Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > All those in favour of capital punishment, say I.....

[ariel]

Originally Posted by Tonio600

Maybe because we go beyond the obvious.

What is obvious today may no longer be so tomorrow.

Like Lord Phillips who believes that five years in prison is long enough to pay for any crime. Lord help us from such PC people.

[Tonio600]

You start your sentence with "Like" but I can't see the common point.

[Loz]

I totally get what Antoine is saying here. The injustice of executing someone who is later found to be innocent is a shattering idea for a society to accept, without counting the effect such a thing would have on the lives of those directly touched by it.

You would wish to avoid such injustices at all costs, of course. However, one such cost is that you are left with murderers who, in reality, live out a portion of their lives behind bars and who are then released back into society. For some, rehabilitation may have been possible, for others though, nothing has changed - they are still a person capable of murdering.

It has been suggested that execution for premeditated murder is no deterrent for some would-be murderers. On the other hand, I cannot believe for one moment that it would not be a deterrent for a large number of people. Execution would be a valuable tool in dissuading people contemplating murder, the sort of people for whom the possibility of 15 years imprisonment represents an acceptable risk compared to the potential benefit of "getting away with it". A counter-argument to this last point is "make life sentences mean life". However, you could end up incarcerating an innocent person for the rest of his life - if no evidence of his innocence comes to light, you have still taken his life away from him to an extent that rivals that of execution. If evidence comes to light, the innocent person walks free of prison - not unscathed by the experience. An innocent has escaped unjust execution, but you still do not have a valuable deterrent against murder.

In the end, you need to look at the matter as dispassionately as you possibly can. You have to balance to risk of injustice/miscarriage of justice where an innocent person is executed, against the injustice of a legal system that is not doing its utmost to protect innocent victims of murder. If you accept that execution is any form of deterrent, you must accept that it is an idea that deserves as least as much consideration as our fear of innocent people being executed.

[749er]

I am not sure about the death penalty, seems an easy option for some, like the guy in the USA convicted of being part of 9/11. best thing is to let him rot in jail. But I don't see why I should pay for them either. They should be made to work to pay their keep, maybe they wont then have the energy to worry about which Sky package they should be asking for.

The "policeman", if he was a policeman, which I doubt, who shot the Brazilian was a very brave man, and most Londoners would agree. He did a very difficult job, and unfortunately for him, the information he was given by his superiors was wrong. He trusted his superiors and did his job to protect the rest of us. No comparison with the animal that killed the policewoman.

[Tonio600]

To me the problem is more why people sentenced to jail for life don't remain in jail for life. Is that a collective memory problem? Or maybe because they've been nice and behaved well for 15 years we assume they've paid their debt? No the victim(s) won't come back, so they must stay behind the bars.

Also I think we should allow them to die if they want (euthanasie? don't know the word in English...). I guess after 15-20 years behind the bars I would want to have a rest of it, and we can't either force them to stay alive behind the bars. They took a life, they can give theirs.

But in no way the justice should allow itself to kill somebody. Nobody and nothing should be allowed to kill somebody. The justice is not above the rules. And if you kill somebody, then you should be prepared to spend the rest of your life in a few square meters room.

Anyway. I think there was interesting views in that topic, but nothing made me change my opinion. I'm not saying I will never change it, and people thinking differently than me should not either. We never know what life will bring us.

I may have a son one day, and he may be innocentely murdered by a sick guy. But he may also be innocentely murdered by the justice because he was either at the wrong place at the wrong time (and a lot of people are), and because it would have been either him either the son of somebody who's much more important than me...