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Oklahoma Botched an Execution With Untested Lethal Injection Drugs
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "The state of Oklahoma had scheduled two executions for Tuesday, April 29th. This in spite of myriad objections that the drugs being used for both lethal injections had not been tested, and thus could violate the constitutional right to the courts, as well as the 8th Amendment: protection from cruel and unusual punishment. After much legal and political wrangling, the state proceeded with the executions anyway. It soon became clear that the critics' worst case scenarios were coming true — Oklahoma violently botched the first execution. The inmate "blew" a vein and had a heart attack. The state quickly postponed the second one. 'After weeks of Oklahoma refusing to disclose basic information about the drugs for tonight's lethal injection procedures, tonight, Clayton Lockett was tortured to death,' Madeline Cohen, the attorney of Charles Warner, the second man scheduled for execution, said in a statement. Katie Fretland at The Guardian reported from the scene of the botched attempt to execute Lockett using the untested, unvetted, and therefore potentially unconstitutional lethal injection drugs."
sciencehabit also points out a study indicating that around 4% of death row inmates in the U.S. are likely innocent.
The inmate "blew" a vein and had a heart attack.
Sounds like it worked okay.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
> 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heart attack vs. breathing dirt
False dichotomy. Everyone reading this would not be effected by either, as long as he's behind bars.
Cue the madding crowds telling me why I'm wrong to hold my opinion
Why does the US still even have the Death penalty?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Clayton Locket shot a man multiple times and then buried him alive. That same night he committed 18 other violent crimes including rape, burglary and assault.. http://www.ca10.uscourts.GOV/opinions/11/11-6040.pdf
I'm pretty sure no matter how he died, it was more humane than the murder and rape he committed.
Seems they've tested it now.
He also raped her friend that tagged along with her.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Lots more political posts of late, generally of a liberal slant. Whatever, but is the quality of the political discussion/diatribes that follow why folks read slashdot rather than move on or national review online or such.
Stuff that matters? Maybe. News for nerds? Not so much.
The punishment should be proportional to the crime, but does not need to mirror it. An eye for an eye is a bit outdated, no? If capital punishment is to be used, it should be done in a way that is neither cruel nor unusual - that's the law, until a jurisdiction collectively decides otherwise.
Breaking our laws to punish those who broke our laws: this may be widespread and socially acceptable to some people, but that doesn't make it right. If you want someone to be tortured to death, then seek a change in the law.
bring back the firing squad. It is apparently neither cruel or unusual. Our police use bullets all the time for minor matters.
Maybe you fail to see justice is not about revenge.
can now be labeled 'tested'.
The test can either be graded as a success/fail according to your ethics.
So you're saying a justice system shouldn't try to be any better than criminals?
It was an execution that almost certainly violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I find it hard to believe that no one has looked into execution using Nitrogen. Something akin to an old style dive helmet with a hose near the top to feed in gas. When the time comes, switch the flow over from air to pure nitrogen. Simple, cheap, painless and there is a limitless supply of Nitrogen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation
I am amazed at the cavalier attitude with which many people accept the right of their state government to kill its citizens, and furthermore, am chagrined when something "goes wrong" and people are outraged.
*insert pithy sig here*
Some people think that the justice systems' job is the arbiter of karma, rather than preventing crime. I've not discovered a way to discuss these things with the former group. I'm not sure what you can tell that kind of person.
Generally when we as a society decide that we do not torture criminals to death, it is not because we don't feel the criminals deserve it, but rather that we as a society are better then that.
Did you know that in many countries, sentences are served simultaneously, rather than consecutively?
I don't understand why hanging isn't used anymore. No chemicals to go wrong. No blown veins. Just drop them until dead. Boom. Done.
He shot someone and watched as his two friends buried her ALIVE. 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heartattack vs. breathing dirt. You decide...
So you condone torture?
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We have to pay for this monster to live for the rest of his life. We *all* pay taxes for that. It's expensive. Tell me how that doesn't affect us. A death-row inmate costs, what, $50-75-100K/yr to house and feed? We get no value from this. This is akin to toxic waste disposal. How many doctors, teachers, scientists can we hire for the amount of money we pay to house these people? How much further would we be as a society if we spent the money on getting ahead, not waste disposal?
I'm sure I will get an argument that "All the appeals that death row inmates use before being put to death cost more than just imprisoning them for life!" Maybe if we cleaned up our unnecessarily exhaustive legal process that has basically become a job program this wouldn't be an issue.
According to Robert Patton, the director of Oklahoma's department of corrections, when doctors felt that the drugs were not having the required effect on Lockett, they discovered that a vein had ruptured.
This is not a problem related to the drug(s) used but incompetent administration.
This in spite of myriad objections that the drugs being used for both lethal injections had not been tested ...
How does one test lethal injections?
Just because the government is doing it doesn't make it right.
So you're saying a justice system shouldn't try to be any better than criminals?
Agree. This is the slippery slope that leads to barbaric systems like Sharia, with stoning for adultery, death for professing belief in other religions, and so on.
It's out of fairness. People should not be allowed to be evil and get away with it gracefully. Otherwise, you just encouraged a "fuck you, I can do what I want and get off easy" mentality. People need to fear the ramifications of being evil fucking asshole.
It's a strange person that celebrates any death. Presumably though, it's this mentality that allows the death penalty to continue in the US.
It's one thing to claim about the drugs being untested .. and you can still probably claim they're untested, because all of the reports are suggesting that it was a blown out blood vessel, so the whole thing would've been botched no matter what drugs they had actually used.
(and before you say I'm just against executions ... I actually think that prisoners who are sentanced to life without parole should be given the opportunity to be administered euthenasia ... but the costs of capital punishment as they curently exist are so high that it should only be reserved for those really, really horrible crimes (which this one would seem to be).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You're absolutely right. Proportional. He raped, tortured and murdered. So what is proportional to rape, tortured and murdered?
I guess the conclusion would be that if I don't want to die in agony on a gurney, probably a good idea not to be a murderer.
Personally, I don't understand why they don't just push them off a tall building. Gravity is free, nearly 100% guaranteed to work, and they have a few private moments then to reflect on their lives while they plummet. Plus on the faint chance it didn't work, trying again is free too. And then crows get to eat afterward, so it's "green" as well.
Oh, and "sciencehabit also points out a study indicating that around 4% of death row inmates in the U.S. are likely innocent." let's be careful with our use of language here. This is not 'random innocent people being dragged off the street, convicted of a capital crime, and being sentenced to death." This is generally "lifetime criminal ne'er-do-well scumbag who has caused incalculable misery in his* life and a rap sheet 10s of pages long if not hundreds, being *finally* convicted of something and then, after decades of appeals and 00s of 000s of $, finally executed".
*his, because it's generally a man. Evidence of sexism in the criminal justice system? (Obviously not, but I highlight it to preemptively mock the people that assume that disproportional racial convictions are likewise "proof" of racism in the system.)
-Styopa
It is not justice if somebody is been given the death penalty and then gets 45 minutes of torture on top.
There is a reason torture (or cruel and unusual punishment) is not legal. If we treat criminals not better then they treated their victims we're not better than they are.
As a society we should strife to be better than our criminals and not hide our own cruelty behind words like justice and punishment.
Just hang them it's a tried and true method of making sure the prisoner is executed. All of these alternative ways are just there to make people feel better.
So you think people should be able to commit two crimes for the price of one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZAL64E0DI
Or even something simpler, like some kind of coup de grace, maybe a 12 gauge slug to the back of the head? Maybe by making executions much more visceral we'll be less inclined to make them clean and clinical and stop thinking about them as clean and clinical.
As bloody as such an execution would be, perhaps it should be so and the judge, prosecuting attorney and lead low enforcement investigators could be mandated to be in attendance and watching. It's one thing to plant evidence, withhold exculpatory information from the defense, commit gross prosecutorial misconduct and run quadrennial judicial elections on your persona as a "hangin' judge" when the convicted is executed somewhere else in a manner more consistent with outpatient surgery than an actual execution.
But when you know ahead of time that if the death penalty goes through you're going to see a human being have a good chunk of the head taken off in front of you, maybe you might not sleep so well knowing it happened because you broke the rules.
Let's take a brief look into the mind of the supporters of the death penality. A BBC reporter investigated a few scientifically proven humane ways to kill a human being, and offered them to Robert Blecker, Professor criminal law and constitutional law at the New York Law School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... So, with people like these on the spearhead of the pro-death-penalty movement ... can we expect a humane death penalty?
So, the standard philosophical counterargument is "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" but I suspect that despite the fact that the edgucated world as a whole had already resolved that capital punishment is immoral over a thousand years ago, you'll continue to lack empathy for those you feel "don't deserve it" so I'll argue from your point of view.
Lets make several points so you can disagree with them directly if you feel you need to:
1. Capital punishment costs orders of magnitude more money than Life in prison. The trials have to be rigorous, and therough, we have to be absolutely sure of the defendants guilt before we execute them. They get guarenteed retrials and the evidence has to be air tight. As a result, capital punishement trials costs states many millions of dollars each.
2. Murder trials are very difficult on the victims family. In order to get a conviction the prosecution needs to present very gory details, interview the family on the stand in depth, etc...
3. Prison is worse than death.
So, if you want to save money, save the family grief, and punish the prisoner in pretty much the worst method available legally, let him rot in prison for the rest of his life. You don't even need to be an ethical person to know that it's the right thing to do from every perspective. When even the catholic church things what you're doing is too barbaric, you know you're doing something wrong.
And then are they released on double secret probation?
Simultaneously serving multiple sentences doesn't really make logical sense if they're being imprisoned 24/7 for the duration of their sentence. It's not like they can be imprisoned for 48 hours a day to serve two sentences simultaneously. What you're effectively doing is just having them serve one sentence and dropping the rest, not having them served simultaneously.
The criminals involved had no concern over the victims. They didn't ensure they had a comfortable safe end to their life, they most likely died in horrible trauma or worse. Should this individuals have died in a calm and wonderful way so he had no suffering....I'm sure that would be for the best, no one planned this, it just happened, do I feel for their family; Yes. Do I feel for the criminal: no his fate played out as it was planned.
From my understanding, a week with Slashdot Beta should about do it.
the challenges have been around which specific drugs would be used & sourcing (compounding pharmacies vs pharmaceutical companies) - they could have been using brand Diprivan (propofol) & would have gotten the same result. I saw an interview w/the guy who more or less "invented" lethal injection where he said the drugs always work, it's the delivery that can get screwed up b/c it's carried out by "idiots" (i.e. prison guards). this was a physical problem, not a chemical one but that said if they can't reliably run an IV the drugs & sources are moot.
and that said, I'm definitely pro-abolition but this being /. let's get the science and cause/effect right...
Nitrogen hypoxia. Cheap. 100% effective. Readily available. Doesn't torture the inmate. Why don't we use it? Apparently it's not satisfying our need for justice to equal revenge.
We have to pay for this monster to live for the rest of his life. We *all* pay taxes for that. It's expensive.
And carrying out a death penalty also has it's costs. Take a read of costs death penalty. (I may be cherry picking a bit here but) From that article it was estimated that California could save $170 million a year by commuting al death sentences to life in prison.
So do you want to pay more or less taxes?
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Well, if you want to go full-on medieval, let's do it properly and just implent the sharia. Slowly poisoning someone to death ... or stoning them. What is the difference? Yes, the stoning is the more honest option.
I would think the euthanasia machines that use helium might be a viable alternative.
The fact of the matter is that the international companies that make the drug used for euthanasia will no longer allow it to be used for executions due to international pressure.
That seems to me the international community must condone hanging, electric chair, firing squad or lifetime imprisonment (because, surely, decades of mental restraint, solitary confinement and attacks/rapes by other inmates is not "torture"... Heck we treat dogs more "humanely" by putting them down using those same drugs not allowed in "executions")
Yea because otherwise everyone will be evil. I mean its lucky the US has the death penalty because it has deterred so many of the evil fucking people. Oh wait, the US has one of the worse rates of violent crime. States with the death penalty don't have less of this crime. It is not a preventive nor a deterrent.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I wonder how many of the people who are saying "What's the problem if the death penalty is horribly painful? This guy deserved it!" are also the ones who express horror over the government torturing people to get information from them or spying on everyone just on the off chance that one of those people might be planning something bad. If your government is willing to go to such lengths to get information from people, then do you really want to give that government the ability to kill any prisoner that they deem to be a "waste of taxpayer money"?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Leaving assite entirely the debate over death penalty to begin with, when we have to put down our pets, vets don't seem to have any trouble putting them to sleep, (and then inject more and more until sleep becomes permanenet.) Maybe the state just needs to fire to their medical experts and hire some country vet?
Honestly... I don't think you'll ever "pay off" intentionally harming another person(unless the harm is strictly financial). Which, to me, makes the question become "What else can be achieved through the prison system?"
Does rehabilitation require longer sentences for multiple crimes? Does deterrence play that large a role in exactly how serious a crime people are willing commit?
I think the actual observational evidence I've seen says: "No, but a system to retain unreformed criminals makes sense" and "No, people aren't concerned with degree of consequences when committing serious crimes." But I welcome new information regarding these points, it's good to learn from being wrong..
We have to pay for this monster to live for the rest of his life. We *all* pay taxes for that. It's expensive. Tell me how that doesn't affect us. A death-row inmate costs, what, $50-75-100K/yr to house and feed? We get no value from this. This is akin to toxic waste disposal. How many doctors, teachers, scientists can we hire for the amount of money we pay to house these people? How much further would we be as a society if we spent the money on getting ahead, not waste disposal
There are approximately 3,000 people on death row. I would imagine a liberal estimate, if we never killed any, would put mayby 10,000 people that might otherwise, eventually, be executed in prison for life.
As of 2011, there were 2,300,000 people in pirson.
So to answer your question as a percentage: We could save less than 00.5% of our prison budget... assuming executations themselves add $0 cost to the process, and assuming that those executions were carried out before even the trial happened. If you have trials, and waits, and there's a cost to the execution: we save less still.
And remember: these are based on grossly liberal estimates. If I just use current numbers, the savings is closer to 00.1% before lowerign it further with execution costs.
How about you drop the pretense that the issue is cost?
Put them to sleep, slit their throat.
I'm glad to see that you make this important moral decision about right and wrong come to dollars and cents. Sounds right to me.... NOT!
No we decide it because it was an issue of the time. Like being forced to quarter troops.
> 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heart attack vs. breathing dirt
False dichotomy. Everyone reading this would not be effected by either, as long as he's behind bars.
Cue the madding crowds telling me why I'm wrong to hold my opinion
He'd still be there to torment his prison guards and fellow inmates. The decline of the death penalty matches up nicely with the rise in supermax prisons.
Everyone who brings up your line of logic imagines that the most base, vicious members of society will sit in prison for the rest of their days reading books and reflecting on their life's choices. It isn't so.
Take a good look at how these life sentence crooks entertain themselves when they have nothing to look forward to but decades of confinement. Then decide if you still think lifetime imprisonment is irrelevant to the living, and to lesser criminals.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I don't think so. His painful death was an accident, just as much as if he'd slipped on a banana peel and brained himself on the way to the execution chamber.
because the actions of a legally constituted government should be equivalent to those of a criminal?
I mean it is all about one-for-one retribution, correct?
You're trying to pretend that time in jail = some cosmic debt owed.
The countries that have this different system, don't take that perspective.
There are a lot of bloodthirsty people here on Slashdot.
I think it's a good thing to try to move away from the, "He made others suffer so he should suffer," mentality. Punishment, capital or otherwise, should be about rendering the criminal incapable of commiting futher crimes to protect the populace. It's self defense, nothing more. Making sure that criminals suffer is barbaric. It turns my stomach a bit, and I liked that cinnamon roll.
Generally when we as a society decide that we do not torture criminals to death, it is not because we don't feel the criminals deserve it, but rather that we as a society are better then that.
So what you're saying is that once society improves, we can start torturing criminals?
That cost, even if it is correct, it is negligible in the face of: (a) the risk of murdering innocents, when other methods of containment exist; (b) the shame of being one of only developed countries in the world that still implement archaic methods of containment; and (c) the fact that this sort of person and his mental condition is ultimately a result of his own unfavorable context imposed by society.
There is no disorder to torture murders to death. It is not nessasary. Ironicly it is those that think they can stop the death penalty by starving it of drugs that caused the situation.
Why don't states just approve capital punishment using a respirator and a tank of inert gas like helium or nitrogen? Nitrous oxide would do as well as make the experience less unpleasant. Seems a lot more reliable than injecting chemicals.
The framers of the Constitution and Bill Of Rights did not think it to be "cruel and unusual" to hang people. Why do people today think it is? Why not go back to what was acceptable when the foundations of our nation were laid.
Learn the difference between justice and vengeance.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Simply design a chair with an adjustable height, single shot firearm(really just a triggering mechanism, a chamber, and a short barrel) that is placed nearly against the skull at the forehead. Have a remote trigger, so all the executioner has to do is push a button (or hell, even just have him start a mechanical timer). It's quick, almost guaranteed to be instantly or near-instantly fatal, and cheap. You could place the gun at the base of the skull so that it guarantees the brain stem is severed, but then the witnesses have to deal with the face blowing out. Through the front (or maybe side) of the forehead is a cleaner wound and allows for an open casket. Or, if they wanted cleaner and less traumatic for the witnesses, place it up against the heart. Much cleaner kill, but a little slower. Either way, much less painful than electrocution or lethal injection.
Yes, I am for capital punishment, because I see it as what it's name states: punishment. It is not a deterrent, it is the ultimate form of punishment for someone who has been shown to have committed especially heinous acts. Give them life in prison and it only gives them a more captive audience to prey on, unless you put them in solitary confinement (and that even closer to torture than lethal injection is). And yes, I understand that innocent people have been convicted and executed, but how many other innocent people have been convicted and spent their entire lives or died of health or other reasons in prison as well? The average wait on death row is over a decade, and can reach over 20 years. This includes numerous appeals, and there are a number of non-profits also working to find exculpatory evidence for people on death row. In fact, I am for a longer period between sentencing and execution(perhaps allow the person to waive extended time if they prefer), because it allows more time for the innocence of the person to come up. However, the treatment of death row inmates should be a little better: while they rightly should be excluded from other inmates, they should still be allowed regular exercise and contact with guards and visitors if only to preserve their mental health.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Or beating people up because they are different Five Hasidic Jews Arrested for Williamsburg Attack on Gay Man
Or because they don't follow your rules Ultra-Orthodox Israeli couple sparks riot after telling woman to move to the back of a public bus
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No, I'm taking the perspective that "serving simultaneous sentences" doesn't make logical sense. You're not serving simultaneous sentences, you're serving one sentence (presumably the longest or harshest one) and having the rest dropped.
It's more complex than that.
You face many concerns considering legal punishment: deterrent effect, risk of harm to innocents, and direct impact of punishment, to name three. These depend largely on the crime, the punishment, and the surrounding culture.
The deterrent effect, for example, has two major factors: perceived severity of the punishment and perceived threat of punishment. A weak punishment, colloquially a "slap on the wrist", carries little deterrent effect; a strong punishment carries high deterrent effect. A punishment lacks threat if it is unlikely to actually occur.
The strength of punishment comes from perception: jail time, pain, execution, fines, and how much the individual fear these personally. Some individuals do not fear prison; others fear it a lot. The poor fear fines more than the rich. Death almost universally incites terror. Pain is unpleasant, but imprisonment may destabilize personal security and provide greater fear.
Punishment carries threat when it is likely. The death penalty is a great example: in drug-riddled ghettos where criminal activity meets its abrupt end 99% by death and 1% by state execution, state execution carries no threat. In peaceful but armed suburbs, attacking someone may get you shot. Either way, someone will probably shoot you in the face before the state gets to you; if the police do catch you, they may simply provide a noose to save you from a bullet. In peaceful suburbs with low justifiable homicide rates, state action is the dominating outcome to murder; execution becomes a looming, subconscious threat.
Putting these together: the death penalty is a deterrent only where death is feared and state execution is a likely consequence of capital crime. In places where the criminal base is used to and does not fear death at a distance, state execution is a laughable thing; the first thing to consider is how to not get killed committing your crimes.
Once it's determined the deterrent effect, you have to consider other consequences. Fines and jail time can destroy lives. Executions kill people. If 4% of the executed are innocent, but executions provide such a deterrent effect as to stave off a hundred murders for each innocent executed, then that is unfortunate. If 4% of the executed are innocent, and executions provide no deterrent, then that is unacceptable.
And of course there are other considerations. I mentioned direct impact of punishment. You will want a punishment which rehabilitates criminals if repeat offense represents a larger proportion of the crime than the additional general deterrent from the next best method. Putting together further conditions, you can increase the severity of punishment as the risk of punishing innocents decreases (it's null if the punishments to innocents is dismissed on appeal 100% of the time before the time is served--increase punishment as much as you like). It gets extremely complex.
Justice is like sex: it feels good, but that doesn't make it wrong. Executing a man who stalks, rapes, and murders a woman feels immensely liberating to some; it is anxiolytic to a society who can distance themselves from the act of killing yet feel that they have participated in punishment. At the same time, such a man has earned his punishment. We may look down on people for enjoying vengeance, but we should not thus assume punishment is wrong.
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To be more correct, we feel that we should claim a moral superiority by deciding an action is wrong on arbitrary grounds.
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The judge can decide at sentencing whether multiple convictions can be served concurrently or consecutively.
All points of time and space are connected.
How about following your own advice?
4% is absurd even .000000001 is too much...
I condone the discomforting terror that sweeps a society when they see a despicable man brutalized by the sheer, violent unleash of hatred upon him for his terrible acts.
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Execution by Lethal Injection is designed to make the judiciary feel less guilty about killing someone, not cause some executionee less distress. As such administering an anaesthetic followed a cattle gun followed by opening the jugular veins would be more economical and just effective.
*It should be noted that I'm merely speaking from experience and my comments concering [the Bible Belt in general and Oklahoma in particular] might be tainted with a degree of personal bias because (A) I am not a cultural-relativist and (B) I live there. :p
Sorry this is the 21st century, savagery is somewhat frowned upon now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Do you want to know exactly how bad I feel that this guy suffered for an hour?
I think as little as me, but that is not the point.
What I personally dislike is the gruesome picture that this botched execution sends back to society.
(I also feel the need to state that I'm against death penalty, for miscelanous reasons)
I was recently assigned to a jury panel in a murder case. The state I live in has capital punishment.
I went into the courtroom with a fairly solid conviction against the death penalty (excluding military cases, i.e. fratricide, where soldiers should be held to a higher standard and capital punishment could be considered a necessary component of discipline).
As the evidence was presented, I started to question my beliefs. The defendant was accused of murdering and raping a 12 year old boy, and was a twice-convicted sex offender (why he wasn't already in prison is an entirely different question). This person showed no remorse for the crime, and if given life imprisonment, would still be able to see his friends and family....something his victim could no longer do. It really made me question my thoughts on capital punishment.
In the end I wasn't chosen for the jury, and the guy was found guilty. I still believe that capital punishment is wrong and doesn't solve anything, but life imprisonment, although no cake walk, doesn't necessarily equate to justice or punishment...because let's face it, this criminal won't be rehabilitated and shouldn't be given the chance.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Is that the GOP forces medicare part D to pay top $ for meds, services, which is why it costs more than ACA.
Yet, the same GOP is unwilling to fork money for the drugs necessary to do these executions correctly to have them manufactured in the US.
What a looney bunch that has a great deal in common with the worst leaders in history.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
all of the reports are suggesting that it was a blown out blood vessel, so the whole thing would've been botched no matter what drugs they had actually used.
The reports all come from the same source: the team that botched the execution. It is essential that there be an independent autopsy,
Oh, I guess I'm completely ignorant of my own justice system. Are there guidelines about when he should do which?
So how is this supposed to be tested?
Taking someone's life through a death sentence or a whole-life prison term will never bring restoration to the family of the victim.
So do away with most whole-life sentences. Restore decent parole opportunities. That's what happens in almost every other civilized country, allowing almost all prisoners an opportunity to reform.
The rise in supermax prisons has way more to do with the potential profit for the commercial prison industry than it has to do with crime.
How exactly does one 'test' lethal injection drugs?
So... what exactly do you think those years are achieving?
Non-concurrent sentencing creates some weird artifacts.
Criminal A is involved in 2 bank heists that steal $10,500.
Criminal B is involved in one jewelry heist that steals $50,000
Criminal A gets 2 counts of grand theft, and a sentence twice as long as B who stole more.
Funny how the same gouverment which can issue "national security letters" to force companies to divulge all kinds of information as if they are doughnuts isn't capable forcing the company to keep delivering their lethal drug. You know, because of that same "national security".
I'm sure if you ever get "mistakenly" classified as toxic waste, you will continue to feel the same way.
But any ways we need to cut back on capital punishment. To many cases of over aggressive prosecutors with weak evidence that have lead to the wrong person being found guilty.
I've read that in Switzerland their suicide kit comprises a helium bottle and a plastic bag.
Also when I give 0,5 litre of my blood, I know that I may faint if I don't drink enough and then stand up suddenly.
I guess making someone give all of it would be fatal with no pain.
(again I want to state that I'm against death penalty, I don't suggest anything to carry on those punishments, just wondering why they still use drugs)
I would posit that being locked away in a box with people as bad as me for the rest of my life is not "getting away with it gracefully."
China, Malaysia, vietnam, Uganda, Indonesia, Gambia, Thailand, India, pakistan, Bahrain, Botswana, Equitorial guinea, Bangla desh, UAE, North Korea, Kuwait, afghanistan, Taiwan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Sudan North and South, Ethiopia, Somalia.
Nice crowd.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
There has been steady spate of celebrity deaths from overdoses of sedatives back to Marilyn and before. In many cases the drugs may have made them lose count of doses or they are feeling really insomic and overdose. The Micheal Jackson "milk" propofol should be used at triple dose for quick and painless ending.
Lets see how you feel about that, when someone does that to you or your family member.
I prefer people rot slowly in a concrete box for the rest of their lives... death is too easy, even a horrifically painful one.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Honestly I am not sure. I think it is up to the judges discretion and is probably followed by the prosecutors suggestion. There are certainly some guidelines they must follow but who knows these days. The courts appear to whatever they heck they want so...
All points of time and space are connected.
This is not what I come to Slashdot to read about. I come to Slashdot for tech industry news. For intellectual property news. For news about trends in programming, hardware, etc.
And I, for one, as a person who's been reading /. for years, am getting sick of seeing it turning slowly but surely into just another news aggregator.
Stories like this one, with the added flamebait about "4 percent of people on death row are likely innocent" -- even if it's true, we know why it's being put there -- it's flamebait -- make me want to stop coming here.
tell that to those who order drone strikes on their own citizens with out so much as a grand jury inditement.
Yea, it got the job done in the end. I don't see how anyone can pity the guy after what he did. Just glad he is not going to get off easy by sitting in a jail cell for the rest of his life eating up tax payer dollars. He deserved some pain.
"we should be better then the criminal" is a nice book or movie saying, but in reality there has to be punishment that matches the unspeakable horror guys like this create, and putting them in a jail cell is not nearly enough.
"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."
Cheaper and more reliable.
No, you're not wrong to have an opinion-- it's just that your opinion might be wrong.
Stop acting like a victim just because people disagree with you. Is that an official logical fallacy? "Appeal to victimhood?"
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
He certainly wont be committing any more crimes
Why not just bring back the firing squad? It's pretty fail-safe from what I hear.
Some people clearly deserve to die for the crimes they have committed. However, I will am not convinced that our current criminal justice system is capable of truly deciding who those people are with 100% certainty. Lock them up for life, restrict their freedoms, treat them with the level of respect that a PRISONER deserves.
Nowhere it the Constitution are those rights declared. You're thinking of the Declaration of Independence. Life, liberty, and property can be taken away with due process of law, and nowhere are you guaranteed happiness or even its pursuit.
Don't make this about comparative religions.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The parent poster may or may not have intended it this way, but he actually brings up a good point.
If you commit a capital crime in the US, are tried and convicted for it, and your skin is black, you have a MUCH higher chance of actually being executed for it.
Frankly that fact alone should be enough to rule out capital punishment in the US for the foreseeable future.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
How does one test a lethal injection drug?
Really. Honestly. Bring back hanging. It's cheap, simple, and works every time. The Singaporeans have it down to a science. Wire cable, counterweight slightly more than criminal's weight. Bam. Done. Hand body to grieving family should there be one. If not, dog food.
B may have stolen more, but A committed twice as many crimes. The act of stealing is the crime more so than the actual amount stolen.
I was really hopping they'll botch the other guy's execution so that he could suffer a very very slow and painful death
(the other guy programmed for execution that evening raped and killed a 11-month baby)
I decide that the state should display more dignity and decency than a callous murderer would.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Have your daughter raped, shot and buried alive.
See if that changes you.
I would be affected by him being behind bars. He was a terrible person, a menace to society, and my tax payer dollars would put a roof over his head and 3 square a day for the rest of his life. Now it doesn't. I'm sure his victim's family feels the same way. So would Locke and Hobbes, as this man completely violated the social contract that is inherent to the functioning of modern civil society, so he has been removed. There: your opinion is incorrect.
You're also wrong with "effected". Effected as a verb means to bring about. Affected means impacted or changed in some way.
"The hospital effected new processes that affected patient care positively."
I oppose the death penalty in practice. I also support the idea of the death penalty, in theory.
So the question is, how can this be? Well, there are people so evil that they deserve to be removed from this planet. However, because of the wickedness of the state, we cannot assure that everyone put to death actually is deserving the death penalty gets it, nor everyone deserving it gets it, it is wholly arbitrary in the net results. This makes it completely unsuitable for actual use.
Or as my dad used to say, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The message could be that if you commit a horrible rape and murder then you may be killed in a horrible way. I'm ok with that. If it makes one person fear the death penalty enough to avoid committing a crime then it's worth it. If not, then chalk it up to karmic justice. Everyone dies. A natural death isn't always pain free.
None of the stories, CNN, HuffPost, NYT mention the victims.
Fuck this guy. What happenned was perfect justice.
They should've kept this POS alive and keep doing this for
days, weeks even. That's justice.
Again: Fuck this guy.
It was an execution that almost certainly violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The INTENT of the execution was NOT to cause him pain. The intent was to put him to sleep, then when he was unconscious, cause his death by medication. No pain is caused when this process works as designed. Had the IV not malfunctioned, or had they caught the fact that it had before they started the lethal part of the medication delivery, there would have been no pain caused.
The PROBLEM was that the IV they where using to deliver the medications blew out the vein and stopped working sometime after the sleeping medication was started. This only became apparent AFTER the medications used to cause his death had been delivered. This was an unfortunate accident.
This will and should cause a care examination of the process being used. They will make adjustments to avoid this problem in the future. But one thing is CLEAR, this was not because they where using some untested mix of medications or the wrong dosages. I'm guessing that from now on they will start two IV's and then be ready to keep the subject unconscious though either, while the lethal medications are administered.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Living in Europe, I read this thread. Horrors. I'm usually quite happy about the differences and similarities between our two parts of the world and try to learn from the for me different US perspective.
But this thread is like going to China; it makes me utterly aware that I'm European (from Sweden, less important here). I'm from the part of the world where the state does not kill it's citizens for whatever reason. And this this is in the end a question of moral. Discussing this from the point of costs is just not sane. Nor is it a technical issue on the best way to slaughter people.
I should listen more if these methods were effective in any measurable way, besides winning elections. But we all know this is not the case.
Quite near in time and space was the mass-murder committed by Anders Bering Breivik. in Utöya which killed 69 people. This was in a country were even the life-sentence is prohibited, Breivik was sentenced for 21 years. To my knowledge there were (almost?) no debate about a need for capitol punishment this case. Norway was, and despite this exception still is a society with very little violence. To me, it seems like the society focused it's efforts to take care of the victim's relatives and to rebuild the overall trust rather than revenge. I really admire this.
--alec
I don't see how it can cost so much to put someone to death. There are any number of ways to kill someone essentially for free. We manage to economically kill livestock in a manner that the public considers to be acceptable. These are people we as a society have decided have no further potential contribution to make, and are better off dead. Maybe some think we should keep them locked up for life to "make them sorry" for what they did. I don't know if that works or not, but I don't really see why it matters either way. They're not going to get out and start sweeping floors or changing oil, or anything else useful. So why should we feed and house them?
Maybe it's the appeals process that costs so much money. In that case, maybe a spending cap is in order (for both the prosecution and defense) to prevent some laser from taking heroic measures in court and sending the bill off to the taxpayers.
Executions should be done by beheading with high powered laser. Eliminates the main objection to the guillotine, the blood. The laser cauterizes all the blood vessels as it severs the head.
Proportional means that someone who steals a car should get a proportionally more lenient sentence than someone who commits murder, but there must be a limit. Depending on jurisdiction, that limit is death or life in prison.
If you start taking proportional punishment too literally then we'll be setting up torture chambers instead of execution chambers, and intentionally keeping felons alive as they writhe in pain for days on end. If that's what you want, then that's your right. I'm personally glad society is moving away from that, not toward it.
What amazes me is that it's mostly the right wing which supports even these violent and revengeful executions. These are the same people who claim to be for some sort of nebulously smaller government, but want to give some governments the position of monarchies - as in the King of Oklahoma's representitives can do no wrong and may deliberate in secret as the king wishes.
Who is John Cabal?
Americans are savages. It's as simple as that. :an eye for an eye.
They should burn the constitution (no one respects anymore so...) and play by the only rule they seem to accept
Ah, a would-be torturer. You do realize, that you exceed the level of immorality of your would-be victims, right?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
'cause otherwise, the killer state killing killers to teach that killing is wrong is so-o-o not hypocritical ! ! !
Helium hypoxia would be an excellent form of execution. It's painless for the condemned and it would make the process hilarious.
I am reminded of a TOS episode where two warring planets had made their war so clean and clinical that they had no real reason to stop it. Until Captain Kirk came in and showed them what war really was, something horrifying, to be avoided. Even if it meant talking peace with your enemy.
Capital punishment is such an atrocity. Maybe if it was shown to be that atrocity, there would be less support for it. Public hanging, firing squad, maybe even dust off the electric chair. Show that it's gross and disgusting, and that civilized people have better ways to keep their societies working.
...laura
What's so difficult about life without parole? It'd probably work out cheaper, if you factor in the expense of capital cases. Besides, it's easier to pardon and pay compensation to somebody if they're innocent, if they're still alive.
The system is there to PUNISH too. Now you can call it Karma in a hand waving dismissive way if that makes you feel superior but you're just dishing up the same tired old argument that the system is simply there to keep criminals away from the public. No, it isn't - its more than that. There is a natural justice that most normal people (ie not feeble minded metro-liberals) feel needs to be carried out with regards to heinous crimes since seeing that done is one of the foundations of a stable human society.
As you went on describing those groups you got more and more fringe-right.
but want to give some governments the position of monarchies
He was convicted and sentenced by a jury, the sentence was confirmed by a judge, the trial was reviewed by other judges, at multiple levels, all happening before the Governor decided to proceed with the execution. There's no monarchy here, and you can disagree with the death penalty without resorting to false comparisons.
Related opinion that's sure to make me popular: End the lethal injection nonsense and just shoot condemned criminals. It worked for Utah. It requires no medical personal to take part and violate their oath. It requires no sourcing of components from overseas trading partners that are anti death penalty. Being shot with a rifle is a damn near instant death and is a lot more humane than experimenting with drugs.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
How can libertarian leaning people grant the government the right to kill people? Sure, they are killing dirt bags right now, but we know that governments grow and expand their powers over time. How can we be certain that in the distance future that the government won't eventually kill people for having too many children, or cutting off the wrong official in traffic? That's approximately when it stops being out government and starts being our ruler.
Zero tolerance for capital punishment, because the power over life and death is the last thing we should permit our government to have!
He shot someone and watched as his two friends buried her ALIVE. 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heartattack vs. breathing dirt.
Of course that is not beyond what he deserved. This is not about what he deserved. The reason we don't torture people is because only people who are mentally damaged, like him, do that to other people -- regardless of what they deserve. I am not mentally damaged, so I don't want to torture people, and won't have my state doing it in my name. Civilized people don't torture people to death. We take bad people and remove them from society, ashamed that they were once allowed to roam free, but not made worse by allowing blood lust to take our minds.
And if you are so inclined, you should seek help. If you're not going to do that, at least keep it to yourself. Pretend you're not a degenerate so you don't debase us as a society. Or, if you can't control it, at least have the decency to leave evidence when your monster drives you to some hideous act so we can catch you and put your deranged ass behind bars with the other animals.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The Psuedomedical argument is dead-on. Why are we trying to make the execution painless and less traumatic than what happened to the victim of the crime? Gravity and altitude or water are perfectly reasonable methods.
That said, we also spend far too much money to obtain drugs that the drug makers obviously don't want used for executions.
The solution is simple - the U.S. destroys literally tons of heroin each year. More than enough to handle the execution demand. Instead of worrying about the precision of the three drug method, go with a simple opiate overdose. It's just not possible for the condemned to feel pain. He gets high, he dies. Push the plunger until the heart stops, hook up the next guy.
Now the weird part is that every heroin distributor is going to be screaming - "That's my stuff in that needle! It's good enough for the state of Texas, it's good enough for you!"
Saves money, saves debate time.
Citing data from a group funded by an anti-death penalty groups and individuals? Yeah, cherry picking just a bit.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
And what about the 4%? Is that an acceptable attrition rate?
Why are they experimenting with 3-drug combinations when they could just use sedatives? They work just fine for putting pets "to sleep".
How about you drop the pretense that the issue is cost?
So the main argument tossed about the media against the death penalty is about the cost. That argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny, so you say, Forget about cost because even if it costs less to execute people it represents such a tiny fraction of the overall cost. Except that doesn't stand up because your 3000 death row inmates represent between $150 and $300 million per year, so despite it being just a small percentage of the overall tab it is still not a small amount of money. Maybe we save that cash and throw it education or urban blight? You like those things, right?
Just be honest about your argument: You are against the death penalty because you are simply against it.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
well if he wound up dead and it was a scheduled execution id say this is simply a tuning problem
I think the following two things are objective facts that all persons in this discussion would agree with:
1) Sometimes people do cruel or unusual things to other unconsenting people.
2) It is against the law for our government to inflict cruel or unusual punishments.
(Am I mistaken? Are either of these two "facts" disputed and not actually facts?)
And I think both you and I (but not everyone) would accept 1a: Some people deserve cruel or unusual punishments.
Either we're going to have to withdraw our support for that law (amend the constitution) or accept that our policy isn't be about giving people what they deserve. That doesn't necessarily mean we can't have a death penalty, just that there are limits to how far we can lawfully go, and those limits are likely to fall short of what some people deserve.
tl;dnr: people getting what they deserve, does not suggest a lack of problem.
That's exactly the same standard we're supposed to be using in non-capital cases too!
It is not valid for death sentences to cost more than life sentences. The real problem is that people aren't getting competent and thorough defenses in the initial trial. I would argue it's even more of an injustice for those receiving life sentences because, without the permanence of execution, the public sees it as less of a problem worth fixing.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Not so much deterrent as prevention. These guy won't be committing horrendous crimes again if they're dead. The problem is - of course - that they still do spend a lengthy time in prison and the death penalty isn't really any more cost-effective than imprisonment.
That said, you can't really argue in the way of "the perp still did it" as a point against punishment being a deterrent. You'll always have some people who do terrible things, but you can't really count those that DIDN'T commit a crime due to fear of punishment.
Why not use the same devices used to put down livestock? Is what's good enough for our food not good enough for criminals?
Why does the US still even have fines? Why does the US still even have imprisonment?
Answer any of these questions, and you'll have answered them all. Show the foolishness of any of them, and you'll have shown the foolishness of them all.
I think the most popular answer, is that we have these things to punish criminals. HTH.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Nothing is proportional to murder. That's what makes it such a terrible crime; there's really no way justice can ever be served since it's impossible to repay the cost of a human life. Some people try with the death penalty, but to me it just reeks of vengeance, not justice.
I don't see why we are spending millions of dollars dragging this crap through the courts when we can solve the problem with $10 of rope from the hardware store and a nearby tree. I'll even give them the rope, lowering taxpayer cost to $0.
It's certainly a tried, tested, and true method. Quick and painless.
Or do you think they'd complain and want to know who manufactured the rope first? Fine. I'll leave the plastic label on it for them to read. Again, a simple solution.
Or, alternatively, just bind his hands and tie a plastic bag over his head. Suffocation is pretty painless also--he'll just pass out and fade away. And again, cost: $0--you can get a plastic bag for free from almost *anywhere*.
All i can think of when i see the picture of the room where people is being murdered is: What would the future generations think of this?, i can only find a resemblence to burning witches on a bonfire. What troubles me the most is that there is actually spectators of this assassination, sick bastards.
That's exactly the same standard we're supposed to be using in non-capital cases too!
It is not valid for death sentences to cost more than life sentences. The real problem is that people aren't getting competent and thorough defenses in the initial trial. I would argue it's even more of an injustice for those receiving life sentences because, without the permanence of execution, the public sees it as less of a problem worth fixing.
I'm sorry, I thought we were discussing reality and not imaginary worlds where trials were always just and fair.
So... which one you consider has been decided to be wrong on arbitrary grounds? The crime (for example, torturing someone to death) that was committed for whatever reason, or torturing that person to death?
It is what it is.
Learn the difference between justice and vengeance
That's a false dichotomy, dickwad. There is no law if there is no punishment for breaking the law -- otherwise, it's only a suggestion. There is no civilization if there is no law. The punishment should fit the crime. Your sense of "justice" was overwritten by an idiotic, retarded concept of equality that makes zero sense outside of Bizarro world. Don't worry, though, it's pretty common on the internet to be such a fuckup when it comes to these semantics.
Your weird, impossibly-stupid concept of justice illustrated outside of your ethereal bubble of stupidity:
He raped and killed an 11-year-old, therefore we must rape and kill him as an 11-year-old
That dog got loose and bit someone, so justice determines that someone must get loose and bite that dog
That kid stole gum from a store. That store should steal gum from that kid.
This isn't justice. It's idiocy. The scales of justice aren't about perfect equality at such a granular level -- they are about meting punishment that the crime deserved.
The thing is, it WAS enough to rule out capital punishment in the United States.. back in the 70's, when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was being applied in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner because most death penalty states really had no standards as to the methods used. When the lethal injection got introduced and made more or less the standard, the Court ruled that the death penalty could once again be put into effect.
It has been argued (but not in front of the Supreme Court) since then that the racial inequalities on death row make the death penalty just as "arbitrary and capricious" as before the methods were standardized.
However, my state (Connecticut) recently banned the death penalty for everyone except people who were on death row before the ban was put into effect. Our last two major executions ("Mad Dog" Taborsky and Michael Ross) were both serial killers, and both white. Michael Ross actually gave up his appeals so that he could die faster. I'm not sure how many current death row inmates in CT aren't white, but I know the last two people added to it (Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevski) are both white. Of course, CT is a far cry from the southern states in terms of how often the death penalty has been applied historically.
From my understanding, a week with Slashdot Beta should about do it.
Too cruel and unusual. No one deserves that.
The scumbag is dead AND a little bit of justice was served as well.
So he suffered a bit and knew something was wrong before his ticker gave out.
The problem is....?
I always thought Tolkein (through Gandalf) put it quite well
Don't confuse Gandalf/Tolkien's admonishment about eagerness with ruling out that ultimate punishment when it's appropriate. Not to mention the concept is a little muddled anyway. Of course we can't "give life" to some innocent who was, for example, killed by a violent sexual predator. Our inability to do that sort of magic doesn't mean we should let cruel, predatory violent killers carry on with life, either. Such people have stated - often verbally, but always through their actions - that they consider any social contract regarding the value of other's lives to be out the window. He has said, "I get to decide on a whim - and without any consideration of how you live your life - if you live or die ... and when you die, if I get to rape you to death in the process before choosing my next victim."
Our inability to "give life" back to you after he's raped you to death isn't a sign that we're unable to realize he's waived his own claim on life. We don't have to be "eager," in Tolkein's parlance, to deal with such a person. But nor should we nurse him along in a cage for the next 50 years.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
With the advent of DNA testing many people have gotten of death row as they were innocent. How many innocent, not necessarily outstanding members of society, have we executed? Most happen to be minorities. The people yelling the loudest for death penalty are white males.
not sure how giving drugs to a murderer could violate 8th Amendment.
he died. what is the problem? should've hung him at the gallows instead. why we care about how suspect dies? how about the feelings of the victims and their families? does suspect care about how they died?
Gandalf killed his fair share of goblins. You didn't see him pussy-footing around, trying to gently incapacitate them.
No one gets in trouble because it is the government. They can cause real damage and no one is ever held accountable. Ever. Look at the NSA, prime example. If one of us breached national security we would be locked up and never even heard from again. But they do it and no one is even arrested. Hell, they probably got a raise. In this case someone probably got paid administrative leave. They should just do away with capital punishment all together since they have executed innocent people in the past. The system is broken and when you are dealing with peoples' lives, then you simply don't use it.
I'm not a big on the death penalty in general, but I don't see why we don't just use a firing squad. If they're worried about who'd do it, they could ask for volunteers. There'd be plenty.
Play Command HQ online
Ah, here is the core of the problem with these arguments - it's not his fault but society's fault he ended up this way.
You're assuming that, statistically, African Americans statistically commit the same kinds of murders as others, but that's just not true if you look at actual data. The higher death penalty rate for African Americans results from a much higher rate at which African Americans commit the kinds of crimes that receive the death penalty. The reason is clearly not race per se, because there are many recent African immigrants for which none of these statistics hold.
Fuck you asshole.
From The Guardian:
Lockett, 38, was convicted of the killing of 19-year-old, Stephanie Neiman, in 1999. She was shot and buried alive. Lockett was also convicted of raping her friend in the violent home invasion that lead to Neiman's death.
You feel bad for this POS? You are stupid motherfucker. Fuck you.
And fuck you again.
We all could save a lot by just shooting anyone ever suspected of any wrongdoing.. is cost really the way to discuss this?
It's not meant as a deterrent, you're right, it doesn't work as one. it's meant to simply eliminate remorseless, hopelessly evil people from the world.
The US has a high population than many other countries, thus a higher crime rate than those countries, but also an open news media, so nearly every crime is tracked and reported, and even sometimes makes national news if it serves an agenda.
If you look at http://www.nationmaster.com/co... there's even a disclaimer that states, "DEFINITION: Note: Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.." There is also a difference between a murder and an execution: a murder of an innocent is unprovoked; killing a murderer is not unprovoked and he/she is not innocent. (Granted, they should be DAMN SURE they guy they're executing is indeed the guilty party, in this particular case, it was no contest). Frankly it's akin to killing cancer cells. Rehabilitation where violent criminals are concerned is an extreme rarity, practically a myth. And I'm fairly sure that more than half the vocal anti-death penalty crowd here would suddenly drop their lofty principles if the man strapped in the gurney was Dick Cheney.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
On what data are you basing your statement? I thought it was interesting, but wanted to verify. Google search: "statistics death row executions race"
First result:
Race of death row inmates executed since 1976 (US).
Comparing the percentage of executions by race to the population data shown lower on the page, I don't think your statement is correct. More whites are executed, but more blacks have pending executions.
sig: sauer
"You're assuming that, statistically, African Americans statistically commit the same kinds of murders as others"
No, I am not. That is explicitly controlled for by only counting capital murder cases.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
How about you drop the pretense that the issue is cost?
So the main argument tossed about the media against the death penalty is about the cost. That argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny, so you say, Forget about cost because even if it costs less to execute people it represents such a tiny fraction of the overall cost. Except that doesn't stand up because your 3000 death row inmates represent between $150 and $300 million per year, so despite it being just a small percentage of the overall tab it is still not a small amount of money. Maybe we save that cash and throw it education or urban blight? You like those things, right?
Just be honest about your argument: You are against the death penalty because you are simply against it.
1) Please feel free to argue with the media about what you assert the media said. I am not them.
2) Your comment is also out-of-context. The question was asked, and answered. You hack a straw man by pretending I was addressing something other than what I was.
3) I am not capable of tautological wants. It would be kinda cool if I could, but I cannot support or oppose something because I support or oppose it. I do require some reason for a position.
On to your post. *You* assert that we should kill people for the reason "it saves money".
OK. Let's kill all people, at arrest. Indeed: let's just have the arresting officer shoot them on the spot. That will save *far* more money than your plan will.
No? That's not your position? Then what is your position? What was that about honesty?
Taking someone's life through a death sentence or a whole-life prison term will never bring restoration to the family of the victim.
So do away with most whole-life sentences. Restore decent parole opportunities. That's what happens in almost every other civilized country, allowing almost all prisoners an opportunity to reform.
The rise in supermax prisons has way more to do with the potential profit for the commercial prison industry than it has to do with crime.
I never said anything about life in prison or a death sentence bringing restoration to the victim's family. I'm concerned with getting dangerous, extremely violent people away from the living permanently. A dog gets rabies. Am I mad at the dog for getting rabies? No. Does it matter how he got rabies? Only insofar as we can eliminate the source; for the fate of the dog, it doesn't matter one wit. The dog is put down because it is simply too dangerous to be allowed around the living anymore. So it is with death row inmates. As for what 'civilized countries do', kindly provide some stories of comparable murderers who were successfully re-introduced to society.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Here's one original study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111 There are many more out there. The consensus is that a non-trivial amount of people are wrongly sentenced to death, and an even higher proportion are wrongly convicted, but never exonerated on further review
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Crime is a legal thing.
You indicated a person may deserve something--that it is morally his due to receive it. To decide we do not want to deliver it is based in arbitrary moral grounds. Often such views are held in parallel with the view that we may feel good about such a man experiencing hapless karma (e.g., getting attacked by a bear while standing over a woman he raped and murdered in the woods); while we are above inflicting the same (throwing the man in a cage with an angry bear). We openly hope that bad things happen to these people so that it is not upon our heads.
Such arbitrary morality absolves us from consequences. We concoct a fantasy of no consequences to deal with this, e.g., the insistence that the death penalty or even punishment itself provides no deterrent. Reality is both less pleasant and less simple: punishments provide deterrents based on a large array of factors, each of which varies with the local culture. In some places, execution provides no deterrent; in others, execution provides a major deterrent. Even in the latter, we absolve ourselves from the consequences of more innocent blood by convincing ourselves we are civilized; and besides, that particular blood is not on our hands, so it is not our concern.
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Yea because otherwise everyone will be evil. I mean its lucky the US has the death penalty because it has deterred so many of the evil fucking people. Oh wait, the US has one of the worse rates of violent crime. States with the death penalty don't have less of this crime. It is not a preventive nor a deterrent.
I've never considered the death penalty as a deterrent. It is because it is not, it is punishment.
Then we can lower the cost of death sentences. Juries will feel more responsible when their decision is likely definitive. Prosecutors should also be liable to be executed themselves for any abuse of the process
There are plenty of studies out there that show that executions cost significantly more than life imprisonments. You can get started with some studies here: http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost If you want to save money, lock people up in the Waldorf Astoria for life.
aybe if we cleaned up our unnecessarily exhaustive legal process that has basically become a job program this wouldn't be an issue.
Yes, because making sure due process was observed, mistakes were uncovered and general asshattery by various people was minimized is just a job program. I guess we should just put you in a suit and call you Judge Dredd, right?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
It is not just the ultimate punishment, it is the ultimate protection for society. It should be held only for those who have killed on more than one occasion and would be likely to kill again if they ever escaped prison. Who would like some of those 4% put into a home next door?
When you bring up stats to deal with real persons, you are showing great laziness.
Each of these cases should be based on their own merits, regardless of what group they fit into.
If you are using the stats on skin color, you are saying that the judges and juries in these cases are racists. You are insulting people you have never met.
As to means, several shots of Benedryl or similar sleep agent,
then put a plasma cutter up to the ear or base of the skull and turn it on until it comes out the other side. Done in a few seconds.
Rope is a time proven method and is very cheap.
This is an interesting point, but it does lead to another problem/cost. If you don't have the threat of a death sentance, then you can't get evil people to take a life without parole sentence without a trial. No one take a Life-WO-parole sentence, no matter how guilty they are, unless there is something worse on the table.
Take this case for instance:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-06-14-3535475282_x.htm
There is no way this dude doesn't take Life-WO-parole sentence without a trial if the death penalty was an option (he got something like 500 years after trial). Those no-death sentence cases cost taxpayer money as well.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/courts/death-looms-for-clayton-lockett-years-after-killing-oklahoma-teen/
Pretty tidy price to pay forcing a teenager's friends to bury her alive while snickering about it.
Good riddance. The scumbag got what he deserved.
Also pretty sure he's not in that 4% group sciencehabit is so excited about. Aside from that, the figure they got is extrapolated using "statistical methods used in medical studies". Techniques that generally negatively bias. Of course without the details it's hard to say how biased that approach would have been mathematically but reading the article it's hard to understand how they got to that figure using the logic they've admitted to driving their premise. That is exonerated inmates.
I read your longer (similar) post earlier, and while the argument sounds convincing, I would like to see some statistics about the execution being a major deterrent (in comparison to prison terms). I wonder if there are any papers that take into account the subcultures of an area (say state) with death penalty and compare the crime rate to a similar states (and so on). Could you link to one of these, or what is your argument based on?
It is what it is.
I'd like to know how many people who are advocating AGAINST capital punishment on this forum are FOR abortions including late-term and partial birth abortions. My wife, who changed her views after we got married pointed out to me that being against capital punishment was inconsistent with being for abortion. I thought about it and realized she was right. So I changed my stance. I'm now PRO Capital Punishment. But if your view is inconsistent (Against CP and For Abortion) then ask yourself this: "If I'm against a person who committed terrible crimes being executed, then why am I for allowing an innocent life to be terminated just because it isn't breathing air at the moment, but would if delivered to term or near term?"
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
It is difficult to reply when you do not point the exact problem in my argument. Nevertheless, I do argue that it is probably not his fault, ultimately. But that does not imply that I defend that he should be exempt of any sanctions. Any criminal has to be punished. However, society should expect any normal human to learn and recover. If, at any point, society believes that a person probably cannot learn and recover (at any cost), it is society right to contain this person and its duty to investigate ways of doing so. If that turns to be life imprisonment, so be it. However, when an society kills someone prematurely, it removes this person right to try to learn and recover. I would accept a different argument in case society could not keep this person contained, but that is not really the case.
The state should not have the power to sentence an individual to death, but death should be available to those who would choose it.
Our government should not kill. A maximum sentence of life in prison is all the force that it should be able to employ against any individual.
If a person sentenced to life does not wish to continue the sentence, then they should have the option to request an end to it. After suitable mental evaluation, and assuming they are resolute, they should have what they seek.
This brings morality and transparency into the process. This is the right thing to do.
Read that page again. The strongest documented discrimination is over the race of the victim:
White Defendant / Black Victim (20)
Black Defendant / White Victim (270)
A black person who kills a white person is far more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced to death than vice versa.
A Poulan Chain Saw does a wonderful job on a body.
Ha ha
FU !
No chemicals required.. just hang em.
How else would you give back the time someone spends in prison?
Time spent in prison is as irreplaceable as a life.
Caught a retweet yesterday along the lines of "As far as I know, the only Christian sect that advocates the death penalty is Southern Baptist."
"We don't care what Jesus would have done, WE WANT BLOOD!"
Then he shot her and buried her alive.
I have a teenage daughter. I hope it hurt like hell when his execution was botched. Let's bring him back to life and keep testing this form of execution. Over and over.
Inject him with Drano for all I care.
Fuck him.
For double executions, combine with sulphur hexafluoride for harmonic effect.
Ezekiel 23:20
I would caution you on that point. Millions of perfectly normal people are willing to torture. The Milgram Experiment provided statistically significant proof, and the historical record of societies that have fallen into a-couple-sigmas-more-authoritarian-than-the-median systems of government is also pretty clear on this point.
And this is how 99.9999% of us respond to the monster within ourselves when given the opportunity to murder or torture. We choose to act like humans ought to. It's a good solution during peaceful times.
OK, 99.9999% of us behave in a civilized fashion in real life. On the internet, the truth comes out. I'm actually grateful for the "I WANT HIM TO SUFFER!" crowd. They serve as a reminder for the mostly-civilized folk that we're all just one authority figure away from becoming like them.
I was under the impression that the stronger correlation isn't to the race of the accused, but rather to the race of the victim.
Argument's based on psychology and internal systemic simulations. I've linked to papers before that argued the death penalty is a deterrent, and those that argue that it isn't. I linked to one a while back that argued both, without coherence, based on various statistics and seemingly unaware of self-contradiction; its summary didn't conclude anything, nor did it acknowledge the lack of conclusive evidence.
Mostly, I'm just outputting summary knowledge gleaned from a lot of consideration and a lot of information I've come across over the years; I don't keep a running scientific compendium to cite from. If the argument sounds convincing, you can either do your investigation to put it to rest or you can just assume I'm amongst the ranks of Locke and Voltaire. In any case, the argument that an action may or may not have an important effect isn't exactly sweeping: I'm basically telling you that policy involves examining hard the effects of that policy, and that some effects cannot be considered as general patterns. I've made the same argument about gun control.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
generally this refers to animal testing and best information on the physiological effects on an ape.
The testing that "should" have been done would have been controlled ape euthanasae followed by autopsies.
Just give the person some sedative and when he sleeps, just pump the bastard full of cyanide.. He won't feel a thing and it's cheap... How hard can it be... Or just use a guillotine...
And yet they are letting people out early because there are too many of them. How does that deter evil people? Have these people even been re-educated?
Because now we get to live in a world that's minus one piece of shit baby rapist/killer.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Yeah, but you have to buy the bullets for each execution. I say we bring back the old guillotine. Each execution is free after the purchase of the device. It gives you plenty of viewer excitement. And I don't see any way for it not to be quick and painless.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
"All the appeals that death row inmates use before being put to death cost more than just imprisoning them for life!" Maybe if we cleaned up our unnecessarily exhaustive legal process that has basically become a job program this wouldn't be an issue.
Yep, just give the power of execution right over to the armed thugs (police) in the first place. Then nobody had to pay for judges to hold unnecessary trials and we don't need to spend money for these expensive prison systems. Let's just go full on Judge Dredd style!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
IIRC, it has been posited by the Innocence Project that 50% of persons convicted using eye witness accounts are not guilty of the crime of which they were convicted. Take a look at the number of people released over the past few years after dozens of years in prison who were found not to have committed the crime that put them there. One of the problems for the many innocent folks in prison is that there aren't many people willing to put in the effort to research their situation since there's little profit in doing so. And once an innocent has been put to death it's even less likely that the case will be reconsidered. So, what's the percentage of executions done on innocent prisoners? Who knows, but it's likely much more than 4%.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I'm not convinced capital punishment is a sound choice, but why do they make such a big deal about it? there are opioids that would cause prompt and relatively peaceful death, not to mention extremely powerful muscle-relaxants.
My veterinarian did an excellent, cheap and painless euthanasia of my dog. I don't know why we can't have Vets manage the process. They are cheap, professionally trained and experienced.
*** Don't be dull.***
So tie him up, shoot him twice, and let him suffocate in a grave. Perfect equivalency. The punishment would exactly fit the crime, and by definition, be fair. Nothing more, nothing less.
Annnd before someone says the trite 'eye for an eye leaves the world blind'...if you didn't....you'd be the only blind person as the third eye-gouge is escalation, not retaliation as they got to go first.
Not the Dostoyevsky kind but the real thing. As I've aged, I have softened on my stance on capital punishment. My moral side feels that some crimes deserve to be met with death, and my rational side see the flaws in the legal system: far too many errors, especially by "eyewitnesses", mandatory minimums, three strikes, unethical prosecutors. Between those two sides I see how many people we lock up (quite a few are innocent, some sentences don't fit the crimes), and wonder why we still have so much crime in comparison to countries less inclined to incarcerate criminals. I'm shocked at what can cost you your life in many places: drug convictions in Indonesia, blasphemy in Saudi Arabia (can't wait to visit!). Are we somehow a more "just" country because we reserve the death penalty for the most "heinous" of crimes? Is our system of justice meant to punish, deter, or both? The advent of execution by lethal injection allowed us to see it as neither cruel nor unusual. Hangings, beheadings, and firing squads are now too barbaric. But as bunny ("Platoon") says "The only worry you got is dying. And if that happens, you won't know about it anyway." Maybe the method of execution is more about the conscience of those asked to carry it out. As a means to deter crime, no one can say for sure whether a criminal has been stopped short of carrying out a crime because of a potential death sentence. It didn't stop Clayton D. Lockett, but that doesn't mean it's not a deterrent. I understand why his victim's family might support this sentence. When I add it all up, however, capital punishment is loosing its appeal (pun intended).
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
You're quoting the guy whose side, had they actually DEALT with Melkor in the beginning...wouldn't have had all those subsequent deaths from multiple wars by his underling. I'd say their hands were drenched in blood through their negligence, and in no position to preach.
Never heard the justice system was to prevent crime. Cops enforce laws, not prevent crimes. Judges weigh over the fate of the caught. Nothing about prevention, beyond any message sent to those that consider committing felonies.
Well, for such a cruel crimes cruel and unusual punishment would be proportional. However there are good arguments for nonetheless not carrying out such punishment.
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
â"The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 2: "The Shadow of the Past"
It is worth the expense of supporting the guilty on death row through the lengthy appeals process if it means avoiding even a single wrongly convicted person being executed.
He was sentenced to death by lethal injection and is dead now because of it. Don't see any issue here...
I have no problem with death penalty but on appeal it becomes beyond any doubt. This tends to extend appeals forever. This is lawyer full employment standard. So I would never vote for death penalty.
If prosecutor or police willfully hid exculpatory evidence they should be tried for attempted murder and get death penalty. This is not a game to be won by any means. They should be held to highest standards.
I support capital punishment but believe a higher standard of proof should be required to impose it.
Perhaps something like "Beyond all rational doubt" rather than "Beyond reasonable doubt" should be required to impose the death sentence. As well, esp. in capital cases, the jury should be instructed about particularly unreliable types of evidence (notably eyewitness identification of those not well known to the witness or in any but ideal lighting conditions) and be instructed not to rely on such evidence unless there is substantial "reliable" evidence to corroborate it.
Many guilty people would be spared the death sentence (instead subject to life imprisonment without possibility of parole) with this higher standard of proof but it would partially address the problem that you can't "undo" an innocent person being executed but, with advancements in science and delayed discovery of evidence or prosecutor misconduct, someone can be released and at least live their remaining life as a free person.
However, I believe we should provide a painless "death" option for anyone sentenced to "life without the possibility of parole" who requests it. This system should include safeguards to prevent rash decisions (such as requiring the request be made once a week for eight consecutive weeks, not considering requests made in the first year or two of incarceration, examination by a shrink or board of shrinks, and allowing the decision to be rescinded at any time but doing so would start a new two year window in which a request would not be considered). Those who are truly guilty and know they are almost certain to never be released might elect this option and it would save them pain and us money.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
...whatever was wrong with the guillotine? Be quick, reliable (a modern one should be), and the gore would sate the bloodlust while preventing anyone from deluding themselves that this is anything other than killing someone.
"Clayton Lockett was tortured to death" GOOD !!!!!
he beat and tortured a young girl, fuck him. good bye you shit stain of a human.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/courts/death-looms-for-clayton-lockett-years-after-killing-oklahoma-teen/article_e459564b-5c60-5145-a1ce-bbd17a14417b.html
Bumper sticker morality should stay on bumper stickers.
So you're saying a justice system shouldn't try to be any better than criminals?
Agree. This is the slippery slope that leads to barbaric systems like Sharia, with stoning for adultery, death for professing belief in other religions, and so on.
Or beating people up because they are different Five Hasidic Jews Arrested for Williamsburg Attack on Gay Man
Or because they don't follow your rules Ultra-Orthodox Israeli couple sparks riot after telling woman to move to the back of a public bus
If they had laws saying that people had to stay at the back of the bus or that they had to be beaten up then you'd have a point
I live in San Francisco, voted for Pelosi and Obama, and am quite liberal. And I fully support the death penalty, and am happy to see this guy off the face of the earth.
Untested? Bet this make them have drug trials now. Where do I sign up? I would think this would be the mother of all drug trial paydays for volunteering!
I didn't see anything to this effect in the more highly moderated comments so far, but I think the real story here isn't that they used "untested" drugs, but the reason WHY they had to use those drugs in the first place. They likely couldn't get the anesthetics that they would normally use, since various European companies who manufacture the bulk of these drugs will no longer sell them to prisons intending to use them for capital punishment.
See, for example, here and here.
The European drug companies have taken anti-capital punishment actions which are resulting in undue suffering of executed inmates while the prisons look for alternatives to the now-unavailable anesthetics. Who shares what portion of blame for what will vary depending on who you ask and what their views on capital punishment are. But, regardless of your ethical viewpoint, the European drug companies are the cause, and stories like this one are the effect, while the parties involved are still adjusting to the new drug-availability situation.
This seems like an incomplete argument. If you're convicted of a crime and not given the death penalty, your prison sentence is likely to be much harsher if you're black than if your white. Should I support closing all prisons? If you're convicted of a crime and fined, you're much more likely to receive a larger fine if you're black than if you're white. Should I support abolishing all fines? It seems to me that it would be logical to support fixing the disparity.
Okay, and what are the total number of convictions for each of those specific types of crimes over the same time period? Those numbers need to be normalized to be comparable. That same page lists a much higher number of white victims than black ones, so it isn't clear whether the data supports your claim.
This site indicates that the rate of Black Defendant / White Victim homicides is ~3-4x of the reverse while the executions are >10x. That does seem to point to a racial bias in executions. Although, that covers all the way back to 1976 (and even earlier convictions). I wonder if those rates would tend to converge if we exclude older data?
Knowledge Brings Fear
"Shoot straight you bastards! Don't make a mess of it."
Have gnu, will travel.
Surely, the best option is to give the criminal a gun after sentencing, and allow them the opportunity to do something useful for society, and blow their own head off... if I was facing life imprisonment, I would like the opportunity to save society millions of wasted dollars.
If they are a pro murderers, they can do a great job on themselves...
what amazes me is that the democrats dont support killing criminals who murder other people, but have no problem killing an unborn child who hasnt had a chance to break the laws. For the record, Im pro death penalty for people who are caught in the act or who show no remorse. im also not against abortions legally eventhough I dont like them morally
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
and how much more could we save by swapping all life sentences to the death penalty and actually follow through and not let people live for 30 years on appeal after appeal?
How much more could we save if we just let all the criminals free!!!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
funny how I just used their site to make an argument above against someone stating that we kill too many people. We have killed around 1300 people since 1976. Id say there are way more than that that should have been killed by now in a country of 400 million
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The method chosen for an execution is not to make it as painless as possible for the victim but its purely for the person who has to do the execution.
If it was for the victim then things like drowning would be done since apparently that is a pretty easy way to go. Its not pretty to look at or to perform.
Executions don't work no criminal fears to be executed and doesn't do his crime for that reason the only way to reduce crime is by increasing the chance of being caught.
Many studies have been done on the subject of capital punishment and harsh sentences and they pretty much all said that it doesn't work rehabilitation works better and like stated above its not a deterrent to the criminal because they don't expect to get caught
vengeance IS justice...just more fun!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I find it hard to believe that no one has looked into execution using Carbon Monoxide. The cost is negligible and the effect inarguable. You feel drowsy, you fall asleep, and you die.
It's so sneaky and lethal, the CDC estimates it killed > 16,000 people in the U.S. in a five year time period alone.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
end of story... and probably with a lost less torture and pain than his victim
This is really stupid, given that hypooxengation is not only a painless way to die, it's reported to be actually pleasant. (This is based on old reports from Air Force pilots with defective oxygen gear. Many survived.)
Just slowly decrease the oxygen levels of the air, and they will not only die, but won't mind a bit.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Frankly I can think of crimes worse than murder. Rape and child molestation for example. I find those crimes to be WAY worse than murder. I can justify murdering rapists and child molesters, i cant justify rape or child molestation
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Less. So let's cap the number of appeals and put a hard limit on how long someone sits on death row before we carry out the deserved punishment.
Any other problems you want me to solve for you?
Not a proponent of the death penalty, but it remains in the U.S. because of 1) retributive justice, in the sense that a victim of a horrible crime's survivors may not receive closure until the threat has been eliminated, and 2) the deterrence factor, that criminals may be less likely to commit crimes where the penalty is death rather than life in prison. Whether these benefits outweigh the costs, or if they are actually beneficial at all, is the debatable aspect. However, simply because certain other countries do not condone the death penalty does not stand to reason why the U.S. should similarly not, without better argumentation. Many other countries do not have well-developed individual rights (e.g. gun ownership, property rights, the right to make informed medical decisions), and so differences in governmental systems can be as much of a boon as a curse.
Frankly I can think of crimes worse than murder. Rape and child molestation for example. I find those crimes to be WAY worse than murder. I can justify murdering rapists and child molesters, i cant justify rape or child molestation
That makes you a democrat. Democrats think rape is such a horrible crime that it justifies murdering an unborn child that was a result of rape (even if most abortions aren't done for that reason, they just can't afford to let one go!)
And child molestation? That's full democrat "think of teh children"
A truly non-democrat position that adheres to the Constitution would be to simply leave it to individuals to defend themselves, and tell the state the fuck off and stop deciding who lives or dies. You have the right to bear arms. USE IT. When every women and child is packing heat, rapists and child molesters will think twice!
And carrying out a death penalty also has it's costs. Take a read of costs death penalty [deathpenaltyinfo.org]. (I may be cherry picking a bit here but) From that article it was estimated that California could save $170 million a year by commuting al death sentences to life in prison.
So do you want to pay more or less taxes?
California makes a really bad example because they don't really like to kill people despite having the death penalty. People sit on death row for decades. A better metric would be a state like Texas that, eventually, follows through with it's execution orders in a more (albiet still very long) timely manner.
Baldus and Woodworth answered a lot of your questions. Case-controlled studies are never perfect, but they're the best evidence we have.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.or...
Two of the country's foremost researchers on race and capital punishment, law professor David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth, along with colleagues in Philadelphia, have conducted a careful analysis of race and the death penalty in Philadelphia which reveals that the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black. These results were obtained after analyzing and controlling for case differences such as the severity of the crime and the background of the defendant. The data were subjected to various forms of analysis, but the conclusion was clear: blacks were being sentenced to death far in excess of other defendants for similar crimes....
Another measure of race's impact on the death penalty is the combined effect of the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. In the Philadelphia study, the racial combination which was most likely to result in a death sentence was a black defendant with a nonblack victim, regardless of how severe the murder committed. Black-on-black crimes were less likely to receive a death sentence, followed by crimes by other defendants, regardless of the race of their victims.
Let me get this straight: using the word "retard" is deplorable, but inhumane treatment of prisoners is A-OK?
fullretard.jpg
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
Fallacious reasoning. Anecdote is not Data.
I am certain the death penalty has acted as a deterrent in some cases. For example kidnappings, where killing the victim would make sense if there was no or little greater penalty.
The fact that one or a few or even many are not deterred does not mean that some or many or more OTHERS are not.
Without arguing the morality of the death penalty, it seems like a deliberate overdose of either would offer a painless death to the recipient.
Given that the death penalty was in existence prior to his crime, yet the perp still did what he did, it seems that the threat of punishment was no deterrent. So if the death penalty is not a deterrent...
That's completely faulty reasoning.
Example: if, in the absense of capital punishment, 63 crimes are committed in Fooland, and in the presense of capital punishment, 50 crimes are committed in Fooland, there has been a definite deterrent effect despite the fact that 50 perps were undeterred.
Those are obviously made-up numbers, but I suspect there is some point at which the size of the deterrent effect would convince everyone to keep capital punishment on the books. For example, if you could choose between
would you not choose (b)?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Those who are convicted of acts like this one and there is no doubt of there guilt should not be executed this way. Why waste of a pefectly good medical research subject.
Presumably, this means that Criminal A destroyed twice as much property breaking in, endangered twice as many people during getaway, had a gun in twice as many people's faces. Sounds fair to me.
Last post!
Seems like a lot of people die from heroin overdose that is self injected. It can't be that painful if people do that to themselves. Why not use heroin overdose for lethal injections?
If you're going to do it, use a BULLET..
Tried and Tested.
I hear that the White House is mortified by this, so hopefully we will soon do this in a much more humane way: via targeted drone strikes, without trial.
The parent poster may or may not have intended it this way, but he actually brings up a good point.
If you commit a capital crime in the US, are tried and convicted for it, and your skin is black, you have a MUCH higher chance of actually being executed for it.
Frankly that fact alone should be enough to rule out capital punishment in the US for the foreseeable future.
In the midst of this shitstorm, you pulled the racism card? Really? Is there NO conversation you agenda-pushers can't derail with your chosen brand of activism?
> A black person who kills a white person is far more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced to death than vice versa.
Those are bad statistics unless we know the base rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
I'm not talking about "right" or "wrong" here. It's just that here our two cultures are so fundamentally different, despite that we share so many values in other contexts.
There is a big difference between life imprisonment and execution that you are missing.
With life imprisonment, it is at least possible for the system to realize a mistake has been made and partially rectify it. It actually happens shockingly often.
Once an execution has been carried out, however, we can no longer even partially rectify the error.
Absolutely we should support fixing the system more generally. But that should not stop us from also declaring a moratorium on capital punishment until that goal is accomplished.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Execution is not about revenge.
Read that page again. The strongest documented discrimination is over the race of the victim:
White Defendant / Black Victim (20) Black Defendant / White Victim (270)
A black person who kills a white person is far more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced to death than vice versa.
Reread it again. That comparison is without relative context, they're not percentages: It's very possible that simply, more blacks are killing white people than white people are killing blacks, resulting in their higher percentage of interracial crime leading to higher instances of executions. The numbers given there do not state out of how many cases total there were, simply that more blacks were executed for killing whites than vice versa.
The solid statistic here is that 43.10% of deathrow inmates are whites, opposed to the lower percentage of 41.71% for blacks, which is contrary to everything you normally hear spouted on TV and newspapers.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
A death-row inmate costs, what, $50-75-100K/yr to house and feed?
The real criminals are the prison industry. Let's say prison is not a standard household and there are guards and such. But they are also living on a very small piece of real estate per person. Going to college is cheaper than going to prison. Money that could be going to provide financial aid to students is being used to house criminals at outrageous rates.
Yup, it seems there's certainly some fairly good evidence to support race playing a significant role in death sentence rates.
I guess the question is now, how do we know when that disparity is fixed? Executions aren't such a common event that statistically significant data can be rapidly compiled (thankfully). And the overall statistics will be slow to change for the same reason. Since it seems you've looked into this more than I have, are there any studies that have looked at this while excluding convictions prior to different dates to see if a trend can be discerned? I would hope we've made some progress since the 70s on that.
Knowledge Brings Fear
Until an autopsy is done there is no way to know if/why a vein burst. It may or may not have anything to do with the lethal injection drugs. The rush to judgment over the drugs is simply a knee jerk reaction by those opposed to the death penalty. It's also worth asking why we have a shortage of the tested drugs. Is it not sue to the anti-death penalty groups harassing drug companies? So they created this problem because they didn't think that some other method would be tried.
Have you actually spent even a second thinking about what you're arguing?
Simple math: Let's take your number - 100k per year per death row inmate. Let's DOUBLE it, to make it even more expensive. 200k per inmate per year. MY GOD, HOW EXPENSIVE!
There are 3,000 people (actually a bit less) on death row in the US, but let's DOUBLE that number, just to make your argument even more powerful. 6,000 people on death row at $200,000 per year in expenses - gosh, that's going to break the bank!
Except it won't. It comes out to 1.2 billion dollars a year to house people on death row. Let's DOUBLE that to 2.4 billion dollars a year just on housing these people.
There are 300 million americans (roughly) but not all of them pay taxes. Mittens got in trouble during the election for saying that 47% don't ever pay taxes, but let's be even more ridiculous - I'm going to say that only 10% of Americans pay income tax. That's 30 million tax payers.
So, 2.4 billion dollars, split by 30 million people... that comes out to.... $80 dollars per year per individual tax payer. Remember, I doubled your estimate of expenses. I doubled the number of people on death row. I doubled the resulting multiplication, and then I took a ridiculously small tax base figure to get to that WHOPPING $80 per year.
What you're saying to me is that $80 per year in your pocket (and it would actually be far, far less) is worth it to you to vastly increase the odds that innocent people will be executed. You're saying to me that you having $80 a year (or about 22 cents a day) is more important than trying to keep the state from murdering innocents or at least reduce the chances of that happening. You're telling me that 22 cents a day (actually a lot less) is more important to you than sparing the families of those wrongly convicted and executed from the anguish of the state run amok.
There's a monster here, but I'm pretty sure it's you.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Capital punishment is retroactive abortion.
> There is a big difference between life imprisonment and execution that you are missing. No, I didn't miss that. That's what I meant by "incomplete." The original statement was this disparity "alone should be enough to rule out capital punishment in the US for the foreseeable future." But that statement missed pointing out why there should be a moratorium on executions compared to a moratorium on prison sentences and fines. It was incomplete.
Except last i looked blacks are 12% of the population, which means the incidence is 4 times what we would expect all else bein equal.
this thread spawn the best and brightest slashdotters indeed...... exactly when a military 'on duty' stops being a murderer in the eyes of victim's family members ? why is that alright? We totally condone murderers in so many situations, I say that the sole judge of the extent of the punishment should be the victim's closest family alone whenever it's possible.... Personally I would favor an incarceration only system.... death penalty is just some dark ages religious shit we should overcome asap....
The question then becomes: do you want to be a good person with a clean conscience, or do you want to inflict a punishment proportional to rape, torture and murder?
You miss a critical factor in your analysis.
People take cues from society, when society says that deliberate killing isn't taboo, but something that's justified in appropriate circumstances, people are going to take the cue. You're normalizing killing and providing rationalizations to potential killers, it would be a hard effect to measure but I'm sure it exists.
I stole this Sig
You mean Texas where it's pretty much a given that they've executed at least one innocent person, and where the governor doesn't care?
Yeah, I think that's probably not the state you want to be using as an example there, unless you're perfectly OK with innocents being murdered by the state run amok just to (maybe) save a few pennies.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I could accept the death penalty if certain conditions are met. I'd have to be convinced that (1) The person was really guilty (2) He had a fair trial (3) Other people who committed the same crime also get the death penalty.
The problem here is (3). Black people are more likely to be executed when they kill a white person. I don't know if there's any current research. You'd need large numbers to break down an association by time series, and they may not have them. I doubt that the country is significantly less racist than it was 30 years ago.
I think that once we've established that there's so much discrimination in the death penalty, the process is hopelessly contaminated. Whenever a black person is executed, you can never be sure that a white person would be executed for the same crime. That violates basic fairness.
If a prosecutor wants to execute somebody, then he has to resolve every possible doubt. If the prosecutor can't eliminate the possibility that the death penalty was imposed because of racism, then he won't convince me it's appropriate.
There are other unfair disparities. The Mahmudiyah killings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... of the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her and her entire family, was about the worst of the worst. The soldiers most directly involved were sentenced to life terms, but none of them was executed. If we didn't execute the Mahmudiyah killers, I can't imagine how anyone could be executed.
Wealth is a disparity. Many millionaires have clearly committed murder, but no millionaire has ever been executed in the U.S.
Generally speaking, the people on death row have been convicted of horrible crimes. I do have some dostoyevskian sympathy for them, but I have much more sympathy for their victims. When I think of the crimes that Lockett and Warner in Oklahoma probably committed, their execution bothers me a lot less. When I think of the crimes the soldiers at Mahmudiyah committed, their execution would bother me a lot less too.
But you can't convince me that it's right to execute somebody because he's black when you don't execute somebody who committed an equally horrible crime because he's white. And that seems to be happening.
People OD on heroin all the time. Why is this execution business so complicated?
Someone must be making money is why.
All else being equal, I'd rather extra money be spent determining someone's guilt or innocence, rather than incarcerating them. If people sentenced to death by incarceration received the same scrutiny as those facing death by lethal injection, then it would cost more to put someone in jail and throw away the key than to execute them.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Then why are we differentiated grand theft from petty theft, eh?
I do believe in the death penalty, and always have. I understand that there is a statistical chance of errors in trials that take place and unfortunately innocent prisoners suffer a great injustice. But let's stop for a moment and consider a few scenarios.
Sometimes the innocent are railroaded and/or the system designed to give someone a fair day in court is corrupted/flawed. In the cases of corruption it is those that corrupt the system, for what ever reason they try to justify, who should suffer the same fate as the innocent. As stated, this is about 4% of death row inmates.
But this also means that 96% of the time! the system works and the guilty are punished according to the laws of the state(s) they committed the crime in. In the case of murder, there will never likely be an even playing field, because no two people lived the exact same lives, under the exact same circumstances, nor committed the exact same crime.
This will sound cold-hearted to many of you on this forum, but as an honest, law abiding (doesn't mean I agree the laws are right) citizen, who has worked hard all my life, slowly earning and saving, it am tired of financially supporting people who CHOOSE to break the law. As a citizen, I believe in a right to a fair trial, and I believe if everything was done by the book, and the presumed guilty are found guilty, then let the punishment fit the crimes. In the case of murder, I believe it is fair to inflict the death penalty and within a max of one year from the original conviction. I don't agree with multiple appeals situation, one appeal and if still found guilty then the guilty should NOT linger on death row for years/decades. Justice is not being served, to the prisoner found to be guilty, to the victim's family, and to the tax payers. This is not about greed folks, it is about what is right and fair to those of us who CHOSE to stay out of trouble.
Finally, the prisoner found guilty of murder, should be killed in the same exact manner as the victim(s). In the case of too many different methods to choose from, choose the one that is deemed as the worst and administer that form of punishment.
For those of you who support life in prison, feel free to go ahead and pay more taxes to support your cause, put your money where your mouth is, but until then, please stop making me have to pay the financial price for someone else's poor choices.
How can something be cruel and unusual when the person it is being used on has shown by their own actions that killing another by horrific means, isn't unusual for them? I say, douse them with gasoline and light them up and have a marshmallow roast with them supplying the heat to celebrate the world without them in it.
Perhaps we can't rectify the error of executing an innocent man.
But we can discourage and mitigate fast positives.
The solution is to execute the judge and prosecutor of any case that shows an innocent person was executed by the state.
I think there was Star Trek episode or well-knwn science fiction that advocated such an approach. Keeps the system honest.
They won't make the same mistake twice, and they're less likely to make it in the first place, because the consequences of doing so are critically personal.
Put some skin in the game - gives you pause for thought instead of letting your rage take control.
I'm sure I will get an argument that "All the appeals that death row inmates use before being put to death cost more than just imprisoning them for life!" Maybe if we cleaned up our unnecessarily exhaustive legal process that has basically become a job program this wouldn't be an issue.
The reason why the legal process is "unnecessarily exhaustive" is to minimize the chances of executing an innocent (and even then, apparently, we're still not all that good at it). If you get rid of it, then you're murdering that much more people for something they didn't do.
Ultimately, that's the biggest flaw in your argument. We do get value out of letting those monsters live for the rest of their lives - that value is the lives of people who are exonerated while they serve their sentence.
So who friggen cares how he died. I'd prefer that he got disemboweled while alive. Another idea I had was for these criminals becoming human lab rats to pay for their crimes. My and my wife debate this issue all the time. She's against any form of execution... Not me. There needs to be some form of deterrent. I
You listed three points, A, B, and C, as if they are equally considerable. On the contrary, the ONLY thing that matters is A (the fact that innocents will be murdered), which cleanly voids the possibility that a government -- ANY government -- can possibly employ a death penalty while reamaining moral and just. All it takes is ONE innocent killed, and POOF -- there goes the possibility that government is doing this for the benefit of innocents (which is of course the underlying justification).
have grreat
Which logical fallacy was it where you stand up a situation and then silently remove a piece of that situation? You've claimed "appropriate situations", and then removed the concept.
It *is* appropriate to kill in self-defense where other alternatives are significantly less profitable. If you have a 90% likelihood of death in self-defense by non-lethal means and a 90% likelihood of survival by applying lethal self-defense, it is more profitable to apply lethal self-defense. You are not morally obligated to take a severe risk of death to avoid harming a man who is trying to kill you and has damn good chance of succeeding.
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He suffered less than his victim did.
F*ck you, that's why.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
So, in an attempt to be humane, and not allow it's drugs to kill people, and try to influence our country's penal system.. Foreign manufacturers of the drugs that would have killed him painlessly were not available. So this suffering (which, as long as he was guilty, doesn't bother me one little bit) was actually caused by some feel-good, do-gooder liberal. Nice.
Vengeance is not justice, if you only seek to inflict the same pain on others, why then shouldn't someone else be able to inflict the same pain on you, you're causing them the same amount of pain. Justice is making right what has been done, and making someone suffer isn't justice, as he isn't going to learn from the suffering, nor will anyone else. The death penalty is supposed to be a deterrent, which if people were rational would make sense, however there is no rational thought in most murder.
This guy had a girl shot and thrown into a shallow grave alive and buried alive. What about the girl he had shot and buried alive. I'm all broke up over his painful heart attack. I say bring back hangings, firing squads and beheadings. These are three methods we know work and work fast without pain.
Paul E. Bahre
Even with those "exhaustive" legal processes we still have a rate of about 4% of wrongful convictions on executed inmates. That means 4 out of 100 people are dying for a crime they did not commit. While I'm generally a good of the many, I'd have to say this is one of the cases where the good of the few outweighs the needs of the many, specifically because it affects everyone.
Why assume all else is equal? You refuse to acknowledge the possibility that more blacks kill whites than vice versa, regardless of population, because .. let me guess, that sounds racist? I'm just looking at the numbers. Think about how many of these murders are committed by gangs, like the Bloods and the Crips for example, or for that matter, MS-13, though that's latino. The vast majority of gang members are minorities. It's not an improbable scenario. Though they kill even more of themselves probably than non gang members.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Baldus and Woodworth answered a lot of your questions. Case-controlled studies are never perfect, but they're the best evidence we have.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.or...
Two of the country's foremost researchers on race and capital punishment, law professor David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth, along with colleagues in Philadelphia, have conducted a careful analysis of race and the death penalty in Philadelphia which reveals that the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black. These results were obtained after analyzing and controlling for case differences such as the severity of the crime and the background of the defendant. The data were subjected to various forms of analysis, but the conclusion was clear: blacks were being sentenced to death far in excess of other defendants for similar crimes....
Another measure of race's impact on the death penalty is the combined effect of the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. In the Philadelphia study, the racial combination which was most likely to result in a death sentence was a black defendant with a nonblack victim, regardless of how severe the murder committed. Black-on-black crimes were less likely to receive a death sentence, followed by crimes by other defendants, regardless of the race of their victims.
I guess that Americans are lower than savages. Savages rarely killed to defend themselves from the white men who stole their lands, white men who gave them alcohol, and stole their wives, white men who killed their children, white men who gave them diseases. Ever so rarely did they kill for revenge, but good Christian believers believe in revenge by death.
you talk as if the injection was deliberately formulated to cause pain
sentence to life or death, either way we're talking away the man's life, the least you can do is be honest about it.
"Man dies in botched execution"
How about what vets use? Are humans somehow different?
You think we passed a bunch of bullshit laws to trick innocent people into committing felonies as a conspiracy to keep the jails full? How then do you explain all the early release stuff where the state leans on the prison to let convicts walk to balance out the population numbers? You got it ass backwards, and i'd like to see just one example of these "railroading" felony laws forcing innocent citizens into prison to fill quotas.
If you put that on a bumper sticker, you'd make millions.
If this is torture than I got tortured when I broke my arm playing baseball as a kid.
Torture requires intent and deliberate action, this had neither, even if you use the version where intent is disproven rather than proven you don't have a case.
They set out to kill the guy clean and quickly with every reason to believe this would be the case. It wasn't. Shit happens. Once they knew they had a bad batch they didn't stick the other guy and thats about all they could do. While there may be cause to look into tightening the quality control of their distributors There was no cruelty in this beyond the philosophical sort life tends to have all on its own.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/1400-lifers-released-from-california-prisons-in-last-3-years/
its also exactly what DIDN'T happen here.
I wasn't trying to discuss whether the death penalty should be used or not, just whether it is being fairly implemented. And it appears that historically it has not been. That does raise the question of whether that problem continues today. If unfair sentencing is continuing or getting worse, we probably should suspend all executions until we can resolve the issue. But the data only indicates a historic issue, not necessarily a current, worsening, one.
I think this is one of the key disagreements:
I doubt that the country is significantly less racist than it was 30 years ago
In my opinion, societal attitudes toward race have changed a lot in the last 30 yrs. And those changes likely have some impact on the apparent racial discrimination in the application of capital punishment. To what extent? I have no idea, I can't find any data to (in)validate that hypothesis.
Knowledge Brings Fear
Which logical fallacy was it where you stand up a situation and then silently remove a piece of that situation? You've claimed "appropriate situations", and then removed the concept.
It *is* appropriate to kill in self-defense where other alternatives are significantly less profitable. If you have a 90% likelihood of death in self-defense by non-lethal means and a 90% likelihood of survival by applying lethal self-defense, it is more profitable to apply lethal self-defense. You are not morally obligated to take a severe risk of death to avoid harming a man who is trying to kill you and has damn good chance of succeeding.
I should have been more specific, war, self-defence, and apprehension of felons are sanction methods of state killing, but execution is a new category entirely. Execution is killing for punishment, justice, or revenge, surely there's a non-trivial category of murders where the killer feels wronged by the victim and is seeking punishment, justice, or revenge. I've no doubt that the state declaring those are valid motives for killing helps provides moral justification for some murders.
I stole this Sig
True, but I think the basic point still applies.
"You can't use that drug cocktail on a human because they haven't been tested on a human."
I don't read all the studies, but I do notice a few of them.
The NAEP, which is the best data on educational achievement, found that the gap between black and white scores on reading and math are narrowing. I suppose that's an accomplishment.
But there's still a lot of racism. For example, in New York City, where I live, I followed the stop and frisk laws. There was detailed, convincing testimony in the court case, which the judge summarized in her opinion (which was a story on Slashdot).
Police used to stop men on the street, with no cause for arrest, and search them illegally. If the men protested, the police would rough them up and arrest them. The facts were clear. Cops got caught on tape. They were clearly targeting black men. They were giving black men misdemeanor convictions.
The final proof was that the Wall Street Journal editorial page had opinion pieces, many of them written by the Manhattan Institute, arguing that police should be stopping black men more often than white men, because black men were more often involved in crime. So there was open support for a deliberately racist policy.
And this is just my own personal experience, but last night I was in a fast-food diner in Times Square. A black man came in. A drunken white woman was sitting at a table, and when she saw the black man, she said, "You get out!" The counterman backed her up, and the black man left. It turned out that neither the woman nor the counterman had ever seen the black man before. This is in Manhattan in 2014. Sure she was drunk. But this is what black men have to put up with.
So I click into this article hoping to get some discussion about the medical specifics of what went wrong and how.
All I find instead is a sea of politics and name calling. Why do I even bother with this site anymore?
You open an interesting philosophical point: where the state fails to execute a murderer, a man may forfeit his life to state execution by carrying justice by his own hand. On principle in the ideal case, I don't have a problem with this; we all know Samuel L. Jackson doesn't.
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Say Phil from gang A is murdered, and his friend Bob is certain that Frank from gang B did it. Do you think that Bob is justified in killing Frank?
I stole this Sig
So do you want to pay more or less taxes?
That is what I kept telling conservative friends about mandatory health insurance (Obamacare): do you want to pay for the uninsured people to get service from an expensive emergency room, or do you want to pay for regular preventative care, non-emergency care, for the uninsured? Because either way we are going to subsidize health insurance for the poor, so long as we legally mandate that ER's must take care of anyone.
This whole issue is ridiculous. Look, I'm not going to get into the moral debate over capital punishment. What's ridiculous is how people can't seem to figure out how to kill someone efficiently, humanely, and without drama.
Forget all this "lethal injection" nonsense. Just go with nitrogen suffocation. It's cheap, you get drowsy, you fall asleep, and you don't wake up. End of life, end of drama. Done. Christ, you'd think this was difficult like calculating the orbit of a mars probe or something....
Yes. I believe that we could greatly reduce the number of executions by requiring the governor
who signs the death warrant to pull the trigger. I believe we might thus discovered that W actually
*did* have some compassion in his "conservatism."
Those who got the old drugs taken off the market are responsible. Now this group are now complaining about problems with the new drugs? Also who do you propose as subjects to test these drugs?
It's hard to argue with someone who disagrees on such a fundeental point. However, I always thought Tolkein (through Gandalf) put it quite well:
I don't know if you're joking or not, but in either case, I still think you and just about everyone else in this forum ... supposedly used by intelligent people .... are, well, basically a bunch of overblown, windbag opinionists who have nothing better to do than spout bullshit like a whale blows water.
Law is not flawless.
Punishment isn't always dealt to the guilty.
People, generally, are the cruelest animals to walk this planet.
Ice cream melts in the heat.
Dogs sometimes bite.
Tomcats sometime spray.
Educated idiots rarely seem to 'get it' when discussing something as ridiculous as a penalty that equal numbers of people agree with, and disagree with.
And lastly - politicians, judges, lawyers, and just about every convenience store and hamburger joint manager have God complexes that compel them to do the job they think they're doing.
In Oklahoma they took a convicted killer, who admitted as much, and put him on a gurney, strapped him down, shoved a needle in his arm, and either the drugs or his shit-crazy fear of what was happening caused him to 'blow a vein.'
No matter what, he got what he deserved - the carrying out of his sentence.
One less criminal with a chance of someday, somehow, being set free to possibly do more harm to a defenseless victim.
Case closed .... all this 'discussion' on the who, what, where, why and how scenarios are basically a moot point.
Spout on you silly whales .... spout on.
I've stood on both sides of this debate in my lifetime. After seeing both sides, I can only conclude that the debate is fallacious.
You can argue for or against the death penalty. Reasonable arguments exist on both sides. The problem that we are actually trying to resolve, without actually identifying, is whether or not the justice system is fair. Put bluntly, it is not.
There are open and shut cases where reputable witnesses can testify that a crime occurred. Unfortunately, far too many crimes are without irrefutable evidence. When you start jailing innocents, and turn jails into storage facilities for non-violent offenders, you have broken the idea of justice.
For a moment, consider two men. Same race, age, and approximate location. One is a bank manager, and the other is barely getting by on a minimum wage part-time job. When the later man steals a car to fence for money, he is sent to prison. When the former man steals millions of dollars to fuel a lavish lifestyle they are also sent to prison. The reasonable person says the car thief gets a much smaller sentence, because the value of the theft is smaller. People familiar with the US justice system will reject this idea, and tell you the banker goes to a white collar daycare facility, while the car thief goes to a real prison. All of this is predicated upon white collar crime being "cleaner." I don't buy it.
The same is true on death row. There are innocent people there, along with the guilty. When the day comes that an innocent is executed, then by our own rules we are murderers. Who then remains to carry out our executions? Surely not the prosecutors, who may have lied to earn a conviction. Surely not anyone who supports the death penalty. Finally, surely not anyone who believes in justice.
My tax money may go to keeping some of this scum alive, but alive and guilty is something I can live with. Dead and innocent is unacceptable, if we are ever to call ourselves true purveyors of justice.
Educated white sociopaths tend to become CEOs, who can kill hundreds or thousands at a time and get off scot free.
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In peaceful suburbs with low justifiable homicide rates, state action is the dominating outcome to murder; execution becomes a looming, subconscious threat.
There's scant evidence that this is in fact true. Murder in these settings are almost all crimes of passion. There's no "subconcious" threat to evaluate.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. We tend to not commit crimes due to an internalised moral compass given to us both by birth and upbringing. We tend to stay on the straight and narrow because that's the right thing to do, not because we consciously or otherwise perform a running cost-benefit analysis. (In fact, society wouldn't nearly work if that were true.) We as a species don't want to kill members of our own species, and will go to some lengths to avoid that.
There's indeed strong evidence to this as studied in the field of killology, i.e. the study of how to make men kill each other. It turns out that training a killer is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Quoting a marine corps sergeant "One man in eighty is a natural killer. The rest we have to teach!" (Which I note corresponds nicely with the prevalence rates of psychopathy.) And it's illustrative to learn how this process is carried out. Not with moral guidance on the "rightness of killing" (which would be wholly superfluous under your model, people would just subconsciously evaluate that it's no "OK" to kill, and be done with it), but instead by instilling the automatic somatic reflex to take certain action that will result in the likely death of your opponent.
Stefan Axelsson
There's scant evidence that this is in fact true. Murder in these settings are almost all crimes of passion. There's no "subconcious" threat to evaluate.
So, because people will not execute premeditated murder where the dominant threat is state execution, you conclude that murder in such a situation is a crime of passion?
The situation you described seems to set a threshold: people fear state execution and so do not commit murder; they must experience a state of passion strong enough to override this deeply-ingrained threat before they will commit murder.
We have crimes of passion in ghettos with a murder rate of 10 per day, too (we had that in Baltimore City for a few weeks--double-digit daily murders). "Fuck you man you cock sucking nigger" "WHAT? *BULLET* WHAT NOW MOTHERFUCKER?!" Instant murder. And yet in other places, it takes much more to tip the scales.
We tend to stay on the straight and narrow because that's the right thing to do, not because we consciously or otherwise perform a running cost-benefit analysis.
Everything you do is run through established facts in the basal ganglia. Your "Moral compass" and your well-accepted fact that the police will come and get you and put you in the chair are the same thing. Immediately reject the idea that people make "Conscious decisions", because we hardly do.
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By "Certain" do you mean he has reason to estimate this with perceived certainty, or that he saw it happen or otherwise has concrete, irrefutable evidence to the fact?
In the latter case, it is difficult to argue against.
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Chased by topless women off a cliff.
So once Bob kills Frank is Joe from gang B justified in killing Bob? You've basically just endorsed gang wars not dissimilar to the ones destroying some inner cities.
I stole this Sig
I didn't say it was readily easy to argue for, just that it was difficult to argue against.
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Well I just gave the argument, that justification is a sliding slope that can very easily lead to a cycle of violence. That's why I think it's wise to ban capital punishment.
When someone asks under what circumstances of revenge, justice, or punishment it's appropriate to take a life, we can simply answer none.
I stole this Sig
Ah. Sliding slope is not a fallacy in all cases, but it is here. You're using an undistributed middle: all murder is taking life, all state execution is taking life, therefor all state execution is murder. Yours: state execution is execution for justice, mob justice is execution for justice, therefor state execution sanctions mob justice.
The problem is state execution operates under due process--a legal system which carries consequences--while mob justice operates under no such thing. Mob justice may create a cycle of violence, but it is hard to argue that the actions are themselves individually or wholly unjust. Legal justice adds due process and obstructions to the cycle, creating a more stable system.
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Mob justice has a process. The claim isn't that state execution is a valid justification for mob justice, it's that it's a justification at all.
Potential killers look for ways to justify their actions, even if they're poor justifications they'll still use them. Say execution is only just when done under due process by the state they'll rationalize that it means some deliberate killings are just and moral, therefore their murder is as well. State that deliberate killing is never just, that justification becomes much harder, killing is less normalized, and a few lives may be saved.
I stole this Sig
I thought he died after an hour?
Something else I've wondered about is why, if we believe these people are the worst of the worst, we don't use them as case studies in psychoanalysis/physiology. Sure, few might be willing to participate (any number of offered privileges could be used as incentive, though), and even if they do it wouldn't be an ideal situation (if the examiner/pshrink could even be in the same room, they'd be surrounded by guards and/or council, likely), but they could so provide valuable insight into human development that might allow us to recognize these kind of people at an earlier stage and get them proper help.
Could well be that the people our society are so interested in killing are worth more to us alive than dead.
And despite all the long prison terms, death penalties, and all the alleged "deterrents", our crime rates our still worse than many of our European counterparts that don't employ these methods. Prison isn't much of a deterrent anymore; since the crime record essentially removes any chance of prisoners getting a decent job that they can feel good about, most likely a return to crime would result.
I highly doubt that most of the victims would enjoy the justice system exacting society's vengeance, either.
There is a big difference between life imprisonment and execution that you are missing.
Considering that guilty people often commit suicide to prevent themselves from facing life imprisonment, I'd say that's not as big a difference as you make it out to be.
This is what happened when someone bury someone alive...it's called Karma, and I hope the hell he suffered and now he can rot in hell!
Let's use them
K. S. Kyosuke: You've been called out (for tossing names) & you ran "forrest" from a fair challenge http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
there's something called the Constitution. It consists of more than just the Second Amendment. And it says in no uncertain terms that "cruel and unusual punishment" is no bueno.