To reconsider my feelings re. Death penalty.

[FoxgloveFairy]

Just read a story about a young guy in the US who broke into a house and, not finding anything to steal, decided to rape the female occupant. A 101 year old woman. Not a string-em-up advocate, but just looking at the arrogant grin on this young man's face in court, I feel right now I could be persuaded.

The problem with your arguments, elephantspoo, is that they are still founded on the assumption that prison does not constitute any kind of punishment. If you believe that, I suggest you volunteer for a long spell in a prison in the league of Belmarsh, and you will discover it really isn't the cuddly sinecure you imagine.

Your comparison with the armed forces rests on the assumption that those who oppose the death penalty fully endorse military action that results in the deaths of unarmed combatants. Since in general they don't, that flies out of the window. And even if we did, there is an inherent fallacy in assuming that killing by the military justifies any form of state killing: quite simply, it cannot.

As for the likes of Ian Huntley: damn right we should show him more compassion than he showed his victims. The whole concept of justice and society relies on the assumption that we don't descend to the level of the likes of Huntley.

Icimoi - Do you believe the victim deserves justice in any way? No matter how I ask the question, and I've asked it many times, only writtenguarantee has offered her opinion on whether or not a victim should have a right to justice.

writtenguarantee - Thank-you for your considered response. I don't assume objectors to the death penalty support war. Quite the contrary. I merely pointed out to those who boasted that they live in a country that did not have state sanctioned murder, that in fact they were wrong. That was the root of that point. Either way, killing is killing, and if it is not done in defence of your family in response to direct threat, and is in fact done because it is what I was ordered to do, then it is state sponsored killing. I never said it was wrong per se, what I said was it was ignorant to believe we did not live in a country that sanctioned killing at the behest of the authorities, and on the grounds that we did, I saw greater benefit to killing pedophiles and murderers threatening our families than people in foreign countries arguing over who has the right to the revenue from some oil wells.

Your point on justice is very interesting though. You see, if someone stole my car, other than personal attachment and a few personal belongings, I feel that if the guy got a year in prison, and provided my insurance paid for me to be made good, I wouldn't care. But if someone raped or murdered my child that would be different. I believe I have the right to expect justice. You point out that justice is an individual thing, and maybe that is so. Maybe the victim should be given the choice. If a guy steels four card and one victim is happy with six months, the next a year, but the third thinks he should do seven, maybe he should face the sum total of eight and a half years.

Does a girl who is raped have the right to live without fear that she will meet her attacker again in the street? Does the mother of a murdered child have the right to expect her child's killer never to walk again? I'd say they do. I'd also go so far as to say they also have the right not to have to pay for their perpetrators health well being and care. Yes, pay for their jailor's wages, but no, don't pay for their medical treatment, food and television privileges. Let the do-gooders in society chip in and fund entertainment for the child abusers, and force the murderers in our prisons to work in chain gangs or in factories on the prison grounds. It's not slave labour. It's punishment and retribution for crimes committed.

Societies all strike a balance of what is and isn't acceptable or tolerable in their community, and we all form opinions on that. You have yours, I have mine, but in the middle is the line society has drawn, a balance it has set; and we have exactly the amount of pedophiles, rapists and murderers that we want to have.

Yes, the victim deserves justice. He or she gets it by virtue of the imprisonment of the perpetrator.

Certainly if someone murdered my child I would want them to be killed slowly and painfully. However, I recognise that the justice system simply cannot be run on the basis of my primitive wish for revenge.

Have you ever considered the practicalities of running a prison where conditions are so harsh that there is no incentive to behave, to rehabilitate, or indeed to refrain from attacking your jailers regularly, and where most of the inmates will inevitably become feral? Would you want to be a jailer in that prison?

and on the grounds that we did, I saw greater benefit to killing pedophiles and murderers threatening our families than people in foreign countries arguing over who has the right to the revenue from some oil wells.

the difference is that while our military actions may lead to death, that certainly isn't there primary goal. In fact, that isn't a goal at all and some effort is put into not have "collateral damage". So, while people on the other side die, that isn't the military's intention. I am not excusing it, what I am saying it is different from the deliberate killing of a defenceless person.

Does a girl who is raped have the right to live without fear that she will meet her attacker again in the street? Does the mother of a murdered child have the right to expect her child's killer never to walk again? I'd say they do.

People have given good reasons above why you don't want rape and murder to carry the same sentence. thus, if murders get life, rapists cannot. So, I will have to say I disagree with the first sentence and I agree with the second.

I'd also go so far as to say they also have the right not to have to pay for their perpetrators health well being and care.

the problem with that is that you can't simultaneously remove someone's ability to make enough money to eat, and then not provide food. and I don't understand why that then doesn't apply to other prisoners. why should a car thief be supported by the person whose car he stole? My guess is that you don't support forced labour for these people.

prisoners' labour won't be enough to pay for prisons, and there is a host of other problems with it (if they are doing useful work, we should pay a legitimate company to do it), so taxation is the main way we pay for it.

and we have exactly the amount of pedophiles, rapists and murderers that we want to have.

no we don't. As I said, I think the penalty for rape is too light. we may actually see a reduction with an increase in sentence. but murder carries a penalty stiff enough that raising it to death won't add deterrent value. you seem to be asserting it will, but evidence is to the contrary.

writtenguarantee - We have exactly the amount of rapists and murderers in our society that we want, because the general consensus of us all and a group is that this is how many we are willing to tolerate, and this is the system we are going to use to create and maintain this balance. You may not like it or agree with it, but that is what society wishes. That was my point.

As for working in prisons, I'd happily see all prisoners forced to work. If prisons were free to generate income via putting the prisoners to work, maybe we wouldn't be buying Ikea chairs and bookcases, maybe we'd be buying British and keeping more of what was spent here in the UK. maybe we wouldn't be spending billions on road maintenance every year if a chunk of that labour was being provided by a chained prison population at nominal cost.

Icimoi - So you would be happy to forgo your desire for retribution if someone killed your child, for the benefit of a more humane society and greater care of the killer. I couldn't say the same, and I know I couldn't, and I suspect most people who advocate forgiveness and rehabilitation would change their opinion in a heartbeat if it happened to them. You see I see the hypocrisy in that. I admit that I would want my child's killer dead. That I see that as justice. I cannot stand here and say, no this is wrong, they can be rehabilitated so long as you educate them and teach them that they did bad things. When I know that if it were me, my child, I'd want them dead.

Our system of justice is run for the greater good of the perpetrator, to the detriment of the victim. You can never have justice so long as the the system is run by people who have no interest in giving justice to the victim.

As writtenguarantee pointed out, we are all different. Justice for me would be a death penalty, justice for someone else may be 10 years in prison. But when society says, that persons level of justice is correct, and that persons justice is not, you have huge swathes of the population who do not receive justice when their son is murdered or their daughter raped.

That's just the way I see it.

elephantpoo, how on earth does arresting, charging and imprisoning murderers and rapists equate with wanting them or tolerating them? You simply aren't even using the English language according to its normal meaning.

Prisoners are forced to work. You cannot suggest that imprisoning someone in the type of conditions found in our prisons is for the greater good of the perpetrator. I simply do not understand why you refuse to accept that prison is not the easy option that you depict.

I too would want the killer of my child to die, but, as I have pointed out above, the justice system cannot work solely on the basis of the primitive revenge reflex of those injured. Where does that logically end? You've already said you want it extended to rapists, despite the fact that that would give rapists every incentive to kill their victims. How about people who attack their victims and don't kill them but leave them paralysed? How about attacks that result in other life-changing injuries? How about attacks that result in serious but not life-changing injuries? Should the victim of a piece of petty vandalism be entitled to demand the perpetrator's death? Where do you draw the line?

And what if, say, the mother of Lesley Molseed had been entitled to demand the death sentence for the person convicted of killing her child? How would she have felt when she discovered that she had in effect herself killed a totally innocent man?

Icomoi - I said society decides how it chooses to deal with perps, based on what it thinks it should do with them and how, and that system of deterrents establishes the level of such crimes within society. If we reduce the penalty for burglary for example, we see an increase in burglaries. Society as a whole gets to choose how much burglary is tolerable and what the penalty should be. In our country we see it is being a minor issue and give people six months to a year. But that is our choice.

Same goes for rape, child abuse, murder, man slaughter, car theft, fraud, etc. we get to choose how much we are willing to tolerate as a group, and set the punishment for those who do. That is how our penal system works.

Now, you might be suggesting that we are not tolerating crime, because we are punishing those who comit crime, or that we want less of it because we pay the Police to stop it. And if those are your arguments, the lets look at those....

If the British population wanted zero child abuse for example, we would take action to remove child abusers from society. We would lock them up and not let them into society. We would monitor child abuse websites and lock up all who access them and never let them out. But we do not do those things. Our society as a group decides what is and isn't an acceptable level of offending, and what should and shouldn't be a suitable level of punishment for that offending. Correspondingly we have the level of offending that those tariffs encourage, and the population accepts that level of abusers in their midst and makes set adjustments to the laws as and when they deem it necessary.

If your contention is that the people do not control the level of criminalist in their midst, you are sadly mistaken. EVERY means of controlling crime is at the disposal of society, and what society as a whole chooses to do is up to them based on how many or how few crimes they want to occur.

I am not advocating some totalitarian dictatorship where we eliminate all crime by exterminating all criminals based on the flimsiest excuse in a knee jerk reaction to rid the country if their disease, as you seem to imply my argument amounts to. I am merely pointing out that the system we have at present creates a level of rape and child abuse that I personally see as being unacceptably high, that I do not see anything like justice for the victim of those sorts of crimes. And that what is alleged to be our 'justice system' would be more 'just' with a more brutal penal system founded on hard labour, longer sentencing, and capital punishment for the most serious offenders.

I mean realistically, how many of us are dumb enough to believe child abusers released in to the community are ever not a threat to our children. Are you now going to contend that with the right education and coping mechanisms there is no reason why a convicted pedophile shouldn't be living in the community? Do they have any practical way of ever contributing to society in any way whatsoever? Admittedly they make good doctors/teachers/etc BEFORE they are caught, but honestly, what benefit can they ever provide to anyone ever once they have been discovered raping children? Explain it to me, because I just can't get my head around your position.

If we reduce the penalty for burglary for example, we see an increase in burglaries. Society as a whole gets to choose how much burglary is tolerable
Tosh.
Kindly provide empirical evidence of such.

We have had crime sprees in the past owing directly to tipping criminals out onto the streets in order to free up prison spaces.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7975302.stm

Dora perhaps if we managed to provide better rehabilitation services that wouldn't have happened. However, reduced sentencing has not been shown to increase crime, just as the death sentence hasn't been shown to reduce murder.

Statistical arguments always depend on the parameters and definitions. They're never true or false per se.

It has been well established over and over again that capital punishment, the harshest punishment of all, does not act as a deterrent to murder.

It may not. But, if you hang all the murderers then the murder rate will go down, because several murderers have killed more than one person. This clearly can not happen if they're executed after the first offence.

What? Dora that makes no sense whatsoever.
Goodness, what is it this week with people who seem able to create nonsensical sentences on a whim.
As for your point about statistical arguments, that too is nonsense. It's a very simple process to use differential parameters etc. It's also a fallacy that statistics only work the way that politicians want them to. If done properly, then they can be proven to be correct.

Dawn - You continue to just snipe with BS. Clearly is you kill murderers, it reduces the number of murderers alive in the country. They do not rise from the dead. There is no zombie apocalypse on our streets. Their numbers go down. You keep killing them and they die. It is called attrition. Unless you are actually contending that buy killing murderers, you encourage them to procreate and multiply, in which case I want some of your mess.

Icimoi - It doesn't have to act as a deterrent per se, all it has to do to be an effective policy is kill the murderer. If the murderer is going to kill anyways, and you content that it is not a deterrent, then it makes no difference if you have capital punishment or not. Your premise that education in prison rehabilitates has a failure rate, so clearly it is not a deterrent either. It's not like they decide not to kill someone because of fear they may be forced to read a book in prison. So education at best can only reduce reoffending rates, whereas killing them eliminates 100% of all reoffending.

So regardless of how many choose to kill and come in the front door, you can at least eliminate those you choose to add to the problem by not putting them back outside to murder again. All your preferred love and understanding does in add to the murder rate in the UK. There is no evidence that releasing murderers into the community reduces crime a whatsoever.

Meds not mess.

If we killed all the murderers we'd still have murderers. Logic.
I'm not talking bullshit. There are only two people on this thread that have come up with the most unutterable tripe and neither of them are me.
It scares me though, people who, until you look at the grammar and sentence structure appear intelligent, getting involved in these debates. Working on nothing but emotion and logical fallacies, no actual facts and when they're picked up on it, complain that there argument is being picked apart.
Fucking scary.

Just two cases in point: Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Both began murdering when we still had a death penalty. That did not stop them from beginning to kill, nor did it stop them from killing a number of people. In practice they haven't been hanged, and of course they haven't killed anyone since they were arrested. Of course these two were never released, but the fact that people released from life sentences are out on licence and are closely supervised is an important factor in preventing reoffending.

The plain fact of the matter is that most murderers either think they won't get caught and/or convicted, or they don't care. The same manifestly applies in areas that have the death penalty.

And both elephantspoo and DoraGora continue to evade the question of how it would have been justifiable to kill Stefan Kiszko and Sally Clark.

Timothy Evans.
George Kelly.
Mahmood Hussein Matten.
James Hanratty.
Derek Bentley.
So many other innocent lives taken.

We have exactly the amount of rapists and murderers in our society that we want, because the general consensus of us all and a group is that this is how many we are willing to tolerate, and this is the system we are going to use to create and maintain this balance. You may not like it or agree with it, but that is what society wishes. That was my point.

you keep talking as if we control the number of rapists. we don't. executions simply don't reduce the number of rapists and killers.

As for working in prisons, I'd happily see all prisoners forced to work. If prisons were free to generate income via putting the prisoners to work, maybe we wouldn't be buying Ikea chairs and bookcases, maybe we'd be buying British and keeping more of what was spent here in the UK. maybe we wouldn't be spending billions on road maintenance every year if a chunk of that labour was being provided by a chained prison population at nominal cost.

Sorry, I just can't condone slave labour, no matter if they are prisoners. and seriously, that isn't going to solve the "buy british" problem. you are going to have trained artisan woodworkers in general.

Dawn - A dead murderer is dead. That is a fact. If you kill 100 murderers, you reduce the number of live murderers by 100. I realise that is an inconvenient fact for you to accept, but it is a fact nonetheless. Funny how you offer nothing but your emotive BS flaming is response, whereas, virtually all other poster (Icimoi, wrttenguarantee, et al) have at least been willing to engage in debate and construct coherent arguments to put their positions across. Congratulations!

writtenguarantee - Executing rapists and murderers does reduce the number of rapists and murderers that are alive. It is a fact. I can see you arguing that it does not deter in the first instance, and that is a perfectly fair argument, but killing them means that they are dead. When they are dead they are no longer live killers. They are corpses. Arguing that they are still rapists and murderers once they are dead is a misnomer.

As regards forcing prisoners to work while they are in prison, you are against that, but you are happy to force a woman raped by a man to pay for his defence, his food, well being, entertainment, room and board. How very PC of you. Glad you are happy, but I suspect if it were you that were personally effected by rape of murder, you'd be singing a different tune.

You see that's the problem with championing the cause of the child abusers or the killers in society. Your ideals work very well from a sofa in suburbia, but the minute you find your child dead, you throw your idologies out the window. How very bousgoais.

It's the fact that you a) cannot comprehend the concept of rehabilitation coupled with b) the fact that you come out with such emotional bullshit yourself. As I said, logical fallacy does not an argument make. I'm not flaming you by asking for evidence, evidence that you continually are unable to provide. Stating Congratulations etc doesn't make you clever, and accusing me of bullshit and flaming doesn't make you superior in any way whatsoever.
With regard to killing 100 murderers, do you really thing a) No more are going to come along and b) that the already proven not to be a deterrent death penalty will discourage others from coming along. There are many, many reasons people kill. None of them right, but some are not even aware of having done it. It's not cuddly to not want to kill them. It's surprisingly normal. There are killers who have served their time, learned their lessons and are out again, walking among us, never likely to kill again.
Now, stop accusing me of bullshit, bearing in mind that your racist post was removed, and produce a valid rather than an emotive knee-jerk argument and I may engage with you properly. Currently I see no need to engage with somebody of the hang 'em and flog 'em brigade, particularly as no intellectual capacity is actually required for argument my logical fallacy.
As for not offering anything, I would like to think you may learn something from the links I put up, doubt it, but it's the weekend and now and then I aim to at least feel as though I've achieved something.

Dawn - I have never said capital punishment is a deterrent. I don't see what you are so hung up on that argument. You should like a broken record. I point out that killing them reduces their numbers. That is a fact. I am not going to go and kill 100 murderers to prove to you that they die. You can deny the fact all you like, but dead people do not go on to kill (unless they have Ebola). If you kill them they die. Dead people do not reoffend. Dead people do not get released back into society to kill or rape others.

I realist you are talking purely based on your emotions, but if you found your child dead, I strongly suspect you would all of a sudden forget about your hypothetical ethical structure you have built for yourself, and decide your child's murderer did not deserve to read books and the chance to share the experience with social workers. I strongly suspect you are a hypocrit, but that's fine.

If you really do believe you would embrace your child's murderer and give him the chance to learn from the experience and rehabilitate into a better person, then you really do deserve congratulations. You are a better person than anyone I have ver met.

In regard to those killers out there who 'learned their lesson and are walking among us' as you put it, I am sure those people raped and murdered by people released from prison all have a warm fussy feeling knowing that they at least gave the murderer a second chance. But I guess you are now going to explain that away as someone else's fault for not giving the guy enough books to read whilst he was incarcerated, or not being listened to by suitably caring social workers.

The autocorrect on this site is carp.