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About LinkBacksAt the same time can we also bring back national service?
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At the same time can we also bring back national service?
I'm all for it. But none of this death row rubbish where people are around for years after their sentence. Also the evidence would have to be pretty concrete.
The death penalty is much more expensive than life without parole because the Constitution requires a long and complex judicial process for capital cases
it is not necessarily more expensive. It is in the USA because of the system
Ah, the system...Originally Posted by YorkieBen
Do you have a point? Are you suggesting we should adopt an abbreviated and simplistic process for capital cases instead?
People seem to be saying 'concrete evidence', 'open and shut case', 'incontrovertible proof', 'plea of guilty', blah blah blah. This is COMPLETELY UNREALISTIC. Even in the US, with their expensive concepts of 'presentation of evidence'* and 'legal representation'*, wrongful convictions are unacceptably frequent. Are the Khmer Rouge or Taliban models better?
*Outmoded judiciary concepts such as habeas corpus and the right to an attorney no longer apply to Evildoers, Enemies of Freedom, and Trrrrrrrrrrsts.
Another vote for no. A system where murder (and other selected crimes) results in people been put to death just is plain wrong - I don't know of any system perfect especially when humans decision are a part of it. The system will fail at some point.
For those who do want the death penalty I would wish any injustice on you, would you be happy to be put to death for a miscarriage of justice just to be the statistic of the one in however many that are wrong.
No; on the basis that:
1. I will never approve of any violence which is not in self-defence or in defence of another and this must be a justified defence.
2. It costs more to the taxpayer, even though it's a different system we'd still be having the same problems.
3. We had corporal punishment before, and people have been falsely convicted before. There have even been cases of people being setup because of grudges and executed.
4. It reduces the chances of conviction as juries become more wary of their actions.
5. There is no evidence to suggest that it acts as a better deterrent than a sentence.
To answer the subject....
Yes.
If 'no' then at the very least 'LIFE' in prison should actually MEAN life. Not 'life' which means you're out 15 years later. The implication of being charged with 'LIFE' in prison , means you should rot in that place and spend your last day trapped there.
Also, while we're on this train of thought, prisons should not have TV's in them. Gyms, fine. Books, fine. but TV/video games/computers... NO!
[GSV]Trig (24-02-2008)
No
"Let him have it, Chris!" . Derek Bentley 1952 ?
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
Damned good point, a prison shoudl be just that, your not there to get 3 squares a day and a roof over your head, which in some cases is more than some people get when they havent commited any crime at all...
If prison meant punishment and life meant being buried in the prison grounds then I think there would be a lot less support for the death penalty.
If a murderer spent the rest of his days breaking rocks and doing meaningless and degrading tasks and knew that when he finally died his family wouldn't even have the right to visit his grave then society might feel that some form of justice has been done.
As it is we all know that apart from very high profile cases like the Moors murderers and Ian Huntley life usually means 15 to 20 years if that. And the only reason those cases mean whole life is because of the amount of publicity associated with them. I'm sure there are people who have committed equally heinous crimes who are walking the streets today after being granted parole.
I don't know what the statistics are for people murdering again after being released from a life sentence but as far as I'm concerned if it is just 1 then that is unacceptable.
The justice system is supposed to protect the public and until the 1960s that is pretty much what it did. Since the bleeding heart liberal (with a small l) tosspots got into positions of power the whole system has gone downhill and now prisoners rights are more important than victims rights.
I support the death penalty because there are people who have demonstrated by their actions that they are not fit to share our society with us.
I ask you. Which is the more important statistic? The one that counts the numbers of criminals executed who subsequently could have been freed or the one that counts the number of innocent schoolgirls raped and murdered because someone with a proven history of aberrent behaviour is released from prison while they still pose a danger to us.
I have to be honest here and say that I really don't give a flying fart about it being a deterrent. Nothing is a deterrent to these people. Not the death penalty and certainly not prison. Deterrents don't come into it.
For me it's all about preventing the criminal from repeating his actions. Don't rely on stopping him from wanting to do it. Put him in a position where he CAN'T do it again
Show me an EFFECTIVE way of keeping those people away from me and mine and I will give up my support for capital punishment today. So far the only way of completely preventing reoffending is to stop them breathing.
"Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having."
Yes. Absolutely yes - In concept I wholeheartedly support it.
But maybe not with current incompetent government and services under them who cant even keep their data correct - and their DNA database with 1/5th of the UK population and 10% of that data being incorrect.
But in this country life sentence doesnt mean life - it means a few years. The death sentence might just mean pretending to be electrocuted or something.
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Wow... Is this really a Yes or No question? I mean, it's sparked off quite an emotional discussion already, that I wonder whether the question is ... fair...
Yes, I agree that capital punishment should be a possible sentence
Yes, I agree that mistakes are made, false confessions acquired, folks incorrectly sentenced and this should be taken into consideration when the sentence is considered
I don't think we should consider the cost option. Who cares whether prison costs more/less than execution... We have a social responsibility to pay regardless and to be honest, the fact that some people can even think about the almighty £ when discussing life/death is a little distasteful in my humble opinion. If you want to complain about the cost, complain like for like, not life for life.
If this was a simple question, we wouldn't have found all those little islands to dump our convicts on.... But then, they turned out OK, so maybe all this rehabilitation through hard work could have a little substance behind it!
Bottom line, is that I really do want to sit on the fence.... I want us as a society to have the ability to invoke capital punishment... but then I don't want us to actually use that right.
No, because death cannot be undone. Although someone has lost there life, the state killing of another human being cannot be justified. Too many mistakes have been made in the past. It also gives no chance of repentance. That can be a big help to some relatives of the victims.
However I fully support life meaning life, harsher conditions and enforced labour.
Not around too often!
Adopting a different system to the US does not mean it has to be either abbreviated or simplistic. For a start, you have to consider where you're starting from. The US legal system is based on similar fundamentals to ours, but is different in many crucial aspects - such as the process for determining admissibility or otherwise of evidence. And our system already is very different from the US, in very many ways.
Also, there are many lawyers in the US dedicated explicitly to fighting death penalty cases on principle, and not because of whether the person they're fighting for did it or not. They use all sorts of arcane loopholes and legal manoeuvres to delay execution, and to force appeal after appeal, even when they know that they will lose that appeal. It is often about delay, as much as prevention.
And because the underlying judicial systems, appeals process and evidential rules are different, any direct cost comparison becomes irrelevant because the reason for many of those costs and appeals do not exist in the UK. Unless, of course, you're suggesting that we should abandon our own legal system and adopt that used by the US?
Would the DP be more expensive here than in the US? I don't know, and neither does anyone else. Why not? Because we don't have a system that allows it, and if you're going to do that cost comparison, it needs to be based on the system that would be used. And until you know that system, using the US as an example of what it'll cost is about as representative as using Saddam Hussein's 9mm.
One more point about costs, and structural differences. The US system is State-based not Federal. In the UK, we aren't a collection of states with independent legal and prison systems. Instead of prisons with death row facilities all over the country, like the US, many of which have minimal use (but some of which do not), we could have one or two facilities housing all capital cases. That difference alone is enough to completely undermine any use of the costs in the US as being representative of what costs here would be.
If we're going to use cost as an argument either for or against, it needs to be at least slightly based on the system that would be in use or it's completely meaningless - either way.
EDIT - oh, and the DP isn't coming back here in the near future, or the foreseeable future and probably not ever, regardless of whether people want it or not. So it's a rather academic debate anyway.
Isn't this a repeat thread? Or do we just like debating the same things over and over?
http://forums.hexus.net/question-tim...unishment.html
What's wrong with gladitorial contest as punishment? Each convict is senteced to a minimum number of fights against other convicts/wild animals/strange crystal maze style deathtrap dungeons. Tape the whole lot and broadcast it on Saturday nights thus clearing up the crap saturday night lineup, and sell the rights to every other TV network accross the world to remove the necessity for the license fee.
Reduces the cost of getting rid of all those prisoners massively (could give long termers a few fights in lew of 10 years?), reduces tax burden and it's a winner for the schedules
(Actually I'm against DP for all the good reasons listed above)
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