The death penalty?

[WaywardOn3]

Ok so I was reading this article about a man sentenced to death taking half an hour to die. The state have upped the dose to try to prevent it happening again.

While I'm against having a death penalty his lawyers comments bugged me as him potentially suffering for up to half an hour before death breached his human rights. What about the young pregnant woman's human rights to not be raped and murdered? She must surely have suffered far longer than half an hour and in actual pain/fear for herself and her child not assumed and unconfirmed pain.

AIBU to not care that he may have suffered ever so slightly in his last unconscious half hour?

I feel for the person whose JOB it is to murder people on behalf of the state. In my opinion it is wrong to ask anyone to do that. They will have to live with it forever. And having to watch someone die for 30 mins must have been harrowing for them.

Do people who support the death penalty and would want a murder, rapist etc to suffer not mind that it is the government that is killing people?

If something awful happened to a member of my family I suspect I might want to kill them myself. I'm sure that I would want to cause them indescribable pain.

But the government? A government, a justice system that then tries to stand there and say "don't hurt people, don't kill people, it's wrong"?

riskit, perhaps the students you teach understand the difference between personally wanting retribution/extermination for a terrible crime, and wanting it to be allowed and state-sanctioned.

None of what you say makes me think for a second that maybe the death penalty is justified.

I don't nesscessarily agree/disagree with the death penalty. My point was I wasn't concerned about the pain he went though.

OK, I misunderstood that bit. My point still stands though, that I don't think anyone really 'deserves' pain; and I can't help caring a little bit about even someone who's behaved reprehensibly suffering pain.

While I'm against having a death penalty his lawyers comments bugged me as him potentially suffering for up to half an hour before death breached his human rights. What about the young pregnant woman's human rights to not be raped and murdered?

Both parties have the same rights to not be raped/murdered/tortured. Where we can prevent anyone being raped/murdered/tortured, we should. Where we can ourselves desist from raping/murdering/torturing, we should.

Perhaps only, but I think I would find that difficult to differentiate between were I in that situation

State sanctioned murder is the state saying "you no longer deserve to live". It is them saying that if you do X, you forfeit your right to life.

Currently in the US it is just for certain crimes, mainly murder.

In other countries it is not just for murder. It might be for adultery, say.

Once you start saying "you forfeit your right to live for X reason" you can start introducing other reasons people forfeit their right to live. And that's a very, very slippery slope towards ideas such as "you've forfeited your right to have children" and similar.

YABU to ask ppl on the Internet to justify your feelings.
I couldn't bring myself to care, either.
Doesn't mean I like how it happened or that I wanted any part of it to happen, just a limit on how much energy I have.

riskit, I agree, an individual might well find it hard. Which is why I think society/government as a whole needs to take responsibility for punishment; I believe that society in this sense should be able to divorce itself from individual feelings and emotionally led judgement and decisions.

The entire prison system in the US is messed up. Some prisons are privatized, and they make money based on how many inmates they have. It's in a lot of people's best interests to have more people convicted with longer prison sentences to keep the numbers up, and there's over crowding in most of them. There's been cases with the judges being disbarred because they were selling people to prisons basically and giving offenders the harshest sentence to keep them in there. We have pot dealers in state pens with rapists and murderers because there's no room in lower security prisons. Also, there is no rehabilitation in there, and when they get out, good luck getting a job. No one will hire someone with a record (and rightfully so), so it's hard to get back into society.

I personally don't feel sorry for him, but it's easy to say that sitting behind a computer screen and not watching a human gasp for air for 26 minutes.

In theory the death penalty is alright, some crimes have no atonement. But you combine executions with our bad prison system, people with agendas, prejudiced juries, and it's a terrible thing to have in place.

Princess, but surely the very fact that 'our bad prison system, people with agendas, prejudiced juries' all exist makes the death penalty inherently flawed and unworkable? We can work on the prison system (I hope), but there will always be agendas and prejudices, not to mention flawed evidence; we can't eradicate those, so isn't it just common sense to eradicate the thing that we CAN?

Usually the only people who attend executions are folk who want the satisfaction of seeing that person punished by death. They probably don't want to see a torture session, but they won't find it intolerably horrific, if that is what happens, because they came to see a deliberate death and who said that should be painless?

I've a relative, who is staunchly anti-DP, has been invited to executions. He declined. Finds whole thing obviously barbaric.

Op I think the word that sums it up is karma

I'm opposed to the death penalty. It's a hard thing to defend when custodial sentences seem so lenient but obviously I continue to oppose.

It is not the role of the judiciary or the state to put someone to death however heinous the crime.

I told DS1(9) about the death penalty and he was shocked countries still had it "I thought that was just on horrible histories" he said. Quite right.

Read this - how much worse if we had had the death penalty in the UK at the time.

Until the police are infallible and stop allowing their investigations to be led by prejudice, we can't support the death penalty. That means we cannot ever support the death penalty.

yabu

he is human, no human should suffer in such a way no matter what they have done

For everyone saying that they would be in favour of the death penalty for the murderer of a member of their own family, that is exactly why we have an impartial justice system which takes the law out of our hands.

It is human nature to feel passionately about your own loved ones - measured, rational feelings (understandably) go out the window. It is how you feel about the issue when you are not at the mercy of your own personal feelings that matters, as you can then assess the situation from an objective moral point of view. There is nothing wrong with having different feelings about our own specific case as long as we recognise that we must keep them separate from our views on government policy.

it is a stupid argument imagine it was one of you family

I can not imagine because I can not feel what they are feeling I can empathise

the law can not be dictated by emotions

Guildford Four. Birmingham Six. Lovebeing

watch Fourteen Days in May

then ask yourself if there is ever a need to have the death penalty

it is on youtube

why the hell should someone who has committed such a crime be kept alive? why should they live the rest of their lives in considerable comfort when their victims suffer horribly?

YANBU

I'm against the death penalty for a number of reasons.

But a this man suffering for half an hour is not one of them!

If anyone thinks someone living on Death Row is kept in any kind of comfort they need to research - there is no comfort there at all.

I read a book about Death Row and it's hardly on the same level as the suffering they inflict on their victims.