Is it really humane not to kill someone for a capital crime?

Question

Think about it in this way, if your given the death penalty it's over and done with, your slate is clean. If you go to prison for life and they let you out after 30-40 years what kind of life will you have? "When they send you to prison for life, that's exactly what they take. The part that counts anyway." quoted of Red from Shawshank Redemption. In my humble opinion it would be better to execute someone. That is pretty much what you have done anyway by letting them stay in prison that long. Think what your life would be like if you were seperated from a normal society for that length of time. What could you possibly have to offer when you come out at age 60? How would you survive? Everyone you knew is either dead or forgot about you long ago. What kind of hell would that be?

you all make several good points however you still havent answered the original question, you simply have made counterpoints. But since were on the subject how does life in prison deter a murderer as opposed to a death sentence, here is the murderer's possible logic. HMM gee i kill someone, maybe your mother and all there gonna do is put in prison, where i can get a free education, watch cable tv, get 3 meals a day, and they can try to rehabilitate me. So what's the downside?????

Answer 1

Yes it is almost unimaginable, isn't it. You know the slang phrase "a fate worse than death"? And I am thinking of Joan of Arc who said she'd rather die than be locked up in a dungeon without sight of birds and nature, and the English authorities accepted her choice and executed her.

But I have known a man who was on Death Row in the States and got it changed to Life Without Parole on a technicality. Believe you me he was glad of the change, even though it means 45 years locked up. The problem is that in the US they don't just kill you a week after a death sentence, you first spend about ten years in a high-tech dungeon in utterly uncivilized conditions. My friend was in a 6 foot by 8 cell for 23 hours a day with a fellow-inmate whom he couldn't stand and who played loud junk-"music" endlessly, and with no air-conditioning. He could just see the sun when it was high in the sky by squatting on the floor and squinting out the top right hand corner of his barred window. And the view from that window? Nothing but concrete. And the rules there, you cannot have human touch contact, not even with your mother or sister or children or any outsider, not even in your last hour before execution. No, dear questioner, death sentence as it really is in the US is not humane.

At least after his transfer to Life W/o, he was in a normal prison with normal human contact and light and exercise and could veto his cellmate.

The only real way forward would be to require a killer to live for 10-15 years with a few really good people who volunteered to accept him/her, with sane protection for themselves and to prevent escape, to do deeds that served the community (reparation) in general or else the bereaved in particular (at the choice of the bereaved), with no access of course to drugs and guns, and to change through their example and caring and with the help of counselling (= psychotherapy). There are a few killers who are psychopaths who may be unresponsive to such an approach but it would work with most others.

Answer 2

You must either be very compassionate or very jaded, I don't know which.

What if you were to wrongly convict someone who is innocent? Today, DNA has proved about 80+ prisoners were wrongly convicted and they were let go. You cannot bring back a person after you kill them. People lie all the time, cops and witnesses, and those with faulty memories, too. Over-zealous prosecutors often keep evidence that would acquit someone accused of a crime for their own personal agenda (hidden prejudices, biases) and/or for the mere sake of staking notches on the "win" column, which only leads to the real criminal being out in the streets committing other crimes. Perhaps some new invention will come along to weed out the innocent among the guilty in a few years...?

How many innocent men and women have been executioned we will never know; investigations do not continue once someone is found guilty or executioned... and how many guilty criminals have gotten away while an innocent person has been executioned or imprisoned we'll also never know.

I remember about 30 or so years ago reading about an old, old man in his 80s being released after spending about 60+ years in prison; his accuser a white woman dying of cancer, confessed on her deathbed that she thought her boyfriend got her pregnant many years before, and a poor innocent Black man was apprehended, and the cops encouraged her to say it was him... she repeatedly told the prosecutor that she "didn't think it was him" but was wrongly convicted, sentenced to life, and he spent his whole youth behind bars, losing his young wife and children, who died, along with all his relatives except a grandniece who took him in so he could spend the few remaining years in peace; he expressed relief for being alive and for having been proved innocent. The state convicted an innocent man but it did not kill an innocent man!

Answer 3

You seem to be very passionate on your belief, and I can relate to that. On the other hand, regardless of the capital crime that had been committed bad enough for the death penalty, I think about the actual person who has to administer the drug that kills. Put yourself in this person's shoes; could you honestly make a living out of legally killing people? As for killing off the lifers, I would agree, except that if our society killed off everyone who deserved it, golfers would have to give up their golf courses, because our society would need LOTS of land space to bury all of them!

Answer 4

I don't believe in the death penalty. However, I don't see we bother trying to prevent some criminals - psycho child killers from committing suicide. It might be a cop-out to be dead instead of imprisoned but who cares? Let them kill themselves, get creamated, the ashes buried in manure, and forget they ever existed.