AIBU to ask whether the death penalty should apply for certain crimes in the UK?

I'm confused as to what point you think you're making by throwing around the word 'murder' as though it's somehow bothersome? Yes, there are situations where deliberately killing people is a good thing, and there are situations where killing as collateral damage is unavoidable and considered acceptable as long as it's minimised as much as possible - for instance, during wars. Calling it murder means very little outside of a courtroom.

Anyway, you're wrong, as I understand it - even if the person is wrongly convicted, it's not murder as it's legal. It's a wrongful killing, but not murder.

Yes. Because it works so well at reducing crime in the USA. That's why they have a whole industry of hideous huge maximum security prisons which yield massive profits for unethical fuckwits. Prisons full of people (often vulnerable) serving decades long sentences for crimes such as drug use or theft.
People remain on death row for years. So it's not about saving money.
As many other people have pointed out, miscarriages of justice happen.
Imagine your loved one finally being absolved of a crime they didn't commit but spent years in prison for.
Imagine they'd died in prison before that happened.
Now imagine they were killed. And still pleasing they were innocent.

And the ones that weren't innocent?

Who decides which ones die and when?

When we routinely murder people and claim it's legal and ethical, well, what does that do to us as a society?

And let's imagine we do bring it back and it does reduce the numbers of serious crimes? Well, it works so well there! Maybe we should roll it out for burglary, and shoplifting! (But not tax dodging, good heavens no)

People always cite the US but Singapore and Japan also have the death penalty. Those are two countries with much lower crime rates than here and I would argue more orderly societies with much less drug use. Having the death penalty actually makes society more civilised as deters crime and shows that certain crimes are taken seriously unlike in our sometimes barbaric society. And I remember reading about 20 years ago (so will be more now) that around 100 people have been murdered by murderers who were released after their sentences so these people would be alive if the death penalty was still in place. Having said that I would not trust the current justice system and we are very divided as a society unlike Singapore and Japan which are much more homogenous so would not want it in the UK now.

Excellent point. And there's no real way round this either. The nature of the jury system is that we don't know why they make the decisions they do.

The ramifications outweigh the benefit of death penalty but if it were brought back I would like it for crimes against children the most. Instead we waste taxpayer money on pedophiles’ “rehabilitation” only for them to come out and reoffend.

That’s a lot of words to say you’re okay with murder.

I believe I stated my position pretty thoroughly in my post.

People die preventable deaths all the time - they fall through the cracks constantly.

Police don't protect them from their abusive husbands when they seek help, social services don't take them from their parents when they should, they get refused medical treatment that could save their lives because it's not publicly funded, they get blown up in wars overseas as collateral damage, they kill themselves because the mental health system is overloaded...

Life is cruel and unfair, and people die every day who could be saved/who shouldn't die, and if the worst thing we had to worry about was an extremely rare wrongful state execution, we'd be doing pretty well as a species.

Although as I said, I still do believe it's too risky to give the state those powers, lest they use them for nefarious purposes.

Look at what goes on in America. Do you really think better tech and forensics help there.

It's a big fat no from me for that reason amongst others.

One issue with the death penalty (of many) is that it would make juries slower to convict. This would be particularly the case in the UK where the majority of the population are against it. So effectively you raise the bar for conviction for the most horrendous crimes, potentially allowing serial killers et al to go free because the jury didn’t want their blood on their hands.

We don’t have degrees of guilt in the criminal justice system and for good reason. I.e we don’t have ”probably guilty” and “absolutely certainly guilty” so as to separate murderers into prison and execution groups. And even when there has been absolute certainty of guilt at the time, there are miscarriages of justice. The Andrew Malkinson rape case is a recent one in the UK.

Curtis Flowers recently in the US. If you heard a brief summary of the evidence (loads of eye witness accounts) you would probably be sure he was guilty. He wasn’t and if he had been executed we would likely never have known that as he wouldn’t have lived to clear his name.

So you are, in effect, okay with murder.

The definition of murder is as follows:

The unlawful killing of a human being under the King’s peace, with the intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm.

The execution of innocent people would be murder. You’d be okay with that?

Would you be happy is you or someone you loved were the person wrongly convicted because of one of these minimal errors?

No never.

its a strange human folly that we try and fight against out natural state to eliminate what we don’t like. It never works.

criminals are defined by a legal framework, informed by morality and victim impact.
But that is just a legal framework. Criminals have always existed and always will. People have always been inclined to rape and murder- when this is ordered by a governing power we call it war. When an individual decides to do it it’s a crime. Fair enough, I’m sure we’d all rather neither or them did it.

But what we need to accept is we will never eliminate it. Killing murderers does not eliminate (or reduce) them.
Our instinct to kill them is the same as theirs to kill others and we need to recognise it’s two sides of the same coin.

also to drive home the legal framework point- there are countries where people are given the death penalty for adultery.
Don’t open that box, because you don’t know where it leads. The death penalty is medieval and unsophisticated. It’s murderers murdering murderers

It’s much more expensive to have death penalty than not due to all the legal fees fighting appeals costing more than housing them for life

No, our system doesn't prevent or deal with miscarriages of justice sufficiently well.

Absolutely not. Ever. Miscarriages of Justice come to light all the time, even one innocent person being killed by the state is one too many.

The USA and Singapore are hardly ‘backward and tinpot’ or not ‘serious’.

I would argue the correlation between societies with higher levels of violence and the death penalty is higher.

Maybe you could ask her

Do you 100% trust the criminal justice system? Do you believe the police, the scientists, the CPS, the lay people on a jury are infallible? Not susceptible to any bias, human error, ever? Do you believe all solicitors are equally competent and all barristers equally persuasive? Because with death, once its done, its done, so its not like any failings can be corrected.
Are you happy with the families of victims having to have cases brought up over and over while the perpetrator makes repeated appeals and its all over the news? Happy to pay for that? Happy to see perpetrators walk free because juries are less likely to convict?
It seems particularly odd to me that many of those in favour of this are those most critical of our current system thinking it 'two tier'. Yet want to give the state they consider incapable of acting without bias even more draconian power.

As most countries don’t have birth right citizenship, I think its about 30, so thats a fairly unwise policy.

My husband is a Swedish citizen, both his parents are Swedish citizens, he grew up in Sweden. However he was born prematurely when his mum was on a business trip in Spain, and spent his first 17 days there before he was well enough to fly home.

Deporting someone to a county where they have no right of residence seems like a fairly idiotic thing to do.

So you're fine with the state murdering innocent people? As long as it's not too many...? Strange choice but ok, how would you like to be executed when one of these murders happens? Or do you not consider that you would have played a role in it?

No!!

No. It's a terrible idea. Why would we go backwards?

The American super max prisons allow contact between prisoners & the prison officers. Imagine knowing for the rest of your life you are never going to have any contact with a human being again & are going to spend 24 hours a day in a cell with nothing to do but stare at 4 walls, no television, radio, books, I've even seen in a documentary where the cells are soundproofed in a foreign jail so the prisoner is trapped with nothing but their own thoughts. For people like the Southport killer & Damien Bendall it is nothing short of what they deserve as their behaviour hasn't changed in an ordinary prison.

Ah, apologies – fair enough, then.

What a strange and nasty sentiment.

Happily, neither I nor anyone I know has ever been wrongly accused of a crime, so I think that would be deeply unlikely to happen. It's leagues more likely that we'll die of cancer or other conditions that would be preventable if we had a better medical system, or the financial ability to pay for private treatment.