This is why we ignore layman's opinions on the death penaltyFollow

Smash, it's utterly inconsistent and the crux of society's conflicted laws on this matter. Like I said, I may disagree with people who are against capital punishment, but I can respect their opinion as long as the taking of human life doesn't become a smorgasborg of some lives having value and other's not.

Totem

"Face it exectutions have never been shown to be a reasonable deterrent. They in fact cost more money than putting a guy in jail for life and there have been enough cases of "whoops convicted the wrong guy" to make almost every other 1st world (and most 2nd world) countries put an end to state sanctioned executions." --Bhodi

Again, that is not the primacy of the force of argument concerning the death penalty. Deterrence is a secondary attribute, if one at all. The taking of a criminal's life is about the State demonstrating that human life is so precious, so sacrosanct, that the only reasonable response to capital crimes like murder is the cold and sober taking of the criminal's life. If deterrence plays into this, it's only in that once dead a murderer can't commit that crime again. But that's a byproduct of the action taken, not the reason the State makes it happen.

Totem

Wrong, Red. When the State allows for abortion to take place, it becomes complicit in the act-- corporate guilt as it were.

Abortion is the taking of a human life. Dance around that all you wish by avoiding what is straight-forward logic, but that fetus is human. Magically giving it context at the second trimester doesn't change what is being created here: human life. It's a murder at it's worst, sloppy legalism at best.

Totem

Not really, but I explained earlier my views on the death penalty, where I replied at length to your post. I'm opposed to it, but not that strongly, and not for moral reasons.





I would. It's not the state's role to act as an executioner, and I cant what benefit that would bring to society.



It depends. If she is in great suffering, and has not prospect of getting better or alieviating that suffering, then yes, i think she should be allowed to allow the doctors to switch off the life-support machine.

But I would only support this if the suffering was unbearable and had 0 chance of getting better.

However, if people want to commit suicide, at the end of the day, it's their choice. It's not up to the state to say who can kill themselves.

That's why those two situations are so different. On the one hand (abortion/euthanasia) the state allows people to do what they want with themselves. In the other (death penalty) it actively decides to put someone to death, and does it. The state is both jury and executioner. Whereas in abortion cases, it is neither.

Pain and the chances of it receeding, yes.



You big softy, you!



Not really. These are two different issues. People can kill themselves. It's not the State resposibility to tell them when its ok to commit suicide. You have religion, or your own morals to make those decisions, it's not really the state's problem.

Euthanasia, which is basically about allowing life-support machines to be switched off, or allowing doctors to "kill" or enable a patient to commit suicide, is different, and I think the "trigger" in this case is pain and (lack of) recovery. Or, to put it even more simply, "quality of life".

I don't doubt that you can find cases where the decision will be extremely hard to make, and where the solution will seem unfair either way, but such is the case whenever you set some arbitrary "line" to determine outcomes.

In general, however, I think pain/recovery are two parametres that do the job well enough.



On this subject, I agree prison is crap. It's complete and utter crap. It's wasteful, inefficient, expensive, and counter-productive in 99% of the cases. I think the whole way we think about, and treat criminals, should be rethought.

Prison helps no one. It certainly doesn't help the people inside. Most of the time, it turns them from petty crooks into hardened criminals. When prisoners are released, most have 0 life-skills, and hence 0 chances of re-integrating into society, and hence it certainly doesn't help "us". It's a sham. A bad joke.

Not only that, but stick mentally ill patient in the mix, have over-crowded cells, and its a receipe for disaster.

Prison should enable the prisoner to rebuild himself, and turn him into a decent citizen by the time he leaves. That's the point of prisons, otherwise we might as well go back to the cages on the public place where people throw tomatoes at them.

And, like the war on terror, and the war on drugs, and all those other stupid hypocritical systems, it is failing. And these failings hurt our societies a lot. And it's not just a US problem, we have exactly the same in the EU.

So, in my opinion, the death penalty is a footnote in this debate. It simply concerns too few people, whereas the inefficiency of the prison system concerns all the prisoners, and is much more damaging to our societies.

Edited, Dec 20th 2006 7:19am by RedPhoenixxx

Totem needs to learn to condense his posts. He's reminding me of HUGEFEMALE

Smash already exposed the very serious and almost absurd flaw in this line of reasoning earlier in this very thread.

So, a)if the primary reason is flawed, b)and any potential secondary or tertiary benefits are non existant c)and there are a number of reasons against it entirely, it stands to reason that it is not the best f'ucking course of action.

You know. I was going to post about how the reason why the death penalty is important, and why its importance lies in making sure we're "serious" about punishing criminals, and that if we don't do so, we'll eventually stop taking the penal system seriously and stop thinking of criminals as "bad".

Stop labeling a whole class of people wholesale and thinking of them as less than human? Christ, that'd be horrible. Oh wait, we'd still have the darkies, right?

What would Doctor Doom do?

My thoughts exactly. I'm sure Dr. D is big on capital punishment. Breaking necks seems a bit crass for him though. Maybe he has a special neck-snapping robot for that.

God forbid we should ever move away from the good/bad, black/white paradigm, and realise life and humans are a tiny bit more complex than that.

The prison system is counter-productive. There is no doubt about it. It's a purely punitive system that makes people more dangerous when they leave than they were when they came in. How can that be a good thing for society? How can sticking mentally ill people into cages be any progress compared to what we had in the Victorian era? How can you stick a guy that sells weed in the same cell as a murderer or a rapist?

It's a stupid, outdated system that doesn't help society in any way whatsoever. Has it never occured to you that the prison population is constantly growing? Doesn't this make you think that, maybe, somewhere, something is not working?

Well, it's not like I ever expected to think outside the box, or to think full stop, so i'm not holding my breath. I'll just read a Republican website to get a preview of your reply...

Yes. Because there's a clear equivalence between people with a particular skin color and people who choose to commit crimes.

Kinda showing in a nutshell where most liberal ideas go south there Smash...