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Death of Lisa Montgomery in Indiana.


DurhamGirl

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15 minutes ago, spunko12345 said:

Your right of course that people can be wrongly imprisoned but the key difference is that it at least gives room to try to correct the mistake. Financial compensation etc even acknowledgment and apology is more that a dead person can expect to receive.

Sure, I am just not sure whether any financial compensation and apology can fully compensate for potentially decades lost. So in that sense, no matter what we choose (imprisonment or capital punishment), we risk causing grave errors to other human beings that we can't correct. 

But yeah, in most cases it is worse to kill someone wrongly than imprison them. Still, we cannot argue as only one of these options comes with a possibility of irretrievable wrongs inflicted on the innocent. 

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2 hours ago, SoulMonster said:

The purpose of imprisonment is at least fourfold: rehabilitation, deterrence, prevention of new crimes, and revenge. 

You are correct that rehabilitation has been shown to not work efficiently (studies report only a 10% reduced chance of new crimes), but this is likely to vary from country to country as a consequence of the resources allocated to rehabilitation programs. Simply imprisoning criminals in itself will likely not result in rehabilitation, it must be couples to rehabilitation programs that work on each inmate to help that person change (education, therapy, etc). 

And yes, proper rehabilitation is expensive. But as others pointed out, so is capital punishment. Maybe it isn't a question about economics but ethics? 

Additionally, someone made the argument that capital punishment should be abolished because mistakes are made. Sure, but the same argument could be made against any other punishment. People get imprisoned wrongly. People get fined wrongly. And yes, you can't make up for a wrongful capital punishment...but can you make up for wrongful 30 years in prison? I am not making a case for capital punishment here, just pointing out a flawed argument. 

It probably lies on the assumption that nothing it worse than death. It is the ultimate punishment. But is it? To everybody? Always? 

Where I come from, we don't have capital punishment (fortunately), but we also don't have very long prison sentences (21 years is typically maximum). We also spend more resources on rehabilitation than most. This includes caring for inmates. This might fly in the face of people who focuses on the "revenge" motif for imprisonment; we think that is a bit primitive and bloodthirsty and would rather focus on rehabilitation. You don't fight violence with violence - that sends the wrong signal. Besides, imprisonment is always a punishment to those involved. Very few wants to lose years to confinement. At least here. 

Agree with 100% of this, except I suppose the issue with capital punishment is it is terminal, literally. If you subsequent find you made a mistake you can't do anything about it, whereas you can always release and rehabilitate an erroneously imprisoned prisoner.

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4 hours ago, Sydney Fan said:

Any crimes that result in life being innocently taken for no conscuencious reason shoukd invole their life been taken . 

Depends on the crime. If someone steals a car and the victim has a heart attack die to the stress of the event then its not exactly a fair sentence. But if they shot the victim and they died of their injurys then yes it is

2 hours ago, EvanG said:

I'd rather see someone like that spending the rest of their life in jail and being miserable than getting the sweet relief of death.

Solitary confinement similar to death row. Unlike the whole life people who are fairly comfy 

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11 hours ago, spunko12345 said:

Paying for them to live out the rest of their life in prison is the cost that society has to bear to avoid innocent people being murdered by the state.

The alternative is to accept that innocent people will be killed by the state as collateral to satisfy people wanting an eye for an eye, its a numbers game and its inevitable mistakes will (and have) been made pretty often by what i see from other posters here. What gives anyone the right to decide that that its a fair trade off.

I don't know about you but I wouldn't be prepared to tell a family of someone wrongly executed "Sorry we fucked up there when we killed your son/daughter/brother but hey we offed 15 other proper fucking scumbags bang to rights so swings and roundabouts eh"

For that you don't need to abolish the whole death penalty. There just needs to be a bigger threshold of when one is "eligible" for it. And that should look into the quality of the conviction and case the prosecution puts forward, meaning how likely it is that the verdict is wrong. Also usually people don't get put down the day after the verdict. It's usually years. You would think enough time to get any verdict corrected.

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45 minutes ago, PatrickS77 said:

For that you don't need to abolish the whole death penalty. There just needs to be a bigger threshold of when one is "eligible" for it. And that should look into the quality of the conviction and case the prosecution puts forward, meaning how likely it is that the verdict is wrong. Also usually people don't get put down the day after the verdict. It's usually years. You would think enough time to get any verdict corrected.

You can't really do that though. No legal system is going to have a different threshold for conviction. It's either beyond reasonable doubt or it's not. You can't say we're pretty sure that this guy did it so we're going to give him a life sentence but this other guy we're REALLY sure about so we can kill him.  

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3 hours ago, PatrickS77 said:

For that you don't need to abolish the whole death penalty. There just needs to be a bigger threshold of when one is "eligible" for it. And that should look into the quality of the conviction and case the prosecution puts forward, meaning how likely it is that the verdict is wrong. Also usually people don't get put down the day after the verdict. It's usually years. You would think enough time to get any verdict corrected.

Well nobodys appeared to be able to have got it failsafe in the thousands of years since it existed so at this point I say yeah just scrap the whole thing.

Im looking at the whole concept of a government deciding who to kill and for what. They still throw rocks to kill women for having affairs in some places. Sure it's been tweaked in the US somewhat but the US system is still closer to that than no death penalty is to the US system.

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10 hours ago, Dazey said:

You can't really do that though. No legal system is going to have a different threshold for conviction. It's either beyond reasonable doubt or it's not. You can't say we're pretty sure that this guy did it so we're going to give him a life sentence but this other guy we're REALLY sure about so we can kill him.  

Why not? A judge decides on what the penalty is. There are sentencing hearings. If there is still some doubt, despite conviction, he could decide on prison for life instead of death row. Take the Peterson case for example. They don't know how the woman died. They don't know when the woman died. They don't know where the woman died. They just know by circumstantial evidence, that it had to be the husband who killed her. That to me is a case that should be a life term, whereas the Aurora/Batman shooting, where there are actual witnesses, would be a clear cut death penalty case. If that means a reduction of death penalties, then that wouldn't be so bad either, would it?

Edited by PatrickS77
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7 hours ago, spunko12345 said:

Well nobodys appeared to be able to have got it failsafe in the thousands of years since it existed so at this point I say yeah just scrap the whole thing.

The thing is, none of the judges really seem to give a shit, which is the problem.

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Dustin Higgs became the 3rd person this wk with his order being carried out 130am there local time 630am GMT this morning Trump has now seen off more death warrants in his time than over last few decades this 1 this morn was 3 in 3 days Trump has seen off 13 federal orders the most EVER in American history

1st thing Biden wants too end this federal execution which means  every federal prisoner will now have a WHOLE LIFE ORDER

Edited by Gavin82
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1 hour ago, Scream of the Butterfly said:

I'm not an expert on the case, but it seems like a massive miscarriage of justice.

Miscarriage being the operative word*. :lol: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*gets coat

 

Edit. Bugger, wrong case. 

Edited by Dazey
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On 1/15/2021 at 12:58 AM, Angelica said:


If the answer is no to either of those, the state is still no better than a murderer. State sanctioned murder is medieval horseshit, regardless of the crime committed.

I'm not even the biggest fan of the death penalty. But having a trial and sentencing someone to death is the same as the murder of the innocent person in the first place? Just think about that for a second and where the logic went wrong there. 

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In light of several of the recent executions, it's easy to agree with this statement: “we have not executed the worst of the worst, but often instead put to death the unluckiest of the unlucky — the impoverished, the poorly represented, and the most broken.” 

Edited by Scream of the Butterfly
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5 hours ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

I'm not even the biggest fan of the death penalty. But having a trial and sentencing someone to death is the same as the murder of the innocent person in the first place? Just think about that for a second and where the logic went wrong there. 

Depends on how you look at it. As some people see it, all life is sacred regardless of any good or bad deeds. From that point of view, there is no difference between murder and state sanctioned murder.

As I see it, the world would be a better place without some of the most rotten individuals in it. Still not a big fan of the death penalty for various reasons.

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4 hours ago, Gavin82 said:

It doesnt even work it does not put people off killing other people 

True. It doesn't appear to be very effective as a deterrent to other potential murderers.

Yet, obviously it is effective in eliminating the specific individual and making sure they will never hurt anybody ever again. I imagine that is the important point to some victims or their families. They can take a sigh of relief when the person who brought so much damage into their lives is gone.

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6 hours ago, Gavin82 said:

It doesnt even work it does not put people off killing other people 

How do you know this? I mean, how do we know it isn't working as a deterrent at some level? Sure, we still have murderers, but how can we know there wouldn't be more if we didn't have the death penalty, maybe only a very few more? I am not even disagreeing, I just don't understand how e can say with any confidence it doesn't work as a deterrent (at some level), when this is more or less impossible to study?

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I know Texas has executed women a few times.  I'm for the death penalty especially if you take someone's life. Some crimes are unforgivable, especially killing a child. 

Having them serve a life sentences and my taxes pay for it, is unacceptable. I also hate it when the spend years waiting to be executed. If they are convicted and you know they've done the crime, execute them right away. 

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3 hours ago, SoulMonster said:

How do you know this? I mean, how do we know it isn't working as a deterrent at some level? Sure, we still have murderers, but how can we know there wouldn't be more if we didn't have the death penalty, maybe only a very few more? I am not even disagreeing, I just don't understand how e can say with any confidence it doesn't work as a deterrent (at some level), when this is more or less impossible to study?

You only need too look up mass shootings or gang killings in USA sure we don't know I agree but killings are happening all time in USA.

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