40
5 votes
Apr 18, 2015

Yes, death penalty should be allowed. Criminals that have been proven guilty without a doubt and that have committed an uncalled for and irreversible crime deserve to be executed, especially if these people are not able to be rehabilitated. If they were to get out, although it's not likely, they would probably get out and do it again, costing another innocent life. I know that it is wrong to kill but why should someone that went out and kill someone else be able to enjoy another day behind bars when you got family members out there suffer and hurting. I feel that if allowing the death penalty it would stop a lot of these senseless crime as far as taking someone life.

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100
User voted Yes, in some cases.
linked reply
1 vote,
Sep 15, 2016

Morally, I cannot argue whether or not the death penalty is good or bad, though I still believe it is a bad policy.

There have been multiple cases where someone was put on death row and years--sometimes decades later-- were let off because the trial wasn't done correctly, new evidence arrives, or the evidence wasn't analyzed properly the first time. So no, I do not believe your first trial should ever be a death sentence.

That being said, If someone goes to prison for life without parole and they have no grander punishment, they'll act out even more and cause even more violence inside of prisons. If someone is on death row, they have even less to be punished with.

I think that all death penalty cases should be left as life-sentence cases, but if you kill someone on the inside, you should be tried again for the death penalty. Since prisons have cameras, guards and witnesses, it should be a relatively quick second trial. This system would perhaps be an incentive for prisoners to act in less violent ways.

Additionally, there is a little fun-fact I learned in my Ethics class a couple years ago. Ironically, the violent crime rate in states that still support the death penalty is higher than in those with no death penalty.
deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without-death-p...wer-murder-rates

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50
main reply
6 votes,
Apr 18, 2015

No one deserves to die, ever. Death is a total and permanent obliteration of what can colloquially be called their soul. If you killed someone, by your own logic you deserve to die. Who can kill you though, since they then would deserve to die? Or if not, who has the power to dictate who lives? And by condemning someone, even as punishment, again it seems they must condemn themselves. There is far too much potential for abuse.
Consider also that incredibly few people have been proven guilty. Modern developments in DNA evidence checking have proven innocent many people who served decades in prison for nothing. What if they were killed instead? If there was a death penalty, at that point the people who convicted the innocent person would deserve it themselves.

Could you explain how having people suffering justifies murder, by the way? What do you even mean by "why should [they] ... be able to enjoy another day behind bars when you got [sic] family members out there suffer [sic] and hurting." Firstly, I can guarantee you they aren't 'enjoying' time in prison. Prisons are abusive money making machines in America, they don't cater in the slightest to what an inmate wants. Are you suggesting we kill all these disproportionately black criminals and replace them with people who can go and enjoy these luxurious prison cells?

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75
4 votes,
Apr 18, 2015

"No one deserves to die, ever." - This sounds like radicalism at its best. There are people who deserve to die. If someone murders a child (let's assume the worst scenario, it happens - rape, murder, cold blood, multiple times), he deserves nothing but death. I agree we shouldn't torture him (although the parents have the moral right to do it), but we definitely should execute him. Who has the power to dictate who lives? In this example, the parents.

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50
2 votes,
Apr 18, 2015

I hold that no one deserves to be destroyed, or to be tormented to the point where they desire destruction as a release from pain. Certainly they should suffer for what they have done, but I consider it more desirable to reform them and make them a productive and safe member of society rather than remove them.

Why do you want the people with the most incentive to hurt a criminal as much as possible to have control over what happens to them? I'd like to point out that the American prison system has become for-profit, leading to a ludicrously high incarceration rate for the benefit of the few, at the extreme cost of the many. In particular non-violent, non-destructive crimes can lead to extremely long times in prison.

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0
User voted Yes, in some cases.
0 votes,
Oct 30, 2015

I support the death penalty, but if life without the possibility of parole, really meant a person would go to jail and not get out until they died, then I would go to the other camp. But we've seen time and time again those who have gotten LWOPP, have gotten out and in a few cases killed again. In some state LWOPP means we'll decided if we're going to let you out in 25 years, and some people want LWOPP to just be 25 years. So until LWOPP means go to jail and you stay there until you die, no compassion release, no pardon, no nothing, I will support the death penalty.

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67
main reply
3 votes,
Apr 18, 2015

It's not about the crime, it's not about the victim, and it's not about the supposed perpetrator. It's about us as a country. Any nation that puts its prisoners to death is no better than those it executes.

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100
1 vote,
Apr 18, 2015

This is a horrible false equivalency that I've seen thrown around. A murderer, in ethical, rather than legal, terms, is a person who kills without justification. A murderer has demonstrated that they will violate the most basic of human rights: Life. By the act of violating another person's fundamental right, they have also chosen to forfeit their own. The society is justified, by virtue of that perpetrator's crime, in ending the murderer's life.

Otherwise, you would say that a person who shoots and kills an attacker attempting to rape and kill them is on the same moral ground as the attacker, or a police officer that arrests a burglar is morally guilty of kidnapping, which is absurd.

You could argue about the process by which we assign the death penalty, due to the probability of a false conviction, but that is not necessarily reflective of the inherent morality of the death penalty.

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