Death Penalty: Being considered bought back to the UK

[Cocoflower]

www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iTqjnNzRM-TiIEv0rLTXb_zb8ITQ?docId=CNG.8f872789736d127ca37fde3925b5a5bc.51

Seems House of Commons is seriously going to be debating bringing this back.

It is minefield- who should get death penalty?

The over-arching concern for me is what if they get they kill the innocent?

Is this a budget-cut saving scheme- cutting the tax payers bill on keeping inmates?

thanks reeling

the other thing of course is the prejudice of the sentencer. In these cases the bastard judge Donaldson, Master of the Rolls stated, rather controversially, that he didn't care who was convicted as 'some Mick did it so why not sentence them as a deterrent to others?'. And the MaGuire family were sentenced to years in prison on dubious evidence (later to be shown as false).

The sort of lesson is that public revulsion at the time gives rise to decisions that are not judicious.

Public revulsion combined with a corrupt police and judicial system. Let's not forget these were the days of institutions such as the West Midlands Fit em up Serious Crimes Squad

Why does everyone use the US as an example when talking about the death penalty? There are plenty of other countries that have it, Japan for one, that have a peaceful and well-ordered society.

I think people use the US as it is federal, so some states have the death penalty and some don't, so it's informative to see how murder rates differ in the same country whether the death penalty is applicable or not. Japan has a unified justice system

You can't compare different US states anyway, as they are so different besides having guns or not.

I officially give up.

You really think you can compare Wyoming and New York? They are as different as chalk and cheese, and it is ridiculous that one government can legislate as if they are the same.
People in rural areas need guns because the police could take an hour to get there.

I suppose it's quite interesting to watch and see where this e-petitioning thing will go. If everyone in the country was online and could just press a Yes/No button, it might have some implications for democracy, and we would in effect be having referendums all the time.

But agree that nothing is likely to happen as a result of this - thankfully. I couldn't bear to live in a place that had capital punishment. I'd probably save them the trouble and top myself ...

Also, in my mind the death penalty is linked to gun laws and the police being armed. No no no.

A return of the death penalty would be a retrograde step.

Execution is murder in the name of justice. It is not really about justice, though; it's about vengence.

Murder is murder, whoever commits it - including the State.

Read a book by John Grisham called an Innocent Man - it will change your mind forever about the death penalty.

I'm strongly in favour of the death penalty. However you first have to sort out the corrupt and incompetent courts and police or people would be executed on a whim. (some are now of course)

Even before that you should be debating the direction you want the justice system to go. At the moment we can't even agree if we are trying to punish prisoners, keep them away from their victims or rehabilitate them. Sentences are inconsistent and seemingly based on the mood of the particular judge.

We need to look at the whole system not just fiddle with bits of it.

Murder is murder, whoever commits it - including the State.

by that logic imprisonment is a crime even if the state does it so we better let everyone out. Including child murderer and such.

If the death penalty existed then who would actually be the person who executed/killed/electricuted the convicted/criminal/murderer?

Who could do it/take the job/sleep at night.

Would the state executioner just do it because they were ordered to do it, so really they would have no guilt about killing someone.

Would someone within the victims family put the final dose of medicine/poison in the syringe?

The death penalty is just a whole ethical/moral minefield. How could anyone say the don't oppose it?

iirc, Albert Pierpoint was the last executioner in the UK in the 1960's and he had a dreadful personal life both during and after his role.

If you read Pierepoin'ts autobiography, you will find he gave up being an executioner in (1984 I think) because he become opposed to the death penalty.

Execution could be just an injection of morphine. It need not be the 'show' that some countries require. Vets do it to animals all the time without losing sleep.
Animal lovers will tell you there's no difference between animals and humans so if vets can get used to it then so can people.
Surgeons kill people all the time. Not on purpose so that is different, but still they have learned to distance themselves or they couldn't operate on people.

And lets not forget we'd be talking about some pretty nasty people. Think child murderer and you may find it easier to imagine.

"If you read Pierepoin'ts autobiography, you will find he gave up being an executioner in (1984 I think) because he become opposed to the death penalty."

He quit as an executioner in the mid 50s after a dispute about the payment for a cancelled execution. Had he been paid in full he would quite probably have kept going.

It wasn't until his autobiography came out in the mid 70s he made the statement that the death penalty doesn't solve anything and was instead just about revenge.

Hw wasstill killing people up until 1984! Wow!

just looked on wiki - hewasn't the last, was he? Just very prolific and from a family of executioners.

"Hw wasstill killing people up until 1984! Wow!"

No, no he wasn't, he quit in the 50s.

"hewasn't the last, was he?"

No, executions continued after he quit and he was never the only hangman that the country used anyway.

"Just very prolific and from a family of executioners."

And also very high profile, he was far from a simple character but at least some part of him liked the publicity that his job gave him and even ran a pub with a "jokey" name about his other profession. After he quit and already had a fairly high profile he sold his story to the papers and then wrote an autobiography.

(i've got a spare red pen for when yours runs out...)

I hadn't really thought about vets or surgeons. We all also take this chance when we drive a car don't we. I feel it is a different, unless the executioner had another part time job on the side which involved a caring aspect to it. Possibly, you never know.

Some might say well he/she was a mass murderer, torturer, committed the most horrendous crimes. These would all be true but would killing that person be better than other forms of punishment?

Have people who believe in the death penalty considered the minor details? Would they like to be the jury, judge, executioner?

So if you think that person deserves to be killed then you have to be willing to kill them yourself, surely.

I think the occasions when you are certain that someone is guilty (Norway for instance) are so rare that the death penalty is, apart from all the moral reasons, too risky. We need to sort out prisons and sentencing and make sure that for example there isn't a sentence of say 15 years, and the person actually gets out after 10. But that is a whole enormous can of worms, and will probably never happen.

To start with, I'm totally opposed to the death penalty. However, on a point of interest, I think ways round the 'person has to deal the death blow' problem have been devised. The firing squad approach is an older way of doing this - no-one knows who has fired the lethal shot, collective responsibility - and some US states have multiple buttons for the lethal injection so it's not known who has actually dispensed the drug.

This is, though, one of my reasons for opposing it: I don't feel I should ask someone else to do, on the state's behalf, what I would not be prepared to carry out myself, and I never would. My other reasons are b) the possibility of wrongful conviction, and c) two wrongs don't make a right, and killing even in return for a criminal killing is not acceptable. But in that case we do need a more rigorous approach to imprisonment and punishment in a lot of cases.

With a jury system like the British there is a good chance that more murderers would get off scot free, because juries would be less willing to convict with the death penalty.