12th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty Oct 22,2011 in Austin Texas

[Kulindahr]

He didn't deserve to die.

What makes YOU think that it's within you or your country's right to take another human being's life - and YES, he is STILL a human being, no matter WHAT he did.

Does he deserve to be tortured? Does he deserve to be beaten? Does he deserve to be raped?

What level of pain, cruelty, and suffering will satisfy you and your DESIRE to commit the SAME CRIME as the criminal does?

You completely debase and degrade yourself, and bring yourself down to HIS depraved world.

Is THAT what you want?

It isn't bringing yourself down to his level: murder is killing without cause; execution is done with cause.

If no killing is legitimate, we should disband the military.

But that leads to where the death penalty belongs: at the hands of the well-armed intended victim or a rescuer.

WhiteEagle, you're onto something here. Life sentences don't actually mean life. 7 out of 10 prisoners sentenced to life actually get released.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/VOSPATS.PDF

Life without parole is also a similar misnomer. I think if we had actual life sentences, you'd see less support for the death penalty. As it stands now, there is no appeal of death.

That's why, as with an infamous child rapist and polygamist, sentences such as "life plus twenty" get handed down, so that if for some reason parole is given from the life sentence, there are twenty years still waiting to be served.

 

[construct]

The proposition that murderers forfeit their rights violates the presuppositions of our Constitution and our legal system. No one forfeits his rights to a fair trial with adequate counsel with no cruel or unusual punishment any more than he forfeits his freedom of religion no matter what he may have done. Fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth amendment protections apply even to murderers. The main one that people talk about (because it is most foundational) is the freedom from cruel and unusual punishment (which the death penalty is not, at least according to the Supreme Court). In principle, I don't think execution need be cruel, and it's certainly not unusual. The others come into play in particular cases.

This leaves the question whether capital punishment is philosophically defensible. I would never condemn or insult anyone simply because they reach a different conclusion than I do. The reasons I universally oppose capital punishment have already been raised by others in this thread.

The Texas case that should give us most pause is the Willingham case. I think in this case Texas executed an innocent man. The best investigative tools available even at the time of the trial were not used. Had those tools been used, I believe evidence would have been developed and presented to acquit him. Gov. Perry disrupted the post-mortem examination of the case to gain political advantage, and it was finally ended because procedural problems were held to be determinative (an indefensible situation in this case).

 

[Mariatenebre]

It serves to shorten their sentence. If you compare it to someone who kills, then shoots themself, justice hasn't been self-fulfilled has it?

Spending every last moment of their natural life in prison is more of a penalty than allowing an escape from their possible guilt or shame, albeit they won't likely have any.

No it isn't removing a person's life robs them of every bit of goodness and the joy of existence. Removing someone's existence is the ultimate punishment.

 

[Kulindahr]

You regard the death penalty as the punishment, i regard it as ending the punishment.

And when you talk about it robbing them of every bit of goodness and joy of existence, how much exactly do you imagine there is in knowing you have the rest of your days to spend incarcerated? It seems not enough that a person has their freedom taken for the rest of days, and that satisfaction can only be gained from death, an eye for an eye.

Well, as i heard a great quote recently, an eye for an eye will lead us all to blindness.

It depends.

I met a guy who loved being in prison. He got to build up his muscles, had no responsibilities, and once he won a couple of fights he got status and was assigned "disciples". He won a fight against a superior over something they disagreed on, and that victory got him promotion. He was on the inner council of some white supremacist group, and loved it.

He got out and hated it. He beat some people up, but on the out it just got people mad. So he busted a guy up good, let himself get caught, pled guilty, and now he's back in his warped little paradise for seven years.

OTOH I know a guy who got framed for kiddie porn, took a plea for "encouraging", and is looking at thirty years till he's outside the bars again. Every day is miserable, not just because he lost his freedom but because he didn't do anything wrong.


To the first, death would be a punishment -- it would take away his little paradise. To the second, it could well be a release.

 

[Kulindahr]

I think tho Kuli, that in the first case, this could be solved easily(ish).
It would require a huge investment and rebuilding (may be good for the economy in the long run).
It would certainly create jobs.
But, and i've mentioned it before on JUB at some point, i think the prison system needs a change. I would support a separation of prisoners from each other so that they couldn't form a society within jail, where they are then able to have distraction from their punishment. Single cells, no communal areas except for a yard and showers. Meals to be eaten in cells. A seperation of prisoners based on white collar and blue collar crime, serious and petty etc.
Its not healthy to have a society within a society, its no wonder that some serious crime occurs in prisons themselves. Its illogical to remove people from the larger community because they are negative for it, only to put them into another community. How are they expected to be rehabilitated or to atone. It sems daft to me.

As for the second guy, i agree it may seem like a release, but if he is innocent, why accept guilt for anything?? I'm confused. But more importantly, is there good behaviour? I mean 30 yrs would be 15 here on good behaviour, and i don't believe even 30 yrs would be given even for child molestation over here. (Tho i have no gripe with lengthy sentences for that)

I know a kid who thinks of suicide sometimes, because of having been in prison.

He'd been there three days, and some guys with all the same prison tattoo came to him and gave him a knife. He was told to pick a "nigger" and kill him, and he had three days to get it done or he'd get killed.

He didn't think he could do it until he heard a black guy telling another guy he just wanted to die but he couldn't find a way to kill himself. So he steeled himself and picked a moment when no one was watching except "his guys", and killed the black guy. He told me if he hadn't heard the guy saying he wanted to die, he never could have done it.

But on the outside there are guys who will take orders from him because he passed that "test". He hates it.


Ironically, one of the big problems with our prison system is the same as a really big problem of our schools: they're big. They're built big to save money -- but it isn't worth the savings.

Big schools fail at taking care of kids (e.g. bullying), and fail at instruction; big prisons fail totally because they're just crime universities. The kid with the knife knows how to commit types of crimes he'd never heard of before -- hours are spent sharing skills. Knowing how to do them, he gets tempted -- and he hates that, too.

Classrooms should be smaller -- twelve to twenty. Prisons should be the same: go ahead and have a massive installation, but divide it into "halls" of no more than two dozen. And run competitions between the halls for things (there's nothing like competing with outsiders to build cohesion).



As for the second guy, he's a bit low of the IQ range -- his mom thinks his school tests showed 92-94. So he's slow, and doesn't grasp complex things. His attorney explained that the plea deal offered a set of charges for which fourteen months was the sentence. My guess is he took the deal, thinking he'd get fourteen months -- but the judge took twenty-four charges at fourteen months each and made them consecutive. At most, he can take off not quite five months of each sentence, for good time (I think that's if he gets a prison job).

He doesn't really remember the sentencing, so I don't know if the deal was concurrent sentences and the judge changed it, or if he misunderstood.

What I do know is that people who could have testified on his behalf found they were being watched by the cops. It wouldn't be the first time in this county that potential witnesses were scared off by the cops.



edit: the charges were "encouraging child pornography", which means having in one's possession images one made one's self by copying someone else's work. that carries a maximum sentence of fourteen months per image. what I don't get is that this specific law requires the state to prove that the person made the images (he had no printer), and also prove that the person knew that there was a law specifically against copying pornographic images. there's no way in hell the DA could have proved either of those, so I told him he should be asking for an appeal because he had incompetent counsel.