Because people are full of faults. And the justice system can see and exploit those faults.
A good article about why you don’t say anything if you’re arrested and ask for legal counsel at the first opportunity
How about you don’t give a false confession?
Problem being there are specific interrogation techniques known to produce false confessions and these techniques are still used in many jurisdictions.
I don’t claim to be an expert on interrogations by any means, but I did see a pretty in depth documentary about the alarming frequency of false confessions gained using certain techniques known by experts to garner them.
Knowing a few assistant DA’s it’s amazing the shit they get pressured with, I know of one case where horse DNA was pushed to match a suspects DNA. Innocent people go to jail knowingly.
It’s politics, not justice in a lot of high profile cases.
Being that, I’ll only support the death penalty when you have an extraordinary amount of proof that the suspect committed the crime.
That is my one reservation. The legal system is a damn joke. Look how close the Duke Lacrosse team came to being convicted rapists.
Otherwise, I’m generally very much in favor of capital punishment. For “no doubt” offenders I’d remove the electric chair and install an electric bench so we can do 6 at a time.
there’s not a lot of evidence that capital punishment is an effective deterrent. It also costs more than just imprisoning an offender for life.
the fact that innocent people are executed really makes it hard to justify. I’m also not a big fan of giving our government the authority to take a life. Having to kill in defense of other people or national ideals is quite different from killing as a punishment. All imho of course…
It is the ultimate deterrent. That person will never again commit a crime.
It also costs more than just imprisoning an offender for life.
I know the studies say that. I still don’t believe it. They just counted everything and the kitchen sink. Some of the stuff, like cost of incarceration, should not have been counted except where the costs would be higher. 20 years on death row – how much more expensive is that than 20 years in prison without parole. (Or more like: how much more SHOULD it cost – nothing. The fact that they treat it differently does not mean it has to be that way)
It does not have to be that way. It could be cheaper if they would go through a set of appeals and be done with it.
the fact that innocent people are executed really makes it hard to justify. I’m also not a big fan of giving our government the authority to take a life. Having to kill in defense of other people or national ideals is quite different from killing as a punishment. All imho of course…
I think that the sorts of cases that qualify for the death penalty need to be tightened up. Too many cases that should not qualify (circumstantial evidence, etc) get made death penalty cases. But that does not mean it never has a place.
for the death penalty to be a true deterrent, you must assume the criminal will be capable of thinking about the consequences in order to be deterred by such a punishment so a crime avoided.
Im pretty sure criminals always think about the consequences of their actions all the time :rolleyes:
It’s a deterrent because they can’t commit another crime if they are dead.
I know, I know…“life in prison!!” Well, our society finds it difficult to keep someone truly locked up for life. Even when we sentence them to death the majority end up dying of natural causes before we finally get around to executing them.
I’d like to see statistics in regard to how many people sentenced to prison for 1st and second degree murder get out and kill again. I suspect that 20+ years in jail would take the fight out of someone.
if they killed someone in the first place to land in jail, its pretty clear the deterrent didn’t work. True deterrents are suppose to prevent it from happening not letting one slip through. Not stopping things after the fact.
What criminal goes around and thinks before they kill someone, oh crap I might get the death penalty, I guess I wont kill someone today. That’s why the death penalty isn’t as an effective deterrent as people think it would be.
Start by looking at how much of their sentence they actually end up serving. Then consider just how hard they had to work to catch that conviction in the first place given their previous record. Then consider that their convictions represent only a fraction of their actual criminal offenses. The faulty assumption is that because they catch a 20 year sentence that they serve 20 years. Unfortunately that’s not always the case. Recent parole reform laws have helped improve the situation somewhat, but the amount of time someone ends up serving for serious violent offenses is still shockingly low.
…and remember that a murder conviction (especially first degree) is a very difficult standard for the state to meet, meaning that a lot of cases are plea-bargained down to something less severe.
If you look at the typical person convicted of murder, the murder sentence isn’t their first time in jail. Generally they have been a fairly frequent guest at the graybar motel, and generally simply jailing them doesn’t seem to get them to knock it off. Making them dead, however, is very effective at preventing them from re-offending.
If you want some sort of punishment that will make criminals not murder other people because they are afraid of what might happen to them, keep dreaming. That assumes that criminals are rational individuals. I’m telling you flat out that many of them are not rational as you would recognize it.
There are people walking among us who are stone cold predators whose thoughts never go much past their next meal. You cannot deter that kind of animal with rational arguments about penalties. You simply put them down so they can’t hurt anyone other than the victims they’ve already tallied. The death penalty is like flushing the toilet.
I don’t view it as justice…there is no payback for murder…certainly not by lethal injection.
I don’t view it as a deterrent…no one who commits a crime thinks they’re going to get caught.
I view it as I would a dog with rabies…The person is too dangerous to be allowed to live and needs to be put down.
That said the threshold for the death penalty needs to be raised significantly. Eyewitness testimony isn’t enough it needs to be confirmed by multiple sources of scientific/objective evidence. Prosecutors must hold with the highest possible ethics. The crime also should be aggregious and in the 1st degree.
More than likely an innocent man murdered by a jury of his peers
Gotta love how the expert witness claims he was pressured by the governor.
So my question I guess is this, if you support the death penalty and an innocent man is murdered, does that make you an accomplice in the crime? It’s still a crime in my eyes to murder an innocent person, even if the government does it.
I recall a big trial in Germany that happened after WW2, they decided it was a capital offense for a bunch of fellas who supported the death of some innocent folks.
And I can understand people wanting revenge, I’d personally wouldn’t want to kill the murder of one of my loved ones, I’d want to torture the fucker for as long as humanly possible, death is an easy way out.
But our government shouldn’t commit acts of vengeance. It’s a body of laws, not emotions.
By the way, I was a huge fan of the death penalty, but after finding out about all of the questionable cases where people have been killed or wrongfully convicted by our government, I can no longer support capital punishment as it is now.
I truly believe they should, as long as those receiving it are guilty themselves. I don’t know about you, but I’d be PROUD to live in a country that had the motto of “Don’t &%^& with us… or else.”
Ok, I’m not talking against other countries, I guess I should have made that clear, I’m talking about the court system. And I know people will make the argument vengeance is justice. But at the same time it involved emotions, and I don’t like emotions playing a role in law.
False premise.
No because it’s not neither murder nor a crime. More significantly being in support of the death penalty doesn’t make you complicit in any way shape or form of a jury reaching an incorrect result.
There is no guarantee anywhere of “perfect” justice.
YEs, I agree.
But when we have one dead to rights, he does not get sufficient punishment.
That is actually not true.
The cost to execute an inmate is almost nothing. The cost to house them is quite a bit. Where the actual costs exist are in the continuous appeals of having an inmate on death row.
And when they compare the two, they don’t factor that in for an apples to apples comparison. They do it like this.
Cost of housing an inmate for life (without including any cost of appeals or other legal fees) vs. cost of execution plus the cost of appeals and other legal fees.
So the argument that life imprisonment is cheaper is based upon the assumption that a person with a life sentence will not endlessly appeal their case at every given opportunity. And if done with similar frequency, a person serving a life sentence can add up to more than a person given the death penalty.
Just like it works for sex offenders, huh?