afterward.
The only function the death penalty serves, then, is preventative. But you consider the holes in the legal system (the foundation being “who can argue the best wins; what actually happened comes secondary”) and it becomes clear: even a jury or judge, who are supposed to be 100% certain, are always going to be 99.9%. With death involved, I don’t want to deal with the 0.01%. At least if the person is in jail they can hope to have a case built for a retrial.
I do not think it is ethical. The problem is that I also think that lifetime incarceration is not ethical. That puts us between a rock and a hard place. I work in the security business and from what I can tell, incarceration does not work. It takes a small time criminal and turns him into a hardened and educated criminal.
Robert Heinlein had the idea that corporeal punishment is the only option for serious offenses. This might have some merit because it
1. is cheap
2. doesn’t end a life
Lashings might sound barbaric, but I would prefer lashings over death (as would most people) or even lifetime imprisonment.
What options do we have? The US prison system costs billions of dollars of taxpayer money on the federal, state, and local levels. Inmates are not cheap. Jails are not cheap.
Ethics is often only very distantly related to cost – for example, if paying for a proven murderer to be locked up means depriving innocent people of life-saving medical treatment then you could probably make a shaky case for execution, however in the real world such comparisons are completely irrelevant. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why!
Incarceration, on the other hand, can be very ethical indeed. If you know somebody to be a murderer, if that person has proven incapable of rehabilitation, then it is absolutely ethical to protect society from them by imprisoning them.
Having worked inside jails and prisons I can say that I absolutely disagree that incarceration is ethical. It might sit well on your conscience to think you have “spared a life” by allowing them to live as animals in a cell amongst other animals, but to me it is equally unethical.
Like I said, neither scenario is ethical but we currently have no other options. As long as our 2 options are unethical: I would prefer the fiscally responsible option of execution over life without parole.
There is a third option – reform the prison system.
I absolutely agree. The current system of incarceration is out of control and costing everyone tons of money except Bail Bondsmen.
Ending the prohibition on all vices and illegal drugs is a great start. I don’t gamble nor do I use any drugs or prostitutes, but the cost of policing these things is simply too high and I don’t think we should be paying for it.
Ramen brother. When a law criminalises sane people who are harming nobody but themselves, that law is wrong.
Yep. Repeal all prohibitions regarding so-called “vice”, empty the jails of these non-criminals and incarcerate the violent ones.
I totally, wholly agree. The prison system sucks!!! Indeed, as Thomas Moore said, “first we make criminals, then we punish them.” As a Texan, I abhor the capital punishment practices of my state. I also think the prison system here is cruel– and our constitutional rights guarantee us no cruel or unusual punishment.
I just don’t see how taking another life can be seen as “just”. People will argue and say executing a criminal will bring a sense of justice to the family of the victim, but you are one fucked up, revenge hungry motherfucker if you get some sort of sense of satisfaction from the death of another human being. Not to mention the family of the criminal. They did nothing wrong and yet they have to go through the hell of having their loved one not only murdered, but murdered by their own government.
This is now how I view execution.
My understanding is that the state considers the person a danger to other citizens. They feel that his/her life is not redeemable and they are a threat to the populace and should be put to death for OUR good.
They could choose to incarcerate them for the good of society as a whole and that would be ethical because it protects the majority while also being reversible if you find out that a mistake has been made. State sponsored murder is not ethical – and it certainly isn’t moral.
Morality and ethics obviously vary greatly from one person to the next.
Life in prison is no life at all. As long as you have no life, why not choose death? Execution may seem barbaric, but spending your entire life in a jail cell is equally barbaric.
I suggest you go and ask a representative selection of prisoners on death row and those imprisoned for life which is more barbaric – I can guarantee I know how that little statistical analysis will turn out for you.
Nietzsche suggested that people about to be imprisoned for long periods should be given the option to kill themselves.
That’s a brilliant idea.
I’d suggest asking them a few years into their sentence would yield more results. But that option is open to them anyway, really.
How is that morally better than execution?
How is that morally better than execution?
Well, to some people, being locked in a cage is so existentially intolerable they’d rather be dead. Others handle it just fine. The point is to leave the option open, so as to not unnecessarily multiply the suffering of the inmate.
Well said, Jordan.
Nope
No, not under any circumstances. If a person has committed a violent crime it is sufficient to separate him from the rest of society. If there is no obvious change in the person’s attitude toward the crime than there should be no release.
So as a society, we should keep paying to keep them alive forever and ever, while they get cable TV and exercise time every day?
The standard of your civilisation is judged on three things:
How you treat the sick and elderly, how you treat the poor and how you treat criminals. Cable TV is besides the point – not murdering them is the point.
Morally, yes. But in the perspective of what is good for society as a whole, no.
Again, I disagree. Setting the example to your citizens that killing them is alright does more harm than good.
It does more good for society because people see that any actions they take against society will not go unpunished, and makes [rational] people think about the consequences before they act. If you don’t set that precedent, you are setting a different precedent that punishment is not taken seriously, they may get a chance at parole, they can still visit with their loved ones, get psychiatric care, and get a hot shower every day.
That’s a false dichotomy, I’m afraid. You’re suggesting that the options are a) execution, or b) a nice cell, cable TV and a chance at parole. That clearly isn’t the case and is more of an argument against the current prison system than for capital punishment.
Also, Western European countries that abolished the Death Penalty many years ago have significantly lower rates of murder than the United States. Of course, there are many other factors to think about, but when looked at in detail, the Deterrent Argument doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.
Generally speaking, most people who commit murder either are irrational as a matter of course, or were being irrational at the time. This is one of the many reasons why deterrence as a strategy is such a miserable failure.
Damned right Elem. Sanity has little to do with killing. We’re evolved to avoid it if we can but to do it if we need to. It’s not an easy thing.
There are situations where I think it is warranted.
Reminds me of a line from Bones: “There are certain people that shouldn’t be in this world. The people, who hacked hundreds of children to death in Rwanda, beheaded them at their desks in school. The people who did that, they should be executed.”
Nope.
Make the criminal the property of the victim or victim’s family. When you commit horrific crimes such as torture, murder, or rape, a case can be made that you are less than human, and not deserving of the rights that humans enjoy. Especially if the victims are particularly young, or the number of victims is particularly high. The victim should be allowed to choose what the punishment (or non-punishment) should be, and its duration. Nobody wins under our current system except the criminal.
Too random. Some victims’ families might be forgiving and let the perpetrator go, while others might torture them horribly.
A person who commits horrible crimes is not “less than human”; they are as human as you or me.
NO!
Execution is too easy. Lifetime solitary confinement is much more punishment and vastly cheaper.
2 things.
Sounds like you are saying that solitary confinement is worse than death. Does that make it cruel and unusual punishment?
Cheaper. If we could make it cheaper to kill a person would that change your mind?
I don’t know, but I doubt it.
Absolutely. If I were convicted of a crime, even falsely, I’d rather get the death penalty than spend the rest of my life in prison.
I think that Capital Punishment is unethical for the following reasons:
- It is hypocritical. If nobody has the right to murder another human being, then what right does the state have to murder another human being?
- The fact that innocence people have been and will continue to be executed as long as Capital Punishment takes place.
- The death penalty is unfairly applied and, in reality, cannot be fairly applied. 80% of people executed were killed because their victims were white, even though Blacks and Whites are murdered in approximately equal numbers.
- The methods used can go wrong and cause extreme pain and suffering, which would presumably constitute ‘Cruel & Unusual Punishment’ and therefore be against the US Constitution.
- It does not act as a deterrent.
- It does not give the family of the victims any closure and some studies cite that it causes them additional stress. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb4345/is_7_29/ai_n28856772/)
- It’s not really a worse punishment than life imprisonment. In 2003, notorious murder Ian Brady took the British government to court for the right to starve himself to death.
You’ve got all the right reasons why capital punishment should be outlawed in the US.
Scott Turow was a part of the committee in Illinois that investigated how the death penalty was being applied in IL. Every single person on the committee came to those conclusions you’ve noted above, regardless of what their opinion was before they joined the committee.
The death penalty is also applied unfairly in that you can have 2 criminals performing similar crimes, but 1 gets the death penalty and the other gets life imprisonment.
No I do not think it is ethical.
However, what I want to point out is what I perceive as a fundamental contradiction displayed by many Christians. In the US, most people (I could even say the vast majority) who support the death penalty are conservative Christians. These are the same people who oppose abortions on the basis that you cannot end a life, that only God has the authority to decide when one’s life should end. Then why on earth do they believe we should be able to “play God” and apply the death penalty? If anybody who thinks like that or knows someone who fits this category can explain this blatant contradiction, please do so, I’m sincerely curious.
Then again, it wouldn’t be the first contradiction of Christians.
Agnostic who very, very minimally (see my comment below) supports use of the death penalty here. This is probably the only political belief I’ve even partially held onto from my days as a conservative Christian, though I am in no way nearly as gung ho about it now as I was then.
When I was Christian, I was taught that the death penalty was OK because those criminals were all guilty sinners but abortion was not OK because those unborn babies were all precious potential soldiers for God. We never really discussed the fact that those criminals had been declared guilty by and would be punished by the courts, not God. There was no debate about whether a fetus was more or less deserving of human rights than an accused criminal. The were stories from the Bible about God’s wrath and punishment for the sinful, and some song about how Jesus loves the little children, and that was that.
Was it contradictory? Yes. Did we care, or even notice that it was contradictory? Nope. But that’s about the best explanation we had to offer.
It isn’t contradictory.
Absolutely, positively, negatively NO.
As far as life imprisonment goes, I think that there are indeed people who have forfeited their right to live as members of society and should be kept separate. To everyone who says that this is unethical, I would like to know exactly what punishment is acceptable as an alternative? Rehabilitation doesn’t exactly work on serial killers. If we let them out, will we make murderers register for a list just like sex offenders do? When someone commits a crime, they should be punished (broad statement…just go with me here). A murderer has committed the ultimate crime – the cutting short of another’s life. To kill them is unethical, but I think that they should be given the most severe penalty possible. I believe that life imprisonment is the most humane option.
This is a serious issue. I think that hypothetically the death penalty is fine on rare and extreme occasions. I guess I just don’t agree with those who feel that the taking of a human life is ethically unacceptable under any circumstances. In my view, there are a few horrible circumstances that warrant the death penalty as a means of ridding our society of irreformable scum.
I do know that many people, even others who also support minimal use of the death penalty, would disagree with me concerning exactly what those few circumstances are– and that’s part of this dilemma: who gets to decide which crimes deserve a possible death penalty? Crooked politicians and politically-motivated judges, perhaps? That is one possible problem with the system right there.
Furthermore, I also agree with those who state that our justice system is much too prone to error for the death penalty to be fairly utilized as much as it currently is. People make mistakes, and judges/jurors are not an exception to that rule. The death penalty should probably be much more rare than it is now.
This is what I’m trying to say: I think that the death penalty ought to be utilized only very infrequently (much more infrequently than it is currently, at least in the state where I live) and under only the most extreme and unquestionable of circumstances, not because I think that the death penalty itself is absolutely unethical, but because the risk of human error in these cases is high and carries irrevocable consequences.
I think that it is ethical in the extreme. Looking at the natural world, conflicts are avoided as much as possible, and few species actively kill their own kind. But ostracizing a member of a group when that member has become to much of a danger to the group does happen. For our species, I do not believe that simply removing the person is possible, putting them into a prison merely puts them into a new group setting. I do think that in some cases this may work, and would hope that the person could someday be shown that s/he could re-enter society. It is in the extreme that execution would be acceptable.
We are simply animals, and animals kill other members of animalia, as well as members of archaea, plantae, bacteria, fungi, protista, and monera. I do not feel that there is anything inherently special about our collection of cells that differ significantly enough to warrant special treatment.
But in our current judicial system, there are too many holes, too many opportunities to err. Because of this, I am highly skeptical that we are currently capable of implementing capital punishment affectively, even in the extreme.
No.
Nope, but I think repeat offender’s in murders, rapes and other horrible crimes are a weight on society that should be removed.
One of the emotional downsides of being civilized is that we aren’t allowed to kill folk just because they are bad. It’s the cost of doing business, I guess.
Yah, I do understand that it is a very dismal way of doing things. But some people just don’t change. Not too long ago here in Alberta, a man was released on bail during a trial for the molestation of a young boy after having already been convicted of it prior (if I recall correctly). During his bail he went out and caught two wonderful new boys and hid with them in a farm until being recaptured by RCMP. These boys lives are now ruined.
People like that just seem like so much more trouble then they are worth.
Sometimes I think we are being too hopeful in thinking we can integrate these people into society.
We could at least increase the penalties for these kinds of crimes so people would actually worry about getting caught (I mostly mean in Canada, as I’m not 100% on the American legal system and where it differs).
Few Americans are 100% sure on the American legal system, myself included.
The death penalty is typically handed down by a jury and almost always in the case of a multiple homicide. A few states have death penalty options for rape but I do not know of any that have it for child molestation.
There were 52 executions in the US in 2009 and 37 in 2008. There have been 1200 executions since 1976.
3483 American Military personnel have died since we began our invasion of Iraq on 3/19/2003.
The death penalty touches the lives of so few Americans I feel like it is an overly popular issue. It is not a big concern considering how few lives are negatively effected by it. If anything, it is more of a distraction from real issues than being an important topic.
The death penalty touches the lives of so few Americans I feel like it is an overly popular issue. It is not a big concern considering how few lives are negatively effected by it. If anything, it is more of a distraction from real issues than being an important topic.
I have to disagree, in that its impact goes far beyond the lives touched and speaks directly to who we are and what we value as a people. A state willing to kill its own citizens is different in kind than one that has chosen a different option, and the people that tolerates people being killed in their name are in turn different than those that would not.
http://people.smu.edu/rhalperi/victims.html
“717 6/11/01 US Timothy McVeigh”
An example of a justified execution, IMO.
To be honest I strongly suspect that he was mentally ill. His behavior certainly points that way – and I utterly reject the idea of executing the insane.
We may suspect that, but without any kind of evidence to support that, all it is is an assertion without evidence. I think his execution was justified.
Well, and this sort of issue came up when we discussed on the blog a while back if torture could ever be justified. I have always felt that we cannot guarantee safety of all members of society and we shouldn’t try to. We have to balance the safety that is provided with our other motivating values; we can’t have everything. This means that occasionally a monster will claim a victim, and while it doesn’t reduce the tragedy of such an event, at least it doesn’t come at the additional cost of our identity as free, civilized people.
That seems kind of idealistic to me, but I can totally understand where are you coming from and want to believe that too.
I am biased on this issue though. I know a few rape victims and one person who was murdered by her brother. None ever had to pay for their crimes adequately; it makes a guy feel like there is no law or protection.
Having been a victim of crime myself, I know what you mean. I’m not saying that there isn’t room to improve law enforcement, only that changes which increase the safety of people come at a cost. It’s like people who complain about being taxed too much but also don’t want their government-provided entitlements and services to decrease. Either revenue has to go up, or services go down; this sort of trade-off is common in many areas. Many people simply balk at paying the cost when they find themselves in the grip of contradictory desires, such as that to be safe and free at the same time.
NOPE
I would say yes, but only in cases where a person has committed multiple acts of murder, on multiple occasions. Even a shooting spree with multiple victims should be included as one ‘occasion’ in my opinion on this.
The bar to recieve the death penalty should be very high, but I do think in extreme cases, It can be ethically justified.
Do you think that a multiple rapist should be raped by the state also?
They probably will be raped in prison, which is ironic. Though they may be the one doing the raping of other prisoners too.
That is a fair point. But raping someone won’t necessarily prevent them from raping again, while executing someone could.
I suggest you watch A Clockwork Orange and see if you can spot the underlying, inarguable message about free will and true justice.
Okay, everyone on this thread that is stating that capital punishment is NEVER justified that has also been a victim of an extremely violent crime or had a loved one murdered, raise your hand.
No one?
On July 4, 1995 my father-in-law was shot to death in a drive-by shooting. Three gangbangers in a car, joy-riding, and shooting at people in their yards on a summer evening, just because they felt like it. They shot and killed a total of six people that night, one of which was a five-year-old child. Ever tried to explain to your 12-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter that their beloved grandfather was killed by a bunch of happy assholes just for the fun of it?
The driver and passenger of the car were sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole. The shooter was sentenced to death, and eventually executed by lethal injection. I think I can safely say that neither I nor anyone in my ex-husband’s family are “fucked up, revenge hungry motherfucker(s)” because we are not in the least bit sorry this creep is dead. I started to write “unrepentant creep” because he expressed absolutely no remorse when caught, tried and sentenced, but became “born again” and “gave his life to Jesus” once the date of his execution was set.
Want more?
On June 22, 2007 my 16-year-old nephew was shot and robbed by a gang of crackheads while he waited for the bus. They asked him where a crack-house was, and when he told them he couldn’t help them, they pulled out a 9mm Uzi and opened fire on him. When he fell to the ground, one of the young men got out of the truck, walked over to him and proceeded to rob him of what little money he had. Before this sorry excuse of a human being got back in the truck and they drove away, he stood over my nephew, smirked and asked, “How many times did we get you, bitch?”
Amazingly enough, only once. But it was dark outside, and my nephew was laying on the sidewalk. He lay there for almost an hour before someone driving by saw him, pulled over and called 911. It’s a miracle in and of itself that he didn’t bleed to death, although it was a near thing. The one bullet that got him did plenty of damage though – he lost a kidney, his spleen, part of his pancreas, part of his stomach and the bullet did irreparable damage to his lower spine before exiting; as a result, he will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. I won’t even go into the psychological damage this act has had on him, but let it suffice to say that Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is the very least of it.
These “people” did the same thing earlier that same day, to a recent Mexican immigrant who probably didn’t even know what they were asking him. Oh, after they’d carjacked the truck they were driving.
They’ve never been caught, but I’m still interested in hearing what kind of “restorative justice” could possibly be appropriate in this case.
I understand where you’re all coming from, I really do because I used to feel that way. But your entire perspective changes when it happens to YOU.
OK.
Your loved ones suffered. They were not the only ones.
That justifies killing people, how?
Well, you have a point there. Would you like to sit down and explain your point of view to my 19-year-old nephew? Tell him how, gee – it’s rotten that you’ve suffered, but you’re not the only one. Just buck up and get on with it.
Would you bother to do so to the family of the first person whose uncle was killed by the state?
Seriously. You suffered. So have I. So have plenty of people. Your nephew’s still suffered. Nothing will take that back. Killing people won’t undo anything.
Appeals to emotion do not ethics make.
Have you been in a wheelchair? Try it for a week or two!
Actually yes. For the last twenty five years. Your point?
I understand where you’re all coming from, I really do because I used to feel that way. But your entire perspective changes when it happens to YOU.
That’s exactly why it can’t be that way.
If a relative was raped or murdered, it would be insane not to want vengeance, to want the person to suffer, to rip them limb from limb. There were (long) periods in human history where this very natural instinct was indulged by law, and it invariably led to the most hideous of results. The state prosecutes rather than the individual in nations under the rule by law to avoid a repetition of exactly this history.
It is absolutely natural and healthy for the victim or their family to want to kill, and it is absolutely imperative that the state prevent this from coming to pass. But if it is the state that prosecutes, nearly all justification for killing disappear as the state’s aims are necessarily different (restoring order), not exacting vengeance on behalf of individuals.
They’ve never been caught, but I’m still interested in hearing what kind of “restorative justice” could possibly be appropriate in this case.
Sometimes, tragically, achieving justice is entirely beyond our power.
Okay, everyone on this thread that is stating that capital punishment is NEVER justified that has also been a victim of an extremely violent crime or had a loved one murdered, raise your hand.
No one?
While thankfully nobody in my family has been murdered, I have been a victim of violent crime, and someone very close to me has been raped. Either way, I don’t think such is a prerequisite for having a pertinent opinion on the matter; all of us have to live in this society that does things in our name and in the name of justice, not just victims or criminals.
My personal condolences to you on your loss(es), and in the second case I do hope they catch the bastards.
I can certainly understand your anger and bitterness, but not everybody who has suffered like you feels the same way about the death penalty. Murder Victims for Human Rights is an organisation that opposes the Death Penalty in ALL circumstances:
http://mvfhr.blogspot.com/
IMHO any individual who takes another individuals life, is thereby taking ones right to live. This person forfeits his or hers right to live due to this act and has to be punished by society with death.
No exceptions?
I fucking hope not. Speaking as a man who spent two years as an intel officer protecting your nation and mine.
I hope not. Speaking as a man who spent two years as an intel officer protecting your nation and mine.
Elemenope: Would you mind to clarify?
If this is a reference to abortions, I fear my argument is that if an abortion is for the better of an individual, e.g. after being raped, and society has agreed it is necessary to do so, I condone unpunished murder.
No, not a reference to abortions. I was fishing for whether your rather absolute-sounding rule was actually absolute.
“IMHO any individual who takes another individuals life, is thereby taking ones right to live. This person forfeits his or hers right to live due to this act and has to be punished by society with death.”
After all, people who kill in self-defense, I believe, do not forfeit their right to life, even if the assailant did not intend to kill them (perhaps a would-be rapist, or a loan-shark enforcer coming for a kneecap). People who kill in defense of others also, I think, do not forfeit their right to life; police officers, especially, face this possibility.
Likewise, people who kill in war I think do not immediately forfeit a right to life, never mind the legislators who declare the war, or the executors who implement its gruesome ends. Or people who make ammunition or bombs or planes.
Also, what of the executioners themselves in a state that participates in capital punishment? Or the judge that sentences people to death? Or the doctors and lawyers without whose participation executions cannot occur?
What of a doctor who accedes to a patient’s desire to die? Or a family member who unhooks another from life support?
Now you got me…;-)
Seriously, I think I should have been more specific here. I agree that killing in self-defence or killing to protect others should not be punished by death as that is for the greater good (if that is not too ambiguous for you).
With regard to war killings and related: I am against war.
As society allows executioners to execute it should not be punished.
Any assistance to end a life which has been requested by the individual or prevents suffering of said individual should not be punished either.
Society should provide the framework to be able to decide what is punishable and what not.
Killing just because of personal gain for a murdering individual should be punished by death, however.
Aton: “IMHO any individual who takes another individuals life, is thereby taking ones right to live. This person forfeits his or hers right to live due to this act and has to be punished by society with death.”
My thoughts exactly. If someone murdered me I can’t tell you how upset I would be. I have a trip to Hawaii coming up, I’m starting a new business, and I have a 6 year old boy that I want to teach and see grow up. How DARE you take that away from me by killing me. You kill me, you deserve to die. Period.
So there will be two six-year-olds without parents instead of one?
That may be the case, but why should a murderer be protected just because he or she has family? Society should be able to take care of the children in both cases. One could argue that the death penalty is not fair to the murderers child, but I think the murderer would still take this willingly into account if the general rule were: If you take ones life you forfeit your own. And that just because of his or hers overwhelming desire to kill the opponent.
I forget who said it but “if we live by an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, we are likely to all end up blind and toothless”.
This kind of retribution does not make for a better world, but maybe making a world where people are taught to value life as the precious limited resource it is for each of us, instead of the biblical claims of eternal life, we might find better ways for each of us to live. This has always been one of the things I have found refreshing among many atheists. I think not only capital punishment but the concept of punishment rather than repayment needs to be set aside.
I agree that it may not make a better world, but it may force people to think about the consequences of their actions beforehand. That is at least what I hope for.
As society does not seem to be able to prevent a murdering individual in the first place, I think society can prevent further occurrences of murder from the same individual by applying the death penalty.
“but it may force people to think about the consequences of their actions beforehand”
This does not really fit with the realities of murder. The vast majority were performed in the heat of the moment and the premeditated ones are planned such that the perpetrator thinks they will be immune from the consequences. The usage of drugs and alcohol is also tied into many non-premeditated murders.
Another study that I found really interesting was that in states where there is capital punishment that the rates of capital crimes increased around the time of an execution as well as rates increasing overall when capital punishment was reinstated after the 1970 ban on executions was lifted. States without a new capital punishment law did not experience as large of increases.
I am a gun owner and support both the right to keep arms and the right to defend my family with my guns. This has shown to be a deterrent in the three instances when I was threatened with violence. I did not fire the gun in any of these cases but its presence did terminate the incidents. That is a true deterrent. But when you look at how the death penalty works, the relative randomness of its use and the massive length of time between conviction and execution, its hard to argue that it serves a positive role. In my native Georgia, a murderer will spend more time in jail before execution than he would spend in jail before being released on parole if given a life sentence. When the person is finally put to death there is a wide gap in the public memory about the crime and the focus in the news is often centered on the convict and how he has found god or written children’s books or how some celebrity is pushing for their sentence being commuted.
Yes. Like measure said. They are to high of a risk to society. This isn’t about revenge, it’s about know that individual will never have another chance to hurt society. The pope should get capitol punishment for his crimes against humanity, but that’s never going to happen.
If the pope is simply removed from his position of authority, I don’t see how he could harm society again. At least not in the manner in which he did previously.
In honesty, I’m probably the only liberal who will say yes it is ethical. If someone has killed somebody then yes. There have been only a few cases where the person was innocent, and even fewer where the person was 100% innocent. True Crime, a movie starring Clint Eastwood, is about this very dilemma. They take up to 20 years before actually killing the person so they can look over the facts and tell if the person is innocent. I wouldn’t want Jeffrey Dahmer around today, the man asked to be killed.
“There have been only a few cases where the person was innocent, and even fewer where the person was 100% innocent.”
Are you saying is that the deaths of a few innocent people is an acceptable side effect of carrying out justice? It certainly sounds like that. How would you feel if it was you or somebody that you loved that was being sacrificed in the name of Justice? Seventeen facing execution in the United States have been exonerated with DNA evidence. Is that an acceptable number of innocent people?
“They take up to 20 years before actually killing the person so they can look over the facts and tell if the person is innocent.”
And they don’t do a very good job. Once somebody is convicted, there is little incentive for police and politicians to free them. It is also a political issue – politicians do not want to be seen as weak on crime. Just recently, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners on Death Row do not have a constitutional right to DNA testing that may prove their innocence, even if they paid for it themselves:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/19/nation/na-court-dna19
List of innocent people exonerated by the Innocence Project:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/know/Browse-Profiles.php
Just to play devil’s advocate… innocent people can die when you drive a car. How could you put innocent lives in danger just to get somewhere faster? Is that really ethical?
Socially we accept levels of cost associated with certain activities because they also provide a benefit that is generally felt outweighs the cost. It is stupefying just how much automobiles add to the value of many areas of life, and so the environmental and human cost, when compared soberly to these benefits, is found to be acceptable. This isn’t to say there isn’t a moral imperative to nonetheless minimize the costs if it is at all possible, and so the practice of driving is regulated to make it much safer than it otherwise would be, and there is a continuing impetus to reduce the costs further.
Dangerous driving, DUI and speeding through school zones are all unethical behaviours, yes. And I suppose it’s true that almost all actions have some element of risk. We drive even though people get run over and shops sell knives even though people get stabbed. But in cases like these, there is a legitimate purpose (getting from A to B, cutting vegetables) that cannot be achieved any other way. If we stopped travelling and cutting things, society would fall apart pretty quickly. The Death Penalty has no legitimate purpose that could not better be served by having Life Imprisonment instead.
The person in that case chooses to take that risk, knowing that they can die but that most likely they will survive as they have in the past. Choosing the death penalty or life in jail is made by someone else, a jury, a judge decide. And of course your death on the road may be the result of someone else’s behavior, but still you chose a dangerous behavior versus the risks and benefits of other choices.
Of course I believe that bathrooms at home are still the most risk prone environment we put ourselves in, yet we choose to use them everyday. We can try to mitigate those risks too – putting non slip strips on the bottom of our bathtubs, wearing our seatbelts, choosing cars that rate favorably in crash tests.
And I guess you could argue the same for murderers, that they take steps to conceal their guilt, to destroy evidence or to throw suspicion on someone else.
Yes it is unethical. And killers serve a good cause. by not killing them they can be free to kill again & again & ….. This helps with population control. So just let them go!! Oh you want them in prison!!! Well only if you can get prisons set up such that the people who want them pay for them!!! I want NO part of paying these guys to sit around watching TV.
Actually I am very much in favor of the death penalty. It cost so much because bleeding hearts want it that way. Also just like anyone else if a prosecutor/judge is found guilty of causing a bad death then give then a trial then string them up.
But I would much rather have Heinlein’s other solution-Coventry-where the killers are but somewhere and totally forgotten….Mars or Venus????
I tend to distrust those in whom the urge to punish is powerful. At least exile is a better solution than state-sponsored murder.
No. If a falsely convicted person is imprisoned and later exonerated, they can be released. Not so much if they are executed.
There are cases where it is justified. I would say that not only would it have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt that the person committed a very serious crime, but that the person accused cannot be rehabilitated and that they will commit more equally serious crimes if they are released.
Technically, every conviction is supposed to be “beyond reasonable doubt.” But there are still people wrongly convicted.
Yes.
At one time I believed in capital punishment but then again, I once was a southern baptist too. I think the real turning point for me was the innocence project where they have found many people wrongly convicted on death row. Beyond the racial issues here in the South, there is the political aspect. A flashy successful capital case right before election day practically guarantees the DA reelection. But as I have become more pragmatic I think this is just one symptom of the fatally flawed criminal justice system in the US that puts more people in jail per capita than any other developed (ok, some will argue that the US isn’t all that developed) country.
Not only do we not need to be killing people, we need to stop sending everyone to jail for longer and longer sentences when we know that our prisons are literally colleges for criminals and the stygma of a jail term makes successful reentry into society even harder. Add to that restrictive laws for where certain sexual criminals can live or work and create a permanent criminal subclass.
I think we need to focus more on repaying damages done than retribution. I don’t pretend to have the answers for murderers and child molesters, but its clear our current system isn’t working. In one of the suburbs of Atlanta there is a group of registered sex offenders living in some woods because it is the only place in the county where they can legally reside due to restrictions on living near schools, bus stops, churches, etc…
As far as capital punishment, one last word – if you are telling people that killing other people is always wrong, how is killing them right? Or sending them off to war where they are required to kill?
I think some criminals may actually deserve to die for their crimes, but I still have deep reservations about the realities of actually carrying out the death penalty. These would include concerns about the possibility of wrongful or erroneous convictions and subsequent executions of persons who are innocent of the crimes for which they are being executed, a lack of any restorative justice coming as a result of an execution, the fostering of feelings of vengeance within our society, the moral and psychological implications for those whose duty it is to carry out said executions, and the pain inflicted on the families of the executed. Other concerns would include questions about the execution of mentally ill or mentally challenged individuals, the execution of those who were under the influence of drugs at the time they committed their terrible crimes, and the execution of citizens of other countries.
The answer to this question is simply: It doesn’t matter. Our lives are one trillionth the time it takes our own eye to blink – on the grand scale of the universe (not our little ant brain scale) – we are like termites on the planet earth…seething like some infestation on its surface – Chemical scum. All humans and this planet will at some time disappear when our sun envelopes it. Then what? That’s the funny thing! There is no then what. There is no ‘point’ to it all.
In my lifetime I’ve seen a promising doctor die a young death due to car jacking. No point – she would have helped many thousands of lives. Dead. God’s plan they say. Yep – all part of the overall pecking order. Predetermined by a human like man in the sky who gets angry. Sure. Humans create the ‘point’ to it all – when in reality there is no ‘point’. That’s the skeleton in the closet. There is no point!!!!
I have to come down on the side of life imprisonment. The state’s only goal should be to make sure that a violent criminal cannot commit further crimes. To turn punishing the criminal into a quest for “justice” is to give in to irrational human nature, and if there is anything we need to keep out of our law books, it’s irrational human nature.
We should not have capital punishment. It is wrong for the state to execute/murder (choose your word) a person while telling the citizen they are not allowed to execute/murder a person. The state is the closest thing we have to a ruler and collectively we are that ruler. When the state executes a criminal, each one of us is actively responsible for the death of that criminal. We collectively execute/murder the criminal for lots of reasons…revenge, the desire to never deal with this person again, fear of being a victim in a similar crime, frustration with the flaws in the criminal justice system…and 300 million more reasons. We should not execute/murder someone by our own actions and we collectively should not execute/murder someone using the state as our weapon.
I can think of two murder cases in Canada, one, in Quebec, where the convicted persons were executed and there has been controversy with regard to their guilt ever since. Canada stopped executing people shortly after and a young man was convicted of a murder he didn’t do. He was released many years after conviction when it was proven that he was not the murderer. Anyone interested in the case may read about it at http://www.danielnpaul.com/DonaldMarshallJr.-1971.html
No, I don’t think so. While I understand victims wish for vengeance and I myself would do everything in my power to execute the murderer of someone close to me. I would only do that if I was 100% certain of his guilt. My stance might be hypocritical, but I can trust myself, while I cant trust the courts, so I would value my own justice every single time.
I also would like to ask another question:
Assume your loved one was murdered, the murderer was convicted and sentenced to death. After the execution it is found out that he was innocent. How would you feel about that?
No. There are definitely people out there who, I feel, deserve to die, even deserve a terrible, grisly death. But it is not the legal system’s —or any organization’s— place to make that happen, regardless of how sure we are of the person’s guilt.
Only if killing that person would save the life multiple people or someone who means more to you.