• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Death penalty for ........ ?

Death penalty for ...?

  • Criminals guilty of 1st and 2nd degree murder,serial killers,mass murderers

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • serial killers , serial rapists ,pedophiles,

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • only mass murderers

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • any kind of murderers and rapists

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    54
I'm such a pain. Didn't find any I agreed with.

The death penalty is a good bargaining chip. Plea bargaining it to life without parole which requires full confession in open court (for family benefit) and negates the appeals process isn't all bad. And, of course, if they DON'T take a plea and ARE sentenced to death, they'll spend their appeal time on death row in almost solitary confinement...year after year after year.

I'm for having the death penalty but not using it except as I've talked about above. For many of these psychopaths, the death penalty is MUCH too easy an exit.

Great, except if you are innocent and don't have anything to confess too. Like is still happening every year IMHO.

Or when you live in a region with an activist prosecutor who has political ambitions and who uses the death penalty as a method of looking tough on crime. And if they are a psychopath, they were not right in the head as they are suffering from a mental disorder with abnormal and violent social behavior. And I do not think it is right to execute people with a mental condition, now they may never be released in society nor locked up and be a burden on the poor prison guards and their fellow inmates. They need to be housed in a prison like institute with specialized mental professionals, kept under constant medication, etc.

For me the plea bargain is one of the greatest evils in the universe. The idea behind it might be one of righteous thinking but sadly it has become a system of total and utter injustice. And how can someone risk a jury trial? If you are innocent, you risk a bad lawyer, an over active and very showy prosecutor and a bunch of individuals whom, from a legal standpoint have about zero knowledge about the law and could be total morons, to decide your life/death. Even if you are innocent or not nearly as guilty as the prosecutor claims, you take the least worse option, plea bargain.

Because sadly the legal system in the US is not that interested in the truth, it is interested in results and convictions. The great plea bargaining where the really guilty get off lighter because a prosecutor does also not want to risk a trial if he fears that a showy lawyer will confuse the 12 jurors into confusion when the case should be a slam dunk if someone were looking at this who would not be fooled by a showy lawyer spinning the facts and creating fiction.

That is at least my opinion.
 
Shrug. Those people who take a plea and are innocent? That's on them. No discussion necessary. If only 3% go to trial and the rest plea? If that's true? Our court system would explode without plea bargaining. Taxes are high enough already. What we don't need is exploding justice dept budgets.

No. That's on us for designing a system that forces innocent people to lie to minimize the damage that may be done to them and their families.

You have a Constitutional right to a trial by jury. The system should not be set up such that it discourages the exercise of that right. If if costs us taxpayers more then that's life. Don't like it. Don't try to put in jail people who don't belong in jail.
 
Shrug. Those people who take a plea and are innocent? That's on them. No discussion necessary. If only 3% go to trial and the rest plea? If that's true? Our court system would explode without plea bargaining. Taxes are high enough already. What we don't need is exploding justice dept budgets.
Easy to say when you're sitting in your comfy home pontificating on the lives of others you will never meet.
 
No. That's on us for designing a system that forces innocent people to lie to minimize the damage that may be done to them and their families.

You have a Constitutional right to a trial by jury. The system should not be set up such that it discourages the exercise of that right. If if costs us taxpayers more then that's life. Don't like it. Don't try to put in jail people who don't belong in jail.
I sometimes think that I would choose a jury trial and reject a plea deal offer, primarily out of principle, because I figure my life would be screwed from that point anyway so it doesn't matter.

But I also know that I'd have to be actually faced with the situation to make a decision like that.
 
I don't think there's much need for the Death Penalty any longer.
 
Easy to say when you're sitting in your comfy home pontificating on the lives of others you will never meet.

And what are you doing? Standing in the crosshairs of truth, justice and The American Way? Our justice system is not perfect. If it were closer thus, OJ would never have gone to prison for robbery.
 
And what are you doing? Standing in the crosshairs of truth, justice and The American Way? Our justice system is not perfect. If it were closer thus, OJ would never have gone to prison for robbery.
No, it's not, and to blow off areas that could be improved by this reasoning is lazy.
 
we should care about the rights of some monsters

Well we should care for the rights of all humans. But given the expense and flaws of the Death Penalty, it's best to avoid it completely. There's no benefit to having it.
 
Well we should care for the rights of all humans. But given the expense and flaws of the Death Penalty, it's best to avoid it completely. There's no benefit to having it.

law rules are established and practised for the benefit of criminals,you may think this way

a psycho will kill your child and you will care about his rights.are you an angel ?
 
Well we should care for the rights of all humans. But given the expense and flaws of the Death Penalty, it's best to avoid it completely. There's no benefit to having it.

I think life in jail is all the punishment that should be given, it is at least as harsh and effective as the death penalty if not more. And if mistakes are made, then it at least is possible to undo your mistake and release the suspect.

The same goes for the refusal of a new trial when new evidence is found that would most likely acquit someone, just because a judge thinks that this person had a fair trial. Ridiculous, innocent but still sitting in jail because you got a "fair trial" is insane IMHO.

Don't get me wrong, even in the Netherlands people sit in jail for a long time when they are in fact innocent of the crime, but at least people try to learn from that in a most serious manner. And that is from banning interrogation methods that have a high risk of leading for false confessions/impure evidence gathering to banning investigation methods because of officers having tunnel vision.

In the Netherlands a case can be re-opened if a novum is found (a new fact) but even in rare cases where a re-investigation of the original information can be found to be a novum. The biggest threats to a police investigation can be tunnel vision and bad conclusions of the scientific evidence in the case.

In the Netherlands a nurse was given a life sentence (and in the Netherlands that is a natural life sentence, so until they are in jail until they are either dead or have a compassionate release due to final stages of terminal illness) based on faulty conclusions and investigation, you can read about her case here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk

The end result is that she was released and she got an unspecified monetary sum (for her 6.5 years sitting in jail while innocent) from the Dutch government. She received 45,000 euro's from her former employer and she received a letter of apology from the cabinet minister of justice for her ordeal.
 
law rules are established and practised for the benefit of criminals,you may think this way

a psycho will kill your child and you will care about his rights.are you an angel ?

The fact is that the Death Penalty costs more money than life in prison. It has and does consume innocent life. It offers no additional deterrent than the prison system in and of itself. It provides no additional aggregate security to society. In the modern era, it is not necessary to have it and having it is in and of itself a danger.
 
The fact is that the Death Penalty costs more money than life in prison. It has and does consume innocent life. It offers no additional deterrent than the prison system in and of itself. It provides no additional aggregate security to society. In the modern era, it is not necessary to have it and having it is in and of itself a danger.

how ? dead people need to be fed ?
 
how ? dead people need to be fed ?

The process and the appeals. Human life intrinsically has quite a lot of value, taking it should reflect that.
 
I am against Death Penalty

This one needs a little more to explain my stance.

I am against the death penalty for one, and only one, reason. Unless you are 100% sure that the person you are convicting is guilty you should not impose the death penalty. And since we can not always be absolutely 100% sure we should not have the death penalty. However, I hope this situation changes sooner rather than later so that the people who do not deserve to live anymore for what they have done will be put to rest by using the death penalty. Until then I will be against the death penalty.


Joey
 
I am against Death Penalty

This one needs a little more to explain my stance.

I am against the death penalty for one, and only one, reason. Unless you are 100% sure that the person you are convicting is guilty you should not impose the death penalty. And since we can not always be absolutely 100% sure we should not have the death penalty. However, I hope this situation changes sooner rather than later so that the people who do not deserve to live anymore for what they have done will be put to rest by using the death penalty. Until then I will be against the death penalty.


Joey

:roll:
 
I am against Death Penalty

This one needs a little more to explain my stance.

I am against the death penalty for one, and only one, reason. Unless you are 100% sure that the person you are convicting is guilty you should not impose the death penalty. And since we can not always be absolutely 100% sure we should not have the death penalty. However, I hope this situation changes sooner rather than later so that the people who do not deserve to live anymore for what they have done will be put to rest by using the death penalty. Until then I will be against the death penalty.

Joey
There have been many times in the past where a jury was 100% convinced of the defendant's guilt... and they were still wrong.
 
Those who have committed deliberate premeditated acts of violence and can not be rehabilitated, regardless of age and mentality.
We simply do not need these type of people in society and we do not need to support their continued existence.

Trouble:

1) There are errors in determining guilt in the first place
2) How do you tell whether someone can be rehabilitated or not? Who makes that call?
3) Any reasonable process to accomplish 1 and 2 costs more than just housing them forever.
 
I've been on the fence for a very long time with the death penalty debate. Until I resolve the consideration of deterrence as a reason to have the death penalty, it is going to continue to be problematic.

Yes, and what I have read in the past says that it is not a deterrant. As such, then it becomes vengeance, which I disagree with in the justice system.

So while I do not object to the death penalty on 'all life is sacred' grounds, I do so on my belief that the justice system of sentencing should be about protecting the public and not vengeance. So locking them up forever meets that goal.
 
imo death penalty should apply to following cases/acts

capital murder

mass murder

any terrorist act that causes death

1st degree murder cases depending on special circumstances (da discretion)

i have thought long on adding pedophiles to that list.....and though i want to add them, i dont think society as a whole thinks the same way

pedophiles belong in a category of their own.....if i knew that it would work, i would castrate them all....and then release back into society...hoping the castration removed the impetus to harm children.....but not sure it would work....and if not 100% i wouldnt want to risk any other child to their debauchery
 
Human life intrinsically has quite a lot of value, taking it should reflect that.

I think that this debate, in general, is very much about that. People choose to weigh some value (which is not intrinsic, btw...there is no biological component to value) of the condemned against their victim(s) and society overall. It's very subjective.

So I prefer to stick to the tangibles, like keeping society safe (which life in prision should accomplish), lack of certainty in all convictions (the innocent may be convicted), and costs.

My moral grounds against it come from my belief that the justice system should not be about vengeance but about protecting individual rights and society.
 
asking if their should be a death penalty.

;)
 
I think that this debate, in general, is very much about that. People choose to weigh some value (which is not intrinsic, btw...there is no biological component to value) of the condemned against their victim(s) and society overall. It's very subjective.

So I prefer to stick to the tangibles, like keeping society safe (which life in prision should accomplish), lack of certainty in all convictions (the innocent may be convicted), and costs.

My moral grounds against it come from my belief that the justice system should not be about vengeance but about protecting individual rights and society.

Perchance, but I don't see what's so subjective about human life having innate worth. All humans are human, we are all equal, and for that to be true all our lives must fundamentally be the "worth" the same.
 
Back
Top Bottom