Bring Back The Death Penalty. Better Yet, Public Execution!

Toogood Reports ^ | July 29, 2002 | Barbara Stanley

[lodwick]

bttt

[Samwise]

The death penalty is the ultimate deterrent. Dead people don't kill.

[ProudAmerican2]

I notice that in the article you posted, only one supposed "innocent" was executed recently (1984).

"In 1990, Jesse Tafero was executed in Florida. He had been convicted in 1976 along with his wife, Sonia Jacobs, for murdering a state trooper. In 1981 Jacobs' death sentence was reduced on appeal to life imprisonment, and 11 years later her conviction was vacated by a federal court. The evidence on which Tafero and Jacobs had been convicted and sentenced was identical; it consisted mainly of the perjured testimony of an ex-convict who turned state's witness in order to avoid a death sentence. Had Tafero been alive in 1992, he no doubt would have been released along with Jacobs. Tafero's death is probably the clearest case in recent years of the execution of an innocent person."

Source: http://www.aclu.org/library/case_against_death.html

[Eva]

I think that, more than the death penalty, we need to bring back our mental institutions. I am not calling for a return to "Marat Sade" type institutions of the past, but a place to hold and protect the dangerously mentally ill, and protect the public at the same time.

[weikel]

Here is my take on the death penalty it should be used for a lot more crimes I think car theft should be punished with death but it should not be used if there is any question of fact.

[weikel]

And executions should always be public and televised.

[technochick99]

You don't need to be a liberal to question the death penalty. I am completely undecided about it, have been for years. There are many compelling points on both sides.

[Brytani]

According to a spring report by the NAACP Criminal Justice Report Spring 2002 - NY state has only 6 people on death row. (Pg. 50)
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/DEATHROWUSArecent.pdf

Also from the same report, NY has not executed anyone since 1976.

[Knitebane]

So.....we as a society should behave like a person who kills during an armed robbery or rape?

No, I never said that we, as a society, should grab a random person off of the street and kill them. To the contrary, only those people who have been through the entire gamut of checks and balances that our society provides and still been found guilty should be executed.

The criminal justice system will be far more kind to Mr. Murderer than he was to his victim.

We, as a society, have an obligation to remove threats to our society. Anything else is a path to extinction.

[Brytani]

The argument usually given by those who favor life without the possibility of parole is society is protected from murders and that those same murders can never harm another person again. Not exactly true, every year prison guards and murdered or harmed guarding these same murders. Other prisoners are also murdered.

I can agree with life-without parole on one condition - IF the person sentenced to this punishment is found to have murdered or brutally harmed another person it's immediate execution. Basically put - they have one more chance to live out their life, if they blow that chance, their life is gone.

Fair enough?

[decimon]

I wouldn't know where is the DNC site. Like some others, you are projecting onto me what is floating about in your head.

[Khepera]

Nobody has killed you therefore the death penalty works as a deterrent.

[Knitebane]

Actually, my point was that lots of bad things happen. Sometimes innocent people die. Sometimes they are the victims of crime, sometimes they are run over by buses. In that light, I submit that it is possible for an innocent person to be executed by the state, but also submit that the benefit of removing convicted killers and rapists permenantly from society is worth the risk.

It is impossible to have perfection in any system. That's a fact. For you to require that the system for executing violent offenders be abandoned because it is not perfect when perfection is impossible raises serious questions about your motives.

I'm straight-forward about what I want. I want the system to be as good as possible, but since I know it won't ever be perfect, I'm not willing to let the miniscule possibility that a person could be accidently executed get in the way of permanently removing violent criminals from the face of the earth.