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The death penalty - why dress it up?

In the U.S. - a majority of people are still pro death penalty. Even though studies show as many as 4% of all prisoners being executed by the state are innocent. In 2018 there were 25 prisoners executed. Statistically - one of them was innocent.

Another question is: why dress it up to make it look like a less barbaric practice than it actually is? The most effective way would be death by hanging, shooting squad or beheading. Still, most states do it through a cocktail of drugs. This is just to make it look more sterile. This practice is expensive too. A rope is cheap, and why not hang 10 people at a time?

BornAtheist 4 Jan 19
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11 comments

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Here's something about the psychology of capital punishment. It's from Dostoevsky's the Idiot. Dostoevsky had been taken out to be shot by firing squad and reprieved just before the order was given:

'To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible.

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I used to be pro-death penalty, then I started to observe government incompetence first hand, and realized you can't trust them to execute the right people.

BD66 Level 8 Jan 19, 2019
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I don't at all think the death penalty should be taken lightly -- even one unjust death is a serious problem. That said, is the death penalty really more barbaric than forcing someone to live in a ten foot cell for the remainder of their life? I'd argue in cases where a person is not just guilty, but also actively dangerous to society, it might be less barbaric (and probably less expensive) to end their life somewhat humanely.

This isn't to say that I'm pro-capital-punishment. But I think the discussion around how we treat convictions needs to be more nuanced than the one we usually have today. Life in prison is a worse penalty than death, by most measures.

Unfortunately, we still require some mechanism in society for dealing with the extreme cases. While we shouldn't be resorting to it as often as we do, still, it seems death and life in prison exhaust the available options for a serial murderer or the like.

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While I agree that some murderers deserve to be hung, in the UK Hindley, Shipman, West to name but three, I do not believe that death is appropriate. Remove them from society for the rest of their natural lives by all means but even though the obvious killers would remain alive, and don't necessarily deserve to, you have to allow for an imperfect system where the innocent would be, and have been, sentenced to death.

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I think the death penalty is barbaric and antiquated. The US is the only country in the Americas to cary out the death penalty. According to Amnesty International, only 53 countries have the death penalty vs. 142 that do not. The US carried out 5 executions in 2017.

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I have been against the death penalty for 30+ years.

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There are good arguments on both sides and I remain undecided. IMO it’s not a moral issue, even if an occasional innocent person is executed. What about all the innocent people killed in wars? I can only conclude that an individual human body has little value. The right policy is the one that gives the best outcome for society.

The way we execute people in the US though seems pretty irrational. Keeping a person on death row for ten or twenty years for endless rounds of legal proceedings is ridiculous. What I think is that Americans no longer have the stomach to do the job properly. This is born out also by the ruse that there are no suitable drugs available when any veterinarian could do the job handily at any time.

If the public is all that squeamish we should just stop the killing. One pertinent question is whether or not you yourself would be willing to personally be the executioner. For me the answer is no.

Maybe I’m decided after all.

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From what I've read, the death penalty does not work as a deterrent.

From an economic perspective, the Chinese method of a bullet in the head was very easy on the taxpayer. The cost of maintaining prisoners for long periods of times must be huge. Granted, there is a lot of employment around supplying prison services but I suspect the net cost is still huge.

Then there's the moral issue for society. I think the morality of the situation is judged by the threat level to society in general rather than individual justice.

From a non-emotional point of view, I see no justification for the death penalty. It's "an eye for an eye" kind of thinking. It solves nothing, and costs billions with little to no effect on broader crime statistics.

What's the threat level to society when the person is in prison?

@jondspen None.

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I believe no country can call itself civilised if it executes it’s own citizens. The risk of a miscarriage of justice is real and if even one innocent person is executed it is reason enough to abolish it.

I'm in total agreement with you.

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I sometimes wonder what the problem is getting certain drugs together to kill a guy. I hear just a speck of Fentanil will kill ten guys. So what's up with that?

Fentanyl is currently being explored for use in the death penalty. The company who makes the original drugs stopped selling them to the U.S. because they disagreed with the practice of the death penalty.

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Hanging might be effective and put it on live TV so everyone could see how many times the body would jump. Then teens and other loonies would want to do a crime deserving of the death penalty because they are going to prove their bodies could jump the most. A Death Cult would be born. Records would be kept.

There is zero evidence that the death penalty would be an effective deterrent. There is more evidence that countries with the death penalty have a higher crime rate. On top of that - the death penalty cost the tax payers billions of dollars every year. The only justifications for it are emotional arguments. "An eye for an eye". Not rational.

@BornAtheist the death penalty is state sponsored murder plain and simple. You are correct the death penalty is not rational, nor an effective deterrent.

@Redheadedgammy, @BornAtheist The only rational thing about the death penalty is that the person being killed will never commit that crime ever again!

@DenoPenno I simply don't see it that way. Murder is murder whether done by some jackass who wants to steal from others, gets caught and murderers some innocent person, or the state murdering the murderer. State sponsored murder (death penalty) is murder.

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