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Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 12:39 pm
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Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 1:09 am
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Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 10:05 am
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Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 11:29 am
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I see the intention of the death penalty. The key word in death penalty is "penalty." The whole judicial system and all is not about trying to undo crimes or just deter them in the first place or anything like that, it's about making things even for victims, retribution. It's like "you violated somebody's rights, now you have opened yourself to have your rights violated back in order to set things right, to receive your punishment." Part of the constitution says you have the rights to life, liberty and property and can not be legally deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process. The death penalty is only legally given out after due process, after you've been through court. Part of the logistics of our legal system I believe is that the government (at least in theory, even if it's not perfectly implemented) exists to protect the rights of it's citizens and when those rights could not be upheld, then to even things back out, the violator will have their rights violated as part of punishment for the wrong they did.
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Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 7:55 pm
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Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 4:23 pm
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The most logical explanation is probably only that it's human nature to punish those who commit wrongs. Thousands of years ago, the "eye for an eye" policy was started by Hammurabi (though a valid argument could be made that this code was not truly an "eye for an eye" because of the discrepancies in punishment that it established based on social status of the victim and the criminal), and today, the same sort of idea continues to exist as rationale for the death penalty. It has to have something to do with human nature.
The reason can't be an attemt to remove all of the 'bad' people from society so that the 'good' can exist in peace. For one thing, the idea sounds like a philosophical equivalent of ethnic cleansing, one that could easily turn into the removal of political opponents and such, and as the system is now, it doesn't seem like that could happen as easily as it would if that were the justification for it. But, the bigger reason why the penalty cannot be part of a larger attempt to get rid of 'bad' people for the benefit of 'good' people is the total ambiguity of those moral classifications. Think of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students took on roles as prisoners or as guards, and after three days, a third of the 'guards' became genuinely sadistic towards the prisoners. The experiment was supposed to last a week, but had to be ended early because the conditions had become dangerous due to the actions of the participants- and according to the Wikipedia article on the experiment, most of the guards were upset by that decision. Think of just about any violent revolution, especially the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The point is, anybody can become evil. Except for eliminating all people in general, there is no way to eliminate all evil people. And that's just using the idea that an action is evil, bad, or otherwise unethical when it harms people other than oneself- and not everyone can even agree on that, based on what I've been reading. When you take into account ideas such as objectivism, which holds that an action is ethical if it is in one's rational self interest; that the definition of morality is the pursuit of individual happiness. And that brings up issues of the definition of self-interest and happiness, and questions of whether and how one can know what will result in their greatest happiness. But, I'm digressing.
I'm not sure whether the rationale for the death penalty could be cost. I don't really have a way to know exactly how the cost of that penalty would compare with the cost of lifetime imprisonment- but I have heard accounts that imprisonment would cost less. It makes sense- a New York Times article a while ago states that there is a significant shortage of doctors willing to perform the procedure, so the law of supply and demand would drive up the cost, and that's excluding the cost of all of the chemicals and such.
The question of what would be a greater punishment is an important one. A lot of it would have to do with individual philosophy- how one believes life should be spent, and what one believes comes after death. The death penalty is not the same thing if you believe that the criminal will have an unending afterlife of physical torture as it is if you believe that death is a permanent end to consiousness, after which there can be nothing. With the amount of disagreement that is bound to exist, it wouldn't be rational to support the penalty because it might be worse. Then, that begs the question- for whom should the punishment be worse? Should the family of the victims feel that the defendant is getting the worst possible punishment? Or should the criminal feel that his punishment is the worst that is possible? Ideally, it would be both, but what if there is a discrepancy?
One last point- and one that I'm quite surprised has not been brought up- is the finality of the death penalty as compared to imprisonment. The judicial system is not perfect, even DNA testing has it's errors. Samples can be contaminated or inadverently switched through simple human error. Juries can easily be biased, either in the defendant's advantage or disadvantage. In the 1920's, there was the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in which two Italian immigrants, and members of the socialist party, were sentenced to death for murder during a robbery- a crime for which there was minimal, if any evidence against them. That's just one example. In a case like that, the death penalty is irreversible- if the ruling is later overturned, nothing can be done, whereas a person can always be released from a prison. Granted, it isn't a situation that comes up on a daily basis, but if there is a possibility of killing a person unjustly, it must be taken into consideration.
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Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2007 8:17 am
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Posted: Mon May 07, 2007 8:19 am
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Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 6:57 pm
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Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2007 10:48 pm
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