21 replies to this topic

[B'Rat]

Let's look at this in a logical way, note with the pros and cons I'm using un-sourced facts not what someone thinks so there won't be any any human rights added into this

        pros of the death penalty                       cons of the death penalty
    1. They won't repeat the crime                     1. They might be innocent
    2. cheaper than life imprisonment
    3. possible lower crime rate

 

it seems that the pros out way the cons and some may complain about that is inhumane, but when we're talking about someone's life can we afford to be humane. Most likely innocent people will die but also some people will live because some else died. On a side note I come from a first world country where the prisoner sit in their nice cells watching TV or reading books and only have to go to 1 or 2 hour rehabilitation, I think all of them should be stripped down the the barest minimum living conditions so that they know that they're life outside is better than a life inside.

I really can't understand your logic... the fact that "the pros out way the cons" doesn't look this obvious to me... unless you count the sheer number of arguments, taking every one of them as equally important, which I suppose is not the point nor could be sustainable...

In fact the arguments themselves sound flawed to me (no real arguments, then), since:

 

pro 1: Nothing that some good life imprisonment can't achieve

 

pro 2: This is drastically false in the current system... one could say that in an ideal system the costs would be seriously reduced, if it was not for the fact that apparently most of these costs come from the legal complications necessary in order to be "sure" that we are not killing an innocent, and judges, tests and lots and lots of experts just cost very much.

 

pro 3: Not supported by data... If one really want to reason without any empirical confirmation (which makes no sense) one could as well sustain as made above that death penalty makes multi-homicide frenzy easier, so that this would become an argument con!

 

 

But the real problem here is that I really believe that there is no way that the advantage of having some cheaper legal system could be compared to the utter horror of possibly killing innocents... It's comparing money to human lives...

 

 

Plus, I'd rather correct the list like this:

 

        pros of the death penalty                                                                                             
    1. In some hypothetical radically different system it could be cheaper than life imprisonment

 

        cons of the death penalty

    1. They might be innocent

    2. In the actual present system it is more expensive

    3. Intrinsic difficulty in deciding which cases deserve it and which not (possible slippery slope)

 

I expand the con 3: Even if you sustain the capital punishment, there is no God given list of the cases in which a crime deserve death (unless one does literally refer to the Old Testament, with adultery and all as from Leviticus 20:10, and I say this as a Catholic)...  what should guide us in the decision? Voters or politicians gut feelings (as pretty much it works actually)? Isn't this "value of human life vs gravity of crime follows from democratic variations of mood" a little bit too arbitrary? Or since we really like some pretense of objectivity should we expect that some brilliant economist pulls out from somewhere a formula which calculate when the value of the loss caused to the society by a specific criminal exceed the value of his life? (so that crimes punishable this way pretty much change according to the financial market) Of course such a method would be absurd and arbitrary, but is it really less absurd and arbitrary than any other method?

Edited by B'Rat, 05 November 2013 - 07:50 AM.

[MissMumbai]

I offer a third option. Use the criminals as subjects for human clinical trials. This way, they would be of some use to the society.