1) Who said anything about lethal injections? And, granting your point, how dare those on the other side characterize me and those like me as "cruel?" Particularly considering what hellholes a lot of prisons are!
2) The State already has powers that it routinely misuses...the power to tax, for instance. I don't see you crying out against them---if you do, I do apologize for misjudging you. Even back when the DP was routine, it was not used indiscriminately, and, then and now, getting someone so much as convicted, much less sentenced to death, was by no means routine.
3) I know of no case of an executed person later proven to be innocent in the US in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, and even Timothy Evans in the UK is by no means certain---serial killers, we now know, have been known to work together. (Fred and Rose West, or the Highway Stranglers in Southern California, to name two examples off the top of my head.) I grant freely that non-free countries often misuse the death penalty, but they misuse all their powers.
4) And this differs from what goes on in courts now in what way?
One reason to be in favor of the DP is that, once it's applied, we need never fear that person again. After Bundy was executed, girls with long, straight dark hair parted in the middle never needed to worry about Bundy lurking in wait for them. Life without parole is a pretty concept---but can you guarantee, for certain sure, that someone so sentenced won't ever get out? Nathan Leopold was sentenced to LWOP---and he eventually walked out of prison. "While there's life there's hope", after all, and even the scummiest murderers (Ramirez, for instance) have people working on their behalf.
Also, if LWOP is as far as the system can go, what has someone already so sentenced to lose if he knifes a guard or strangles an annoying cellmate? Any of us could end up in quod---you, me, anybody. In such a case, I'd much prefer that my prison mates knew that murdering me would put them on a one-way trip to their infernal, er, eternal home.
1) You would do me a favour if you did not indulge in the invention of an abstract anti-death-penalty campaigner designed to suit your priorities, and then apply that to me. I am not so stupid as to use the word "cruel" to condemn any punishment; no punishment is punishment unless it is unpleasant, and intended to be unpleasant. Kindly deal with what I say, not with what you would like me to say.
2) Ditto. If you haven't heard me RAGE about abuse of powers by various so-called "free" states, you can't have been listening. And the fact that you START by admitting that abuse of power is routine ("the price of liberty is eternal vigilance") does absolutely nothing to argue for the death penalty: since they abuse their powers with respect to our money or our businesses, hey! Let's give them power over our lives! Please present a slightly less illogical argument.
3) And pigs fly.I am not even disposed to discuss the possibility that wrongful death sentences might not happen. This is so horrendously irrational that it makes me wonder whether the discussion is worth having.
4) Obviously, it differs in that you are not deciding whether to have a man killed according to your own, or a few people's, wholly subjective perception of his (her) degrees of intent and purpose.
My country abolished the death penalty in peacetime in 1891. It was brought back by Benito Mussolini in 1926, and abolished again, and for good, on the significant date of June 6, 1944 - the day when the city of Rome was freed. As far as we are concerned, it is counted with torture, arbitrary arrest, and secret courts, as a relic of barbarism and tyranny. And if you compare the murder rates in the USA and in Italy, you may find that we do pretty well without it.
2) The State already has powers that it routinely misuses...the power to tax, for instance. I don't see you crying out against them---if you do, I do apologize for misjudging you. Even back when the DP was routine, it was not used indiscriminately, and, then and now, getting someone so much as convicted, much less sentenced to death, was by no means routine.
3) I know of no case of an executed person later proven to be innocent in the US in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, and even Timothy Evans in the UK is by no means certain---serial killers, we now know, have been known to work together. (Fred and Rose West, or the Highway Stranglers in Southern California, to name two examples off the top of my head.) I grant freely that non-free countries often misuse the death penalty, but they misuse all their powers.
4) And this differs from what goes on in courts now in what way?
One reason to be in favor of the DP is that, once it's applied, we need never fear that person again. After Bundy was executed, girls with long, straight dark hair parted in the middle never needed to worry about Bundy lurking in wait for them. Life without parole is a pretty concept---but can you guarantee, for certain sure, that someone so sentenced won't ever get out? Nathan Leopold was sentenced to LWOP---and he eventually walked out of prison. "While there's life there's hope", after all, and even the scummiest murderers (Ramirez, for instance) have people working on their behalf.
Also, if LWOP is as far as the system can go, what has someone already so sentenced to lose if he knifes a guard or strangles an annoying cellmate? Any of us could end up in quod---you, me, anybody. In such a case, I'd much prefer that my prison mates knew that murdering me would put them on a one-way trip to their infernal, er, eternal home.
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2) Ditto. If you haven't heard me RAGE about abuse of powers by various so-called "free" states, you can't have been listening. And the fact that you START by admitting that abuse of power is routine ("the price of liberty is eternal vigilance") does absolutely nothing to argue for the death penalty: since they abuse their powers with respect to our money or our businesses, hey! Let's give them power over our lives! Please present a slightly less illogical argument.
3) And pigs fly.I am not even disposed to discuss the possibility that wrongful death sentences might not happen. This is so horrendously irrational that it makes me wonder whether the discussion is worth having.
4) Obviously, it differs in that you are not deciding whether to have a man killed according to your own, or a few people's, wholly subjective perception of his (her) degrees of intent and purpose.
My country abolished the death penalty in peacetime in 1891. It was brought back by Benito Mussolini in 1926, and abolished again, and for good, on the significant date of June 6, 1944 - the day when the city of Rome was freed. As far as we are concerned, it is counted with torture, arbitrary arrest, and secret courts, as a relic of barbarism and tyranny. And if you compare the murder rates in the USA and in Italy, you may find that we do pretty well without it.
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