YEAH!!! Now I do not feel so bad about those Catholic School girls I have had cooped up for a little over a year I was starting to feel a little guilty.

You've got to be kidding me. That's the entire point of the legal system.


It's also traditional that women are property, slavery is legal and condoned, that royalty don't have acknowledge contracts with non-nobility, that homosexuality could be punished by stoning to death, and that pig testicles were a delicacy. Tradition is a pretty ****ty reason to do something. You're going to have to come up with something else.


Apparently not, or you'd explain why the death penalty is beneficial to society.


Which is an argument for prison reform, nothing else.


"End of story" is an expression most often used to bolster a weak argument and suggest that pointing out the numerous flaws with the argument would be anathemic.
The law is an institution. If you are saying the law has the ability to punish or reward based on a principle in one aspect, it has to apply to other aspects without a clear reason why this should not be the case.

Nor have you suggested why you think the death penalty is a more effective deterrent than the life one.


Yeah, good idea, we should have angry citizens shooting anyone who breaks the law without bothering with a trial or appeals. There's no way that that could backfire or have negative consequences. No way at all.

Let me just get some clarification here. Are you afraid that, for whatever reason, unlike when they're in prison, while they're on the job there would be no supervision that prevents them from committing crimes?

Or are you simply afraid that you might sit on a park bench they cleaned and catch child molesting germs?

My backyard could use it. I'm okay with that idea.

Get this for ****ing facts: Hospitals are legally not allowed to turn away anyone from a hospital in need of help, regardless of their ability to pay. Do you know why the prisoner gets "free" medicare? Because they're don't have any income to hold debts against. Financial freedom + ability to move on in life > living in prison.
Unless you're just saying we don't have enough programs to help the homeless develop jobskills and find a valuable role in the community. In which case you should be saying that, because despite your apparently sincerely held beliefs, executing criminals doesn't help the plight of the homeless.


Unless those murderers haven't reformed, why is that a bad thing? In what way is society harmed by reforming criminals? Are you under the impression that twenty five years is a small amount of time?

Well that's a constructive argument.

Someone getting paid for doing something that doesn't have any tangible product doesn't actually help the economy in anyway. But thanks for fucking playing.

Most criminals are capable of cleaning, digging, mowing lawns, picking up litter, doing very basic construction work, and plenty of other forms of manual labor that doesn't involve putting them in a daycare center or any of your other strawman arguments. In such a position, the net cost of housing them is zero, because they are producing more of value for society than they are consuming in basic utilities, housing, clothing and food.

That's brilliant. fr0g's inability to house ten thousand people in his home means he's a giant hypocrite and we should just shoot everyone arrested for a felony in the head. You're a fucking genius.

I've never seen someone who littered who was then shot in the face litter again. But that's not an argument for providing the death penalty for littering.


You need an argument for the death penalty being beneficial to society that sucks less.


Killing a random person assures us they will never commit murder. Letting them live assures us that the chance remains that that person will commit murder. Erego, by your logic, serial killers are in fact heroes and the bravest of us all.

There are three interests involved in punishing a crime.

a) Preventing the person from doing it again.

b) Reforming the person to be a productive member of society.

c) Making the punishment sufficently harsh as to deter future law-breaking by others.


There's no evidence that the death penalty is a better deterrent than life in prison- violent crime rates are 40% higher across the board in states that support the death penalty vs. states that don't. I'm not aware of the relapse rate on people who spent most of their life in prison, but I'd welcome some statistics. The first point is certainly assured, although if we can't assure this via life in prison we have bigger problems.

I'm confused.

If you're dead, you can't kill anyone. Pretty awesome deterrent from where I'm sitting. But if you mean deterrent for the rest of the population, is it really intended to do that? I always thought it was a punishment for crimes committed.

But I noticed you said "most" of their lives in prison. Shouldn't life in prison mean just that? You're in prison until you die? The fact that so many convicted murders and the like are sentenced to life, but in reality serve whatever the minimum is (25?) then are released into society is kinda freakish, don't you think? We're pretty well guided by the notion of self-preservation. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I believe that a person would say just about anything to get out of prison. So how, exactly, do you prove a person's been rehabilitated?

And most death penalty states are southern states or states with a high minority population, right? It wouldn't be out of line to consider other factors that have nothing to do with the death penalty might contribute to that high rate of violent crime. But the fact remains, anyone spending life in prison or sentenced to the death penalty are most certainly deterred from committing that crime again.

One more question.

Are you people condemning the death penalty just in America? Just for murderers, rapists, etc? Or are you advocating the abolition of it for treason, acts of terrorism, and international war crimes?

Yes Wicked most murderers are released on Parole after serving 25+ years if they lead a peaceful prison life. That is very wrong.

One thing I will say. Prison is not meant to deter shit... it is meant to PUNISH wrongs that have been committed by criminals. If it deters others from committing the same crime that is just a side effect.

As anyone can see by DM's post it tries to use analogies that are meaningless in order to smash facts when those are facts not easily smashed by vapid analogy.

When you KILL a murderer they are dead and they have what they deserve. A litterer has nothing to do with a murderer. Killing those who commit murder is very beneficial to society as it removes thier possible actions from harming society in the future.

25 years is a small amount of time when it is considered that they robbed someone else of alot more than that.

Your attempt at obfuscating the main point of this conversation by utilizing comparisons does not change the fact that murder is a very different crime than anything else and as such deserves the harshest penalties we can toss at those who commit it. Mainly because they continue to do that which put them in prison in the first place. Most murderers will kill again given the chance.

I think that's why first degree murder usually warrants a death penalty, while second degree convictions don't.

First degree is premeditated. Meaning the person has thought it out, planned it out, then carried it out. Stands to reason someone who puts for that much effort would do it again. Second degree murders are often crimes of passion that may not be committed again.

Take OJ for example. We all know he's guilty. He knows he's guilty. The difference is, his was a crime of passion towards his wife and her lover. It's doubtful he would commit murder again.

Only incidentally. From the viewpoint of the justice system as a social construct, the only ones interested in "punishing" someone for a crime are the victims and their close friends and relatives, and they are kept out of the process for a very good reason. The reasons that society punishes crimes all involve social profit. A justice system

a) Provides a deterrent to future criminals. If they think they're going to get caught, people will rarely commit a crime.

b) Maintains society by providing wounded parties an impartial form of justice. Vigilante justice, as Dyshade advocates, would very quickly rip society asunder as it turns into a pointless convoluted series of blood feuds.

c) Extract damages from the convicted in the form of labor. Slavery's oldest origins involve enslaving enemies of war and criminals. We still enslave criminals in effect, only instead of forcing them to repay their debt, we let them sit around and stab each other with home-made weapons at the moment. This is a problem on two fronts, as it means that anyone going in for a short term can easily emerge from prison worse than when they went in, and also it means prison is a cost upon society instead of a cheap labor pool. I'm not fully advocating bringing back the chain gangs because those were too extreme, and the point isn't to be completely cruel to prisoners, but expecting hard labor out of them is reasonable.

I think it is freakish the rate at which those sentenced to life get off early, but not the concept. For one thing, twenty five years is a really fucking long time. Twenty five years is pre-internet, height of the cold war, Duran Duran are the hot new band, ninety-nine percent of Americans haven't even heard of hip-hop yet. Apartheid still reigns in South America, production is just beginning on Return of the Jedi, and John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are all still just picking up steam. You and I aren't even born yet. Let's not dismiss twenty-five years too quickly.

Anyway. Put someone through that huge stretch of time where most of it is spent in hard labor. Remove the cruelty from the system and the in-prison gang culture. See exactly how many people relapse.

It's true that most of those states have a high poverty rate. But consider that perhaps rather than simply it being a case of one factor causing another, perhaps there are many intertwined reasons why the South sucks so bad.

I don't believe in applying the death penalty at all where there is an option. Iraq, for instance, is probably far too volatile to deal away with it just now. It can be a harsh necessity when your prison system cannot support a ton of prisoners. However, that is clearly not the case in the US.

See above.

You shouldn't speak when you don't know. Tell me, have you ever studied the law? At all? To any degree? Because it seems to me if you had you wouldn't brandish such erroneous conclusions as a mark of pride.

Is it that, or is it just that you're actually incapable of refuting logic?

Littering harms society. Yet the logic holds. Killing people for fear of their repeating is not only unnecessary, it reveals a lack of understanding or faith in your own system. Why are you releasing those whom you consider have the remotest possibility of repeating their crimes?

Nothing is going to bring back to life those murdered. The point is simply to make murder unprofitable. Someone who commits murder, gains nothing, and loses most of their life without pay, has not in any way gained. Under these circumstances, with a reliable enforcement of these punishments, few people would be inclined to murder.

I see that you don't know how logic works.

My using comparisons obfuscates points only when those points are irrelevant. If murder is so different from other crimes that wholly seperate rules should apply to it's punishment, then you should start utilizing them and explaining yourself, instead of relying upon logical fallacies that can be dispelled by applying them to other crimes.

youre the one who doesnt understand logic. Putting murderers to death is logical since it serves as beneficial to the rest of us. Letting them live on the other hand is an emotional argument devoid of logic. Get it straight.

For this to be true, there would have to be some benefit to executing prisoners. Can you demonstrate that there is?

Yes, they no longer drain societys funding, also they no longer pose a threat to others.

In what way is this not true of prison labor?

Prison labor does not pay for itself. If it did our tax dollars would not support prisons.

But we are not making significant use of prison labor, and we are currently giving the prisoners money for their labor, which is clearly wrong.

Nor is executing prisoners without cost; as we already went over, it costs a significant amount.

bullshit, the military kills for a living. killing is killing and humans have done since the begining of time. its all a matter of intent. go to militaryphotos.net and watch the boys having some fun pumping round after round and 40mm granade into targets. its what humans do, procreate and kill.