Friggin Wuss Justice systemFollow

What really gets me is how they will keep a death row inmate alive at all costs, just so they can kill him at a later date. You know, provide chemo for cancer patients, make sure the guy with pneumonia gets cured. I know there's some sort of legal reasoning for this, but man... it sure looks stupid on the outside. Let nature take its course!

That list is hilarious.

the U.S. and Japan are the black sheep in there in my opinion.

/sarcasm on

You want to go to a place where the death penalty is enforced?

Come to Texas, we had the #1 or #2 execution rate of the entire country. California has executed 11 people since 1997, I think Texas did that last week.

Comedian Ron White said it best, " While most states are getting rid of the death penalty, My State (Texas) is putting in an express lane!"

/sarcasm off

Anyone else notice this little gem?



What the hell was he doing out on parole???

Personally, I think if you're convicted of something so heinous,and the death penalty is your lot, then you should be taken out back of the courthouse and hung right there.

The reason we have such a stringent appeals process is because of people like this:

Warning - Wordy New Yorker Article

If you don't want to read it, basically it's about Kenneth Peasley, an extremely tough and extremely successful state's prosecutor in Arizona.

He was eventually disbarred for conjurring evidence to support his cases, including in capital murder trials.

But nowadays we have the DNA evidence to find out if they were the murderer or not. Why not use DNA in all murder trials and if the tests results come back that the one on trial was indeed the murder, hang them then and there?

That issue may have had a definite point before we used DNA more regularly, but the technology is there. Use it, and save monry as well as send out a sharp message to those who play around with the thought of murder.

I agree. Once the jury reads a "guilty" verdict, the judge should call him up, then pull a Walther out of his robes and put a bullet in his head right there.

Spoken like someone who has never taken a single legal systems course. The problem with the death penalty IS the fact that it goes by a jury's concept of reasonable doubt. The idea of a jury can be good, but it can also be horribly, horribly skewed. Ever hear of the term tyranny of the majority?

Suppose an African American man supposedly raped and murdered a young, white woman in the rural south. The day of the trial comes, and the majority of the jury happens to be white. Do you honestly believe the man will get a completely fair and unbiased trial? Watch the movie the Green Mile... it explains quite well.

Or

The fact that a jury only has to be 90% sure, to be "beyond a reasonable doubt" is another problem. You know, lie detectors have an accuracy of around 97%, but that's still considered to be too low for submission as evidence. And yet, we're supposed to trust a 90% judgement then? C'mon, that's idiotic.

And then there are the cases of witheld testimony, something which occurs quite often. For instance, there was a case (the name slips my mind, I'm trying to find it though) where a man and a woman were in very near proximity to a shooting, on a highway. They were the first people on scene and they called the police. They were also arrested and tried for the murder. The state disallowed the testimony of any of the other drivers on the highway, since none came forward until after the trial had finished. By the time the appeals court allowed new evidence to go through (since no new evidence is supposed to be submitted in a court of appeals), the woman had already watched her husband be executed in the electric chair. She then sued the government for quite a large sum of money, the judge who had tried them was fired, but still, nothing can bring back her husband, or wipe the fact that she had to watch him be executed in front of her.

Maybe I'm just a crazy liberal, but the blood of one innocent person is not worth your bloodlust for the convicted. If you don't like paying for the people in prison, then stop paying, and let the IRS deal with you. Other than that, suck it up. Innocent people get thrown in prison on a daily basis, because the legal system isn't perfect. They also die in execution chambers. You can try to shrug it off with a quip about bad luck, but god damn, am I the only person who realizes that someone actually died?

Have you ever worked at a hospital? Do you know what it's like to see someone die? Death isn't something to be shrugged off. People seem to take the lives of others for granted, especially when crime is involved. Shame on you.

Me? Um.. no. Never.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get dressed up for some dance they're making me go to.