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i believe in the death penally. like somebody said 30 days. i think we need an express lane. four or five in a single day. I also think it needed to be expanded , all crimes with a gun, no matter if bullets in the gun or not. all crimes against children. all crime when somebody dies. all crimes committed by politicians and policemen. crime where they steal your life savings. all rapes, and that one guy in the blue buick with his turn signal on for twelve miles.
only thing stop crime is fear or death
That's the spirit!
Maybe we could just have people walking around with guns shooting people they don't like whenever they feel like it. That would be true freedom.
This is an update to a debate I had on this thread in 2014 with member pknopp regarding the Danielle van Dam case in 2002.
Paul Pfingst, who was the District Attorney, stated at the time that the suspect/defendant David Westerfield wanted to plead guilty to a lesser charge in return for telling us where Danielle's body was. That means Westerfield is guilty. And many people took that statement as proof positive of his guilt. But, years later, Pfingst stated that they (law enforcement) were trying to work out a plea deal to recover Danielle's body, because they wanted the parents to be able to bury their daughter. So, contrary to what he said at the time, it was law enforcement which wanted the deal, rather than Westerfield. And, far from being evidence of guilt, Pfingst’s new statement supports Westerfield’s claim that he and his lawyers just listened to an offer made by law enforcement. And it was reported at the time that they rejected the offer.
David Westerfield was sentenced to death, and has been on Death Row in San Quentin since 2003, yet the evidence is that he is innocent (see post #22 on this thread).
It wasn't. As far as we know the jury didn't even know the past history of any of those testifying.
Hundreds of thousands are convicted based upon the word of others. Are you saying that if some women is raped and she is able to pick her rapist out of a line-up, says she is 100% he is the one, we should just let him go if that's all the proof we have?
We shouldn't have a trial and let a jury decide?
In 1984, a 19-year-old woman was raped in Virginia. Edward Honaker was arrested for the crime. At his trial, the woman testified that she was very sure that he was the rapist. Her identification was the strongest evidence against him. Despite strong evidence of innocence, he was convicted. But after about ten years in prison, he was exonerated based on DNA.
Another man, Michael Nicholaou, was then suspected of the crime. At least Honaker looked similar to this new suspect. That was not the case with Dianna Green’s rapist, Gerald Parker: he wasn’t even the same race as the man she identified. But she identified her husband, Kevin. And she was sure it was him. The entire case against him was based on her testimony. He was convicted and spent 16 years in prison before he was exonerated, again based on DNA.
So eyewitness identification is even unreliable in the case of rape. But it has such a powerful influence on juries that it causes them to discount other evidence.
Another example of p*ss poor job by the prosecution jury and low IQ jurors. If some had their way this guy would have been dead for years. While I generally don't have sympathy for murders, you need to actually make sure you have the right person.
Now i know this is a jumping off point for a discussion about an issue... but it needs to be pointed out, this young man was not given the death penalty. he was given a 40 year sentence.
That being said, I certainly think that the standard for a death penalty punishment should be exceptionally high. It isn't nearly high enough in most states.
Now i know this is a jumping off point for a discussion about an issue... but it needs to be pointed out, this young man was not given the death penalty. he was given a 40 year sentence.
That being said, I certainly think that the standard for a death penalty punishment should be exceptionally high. It isn't nearly high enough in most states.
Good catch. The standard for the death penalty is and should be different. I doubt this man was even eligible for the death penalty based on the fact pattern established by the evidence.
I don't support the death penalty because of the exorbitant cost to taxpayers when LWOP will suffice and cost much less.
According to whom?
I've seen the studies but the studies always seem to compare the baseline of the cost of death penalty appeals (paid for by the taxpayer) to simply spending life in prison. But such studies have been purposefully misleading as you're still entitled to taxpayer funded appeals if you've been sentenced to life in prison, thus the baseline should include the cost of life in prison along with supported appeals. Additionally, particularly with people living longer now, I find it hard to believe that it costs significantly less money to provide for a young person sentenced to life in prison vs. the same person sentenced to die, where if he's in a state with an active death penalty he can expect to be put down within 15-20 years, as opposed to the 40-60 years he may very well spend being housed and eating three square meals in a government prison. Older inmates? Sure, I can see how it would cost less to merely incarcerate them vs. the death penalty, but this certainly isn't a universal point.
Fundamentally, though, the problem I have with this argument--even assuming for the sake of argument that is does cost a lot more to have someone on death row once we factor in the cost of appeals, etc.--is that it doesn't have to be this way. If you eliminate the number of appeals granted to people--which Congress can do--that will spend things along very nicely. One major reason why we have so many appeals is because death penalty opponents have fought for them. But you can't fight for more appeals and then use the added cost associated with more appeals as a reason to do away with the death penalty.
Hi, sorry for this offtopic. Can someone explain me, if don't mind, why lethal injection is nowadays the most common method of execution in the US? As far as I see in US there is a variety of methods to execute offenders: lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, firing squad, hanging. However, statistics show that most of the executions are carried out by lethal injection and we can barely see cases of firing squad and lethal gas, for example.
Thanks in advance.
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Wrongful conviction in a Death Penalty case
