I have two problems with capital punishment.
1. I think that we, as a society, shouldn't be punishing violence with violence. As mentioned by several others, it's an ineffective deterrant, and life in prison is a harsher sentence (and, I've learned, less expensive to the taxpayers).
2. Sometimes (not real often, but sometimes), a person is convicted of a crime when they are innocent. As seldom as it happens, it should only take one innocent person killed to convince us that CP is wrong, and has no place in our judicial system.

Ok, maybe that's more than two reasons...

Capitol Punishment is not violence, nor is it murder......as it is defined in the USA. The sentence was legal.....and justified if you care about the lives of innocent citizens.

I know numbers mean little around here....but what are the odds of receiving Capitol Punishment in the USA if you murder somebody? One in a thousand maybe....look it up. What the hell sort of deterrent is that? Now if the odds were 50/50, Capitol Punishment might serve as a deterrent.......

I'll vote for that.....let's say we try it out for ten years or so. Watch the murder rate drop.....let the old ladies live. Something wrong with that....

Hello Carl,



That's not what I wrote. (They aren't called penitentiaries for nothing, you know.)



Again, a good law works in all situations. If irrefutable evidence (like DNA) exonerates someone after they have been convicted and appealed -- does that give you at least a little doubt about our system? What about the fact the people who receive the death penalty strongly correlates with the race of the victim?

I'll give you a hint: if the victim is Caucasian, then the convicted person is far more likely to get the death penalty.

Hello Carl,



Capital punishment is killing, and it is violence. Just because it is legal doesn't make it right -- and just because someone doesn't agree with you, doesn't mean they don't also "care" for the lives of the victims.



How is it that only the five (or so) countries* in the world that still use capital punishment often, still have any murders at all? How is it that a large majority of the nations around the world, that find capital punishment repugnant have much lower murder rates?

Do you only care about little old ladies? I'm guessing that you also care about all other murder victims, right?

*China, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, USA -- that's pretty auspicious company we keep!

As far as BF is concerned as long as the murderer isn't a republican he should get the chair, regardless of circumstances.

It's fun to watch to extermists make their case. They wanted a president to be impeached because of a lie about his sex life, but they don't care about the person who commits treason.

Got double standards?

Carl,

You don't ever wonder why your weren't chosen for the high school debate team, do you?

Neil....it seems to be true that white murderers get capitol punishment more frequently, maybe a case of reverse discrimination. None the less....murder is murder, and the murderer should receive the maximum legal punishment, no matter who he is.

What I'm reading from your posts, leads me to suspect you have little sympathy for the old murdered woman from the OP. You now are saying the murderer's confession is evidence that he may have suffered some sort of insanity.....otherwise why would he confess?

This sort of defense could easily be set up by the guy, maybe under directions from his lawyers. Like...."act crazy, maybe we can use an insanity defense during the appeal process". I tend to think this particular murderer had a case of bad conscionce, and knew the case against him was air-tight.

And your impression of what prison is all about, doesn't match the reality of today's prison. A prison sentence today means cable tv, work-out gyms, warm accommodations, good food, libraries, free lawyers......not to mention sex and drugs. This is hardly punishment, more like a vacation.

The elimination of Capitol Punishment, combined with todays prison system, would be another step toward no punishment for any crime.....certainly seems that way. This is what animal trainers advocate today.....reward good behavior, ignore bad behavior.

Sounds ok for dogs.....but still leaves the old lady from the first post with a slit throat.

Hello Carl,

If the victim is white, then the convicted person is more likely to get the death penalty.

I have all the sympathy in the world for any murder victim. And I am saying that all confessions are not the same:

Is the person confessing retarded? This has happened -- the person answered virtually every question with "Yes, officer!" -- and had an IQ of ~60, and was executed.

Was the person confessing coerced by a police officer and/or a prosecutor? Both of whom may have ulterior motives. Convicting the wrong person is worse than not convicting anyone.

Is the person confessing suicidal or otherwise disturbed -- or are they protecting someone else, or are they a glory seeker? Convicting the wrong person is worse than not convicting anyone.

Prison is anything but cushy -- or are you suggesting that he may be a homeless person who figures that he can be living the life of Riley, if only he can get himself convicted of this horrendous murder?

Nothing will bring someone back to life, of course -- and nothing will be worse than punishing the wrong person, just for the sake of punishing someone.

Revenge is Ugly. Justice is Beautiful. Killing is Wrong.

I want to try and avoid the murders in the first place -- poverty and a cornucopia of guns are very important contributing factors to a violent society.

What I read...the person more likely to receive Capitol Punishment is white. Obviously just being convicted doesn't mean you will actually die.

Your approach to crime and murder reduction hasn't been working. Perhaps it's time to try another approach......harsher penalties, and more certain Capitol Punishment when that is the sentence.

From your own "Book"....."The poor shall always be with us". Meaning to me that nothing can be done to change the fact. Blaming the crime on being poor....simply more excuses to avoid deserved punishment.

Hi Carl,

So by your logic, in countries where they have capital punishment for adultery, rape, sodomy, drug trafficking, human trafficking, corruption, apostasy (the formal renunciation of one's religion) -- should have very low or non-existent levels of those crimes?

We (the USA) are already #6 in the world for number of executions in 2006:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment

My point was not that we ought to throw our hands in the air; my point was that the death penalty should not necessarily be removed simply because some innocents die. If it is deemed to serve a positive for the state or nation (people) then it ought to be retained.

Neil... you make a mistake when you attempt to project results from another country, onto the USA. Our situation is completely different, and so are our people. And so are the crimes.

What works here, might not work elsewhere.....and the other way around. I'm still waiting to hear of a way that would have prevented the murder of the old lady in the first post. I suggested a way that might work.....making the punishments harder, more certain. I've heard nothing else.

Repent in prison? Won't help the old lady, and probably won't get the murderer into heaven......"Thou shalt not kill", which a modern translation might read "Thou shalt not murder".

Obviously religion and ever-lasting punishment in Hell is not stopping the murders. We need to do something right now.....something other than build more prisons, and throw money down the bottomless pit of failed Liberal ideas. Murders could be stopped, but not with a bleeding-heart.

Take a look at Neil's data (data, as in facts) - he's listed the countries with the highest number of executions. Do you think that the high rate of CP in any of those countries have deterred crime?

If it isn't working anywhere else, why do you think it will work here?

And the alternative is...... ?

Let things continue as they are, and come up with more excuses for the murders? I'm willing to try something that might work. If it doesn't, who loses? Only the murderers....

Death sentence isn't even a punishment, it's the easy way out. Life in prison is what it should be, with death penalty you're only hurting people that don't deserve it; friends, family, whatever. Someone will always cry when someone dies.

I'm not making any excuses for anyone. All I'm saying is that the trend for countries so far has been 'more capital punishment' = 'more crime'.

Who loses? More old women than if we would reduce CP... according to the data that we currently have.

You wouldn't ignore the facts, though, right??

Edit: Spelling

Also, life in prison is no picnic - suggesting that prison is some kind of vacation.... ridiculous.

Remember the Richard Speck case.....he murdered eight student nurses at one time (I think that's it). He got life in prison. Some years later I saw an interview with him....incredible. He had somehow turned himself into a sort-of woman (drug injections). He admitted he had never had so much fun in his life.....after going to prison. Some of the Speck story......

"In May 1996, Chicago television news anchor Bill Kurtis received from an anonymous attorney video tapes made at Stateville Prison in 1988. Showing them publicly for the first time, before a shocked and deeply angry Illinois state legislature, Kurtis pointed out the explicit scenes of sex, drug use, and money being passed around by prisoners, who seemingly had no fear of being caught; and in the center of it all was Speck, ingesting cocaine, parading around in silk panties, sporting female-like breasts grown from smuggled hormone treatments, and boasting, "If they only knew how much fun I was having, they'd turn me loose."[citation needed]

From behind the camera, a prisoner asked him why he killed the nurses. Speck shrugged and jokingly said "It just wasn't their night." Asked how he felt about himself in the years since, he said "Like I always felt ... had no feeling. If you're asking me if I felt sorry, no." He also described in detail the experience of strangling someone: "It's not like TV...it takes over three minutes and you have to have a lot of strength." John Schmale, the brother of one of the murdered student nurses, said, "It was a very painful experience watching him tell about how he killed my sister."

In this city among the criminal class, it has become a sign of "man-hood" to do jail-time. Apparently you are not accepted among your peers until you spend some time behind bars. So much for jail-time as a deterrent.....

I agree that prisons need to be more limited (no cable TV, limited access to the internet, etc.). I don't even have cable...

Since you've copied directly from wikipedia... I'll do the same:


So your evidence of how great prison is comes from quotes from a man with abnormalities in his brain?

This is the first time you've basically admitted that you've totally ignored everything everyone has said. That's about 12 steps closer to the truth than anything out of the current administration's mouth.

BF blew off that argument quite a while back. It must have been "An Inconvenient Truth."

OK now let's get serious for a change. BF is willing to remove from the earth a person who's killed another, presumably totally innocent person, who was just going about their own business. It's very clear who did the killing, so off with his head.

Now let's examine another great Christian, from the same mold that produced BF. This guy went out and killed, and self defense was his claim. The same BF appaulded because the cause was just. But in the process one or two, err, what? About half a million innocent Iraqi's are now dead? Seriously how many people over there that have died were actually terrorsists? 5%? 10% 25%? Even 50%? Which would still leave several hundred thousand innocents, just like the one BF keeps talking about, dead for no good reason.

(Hint: Carrying a gun would not have helped.)

What sentence would BF impose on this man? And somebody explain why the sentence would be so drastically different than the one BF is imposing on the killer he keeps ranting on about.

How can you tell it's not working in those countries? You obviously can't, so let's not make blanket statements.

There's an easy way to make it cheaper. Deny automatic appeals and reduce the overall bureaucracy involved. Or deny free defense for appeals. It's not like the world would run out of do-gooders who'd work out their appeal pro bono anyway.
It's no true. It all depends on the pay off of the crime. Death penalty might not be strong deterrent against murders, but try using death penalty against shoplifters, and I guarantee, crime rates would go down. Death penalty most likely has an effect on drug offences in countries like Singapore. (Not that I agree on using death penalty on small meaningless crimes like drug trafficing.)
It has no cost on anyone's conscience. Nobody is forced to execute anyone. I'm sure there are many volunteers for this job.
Purpose of judicial system is not to teach, but to punish.
What makes you presume they have a guilty conscience.
I think revenge is a beautiful thing. A balancing act and the whole basis for the need of judicial system. Right to vengeance should be a basic human right.

As for wrongful convictions? If people really want to get rid of wrongful convictions, get rid of the jury, not the death penalty. When you put 12 potentially stupid, bigoted, racist, or just plain evil people on the jury, is it really that big of a surprise you can end up with wrongful convictions. If you have seen 12 Angry Men, you know what I mean. Murder trials are basically decided in the jury selection. Consider this, if you were a murderer would you rather have BF or Neil sitting in your jury? I thought so.

I think I could settle for life sentence, if it truly was a life sentence, but our "justice" systems makes me sick.

One triple murderer has recently been in our newspaper headlines, because he was released on Monday after serving for 19 years.

"After nightfall Valjakkala stole a bicycle. He was pursued by Sten Nilsson and his 15-year-old son Fredrik. The chase ended at a cemetery where Sten and Fredrik Nilsson were both shot by Valjakkala with a shotgun. Later Sten's wife and Fredrik's mother, Ewa Nilsson, went looking for the two, was chased into the woods and had her throat slit by Valjakkala outside the cemetery."

This happened in 1988. He was convicted of three counts of murder. After his conviction he has been in the headlines couple of times as he has tried to, or escaped from prison.

In 1989 his wife was caught trying to smuggle a gun for him to use in an escape attempt.
In 1991 he tried to climb over the prison walls using a rope, but was caught before he managed to escape.
In 1994 he took the prisons english teacher as a hostage, but was caught 3,5 hours after the escape.
In 1997 he was caught from the prison roof as he tried to escape yet again. He was armed with a self-made shotgun.
In 2002 they let him out for a two day UNSUPERVISED VACATION. It was a big surprise when he decided not to come back. He was later caught in Sweden. While he was on the run he stole a car and received a three month sentence.
In 2004 he climbed over the prison walls, but was caught couple of hundred meters outside the prison. He was sentenced to 30 days for this. And as a good use of tax payers money, he appealed the verdict. But later withdrew his appeal.
His last escape was exactly 15 months ago, when he left his "open-prison". He was caught couple of days later.

So the parole board decided, in their great wisdom, to let this "model prisoner" go after serving for 19 years. Which is an exceptionally long sentence by our standards. It seems none of his escape attempts had no effect on the parole decision.

The term life sentence is a misnomer, mockery and insult for victims, and as such, it should be removed from our law books. No matter how many people you kill, you will have your first parole hearing after serving for 12 years and every second year after that, if the parole is denied. Once you are out on a parole your sentence is reduced to 3 years. Meaning, that if you violate your parole, the sentence is turned into a 3 year sentence.

When a mother kills her baby, it's not even considered a murder here. It's a child murder for which the sentence is a minimum 4 months to a maximum of 4 years.

It would be very, very tempting to kill in retribution when you consider the alternative. And who cares, if you get caught. You might get away with manslaughter which is 8 years, 4 years for first timers and even less for good behavior.

It's very easy to be pro-death penalty here. When the alternative is a 12 year insult on victims.

I never would have believed it, but it sounds like the Finland penal/justice system is worse than that of the USA. Hard to imagine.

Murder it seems has become a ho-hum thing all over.....so much for civilized society. It's only a matter of time. Dis-arm all the good guys, close your eyes to further murders, open the prison doors and give all the departing murderers enough money to become model citizens.....oh, and keep voting Democrat. That'll fix everything. Right...... Richard Speck would approve.

Oh and you can always justify the murder of old ladies by pointing out a completely different situation where something happened that you don't like. Just reverse the old saying "Two wrongs don't make a right".

There's another place with a whole lot of old ladies who were murdered, killed by someone as logical as yourself.

Take a look at the countries that Neil listed... if you look at the data, you can see a trend. If CP was working, crime rate would be low in those countries. I looked up the recent homicide rates in those 6 countries, they're spread out randomly... indicating that CP doesn't have any effect on homicide rate.
My 'blanket statement' is a generalization based on data that's available. I have yet to see any conclusive data that CP acts as a crime deterrant...

For a specific example:
Zommer murdered that elderly woman, apparently he wasn't deterred by the chance of getting the death penaly.

And yet, somehow, BF will ignore this, as part of sound logic.

Neil above posted death penalty rates with no corresponding crime rate statistics. There is not enough there to draw any conclusions from or even make a point.

IF China's crime rate was similar to ours, then that would be one piece of evidence that the death penalty is no deterrent in China. If the crime rate is near zero, then it might be information that it works. Given that they have a very different form of government, different expectations of what crime is, and for that matter what gets reported, drawing too much from one source is probably not a good idea.

A few years ago, I worked on a Saudi Air Defense system. Their crime rates are very low. I would not want to live their, but the deterent of harsh punishment seems to be working there.

I saw an interview from one of the government axe wielders who was retiring. They asked if he had any regrets from doing that job. He had one. He did not have qualms with a proven criminal being put to death, or thieves having a hand cut off.

(They showed a picture of a little stall that was selling gold chain. This stall was open to the public on all 4 sides, lots of gold on display, and after many years, the guy running that stall had only had merchandise taken once. When asked how that worked in that case and many others, the consistent, stern punishment was sited as a strong enough deterrent to keep crime down.)

What was the axeman's one regret? He once had a thief die because he did not hit the proper spot when attempting to chop a hand, and the person bled to death. That one person bled to death because his sentence was not what he had earned.

Hello Carl,



Can you please provide a citation for this?

This is different from what I have read, which is a person is more likely to get the death penalty if the murder victim is white -- the ethnic group of the convicted person matters less.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a718864577~db=all
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0023-9216(1985)19%3A4%3C587%3ARAPDIH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K
http://www.answers.com/topic/race-discrimination-and-the-death-penalty?cat=biz-fin

From this last link:

[quote]Black Defendant/White Victim: 21% (50/233)
White Defendant/White Victim:  8% (58/748)
Black Defendant/Black Victim:  1% (18/1443)
White Defendant/Black Victim:  3% (2/60)


These data suggested strong raceâ€