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Then someone demonstrated with some sourced figures that carrying out the death penalty on a person cost the local government significantly more than putting them in jail for life. Jail is cheaper than the lawyers that are required to administer the necessary procedures and trials and appeals that someone has a right to before the death penalty is enacted.
I am not willing to pay 3 times the amount just to have them dead rather than in a cell for life.
So now I'm Against it.
That's pretty much the path I took.
Besides, mistakes have been made and innocent people executed. Any justice system - not just ours - is messy and error prone.
Life in the lock-up will work for me. Life: that means you get buried on premises.
it goes more to the phrasing of the question. do you think 40% of Americans opposed the killing bin laden?
Unfortunately it's possible that after 20 years a lot of Americans (people who answered the phone at random) simply don't know who bin Laden was or what he did that got him hunted down and killed.
I was pro-life sentence for a couple decades, mostly for the possibility of innocent people being executed. Now I consider the costs of lifetime imprisonment, in labor, food, housing, and the trauma inflicted on prisoners and guards. Immediate execution may be more humane and compassionate than many decades of dehumanization by incarceration. The nation is becoming too poor to have a vast prison population.
The death penalty needs to end. One falsely accused and innocent person put to death is one too many. There are too many built in failures where the accused do not have access to proper counsel. For various reasons, law enforcement has shown to be flawed at times in the hows and whys of detective work. There is no correcting a death penalty.
The Innocence Project has shown how many wrongly convicted are innocent. The death penalty removes that chance from the wrongly convicted innocent person to be released. https://innocenceproject.org/about/
The death penalty cost more than life in prison.
"The death penalty is far more expensive than a system utilizing life-without-parole sentences as an alternative punishment. Some of the reasons for the high cost of the death penalty are the longer trials and appeals required when a person’s life is on the line, the need for more lawyers and experts on both sides of the case, and the relative rarity of executions. Most cases in which the death penalty is sought do not end up with the death penalty being imposed. And once a death sentence is imposed, the most likely outcome of the case is that the conviction or death sentence will be overturned in the courts. Most defendants who are sentenced to death essentially end up spending life in prison, but at a highly inflated cost because the death penalty was involved in the process." https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs
Starting a land war in Asia to achieve it (or hide doing it) was absolutely wrong.
As to the point of the thread...
1) Capital Punishment doesn't apply in the discussion of political actors and their actions.
2) The threat of CP doesn't DETER hot blooded actions by people. And it never has.
I was pro-life sentence for a couple decades, mostly for the possibility of innocent people being executed. Now I consider the costs of lifetime imprisonment, in labor, food, housing, and the trauma inflicted on prisoners and guards. Immediate execution may be more humane and compassionate than many decades of dehumanization by incarceration. The nation is becoming too poor to have a vast prison population.
This brings up a couple of matters.
First, why is our country at the top of the list in terms of % of American citizens incarcerated. Considering how much we brag about how wonderful this country is, it seems inexplicable to me as to why so much of our population is behind bars or otherwise (such as on probation) in the legal system.
Second, money should be the determining factor for many things. I'm not sure it should be the determining factor for deciding who lives and dies. The implications of money determining who lives and dies are scary and easily transferrable to the medical profession.
No....but that's not a death penalty question but a tactical/strategic issue.
In the early 90s, I was part of a table top exercise where a Texas town was being held hostage by a special weapon. In the end, we had to give in to the ransom demand and let the T guys get away.....for now. In such situations, however, one might lose the immediate battle but US counter terrorism is relentless and we will strike back.
The other thing I contemplate is that people think that dying is the absolute worst thing that can happen to anyone and I'm not even sure that's true.
I think that being made to live and suffer might be worse. But what comes after death is a matter of belief and faith, and I'm not a religious person. I don't believe in an afterlife where any of us gets to keep on being ourselves, having experiences good or bad. I can more easily believe in energy imprints, or parallel universes or echoes in time, than ghosts. I don't believe in Heaven or Hell. The closest to my (very vague and not very committed) "belief" is something like reincarnation, only I believe that it's just energy and it dissipates and is taken up by new life to be reused in the world. Not like, "you come back as a squirrel" but like, you die, your energy goes out into the world, and when new life comes into being, some of your energy might end up in a blade of grass, the newly conceived life around you, bugs, babies, animals, whatever. Just energy. Your personality? Everything you think of as YOU? Exists only in the memories remaining with those you leave behind, and any legacy of your deeds while you were living.
So what is more significant to me is...what is kind to the others involved in a murderer's life? Not only the taxpayers, not even just the victims, what about their families? Maybe a painless and humane exit lets them get closure on a troubled and difficult person they had to deal with. Maybe it spares them the cost of legal fees and appeals. And maybe, if we are VERY, VERY SURE that someone is truly guilty of a horrible crime.... Maybe THEIR existence is painful. Maybe it's euthanasia, to give them a kind way out of a life they were not able to functionally adapt to?
That's why I'm not even into revenge. I don't need them to suffer. I need them to not inflict more suffering. I want the overall amount of suffering in the world to be less, not more.
If you don't think the state has the right to take away a human life for any reason, then why the absence of outrage from those who oppose the death penalty on Bin Laden's "murder"?
Your entire premise is flawed. Opposing the death penalty is not the same as denouncing the "right to take away a human life for any reason".
Bin Laden didn't receive the death penalty. The death penalty is a sentence given to a person who has been apprehended, tried in a court, convicted, then held in prison until the time of their execution.
When soldiers are out in the field and fired upon by the enemy, return fire is not an enactment of the death penalty. It is an act of martial engagement that can result in the deaths of combatants.
Bin Laden was a foreign combatant. At best you could say he was assassinated, but that, too, is different from the death penalty.
I do not oppose a just war when conducted under the auspices of the International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Convention. I do not oppose killing in self-defense.
I do oppose vigilante killing, killing out of a desire for revenge or vengeance, and killing anyone whose condition prevents them from being a threat, such as imprisonment or incapacitation.
When a truly bad, dangerous person is killed by any means, I don't pity them, but I do pity the society that murders for the gain of some kind of satisfaction over any rational response.
money should be the determining factor for many things. I'm not sure it should be the determining factor for deciding who lives and dies. The implications of money determining who lives and dies are scary and easily transferrable to the medical profession.
Money will be less of an issue when most people don't have it. As the nation transitions to an agricultural economy, I expect barter will mostly replace cash. When people are toiling in fields with hand tools and struggling to adapt to climate change and environmental damage, giving their hard earned food to criminals for decades will be a tough sell. If criminals work for their food, they would be taking work from people who could be law-abiding farmers. Prison labor is a euphemism for slavery.
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