I'm going to look at this from a slightly different perspective. As a Law student, it's possible that one day I'll be representing people in court. Now, were that the same situation for you, and you had to prosecute someone for murder (and thus suggest a sentence), could you, morally, cope with sending someone to their death? It's one of the reasons I've sworn I will never practice criminal law if there is even the remotest chance of somebody's life being extinguished. I would not, and could not, have somebody else's blood on my hands. No matter their crime, people don't deserve to be treated like animals - in this country we put animals down that are a menace to society, not humans. Our compassion and our humanity is what separates us from every other species on this planet. Are you telling me we ought to descend into savagery and barbarism?
Note, evil exists. Some people do the foulest, most horrific things to others, or even to themselves. That is also a part of our humanity - the ability to be quintessentially cruel. But torture, or murder, of people at the hands of government is something that cannot be condoned. The death penalty is seen as revenge, justice, or whatever else you want to call it. It is also stripping people of the single most valuable thing that they will ever possess. There is no way on Earth that you could convince me that somebody ought to die because of their actions. As Golan rightly says, you can't deter people with the death penalty because nobody knows what death truly is. For all we know, by ending their lives we could be pushing their next life forwards, in a place such as Heaven, if it were to exist. My grandmother once told me when I was very young that "Two wrongs don't make a right", and I stand by that to this day.
Further, suggestions that it could be used in the most extreme cases are totally baseless in law. Define 'overwhelming evidence' to the point of where a judge & lawyers could put forward that a person met those criteria. And then, I ask you, what happens to all of those cases that don't have overwhelming evidence? Suddenly, as the evidence is not 'overwhelming', their trials can be questioned, the judgements overruled, etc. By creating a new 'gold standard', you in turn devalue every other conviction. The legal system works because everyone is treated fairly, and there are criteria into which all wrongs can be placed, each of which has defined punishments. You cannot simply create a new criteria, simply to deal with people who are slightly 'worse' than others. Who defines that one? The law-making process would fall into the hands of the judges, and that is a scenario that the English legal system has avoided for about 700 years. Long may it stay that way. Further, in the United States, when asking for the death penalty, you must have committed murder-one (better known these days as first degree murder). But the thing is, there are no guidelines as to what you actually get - life imprisonment or death. It's up to the judge or the jury to decide on the matter, and frankly, asking twelve laymen to hold the life of a person in their hands is a pretty hideous crime in its own right. At the end of the day, what decides it is whether it's enough of a scandal, how much of a deal the press make of it, and what sort of people you get on the jury. The law has no say by leaving it open-ended. If you cannot specifically state what constitutes the death penalty, there is no way that it can be implemented without losing control of the punishment. That is not law.
CJ, your perspective is understandable, considering where you live, compared to the majority of us here from the Western World. But at the end of the day, just as you see the death penalty as the right way, because of the attitude of the world around you, we don't see it as justifiable even slightly, because of the attitude around us. The US is obviously one great big exception, but even there the death penalty is being phased out. One thing you have to remember is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not every nation has embraced this, but these days, most have. Article 3 states that
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Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
The right to life cannot be waived. Murderers, even having removed somebody else's right to life, still have the right to life.
There is also the issue of getting something wrong. Roughly, the payout by the government for a unlawfully killed relative is £1m. It'll cost a little less than that to keep them in prison, and then if you get it wrong, the payout is far less as they're not bloody well dead. If somebody is executed, there is little chance of reprieve. But if they're still alive, well, at least they still have some of their life left to go. Say you were in a situation where it looked an awful lot like you'd killed someone, and you hadn't. Are you telling me you want to be looked on as scum and executed, even when wrongly convicted, or do you want the chance to fight your conviction? I know which I'd rather prefer.
In short: Everyone has the unquestionable right to life, the possibility of reserving the death penalty for a select few is incompatible with most legal systems, and just because you are used to something, doesn't make it right. Prison is where murderers belong, not shallow graves.
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Ion Cannon!, on 27 Jan 2011, 19:52, said:
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