Opponents of the death penalty: please explain your view

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) - Three Lafayette County men have been found guilty of raping a 3-year-old girl in 2005.

Timothy Jordan, the child's father who was charged with five counts of rape, was convicted Tuesday of all but one count.

http://www.wmcstations.com/Global/st...nav=menu59_2_2

__________________

Δύο άτομα. Μια μάχη. Κανένας συμβιβασμός.

I don't believe in the "eye for an eye" philosophy. I believe humanity should have evolved beyond that.

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

hmm.

are we to assume from the thread title and post that you feel these men should be executed, Equi?

what exactly is your view?

__________________
something witty goes here......

My view is, eye for an eye. It might seem primitive but it works and it is fair.

Works in what way?

I disagree with it simply because I think our government shouldn't be in the business of killing people, simple as that.

If we all used eye for and eye mentalities, Adidass and I would be blind and toothless!

__________________

So, in that case, shouldn't we wait until the girl is old enough to make the decision and then let her do the job? It's not your eye, was it?


One reason to why I oppose the death penalty is that I believe that focus has moved from victim and perpetrator to a way for the public to project their disgust in some form. It's a perverted way to satisfy the mob. The kind of satisfaction or even arousment that people get from knowing that somebody has been executed is the same kind of emotions that people got from watching a beheading or torture session back in the days. And worryingly similar to the emotions the perpetrator feels while doing those horrible things to the victim.

What if the executed person was innocent. That's a drag because of a number of things. It certainly sucks for the innocent dead person. And it's not that great if the real perpetrator is still free. The most interesting thing though... The mob still felt great pleasure when that innocent guy was killed, nothing can change that. Which proves that the death penalty focus more on the feelings of the public than on the victim and the perpetrator.

Then, of course, there's the issue of believing that it's fundamentally wrong to take another person's life.

__________________
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.

Besides being fundamentally against the practice, in practical terms the criminal justice system is too big and too many inequities exist, as a result FAR too many errors are made, meaning innocent people wind up convicted of crimes they didn't commit. With the death penalty, obviously this is something that cannot be remedied after the person has been killed.

There's a weird paranoid fantasy thing where for some reason most can imagine the pain of having a loved one raped or murdered so they feel the visceral need for the death penalty, but at the same time they cannot fathom a loved one being falsely convicted of a capitol crime and put to death for something they didn't do. Obviously poorer communities with less access to good legal counsel and such are more likely to understand the pain of the false arrest and conviction. Most of us from the middle to upper middle class can't seem to imagine being at the wrong place at the wrong time to be fingered incorrectly, but can imagine their Mother or Sister going down the wrong alley. Unless you live in the most crime-ridden areas of our country, I think statistically it's a wash which of these tragedies, victim of violent crime or mistaken perpetrator, would befall your family, yet in most people's minds the former is a nightmare scenario they actually fear while the other a Kafkaesque impossibility saved for "Law & Order" episodes that might happen to other people but not to them.

When the science of DNA evidence exploded in the late 1990s it was shocking to see how many cases were overturned. There are hundreds and hundreds more, and even with the advance of technology some that can't be cleared in such a way. So while Equilibrium can have a specific case in mind with a monster who most of us would probably be fine with being killed for what he did, what about the untold numbers of people who would be put to death for something they just plain didn't do?

I would urge everyone on the fence especially to rent Erroll Morris' excellent documentary The Thin Blue Line. Pick up the DVD of Exonerated, which is a filmed version of a play based on the stories of actual people who have been cleared of capitol crimes. With these kinds of errors being made, I don't see how you can be for killing even the monsters, because there's no way to tell the difference too much of the time. How can we be a just and moral society if this is happening in the system? Does it matter if it's 8% or 2% or .003% of the death row population? If it's happening at all (and it most certainly is), then we just can't allow the practice to continue.


I think.

__________________
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

I dont believe in the concept of retributive justice, neither do i belive in the notion of detterence.Personally i believe in the idea of rehabilitation in terms of punishment. It is imperative that efforts be made to rehabilitate the offender rather than the ever-growing notion especially in American society to "lock them up and throw away the key" .
Michel Foucolt a prominent French philosopher asseses the notion of incarceration and the idea of rehabilitation “By now a quite different question of trust is inscribed in the course of penal judgment. The question is no longer simply: Has this act been established and is it punishable? But also: what is this act?... To what level or to what field of reality does it belong?... It is no longer simply: who committed it? But: how can we assign the causal process that produced it?... It is no longer simply what law punishes this offence? But: what would be the most appropriate measure to take? How do we see the future development of the offender? What would be the best way of rehabilitating him? A whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgments, concerning the criminal have been lodged in the framework of penal judgment.”

There has been an incredible change in the notion of punishment in US society from the 1970's onwards resulting in a shift from penal welfarism.

__________________
Comment is free but facts are sacred

I certainly don't believe in the death penalty. If you're watching a "fictional" film, I'll admit that I like it when the "scum" get their "just desserts", but that's just a literary/cinematic device as far as I'm concerned. When dealing with the real world, I'm completely against it. Many of the reasons have already been explained, but basically my take on it is that it just perpetuates the idea that killing is OK.

But you have to remember that I'm a radical wacko because let me explain a scenario which my wife and I actually agree upon, but most of my and her family think we're nuts. One of us was raped and/or murdered, and the other was present but couldn't stop it from happening. Now, let's say that we are used as a witness and called upon to ID the perpetrator in a court of law. Both of us would do that with no problem. However, that would be the only day that either of us would be in court. I do not want to grieve in open court or demonstrate disgust at the accused, even if I feel it. Yes, I'd be disgusted and feel great loss, but I do not want to perpetuate a cycle of revenge which passes itself off as justice. Put the perpetrator away for life. I can get behind that as being "fair". If I ever went before any cameras outside the courtroom, I would probably never say anything, but if I did, I'd probably say that I loved my wife and truly missed her, but don't kill that idiot. It just won't make me feel any better. In fact, I'll just feel worse.

P.S. Regarding the last post, I can get into the idea of rehabilitation and "forgiveness", but at this point, I just think we need to kill the death penalty first and move on from there.

__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

In regards Holden Pikes comments i think its interesting to look at the Innocene Project that most of you would have heard about, as a good exapmle of the numbers of wrongly convicted persons exonerated, especially as a result of the emergence of DNA evidence. One example i would give is Walter Swift who was served 26 years of a 55year conviction for rape which he was innocent. He was freed earlier this year due to the efforts of Barry Scheck and an Irish intern

Not to go too far down a tangential path, what if the person got "off?" How would you feel then?

My husband used to say to me that if anyone hurt our children, he'd probably go to jail because he couldn't imagine not wanting to get back at the person. I cannot even imagine what I would do (although I can't imagine I could ever get violent.)

Holden's post is really interesting about how the classes would look at it differently. Very insightful and I'd agree.

I really don't know, but I've often thought many people supported the death penalty because of a reaction to Miranda, the increase in crime, and the constant local media attention to crimes. People get angry and scared.

I agree with many of these posts that are against the death penalty, especially because I think innocent people are killed.

But I have to admit that I was happy when Timothy McVeigh was killed. But, yea, that's strictly a desire for revenge.

Good posts, all!

Bingo.

Foucault has an excellent point of view on this issue. I think my beliefs are well summarized here. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a great read (which, I assume, is where this passage is derived from).

holden said it all.

but wouldnt an "eye for and eye" literally mean that the men who raped the 3 year old should be raped themselves?

when does death enter the picture for a crime like this?

Sure does. Imagine what these rapist would feel like if they were raped. I promise you thats a punishment they will hate more than death.

I think life in a prison is more of a punishment than the death penalty.

I hate the death penalty and believe its use makes us little more than animals using our 'reptilian brain' to mete out some sort of twisted justice. Until we can be objective in our judgements of evidence and the accused, and error free in gathering evidence, the death penalty should be shelved.

__________________
If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.

Johann von Goethe

I don't support the death penalty either. If one person was convicted and hanged (poisoned/shot or gassed) wrongly then that's one person too many and there's sure been many of those.

I know everyone doesn't think the same way but the most moving testaments I've heard have come from victims families who have stood back from the crime against their loved ones and refused to also be victims, people like the family of Anthony Walker killed in a racist attack in Liverpool a couple of years ago. His mum and sister have stood up with dignity and have even gone out and walked the streets with the police talking to kids to tackle racism.

I personally see capital punishment as a fairly benign practice. I still however do point out the hypocrisy in the validation of state sanctioned death-dealing as retribution for the act of taking a human life. Regardless, I don't think it really detours would-be offenders, nor do I think it's any worse than those killed by police officers on the streets, or soldiers on a battlefield. The whole idea of authority is being above the morality of common citizens, and all in the pursuit of order or sometimes more power.

The fact is that most proponents of Capital punishment don't admit what the purpose of it truly is, to make society feel better, as if there is some engineered balance that society can enact. It's an emotional response, which as people we try to outwardly deny. We all have felt wronged and wished ill of another individual at some point.

Yet, if one were to execute a death-row inmate, we as civilians, would be subject to the very same punishment. Either way the end result is the same, the inmate would cease to be. A prominent example that even in our own society that the measure of a righteous act or a criminal act is contingent on the title one holds while dispensing it.

__________________


...uh the post is up there...

I don't if we really need the death penatly, but we should least keep creeps like that locked up. Too many get released too soon, I think.

__________________