Romantic is hardly the word. Maybe dramatic.
The death penalty is horrible, and is a horrible mistake. It's not even punishment, because death is something that happens to everyone.
What if instead of the death penalty we gave the prisoner 50 years of pain? That would be torture, and we would forbid it, because it would be uncivilized. But the death penalty is equally uncivilized.
Nevertheless, if we had to choose between giving someone the death penalty vs 50 years of pain, 50 years of pain might actually make more sense. People commit capital crimes frequently, because they don't really care if they live or die. But they would care a lot more if they faced 50 years of pain.
If the pain is enough to make them scream, and we show them screaming on TV, that might motivate a lot of would-be criminals to change their minds.
Of course I'm a barbarian to even suggest such a thing. But what I'm really saying is that you're a barbarian to even suggest capital punishment, because it's just as bad, if not worse, compared to 50 years of pain.
The only possible justification for capital punishment is that we lack the resources to keep the prisoner confined. But we spend more on the capital punishment legal process than it would cost us to keep them locked up forever. So that justification is false, and there is no other justification left. It's simply barbaric, and horribly stupid.
What do we destroy with capital punishment? The criminal is already locked up forever, so we aren't stopping any more crimes. What we really destroy is all the knowledge that criminal has of other crimes we will never solve because capital punishment destroys that knowledge. We also make it impossible to punish the criminal, or to motivate other criminals not to do the same crimes. You can't punish a dead man. And one more thing we destroy is any chance that we might discover the crime was committed by someone else and make things right for the wrongly convicted.
If they were sentenced to 50 years of torture, they would at least have a chance, that someone might discover they were wrongly convicted and someone else actually did the crime, a long time before those 50 years were up.
The fact that this makes sense shows you just how barbaric capital punishment really is.
2007-01-14 23:47:02
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answer #2
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answered by x4294967296 6
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There is no such thing as romance when referring to criminal activity or its punishment. Nor is there romance in war, adultery, or cruelty. Get those notions out of your mind.
What you need is to understand the absolute necessity of the "dirty" jobs which must be done. They are not romantic; they are necessary. Revenge is terrible. Justice is good. It is always a sad time when someone must be executed. Sadness does not lessen the necessity, but make no mistake that it is not a time for fun or romance.
2007-01-14 23:36:30
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answer #3
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answered by Jack 7
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