The Death Penalty

Spot on observation.

I tend to take a balanced view of both issues, and I am pretty far to the left ideologically. I understand and support a woman's right to determine the destiny of her own body. Anti-abortionists argue that the woman and child are separate entities, the child part of the equation is given to the mother to nurture and protect and cannot survive without her. The italicized part is the great bone of contention for me. If a child cannot survive without the mother then is it in fact, at the early stages of development, a separate entity? But I digress...

Do I support the killing of a life that has come into its own, no. nor do I support abortion as a method of birth control. There are steps one can take to prevent such an occurrence, simple and although somewhat uncomfortable steps, but steps nonetheless. I do agree that under certain circumstances abortion is viable option, but when it becomes serial there is a bigger problem that needs to be addressed.

Same with the Death Penalty. The difference is that there are outside forces working within the system (race prejudice, economic and social conditioning etc.) that factor into the decision to end a life. Those forces factor into a mothers decision to end her pregnancy as well, the difference is that it is not a societal decision, it is an individual one.

Freedom means many things to many different people, freedom from want, freedom to do as one sees fit within the confines of ones life, freedom to apply financial pressure to make ones life easier. But with each freedom comes an equal amount of responsibility and major repercussions. the process of ending a prisoners life should not be an easy one, expediency is the thing many Death Penalty advocates want, but expediency gums up the process. It makes what should be rational decisions emotional, and it feeds far more the culture of death than allowing a woman to decide, often in the absence of a partner, to end her pregnancy.

The bottom line for me, and where I see the conservative POV twisted into something else, is where the issue of personal responsibility comes into play. Conservatives seem, by in large, individualists at least as far as economics are concerned, and collectivists where morality is a factor. This seems a greatly hyprocritical point of view, the influence that others have monetarily over each other is far more damaging than that of what we personally do to ourselves. Yes there is a social impact, but that impact is as much because of pressure from the top down as it is from the bottom up, more so in fact.

Abortion is a personal and individual choice, while the killing of a fully matured individual is a societal one. On this issue I feel that we need to default to the individual. I guess that makes me a conservative as well.

__________________
"You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do." -David Cronenberg

i thinks it's rather incredible that republicans ( who are, if i'm not mistaken, predominantly christians ) don't have a problem with the death penalty....( i guess that's why mr. bush didn't hesitate much with going into war which resulted in thousands of deaths )....do protestants have some weird outlook on the sanctity of life i'm not aware of?

__________________
http://www.last.fm/user/diezelpower/

I guess it would depend on whether or not you believe something can be simultaneously seperate and dependent. But even if we were to agree upon a standard of viability, it'd create far more problems than it would solve.

For example: how do we know when a child is viable? It appears to vary from case to case. We know that many children are viable in the third trimester. Should all such abortions be outlawed, then? And how do we know which children will survive until we've actually tried to see if they can?

Most troubling, however, is that using viability is continually changing. Because of advances in medical science, prematurely born infants are far more likely to survive today than they would have been, say, 100 years ago. But surely a 6-month fetus is not any more human in 2006 than it would have been in 1906. And this is to say nothing of the inevitability of an artificial womb, which would render the standard completely (pardon the pun) inviable.

The "personal responsibility" meme flows quite naturally to government regulation of abortion, actually, in that abortion is often framed as a failure to take responsibility for the life one has created. If there is any hypocriscy, however, it would by definition apply in reverse, to people who demand both robust government safety nets, as well as complete freedom from any form of resistance or interference in regards to things like abortion.

I think we both know, however, that both conservatism and liberalism are a bit more nuanced than that. Their economic and sociological views, even apart from varying from person to person, cannot be contained by phrases like "individualist" and "collectivist."


Saying that abortion is a "personal" choice does not settle the issue; it side-steps it. People won't drop their signs and stop picketing if you explain to them that morality should be an individual matter...even if they agreed with you. They'll drop their signs and stop picketing when they believe children aren't being killed, which is what they believe now.
The issue, then, is simply whether or not an unborn child is genuinely human. If it is not, then no justification for its abortion is necessary. If it is, then no justification is possible. Any point which does not speak to the issue of whether or not a fetus has humanity is a diversion from the real argument, in my mind.

All aboard the train to Generalization Station. Your conductor today will be adidasss. Plenty of Republicans do have a problem with the death penalty (*raises hand*), and the War in Iraq has nothing to do with this.

As for the "weird outlook on the sanctity of life" -- I think it boils down to making a distinction between life, and innocent life. I don't really agree with that line of thinking, exactly, but it's not "incredible," or a blatant contradiction.

I'm generally for it, but once you bring something like mental illness into the picture, or some variable like that, things get fuzzy.

__________________

Serial killers /serial rapists - if they aren't rehabilitated after 15 years, off with their heads!

So you mean, if the authorities fail to rehabilitate the prisoner it's fair that he pays with his life? If you told that guy that he had 15 years in prison to look forward to and then there's a possibility he would be exectued on top of that - it's pretty likely he won't put a very big effort into rehabilitating.

__________________
The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

--------

They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

Ok I see what you're saying. And I take back what I said and will say: Serial killers / serial rapists - off with their heads!

90% of serial killers cannot be rehabilitated. Actually any attempt raises the recidivism rate. I don't have the exact statistics at hand.

I say no. It's all very well for people to say they'd support the death penalty, if it was only used in cases where someone was found to be absolutely 100% guilty of the crime, but I personally wouldn't be willing to bet someone's life on that ever occurring.

The way I see it, a person is only found guilty because the evidence supporting them is weaker than the evidence against them. Therefore, what if an innocent person is unable to provide sufficient evidence to prove their innocence? At least a long term jail sentence would potentially provide enough time for new evidence to crop up, allowing the victim to return to their families/loved ones, instead of a letter of apology and a basket of fruit.

__________________
"When I was younger, I always wanted to be somebody. Now that I'm older, I realise I should've been more specific."

Go search "Paul Bernardo" and "James Bulger" on wikipedia and you will see where the death penalty should be used in some instances.

Paul Bernardo and his wife used to kidnap teenage girls, take them to a basement for three days, they would both beat the girl, rape the girl, and film it and watch it over before they killed her. They did it to more than just one.

James Bulger was a two year old child kidnapped at the mall by a 10 year old and 12 year old (Robert Thompson and Jon Venables) and they walked him along for a couple of miles going along and kicking and punching him. Breaking bones in his body until they took him into some woods, suffocated him by smothering blue paint on his face. They then proceeded to molest him and smash his head with a rock. When they realized he was dead, they put him on train tracks for him to be run over so that it would look like that is why he died.

Those people deserve to die, in my opinion. The death penalty is absolutely needed in some instances. And yet, Bernardo is serving a prison term and those boys are out walking the streets right now and it pisses me off knowing that the scum of the earth is still around.

I would have thought that the James Bulger case would not be the most likely to persuade people on the issue of the death penalty. Yes, it was horrific and the killers deserved to be punished, but the death penalty for 10 and 11 year old kids is hardly likely to get much support...

As a slightly different issue, what about bringing back other forms of physical punsihment...like beatings, or cutting off thieves' fingers, or castration of sex offenders (actually don't know if that has ever been done, so it might not be bringing 'back' so much...)

I don't care if they were 5. What they did is one of the most horrific crimes ever and they did it just because they felt like beating someone up.

I think a lot of minors should be charged as adults, but that's because I firmly believe that most of 'em knew what they were doing.

How do you know that's why they did it? You're just assuming that.

Apperantely you didn't read all of the Wikipedia article because it seems they both came from a bad home life. That doesn't excuse what they did, but you have to consider all the factors before you go all willy-nilly with the death sentence.

__________________
"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

Because very article I've read about it (Including a 6 page article I read about two months ago) says they went to the mall and one of them said "I haven't beat up a kid in awhile. Let's find a kid to beat up" and then the other one just went along with it.

It's not "Willy-nilly" when you look at what they did.

It is willy-nilly. You want to give them the death sentence and you're not even considering all the factors. Also, show me an article that says they did it because they hadn't done it in awhile.

__________________
Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notoriou.../bulger/2.html

Ah, there ya go. Typical of kids, blame the other one. So do you believe both of them? If not, which one do you believe? There are just some cases were the death plenty shouldn't be considered, this was one of them.

I think they're both telling parts of the truth. I think the first one mentioned wanting to hit a kid and I think once they had him, he had the idea of getting him lost.

However, you don't know. IMO, the death plenty should only be used in cases of certainty and even then, it should not be taken lightly.