What's your personal opinion regarding capital punishment? Should murderers stay in jail for the rest of their lives or do they deserve to be killed themselves? How would you see the world if every country had the death penalty?
El Guapo
Favorite Answer
I'm against capital punishment, for many reasons:
- Mistakes happen. Since 1973 in the U.S., over 140 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. These are ALL people who had been found guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt." A life sentence is reversible. An execution is not.
- Cost - because of the legal apparatus designed to minimize wrongful executions (and the enormous expense of maintaining death row facilities), it costs taxpayers MUCH more to execute someone than to imprison them for life.
- It is not a deterrent - violent crime rates are consistently HIGHER in death penalty jurisdictions.
- It is inconsistently and arbitrarily applied.
- Because the U.S. is one of the last remaining nations with capital punishment, many other countries refuse to extradite known criminals who should be standing trial here.
- It fosters a culture of violence by asserting that killing is an acceptable solution to a problem.
- Jesus was against it (see Matthew 5:7 & 5:38-39, James 4:12, Romans 12:17-21, John 8:7, and James 1:20).
- Life without parole (LWOP) is on the books in most states now (all except Alaska), and it means what it says. People who get this sentence are taken off the streets. For good.
- As Voltaire once wrote, "let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson."
- Whether you’re a hardened criminal or a government representing the people, killing an unarmed human being is wrong. Period. “He did it first” is not a valid reason.
?
Speaking as British, we abolished it nearly 50 years ago for very good reasons, many of which are in previous answers. But to summarise
- the criminal justice system is not perfect and it happens far too often that the wrong person is executed
- it doesn't deter crime: we have a lower murder rate than the USA, largely because we have an almost total ban on guns (now that's another debate I will quite happily enter but it wasn't the question. Suffice it to say that US states that use the death penalty have a higher murder rate than the ones that don't, basically because they are also the ones with more lax gun laws).
I would also say, as Brandon Di Rocco says, that if you believe in the concept of capital punishment, DO IT! The fact that the USA allows endless appeals against the death sentence, resulting in the major cause of death on death row actually being natural causes and making it more expensive than life imprisonment, is another argument against the mental torture of waiting but it's an entirely different debate.
But let's explore it - when the UK had capital punishment, the execution was always scheduled for three weeks after sentencing, traditionally to allow the murderer three clear Sundays to make peace with God. Three further weeks at most were allowed to exhaust all appeals. Execution would then take place by "long drop" hanging, probably the most humane method ever invented. The prisoner was marched from the condemned cell to the gallows chamber next door, hooded, pinioned on arms and legs, the noose placed around his neck and the trap sprung. It would typically take ten seconds to do this. The idea of the "long drop" was that the executioner would calculate the length of rope according to the prisoner's weight, such that when he falls through the trap, once the rope reaches full stretch it applies such a force that it breaks his neck and he dies in seconds. Washington state still has this method available as an alternative to lethal injection.
There were a few executions in the UK of US troops who had committed murder during World War II. They took place using the British method but American protocol. Albert Pierrepoint, the executioner who did most of them, hated it because American protocol requires reading out all the charges again and asking the prisoner for his last words. Pierrepoint wasn't used to that and I agree with him: it only prolongs the agony.
The upshot is that when we had capital punishment, we USED it, and didn't faff about. It made the debate focus properly on whether it is ever right to commit judicial murder and whether it actually does deter crime.
I just throw all that out because it illustrates the issues.
?
The death penalty is not an option. If a person is accused of murder in the USA and happens to cross the border into Canada, the Canadians will not extradite him back to the USA if he faces the death penalty. Even the British stated that if they caught Bin Laden, They would not hand him over to the Americans, if he faced the death penalty.
Susan S
For the worst crimes, life without parole is better, for many reasons. I’m against capital punishment not because of sympathy for criminals but because it doesn’t reduce crime, prolongs the anguish of families of murder victims, costs a whole lot more than life in prison, and, worst of all, risks executions of innocent people.
The worst thing about it. Errors:
The system can make tragic mistakes. As of now, 142 wrongly convicted people on death row have been exonerated. We’ll never know for sure how many people have been executed for crimes they didn’t commit. DNA is rarely available in homicides, often irrelevant and can’t guarantee we won’t execute innocent people.
Keeping killers off the streets for good:
Life without parole, on the books in most states, also prevents reoffending. It means what it says, and spending the rest of your life locked up, knowing you’ll never be free, is no picnic. Two big advantages:
-an innocent person serving life can be released from prison
-life without parole costs less than capital punishment
Costs, a big surprise to many people:
Study after study has found that capital punishment is much more expensive than life in prison. The process is much more complex than for any other kind of criminal case. The largest costs come at the pre-trial and trial stages. These apply whether or not the defendant is convicted, let alone sentenced to death.
Crime reduction (deterrence):
Homicide rates for states that use capital punishment are consistently higher than for those that don’t. The most recent FBI data confirms this. For people without a conscience, fear of being caught is the best deterrent. Capital punishment is no more effective in deterring others than life sentences.
Who gets it:
Capital punishment magnifies social and economic inequalities. It isn't reserved for the worst crimes, but for defendants with the worst lawyers. It doesn't apply to people with money. Practically everyone sentenced to death had to rely on an overworked public defender.
Victims:
People assume that families of murder victims want capital punishment to be imposed. It isn't necessarily so. Some are against it on moral grounds. But even families who have supported it in principle have testified to the protracted and unavoidable damage that capital punishment process does to families like theirs and that life without parole is an appropriate alternative.
Capital punishment comes down to retribution or revenge- the only plausible reasons to support it.
q S
The death penalty continues to be an important deterrent for crime. The laws need to be fixed up to save money and speed the process up a bit.
If you were a murder would you rather spend 40 years in prison, getting assaulted on a daily basis, hanging around with crazy people, smelling stinky things, hearing noise all the time and eating terrible food or just fast forward to the end?