What is your opinion of the Death Penalty?

Question

1. Do you think every state should adopt it? OR
2. Do you think it should be abolished totally?

Perhaps a compromise:

3. It should only be used for specific crimes; heinous, extremely violent murder, especially where the victims are young children, the elderly or subjected to torture.

4. And for acts of war and terror (Sept 11, Oklahoma bombing, Embassy bombings)

There is always a danger about life terms, because there may come a time, long after the dust has settled and the crimes mere statistics, that these offenders maybe released for 'good behaviour'.

Let me give an example, in 1981 Timothy Buss was convicted of rape and murder of 5 yr old girl in Illinois, and sentenced to 25yrs to life. In 1993, he was released on parole.

In 1995, he raped and stabbed a 9yr old boy over 50 times. He was sentenced to death. However in 2003, outgoing and crooked Governor, George Ryan, cleared death row and commuted all sentences to life or lower.

Buss had his sentenced commuted to life. Now if years from now, another less strict Governor decides to grant a pardon or Buss convinces the Parole Board, what are the chances, he would kill children again?
Especially when he was already scheduled to die.

With prisons overcrowding, staff shortages and rising costs, all it takes is a small mix-up, lapse of judgement, a long passage of time or a more sympathetic Governor, for a convicted murderer to be allow back into society.

Whilst I do not fully agree with the death penalty, I also know that there will always be certain hardcore criminals (murderers), who can never, or will never change.

They cannot be allowed to mingle with society.
Unless there are foolproof procedures and checks, to ensure that they will never leave prison, then the death penalty is the only appropriate punishment for people like Timothy Buss.

Answer 1

3 and 4 plus for all rapists and child molesters

it DEFINATELY stops recidivism

And it IS a deterrent.

All I ever hear is that it's not a deterrent and that recidivism rates are too high.

Obviously people who say it's not a deterrent's argument falls apart when you look at the high recidivism rate.

It is a deterrent. Liberals just don't want to have to make moral calls because they want to say that there is no good and evil and there is no right and wrong. Probably because that would stop their abortion industry dead.

Answer 2

No, because justice is not perfect, and a few innocent people will be executed.

Many people involved in the criminal justice system know this. Consider the fact that Governor George W. Bush didn't allow DNA testing of death row prisoners and neither is the current Alabama governor. There's only one reason. They were afraid the results would exonerate a few men who were about to be put to death, and that this would undermine the death penalty, a law that they would like to keep on the books because it is politically popular.

http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/904.php

DNA evidence, unfortunately isn't available in some cases, but the cases where it has freed death row inmates prove the point that there are innocent men on death row.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=2049

In the US there are 51 criminal codes, and some states will use the death penalty more or less often than other states. When a state begins executing prisoners, it's always the most heinous ones first such as serial murders John Wayne Gacy and Theodore Bundy. Over time, they begin executing convicts for less heinous crimes.

I think war criminals and terrorists should be kept in jail for life, powerless and humiliated. Let them see how their movement or their regime failed and how their ideas were rejected and reviled over time. They may also reveal new details. Consider the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh. Many people believe he had an accomplice who helped him detonate the truck. McVeigh got religious and began to talk toward the end about himself and his philosophy. He may only have been a step away from revealing the names of conspirators.

Dan W's argument and facts are flawed. The men who committed the Connecticut murders had not previously been convicted of a violent offense. Dan W's scheme would only work if we extended the death penalty to more crimes or to repeat offenders. Jail terms can be enhanced for recidivism. Each state can have a life sentence for murder where "life" means natural life, without parole, ever.

Answer 3

I'm not happy about the way government has been using it. Too inaccurate and apparently misused because of bias. There are people I'm not willing to share the planet with. Ted Bundy, Adolph Hitler, John Wayne Gacy. Joe Stalin. My inclination is to change it so the government does not have the option, but the representatives of the victims do. I.E. the convicted is locked in a cell and they have the right to visit. Outside the cell is a loaded gun, and a pile of bricks and mortar. Their choice, no questions asked.

Answer 4

I'm not interested in deterring crime with the death penalty. I'm interested in preventing crime with the death penalty. Too often, people who commit heinous crimes get out of prison on overcrowding programs or good behavior release. They end up killing someone else who needlessly dies at the hands of someone who should never have been let out in the first place.

This happened around the 4th of July in Connecticut. A doctor, his wife and two daughters were at home asleep when two intruders entered their home, knocked the doctor into a coma, then proceeded to rape and murder his wife and his two young daughters. He awoke to a messed up world. The perpetrators? Two idiots with a list of violent priors a mile long who would not have been running around free to do this had they been put to death instead of being put in prison, only to be let out on some parole program due to overcrowding or compassion for the poor locked-up souls.

To hell with the deterrence question, the punishment question and the morally right or wrong question. I'm opting for a stand on simple public safety.

Answer 5

According to the Supreme Court, the death penalty is supposed to serve two purposes: as a deterrent and as a retributive tool. If it fails either of those, then it's unconstitutional because it is cruel and unusual, in derrogation of the 8th Amendment. Following that logic, the Court has found the death penalty to be cruel and unusual as applied to:

1) offenses short of murder/treason (e.g. rape in Coker v. Georgia, because of the disproportionate relationship between the punishment and the crime);
2) mandatory death sentences not allowing for consideration of mitigating factors (Woodson v. North Carolina), again because of the possible disproportionate punishment;
3) accomplices in murder cases who did not actually kill, attempt to kill, or intend to kill anyone (Edmund v. Florida), again because of disproportionality;
4) insane people (Ford v.Wainwright) because no punishment will deter an insane person from doing something;
5) mentally retarded persons (Atkins v. Virginia) because they by definition are incapable of making reasoned decisions and thus not likely to be deterred by the death penalty; and
6) juveniles (Roper v. Simmons) for similar reasons as in #5.

In my opinion, the death penalty is only capable of serving a retributive purpose: it's ability to deter future conduct is overblown. If it actually deterred people from doing horrible things, then Texas wouldn't have any more murders and Massachusetts would be teeming with serial killers.

The fact of the matter is that there will always be someone who -- for whatever reason -- does horrible things to other people. If someone mutilated a person I cared about, I would certainly want to mutilate them right back. Would the spectre of the death penalty be what stops me from doing that? No. I wouldn't do it because I couldn't do it. Some people could.

That's exactly why we have a government: so that we don't live under martial law with people running around committing unchecked acts of vigilante justice. The fact that we go through the charade of a trial and let some anonymous prison guard flip the switch doesn't mean that we have any less blood on our hands than if we had torn the person to bits on our own. We can anesthetize and sanitize it as much as we want: we used to have public executions in this country, with much more violent methods of execution. But WHAT we do hasn't changed, even though HOW we do it has become more "palatable".

What, then, makes us so different from the people we execute? Other than the fact that our acts are motivated by revenge guised as "justice" and their motivations are often incomprehensible or unfathomable? What does the death penalty solve? It doesn't solve crime. It doesn't bring back the victim, nor does it fill the hole left by their death.

As for the person before me who argued that he thinks the death penalty will prevent future crimes by the defendant, that's true: if you kill someone, they can't commit any more crimes. However, the alternative to the death penalty (juries have to be given an alternative when faced with the decision to sentence someone to death) is generally LWOP (life without parole), so they won't get out anyway. If they decided to commit another murder, they'd have to do it in prison during the one hour a day (maximum) that they are out of their cells. My guess is that you wouldn't have a problem with them offing other prisoners as you seem so keen on doing it yourself.

Answer 6

1. Yes
2. No
3. Any capital crimes
4. Yes, of course


My opinion of the death penalty: It isn't used any where near often enough these days. We need to eliminate alot of the lengthy appeals process. To heck with "compromise". We don't need some bleeding-heart garbage determining our criminal justice system.

Hang 'em High!

Answer 7

I support the death penalty for a few specific crimes. But to be impossed there must be sufficient forensic evidence that would on it's merit would convict. Video, audio,chemical and biological facts and science will be needed to convict.

Answer 8

Well seeing how prison is such a great deterence to crime, I think each state should have the right to kill the most violent and heinous of criminals.

Answer 9

It would be better to abolish and instead use proven murderers as in No 3
for Scientific research and drug testing etc.
So we need less monkeys.

No 4 acts of war and terror well a lot of Americans fall into this category starting with Bush. He'd make a good monkey.

Answer 10

I live in Texas and feel that the death penalty has no benefit of deterring crime whatsoever. I actually think the death penalty exists only because it gives "closure" to the families of murdered victims.