Death Penalty for Minors

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Originally posted by Shadarach
I have no idea what kind of tax dollars go into housing inmates for life. But I am pretty certain even frying or jabbing them and all the bills entailed in getting rid of the cadaver would not total the bill for putting a con up for the rest of his or her natural life.

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The cost isn't in the act itself. It's in the fact that a felon on death row gets roughly 25 years worth of appeals before a date for his execution is finalized. Legal costs is what comprises the brunt of the fee for a felon on death row. (After all, you can't exactly order a corpse to pay costs, can you?)

25 years of appeals? We're talking about idealistics.. if the process was as clean as I was implying, guilt or innocence would be determined within months or weeks.

Of course, as I have said before and continue to say.. the world of ideals and the world of reality are some distance apart. One is black and white, the other is technicolour.. sometimes technicolour yawn.

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After all, you can't exactly order a corpse to pay costs, can you?

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Do what they do in the PRC.. charge the family for costs.

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Originally posted by Shadarach

Poeple who kill people on the road, or what ever should get a long time to life. Sure they didn't make a choice to kill folks, but they did in fact kill someone.

This distinction however gets fuzzy in the case of drunk drivers and such, but then it could be argued that such a person decided to drink.

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Wait a second.

Someone who accidentally kills someone in a car definitely gets a severe prison term but someone who drinks and drives and kills someone is "fuzzy" ??????

If anything, the drunk driver is the one who should be getting the life sentence.

Our legal system does not punish people with severe prison terms for things that are not done INTENTIONALLY. This is an established facet of law that is hundreds of years old and it is a good principle.

If you give someone a life sentence for something they did not intend to do, what do you do to someone who did the same thing on purpose? Or who did the same thing due to extreme recklessness?

That is what I mean...the death penalty itself doesn't cost much but the years and years worth of appeals and such cost sometimes millions of OUR dollars. I forget where I saw it, but one news journal said that it actually costs less to just throw them in maximum and throw away the key than it does to kill them.

Of course, appeals will happen either way. :rolleyes Whatever happened to tried, convicted, shot on the spot.

Why is an executioner not guilty of murder themself, after executing a criminal? If killing is a crime, why aren't they guilty of that crime?

I oppose any application of the death penalty at the current time, due to the clear indications that there is something seriously wrong with our justice system's systematic ability to separate the guilty and the innocent. Too many death row inmates have been proven innocent after their final appeal due to new evidence, e.g. DNA proving that a different person raped a woman than the person who was convicted for her rape and murder. In many cases it required extensive campaigning by the relatives of the inmate or by third parties to convince the state to look at the new evidence -- the state's position frequently was that if esculpatory evidence hadn't shown up by the final appeal, it was too late.

This indicates that the process of justice in the U.S. is currently too unreliable to allow it to be the definitive method of deciding whether an individual is killed. You can't bring them back to life if it turns out later that the witness was lying, or the lab fudged the results, or the state-assigned lawyer dropped the ball, or the race/religion/age/etc. of the victim or defendant influenced the jury. Guilty doesn't always mean guilty. And we have no way of differentiation between the 'obviously guilty beyond any possible doubt' and 'apparently guilty beyond reasonable doubt based on the evidence presented which may not necessarily be complete', we can't give the death penalty to one but not the other.

Complaints about the cost of locking someone up for life can be mitigated by reforming the draconian drug laws in this country to end wasting money via the brain-dead practice of locking up nonviolent drug offenders.

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Originally posted by Alydar
Sorry but if a person maliciously causes the death of another

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This is the nice clear cut one. Deliberate, malicious murder is worthy of death.

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So bite the bullet and shoot them.

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Was this deliberate wording? :)

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Oh and one more thing. Rapists and child molestors should get the death penalty too.

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YES, YES, and a resounding YES. Murder is not the only crime worthy of capital punishment.

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Now if there was some just cause ... sometimes the murder of someone was justified and should go unpunished, but hey that's just me.

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This is one of the ways it gets more complicated. Remember, there is a difference between killing and murder.

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Originally posted by Elei
Why is an executioner not guilty of murder themself, after executing a criminal? If killing is a crime, why aren't they guilty of that crime?

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Because murder is the crime. A quick Google search came up with descriptions including "unlawful", "intentional", "premeditated", "deliberate intent to kill", "with malice". An executioner is not unlawful, and has no malice, so he cannot be guilty of murder.

Note that under the same definitions, a drunk driver who kills someone on the road is not a murderer. If you drink a significant quantity of "strong waters that do bemuse a man" and then drive home, you are certainly not intending to kill, and I would hope you have no malice. Consequently, if you do kill someone, you should not be executed as a murderer; but I personally believe that drink driving, whether or not it results in death, is pretty serious.

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Originally posted by Rosuav

Was this deliberate wording? :)

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Yes my good sir, that was very deliberately worded :devil

I think the fairest system is "eye by eye". Even if the person didn't mean it... the victim is not coming back... all we can do to release the victim's family pain is to kill someone else... and promptly before anybody changes their mind.

And rapists should be raped by a big horse.

Salimar

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Originally posted by elei
Why is an executioner not guilty of murder themself, after executing a criminal? If killing is a crime, why aren't they guilty of that crime?

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Because the executioner is not a person. That's why they always wore hoods or masks. The executioner was legally a manifestation of the will of the court. The hand of Justice via proxy.

The story as I understand it, was that excecutioners used to confess to killing someone to a priest, who would technically absolve them of any spiritual guilt, but aparrently executioners were wracked with guilt (Especially when an innocent person was sentanced to death) so the practice was abolished in favour of a firing squad.

Why a firing squad? Because without a ballistics report, there was no way to tell 100% whose bullet killed him (And there was no such thing as a ballistics report back then).

The same principle is used now with lethal injection. A number of officials enter a room with the same number of switches. Each official selects a switch at random and throws it. Only one is connected to the poison. None of the officials have any way of knowing who threw the "killing switch", and thus, no one person is responsible for the death.