The Death Penalty Thread

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Very few, if any. It is mostly lethal injection now. Ten out of thirty seven states offer electrocution as an alternative. Electrocution is rather barbarous. Essentially it is a form of cooking the executee. All of the 37 states that have capital punishment provide lethal injection as a choice. Some of the states offer electrocution, hanging or gas as alternatives. The supreme court of Nebraska found electrocution to be cruel and unusual so Nebraska, which has no alternative method, is essentially a non-capital punishment state by default.

See http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/methods.htm

ruveyn

Fixed your quote there, those long nested ones can get confusing. Me personally, though I really don't care for the whole situation I do sometimes wonder why we went away from the good old firing squad. It was quick, cheap, and even had elements of drama and romance with the whole cigarette and the offer of the blindfold, to me modern executions are almost as horrible for their detached clinical feel as for their existence in the first place.

It is for the benefit of the executioners. That job can have great negative impacts on mental and social quality.

Well traditionally with a firing squad, only one gun was actually loaded with a live round, the others were all blanks for that very reason. I suppose the idea could be modernized with fixed pressure barrels mounted to a machine rest and locked in for instant and painless death, there is a region of the brain that will guarantee that result with a gunshot wound with at least the same degree of success that modern methods achieve. Perhaps the executioners could all throw switches simultaneously with no one knowing who actually pulled the fatal lever, but personally if we must have a death penalty I want the people involved to realize exactly what they are doing, hence my objection to the clinical methods used today.

No need for a firing squad. Just shove a live hand grenade into the prisoner's mouth with a long string attached to the pin. The result would be spectacular and prisons could get great royalties for the films of the event.

I agree, the sick and disabled should be cared for in our society. And people with mental disorders, abusive backgrounds and cultures, etc. need help and rehabilitation. I am for this.

I would want to see robust evidence in favour of a suspect's guilt, especially DNA evidence. I do not want to see innocent people put to death.

I agree that some people who commit murder are genuinely remorseful and deserve a second chance.

The people that concern me are characters like William Bell, Clayton Weatherston, Graeme Burton, Travis Burns and others. These people have resisted or not improved under attempts to rehabilitate them, often they manipulate their behaviour and the system to make themselves appear rehabilitated, get released or paroled and then they reoffend. Graeme Burton, for example, after being asked to leave a club for starting a fight, killed a man entering said club simply because he was there and Graeme felt pissed off. He tricked the parole board into releasing him, did not attend the rehabilitation groups he was meant to, and when threatened by parole with a return to prison, he did a runner. When found by police, he mortally wounded several bystanders to "slow them down" (Graeme's own words). In prison he has repeatedly assaulted any prisoner he "doesn't like the look of or get's in my way". He attacked guards and cops, he abused and beat his girlfriends, threatened to kill them, shackled one to the bed and alternately starved and abused her, and all this because he "enjoys it" (again his own words).

And I will say it again: They have not responded to rehabilitation.


To refine my criteria, I think an offender should be eligible for a death sentence if: the objective evidence is stacked against them, They have been found guilty of murder/rape, They have committed murder/rape before, they genuinely show a high probability of psychopathic personality disorder, and efforts to rehabilitate them have failed.



... I'm surprised by how big the thread has got. I wasn't expecting this response...

What if we dumped them in Antarctica?

EDIT: Not meant seriously

Last edited by Ahaseurus2000 on 10 Mar 2010, 11:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So they could murder innocent penguins?

If we're going to talk non-serious solutions, I rather like the idea of The Running Man, condemned criminals are set loose in an urban wasteland while WWF style "stalkers" attempt to hunt them down and kill them, with escape being rewarded with a pardon. I'm sure we could get a television network interested (Fox, anyone?) and we could rent out a big chunk of Grozny or Mogadishu for the urban wasteland part, I'm sure Blackwater or KBR could provide the stalkers, or perhaps the selection proccess could be a separate game show. I nominate Ted Nugent and Chuck Norris to host...

It's a fair equivalent of the great enjoyment people used to get from watching the guillotine at work. There is nothing more profitable than watching public murders and feeding the grisly appetite of crowds. Bear baiting and dog fights and bull fighting should soon follow. The defense department is missing a great enterprise in not televising American troops being blown up and "collateral damage" of civilians with cockeyed drones.

Where your enthusiasm for guns originates is becoming obvious.

I'm not sure I follow you here; are you implying that there is correlation between and interest in firearms and an appreciation for satire? Cause if you're not, I might think you were trying to take a cheap shot at me regarding a wholly unrelated subject.

To imply that guns and killing are totally unrelated is the neatest bit of black humor I have heard on a long time.

And yet I've established in this thread that I'm against a state applied death penalty, and you're the one that brought up guns... As hard as this seems to be for you to understand, people, myself included, have identities separate from their politics, and aren't easily lumped into generalities. That I like guns no more implies that I like killing than a history major specializing in genocides desires to commit one, and no amount of attempts at scorn and ridicule are going to change that.

I fully appreciate that there is a fascination for the technology of firearms. But to pretend that guns are for any purpose other than to kill or to threaten to kill is not particularly astute. It is reminiscent of the horror of the extremely intelligent scientists who worked for years to complete the atomic bomb and then were totally horrified at the massive civilian death in Hiroshima.

I am against the death penalty because a convicted murderer or rapist may actually be innocent and never did anything wrong and once that person is dead it takes away their rights for a retrial. That is my view.

So am I bloodthirsty or simply naive? You can't seem to make up your mind, and far be it from me to tell an expert such as yourself what my own opinions mean.

Last edited by Dox47 on 14 Mar 2010, 3:49 am, edited 1 time in total.