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

[PenelopeJoanSterling]

Because the topics got mixed up on my previous thread i thought id ask here, for certain types of crime in the uk, would you be either for or against the death penalty for certain crimes and why ?

Being a secondary school teacher is hardly comparable to being an executioner! Nor is be helping someone who wants to end their life to do so humanely.

So you want to cut back on procedural safeguards and access to legal representation at the same time as bringing back capital punishment?

You don't see an issue with that?

My point was that a job is a job, and some jobs are tougher than others. There are jobs that require the employee to look through proof regarding CSA cases. I certainly wouldn't want to do that either, but there are people who do it.

Taking a life is taking a life. In one instance it helps the person, and in another it helps society.

I think we will have to agree to disagree!

To add - for all the resources the US invest in attempting to limit executions of innocent people:

The wrongful conviction rate of persons who are executed is at least 4%.

The general murder rate, by contrast, is around 0.004%.

Against. Always against no matter what the crime. The state and society should never be involved in killing a human being.

His case is as case a good a case to argue against the death penalty as any other. None of my reasons have anything to do with the nature of a crime but they are all about the kind of society I want to live in.

1. State sanctioned killing is a slippery slope.
2. The state and society as a whole should always hold the moral high ground. I don't want to live in a society that thinks that killing is acceptable especially when we have prisons and other means to keep dangerous people off the streets.
3. Miscarriage of justice possibility
4. Biased sentencing towards minorities (imagine if reform or restore were in power and we had the death penalty...)
5. I believe that anyone dangerous to society needs to be kept away from society but beyond that justice should not be about revenge. It should be about keeping society safe.
6. Neuroscience tells you that there is no faculty that can be taken away from a human through injury or disease. Including moral faculties, knowing the difference between right and wrong and acting on this knowledge. Any of us might be so unlucky to be born or develop a lack to act morally and benevolently. Yes, even you, OP.

Define what is required for it to be clear and heinous though.

Well it doesn't actually. It protects the general public but not other prisoners or the guards.

Hasn't Axel F attacked a prison guard - was that the hot water attack? And then there was Ian Huntley being killed.

The Southport killings. A horrendous act and no doubt as to guilt. And I very much doubt that he can be rehabiliated. But he was under 18 anyway so even if we did have the death penalty for certain acts it wouldn't have been imposed on him.

Both failures of the Prison Service in their own way.

The point is, these are known criminals who are no longer at liberty to attack unsuspecting members of the public, which is precisely what the "but it will stop them killing other people" argument revolves around.

Yes, in some cases they will clearly remain a threat to prison staff and other inmates, but the key difference is they are in a confined facility, not at large in the community, they are known to those with the duty of care, not moving around unknown to the general public, and therefore there is knowledge of who and what they are and preventative steps can be taken to pre-empt future problematic behaviour.

A lack of proper procedure, care and attention, or facilities post-incarceration is not a justification for bringing back execution, it's an institutional failure, the causes of which need determined and put right.

There is also another point to bear in mind -

The study of criminality is vital in itself in order to prevent and detect future potential crime. The reason we don't really see prolific serial-killers any more is because of past study of known serial-killers leading to the development of techniques like criminal profiling. If you simply execute anyone aberrant, you totally preclude the ability to study them and learn from them, and then use that learned knowledge to understand and predict aberrant behaviour, therefore saving lives because of the fact people doing similar things in the future are detected and apprehended more quickly.

Aberrant people, including the ones people find more repellent like serial-killers, murderous paedophiles, torturers and so on, all exist as part of society whether people like that or not, so killing them out of hand does not, in any way, help society to understand why they exist, what motivates and drives them, how they operate, how they stay hidden, how they select victims etc etc. You can not solve a sociological problem by only removing all known examples of the problem and then calling it job done, because there will invariably be the ones missed because you are operating on an reactive and not proactive basis, you don't understand what it is you are dealing with, and then there will always be new ones popping up to replace the old simply because they occur naturally in the population in any case.

Like it or not, murderers, paedophiles, sexual sadists and the like are a learning opportunity, and it's stupidly closed-minded to think they are not, because refusing to learn from them just enables future versions of precisely the same thing.

But you can't make a definition of the law so that it describes an example from the past. You have to be able to frame it in a way so that the next person that commits such a crime can be charged and sentenced in such a way. So how do you define it? The murder of a child? What about a mercy killing of a child by her mother. Is that in or out? How about racially aggravated murder? You'll have Restore and the right wing campaigning against that as soon as it's a white person goes on a killing spree. But it doesn't matter because what you're proposing is an extra level of certainty that can't be defined. "Yes Your Honour, we're super -certain this man is guilty. Not just certain, we know he did it. We can tell."

How more certain do you think people would be of a black man than a white woman?

There is no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent (the available evidence is that it is not).

There is no evidence that the death penalty saves costs (in fact, the evidence is that it is more costly).

The only real argument for it is a moral one - retribution (an eye for an eye).

Then it's a question of whether you believe in that as a general moral principle, and next if you believe it moral for the state to administer it. Then, it's whether you trust the state to administer it and, finally, if it is worth the killing of some innocents as collateral damage.

Ultimately, even if you accept the underlying "eye for an eye" principle, the moral argument has to fail.

Excuse the Wikipedia source but it does the trick:

Rudakubana was arrested at the scene. He was charged with three counts of murder, ten counts of attempted murder, and possession of a bladed article. He was later separately charged under the Biological Weapons Act 1974 and Terrorism Act 2000 in relation to the possession of ricin and a military study of an Al-Qaeda training manual. He pleaded guilty to all 16 charges on 20 January 2025, when his trial was due to begin, having initially entered a not-guilty plea.

Pretty heinous and clear to me.

In the highly unlikely event that capital punishment was restored in this country, one of the first problems it would encounter would be that many people would be very reluctant to serve on juries in capital cases.
I recall that when we still had it, a person could refuse to serve on a jury in a capital case, citing strong anti capital punishment beliefs. Juries can be questioned on their beliefs before selection. In such a position, I would state that I could not convict an accused person if they were likely to be hung.
Yes, we’ve heard all the gung-ho types who say they would be more than happy to fix the noose around a convicted person’s neck themselves— luckily those kind of people would never be selected to do so, quite rightly. (It would lead to numerous appeals for starters.)
It would need very serious and fair minded persons to be selected as jurors. And certainly not any old hang-em and flog-em blowhard.

Do away with juries then and use AI. At the end of the day, if it results in there being fewer criminals in the world, it has to be a good thing.

AI isn't reliable, it "hallucinates" and it shows bias from the data sets it's fed.

But sure, let's have life and death decided by a computer 🙄

You mean the same AI that's known to be riddled with bias and prejudice against specific demographics (like women, for instance)?

😂😂😂

A few people on this thread don't seem to understand what AI is and what its limitations are. AI cannot think or make complex, nuanced decisions. It can chuck an input through its algorithm and barf out a literate response; it can trawl the web and rewrite what it "reads" into a summarised answer to the question it was given; it cannot make an independent decision.

Oh Jesus Christ. I wish you were joking, but unfortunately I know you're not.

Oh wow, this is the most foolish idea I've read in a good few days.

AI?? It can't even get the opening times of my local shop right. I really don't think it's ready to judge anything important.

And if your child was one of those "minimal errors"?

I think this poster is being goady, which she is on every single thread I see her on.

"The only real argument for it is a moral one retribution."
This is not accurate.
Retribution is certainly the strongest philosophical justification, but it is not the only one.
Supporters commonly argue:

• Retribution ("just deserts")
• Incapacitation (the offender can never kill again)
• Deterrence
• Justice for victims
• Protection of prison staff from especially dangerous inmates
• Symbolic affirmation of society's condemnation

Whether these arguments succeed is another matter, but they certainly exist.

"Ultimately, even if you accept 'an eye for an eye', the moral argument has to fail."
This is an opinion, not a logical conclusion.
There are serious philosophers who defend capital punishment on retributive grounds.
For example:

• Immanuel Kant argued that justice requires a murderer to receive death because punishment should be proportionate to the crime.
• G. W. F. Hegel also defended retributive punishment.
• Some contemporary philosophers continue to defend capital punishment as a matter of just deserts rather than deterrence.

Conversely, thinkers such as Cesare Beccaria and John Rawls have provided influential arguments against it.
There is no philosophical consensus that the retributive argument "has to fail."