I'm asking you nicely

[blearyboy]

*slept in. Had a slightly sleepless night last night and ended up sleeping until 8.30am. Continued to get myself ready for work very, very slowly despite this. No rush to get in at the moment.
* met a sales person and he was selling me work. Made quite a strong case actually and I agreed to do the work for him. My team will be helping out over the

Comments

[blearyboy]

I wonder. I'm not against the death penalty on moral grounds, I am against it on the grounds that it's too difficult to implement.

Perhaps a society should be able to choose to - humanely - remove individuals who have broken the most fundamental rules. I mean if default person who we all agree to be the worst human being ever had survived and been tried at Nuremberg, should he have been hanged or rehabilitated? Could any person on earth countenance the idea of even a reformed Hitler seeing out his dotage in a nice nursing home in Bavaria?

The aspect of the death penalty that I've always disagreed with is the implementation. One mistake, one mistrial, one person hanged unfairly and that's it. Everyone in that country who supported the death penalty, even if only through apathy, is a murderer.

Laughner shot and killed a little girl in front of enough eyewitnesses to remove any doubt that he did it. The question now is, how much was he in control of his actions? Can someone seemingly so crazy be truly judged culpable? That's where you hit the implementation issue again, and probably why I'd just about come down on the side of sparing his life.

(BTW - it's all academic anyway because he will without question be executed)

[delichan]

I read this reply on my shiniest iPhone on my walk home this evening and I was conversing back with it all the way. Indicates to me that we should probably take it up further over a beer or tasty wine at some point.

Anyway - I DO, I absolutely do have a moral issue with the Death Penalty. There are very few (less than one mangled hand's worth of fingers) things I am so black/white about in my life, but this is definitely one. I think it's WrongWithCapitalization in much the same way I think murder is Wrong - though I appreciate that many others don't agree.

Much of my reasoning for the wrongness of it, when called for, is the same as yours - the logistical issues, the potential for being wrong that is not worth the death of even one innocent person. But that's not where it stops, for me.

Perhaps a fundamental underlier for my stance is that I do believe in rehabilitation - or at least the potential for it. I believe that humans have the potential to change so utterly fundamentally, so as to essentially *be* different people. I don't think everyone attains it, but I do believe we all have the potential for it.

But it's not just that - there's so much more: the nature of "being crazy" (couldn't anyone who deliberately takes a life be categorized thus?), the nature of mistaken paths and how much the rest of your life (or your having a life) should depend on them, what it does to those who love the death-penaltied, the complete revolt I feel at the thought of it being "ok" or acceptable to pre-mediatedly take another life. And possibly more.

Maybe it's academic, but I vitriolically feel it shouldn't be.

[blearyboy]

We should probably save this for the pub (especially if you're replying on an iPhone) but essentially: I disagree with you on a purely theoretical level, I agree with you when we're talking about any real-world implementation of the death penalty.