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 ?

No comment needed...

Completly opposed. In all cases.

The Southport attacker is a good example of someone I would have like to see the death penalty. I am sick of tax payers funding these inhuman people to carry on breathing. A civilised society looks after its victims in my opinion. This is not what ours does at the moment.

Sanctioning state murder cheapens human life. It is simpler, safer (and cheaper) to stick to the principle that every human life is too precious to be wiped out.

Minimal?! How many wrongly executed innocent people is acceptable in your view? What is the threshold?

No, not least because there have been far too many miscarriage of justice.

in that case even some of the WW2 Leaders ?

With Hitler already dead by his own hand it’s not hard to see the executions of the Nazi leaders as purely retributive justice, IMO.
And as this was some 80 years ago it looks less relevant today.

Sounds like something from the hunger games... You killed them, so we'll kill you in retaliation.

I am not against AI. It has its place doing the time consuming donkey work. But without a human, that work will not be up to scratch.

You're proposing blending fallible AI and fallible humanity as if that will.make reintroducing the death penalty safe from miscarriages of justice. That idea is so howling mad I can only assume you are joking.

Why does looking after victims require killing perpetrators?

It was the Soviets who pushed for Nazis to be executed. Had it been a solely British or US endeavour, it's likely there would have been no executions and life imprisonments instead.

It's understandable since the purpose of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was eradication and not just conquest, and there is no doubt whatsoever that had the Nazis captured the Soviet leadership they also would have been executed, but there was a lot of resistance to the Soviet push for executions on the part of both the Brits and the US. I think for Soviet leadership it was important to be able to show to Soviet people that those responsible were dead and were not coming back.

for those that appose the death penalty what about your objects to this : https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5555330-to-think-its-time-to-leave-the-echr

because surely leaving the echr is the slippery road towards it

Well, I'm totally consistent - I vehemently oppose leaving the ECHR. It isn't jut about the death penalty, it is also about workers' rights, women's rights, anti-discrimination and all that good stuff that some folk would just love to do away with.

Quite so. Restoration of the death pnalty is just ONE of the things to which leaving the ECHR would be a slippery slope, and I absolutely oppose it.

That level of naivety is alarming.

There can never be total certainty. And you, and all other advocates of the death penalty, should consider than one of the reasons for its abolition in the UK decades ago was that jury members were increasingly reluctant to convict if the penalty was death. Life imprisonment does not carry that risk.

So it is highly likely that 3 or 4 jury members would refuse to convict, leading to acquittal.

change the system use the jury to decide guilt or not then a panel of judges to decide the suitable level of punishment upto the death penalty ?

But the jury will still know that the death penalty is an option! Your suggestion changes nothing.

Have you seen the state of the judiciary lately?

Anyway, absolutely no to leaving the ECHR and nothing will convince me that we should ever bring back capital punishment, which is really just a form of revenge, not actually punishment.

What about corporal punishment?

You’re obviously in favour and most people are opposed. Every time you get given a fairly obvious point that the jury system is fallible you say that’s a risk the jury takes. Juries make mistakes all the time and the fact they do should mean that anyone with any empathy would shudder at the thought of a person who knows they’re innocent sitting in a cell, watching the hours count down before someone comes to murder them.

Even if a person is guilty, the long slow process of trial appeal, clemency plea, re-trial before the inevitable execution seems too cruel.

some people don’t deserve to walk this earth but a 100% infallible method of sorting who those people are from some halfwit who committed murder in a rage is not possible so you’ll just have to live in a country where you are safe from being murdered by the state.

but knowing a guilty verdict could lead to death sentence is the same thing...

I certainly wouldn’t want to convict someone in those circumstances. The idea of my decision potentially being a life or death one would be too much for me.

It’s very rare that guilt is absolutely clear cut. Usually there have been arguments either way, from the prosecution and defence, and a decision has to be made by the jury. ‘Beyond reasonable doubt’ doesn’t equal ‘beyond all doubt’.

Hard no to that too. I used to think you lived in 1952 but now I see it's 1552.

I have sometimes thought that bringing back the stocks - public shame basically with rotten tomatoes (and, admittedly, worse things) - would be worth it for minor crimes!!