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

I actually meant as a punishment.

I haven’t RTHT but no I don’t agree with the death penalty. Did you know that in the US when you are put to death by the State the medical examiner writes on the death certificate that you died by Homocide? So a person(s) causing the death of another - would you be willing to do the deed? Would you consider yourself a murderer if you did, even a justifiable one? It has been said that unless you could act as executioner you have no business supporting the death penalty.

secondly, it’s not a deterrent.

Don’t get me wrong. I would not shed a tear over the death of many of those guilty of serious crimes and I hope their time remaining on earth is sheer hell. But I could not and would not endorse State killings.

If it ever gets reinstated, I hope you and the rest of the "can't make an omlette" folks are among the first to be wrongfully convinced, or lose loved ones to a wrongful conviction.

So if the jury gets it wrong and the defendant has already been killed , do we round up the jury and shoot them too? They killed an innocent person after all.
Name me one place where the state having the ability to kill it's citizens has worked out well?

I would rather have life sentences that mean life. And proper prisons without luxuries.

I was arrested because someone said i sent 2 emails from a particular lap top.

At the time of the first email I was in Chile, the laptop was in Kansas city.

When the second one was sent I was in Uruguay, the lap top, technically did not exist. It was on a flight from the USA to Australia that goes over the international date line.

The police have only recently started asking for applicants to have or to study for a degree.

The police are not well educated. I have never committed a crime, not even a speeding ticket, but I have had lots of negative experiences with police officers.

No.

Nope, not in support of death penalty.

What I would support is same as Australia - if you’re not born in that country, you serve your sentence and then get deported back to your country of birth, regardless of your legal status there or how long you’ve lived there.

Well, that's not true. Killing in self-defence is absolutely justified.

This has pretty much always been my position, up until recently.

I think some people should just be put down like dogs; there's no reason to keep them alive just to be locked up in prison forever. Just take them out the back of the courthouse after conviction, and shoot them. Where there is incontrovertible evidence particularly, it shouldn't be an issue.

Will mistakes be made? Yes, of course (hopefully minimal). Will innocent people die? Probably (again, hopefully very few). But humans are not an endangered species, and innocent people die or are murdered all the time. Children die of cancer. Pregnant women die in car accidents. Good young men are murdered. I know someone who died simply because the health system was overloaded and his file was misplaced, so he didn't get seen for his symptoms for nearly 9 months - and by then it was too late for treatment to work and he died, only a few weeks after the birth of his first child.

The number of people wrongly executed would be a drop in the ocean compared to all those kinds of tragic accidents, or preventable deaths.

The only issue is that I don't trust governments to have that kind of power, and not use it for nefarious purposes. Although these days, I'm starting to wonder if it's worth the risk.

I see no benefit in keeping violent men alive, to potentially be released into society again.

Even one error is too much. Would you be happy if that one error related to someone you know?

There is no justification for killing someone, ever.

I'm in favour of the death penalty, for anyone who takes a life, and there is absolutely NO doubt of their guilt.

Why do people like Axel Rudakubana, who murdered the 3 children in Stockport, and then went on to throw boiling water over a prison officer, deserve to live? He didn't give two hoots about the children he killed, he wasn't forced to do it, he CHOSE to do it, and then not happy with that, continued to try and harm the prison officers whose job it is to look after him. There really are some people who don't deserve to have our hard earned money spent on keeping them alive. Which in the case of Rudakubana, is likely to be in the region of £4,680,000, and that is at today's prices, so this is likely a low estimate, bearing in mind the 52 years that he MUST serve, before they would even consider parole. In the meantime, the parents of those little girls that he killed, won't have a penny spent on compensating them for their loss and the suffering he has caused, and even if they did, no amount of money could make up for what he has put them through.

I say that if the evidence is indisputable, then the death penalty should be restored.

I also believe that if prison was the hard life that it was originally intended to be, our prisons wouldn't be nearly as full as they are today, and we wouldn't be forced to release criminals into the community to do more harm. However, these are just my opinions, and I know that many will disagree.

Not sure which way to vote as your voting isn't clear.
No, I don't want to be in a country where we can legally kill others.
So for that, YABU

Not always. Not all victims/ families of victims support the death penalty.

If the death penalty actually deterred murder, I might take a different view, but there is no evidence that murder rates are lower in countries/ states with the death penalty.

The death penalty:

• costs innocent people's lives;
• is financially more costly than keeping prisoners alive.

There's just no good argument for it.

See I genuinely find this really interesting because like many people there are crimes for which I desire the perpetrators to suffer a punishment - and a punishment which they feel.

But. The US has supermax prisons AND the death penalty - it doesn't deter anything.

When you actually read into it, what does reduce offending and recidivism is prevention in the community (a strong welfare & education system, hope & aspiration) and a progressive rehabilitive approach like in Scandinavia. But can you imagine the uproar if a political party tried to introduce it in the UK?

We need to be less like the US and other highly punitive States and more like Norway...Even though I do believe some murderers and all rapists & pedophiles ought to be locked up for life.

We've debated this ad nauseam over the years op. If you want to be properly informed go to law school and do the miscarriage of justice module. Lots of universities do them. It was abolished for a variety of reasons not least because it doesn't work. Anyone saying miscarriages of justice don't happen are ignorant of our criminal law system. Witnesses are not always accurate and DNA is not always present. Democracy in this country already decided we don't want executions anymore as they're costly and don't work. Feelings should not come into what would inevitably become a massive cost drain on our country for no purpose.

You mean all of that, which still results in an estimated 4-6% of the entire US prison population being innocent?

It is not cheaper to run a proper actual system that has at least some chance of stopping miscarriages, and it will still have them so cost is not a factor.

As for deterrent, some quotes from one of last executioners in Britain, who knew a bit about it;

"I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge."

"If death were a deterrent, I might be expected to know. It is I who have faced them last, young men and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown. It did not deter them then, and it had not deterred them when they committed what they were convicted for. All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder. And if death does not work to deter one person, it should not be held to deter any."

I do wonder if people who say yes, would be happy to put their "money where their mouth is", and accept that all of them are put into a lottery to be chosen to be executed if any innocent person ever gets killed because they wanted the death penalty and supported it.

Instead of the death penalty we should build super max prisons for any prisoner who is serving a whole life order & is a danger to either inmates or officers, one attack or any violence & off they go, where prison officers while managing the inmates do not come into direct contact so they can't be attacked or injured, there must always be at least a gate between the inmate & officer & if a prisoner has to be moved they must be shackled or cuffed by means of a hatch in the locked cell door where the prisoner puts their hands through to be cuffed before the door is unlocked. At the moment there is no deterrent for someone serving a whole life order, they have nothing to lose. Don't let the prisoners have contact with each other, put meals through the hatch, no contact with the outside wall, no letters, phone calls or visits & a basic regime, no televisions, radios etc, make the rest of their life a living hell.

And probably partially the reason we have so many terrorists. I'd imagine your family getting droned by a Western country as "collateral damage" in your country whilst minding your business probably makes a fair few folk want to join the cause of whichever group is offering a go at that country.

I strongly disagree with the death penalty. Yes there are certain crimes that make me wish death upon the perpetrator, but that’s why there needs to be sense and logic rather than emotion when it comes to punishment. The fact that I’m angry about a particular crime is the very reason my opinion on a suitable punishment should be disregarded. Aside from the much mentioned possibility of killing an innocent person, there is also the fact that it’s hypocritical. You took a life, therefore I will take yours. Making me just as bad as you.

No.

It's State sanctioned murder.

Just no.

No, you're just posting to make people angry. I think you should go away and do a bit more research on the death penalty rather than make uninformed arguments on a forum that basically amount to "I'm right and I don't care to learn any different because reasons."

No, because of miscarriages of justice and its simply not fair on the staff who have to carry out the execution. It traumatised them . However, I also think that if a parent happens to catch a perp in the act of raping their underage child or kills the person who committed a heinous act against their child it should be tried as unlawful killing with mitigation and they should never have to serve jail time.