The Death Sentence.

While I agree that it is a fair tool to use, the scale is flawed by the very nature of the laws surrounding these crimes. Far too many people try to claim "temporary insanity" simply to get a reduced sentence.

I took a philosophy course in college that dealt with this. We watched the film Dead Man Walking and wrote papers about serial killers who recieved the death penalty. I was anti-death penalty before the class, but after reading about what of these people had done, and how the lethal injection method especially is such a simple, relatively painless death, I believe much more that it should be implemented.

A person who has never shown any kind of "insane" behavior before committing a heinous crime is not insane. They lack morals, they lack judgement, and most of all they revel in what they have done. They rarely show remorse for their actions; it is only when threatened or sentenced to death do they show any emotion at all, and that is fear of their own death.

Using the example I put forth above, of the man recently put to death for the rape/murder of two children and rape/attempted murder of their mother, by that scale I would most definitely put him at a 22. His primary motive was sexual perversion, the fact that he shot all three victims in the head proof that he is sadistic in the worst possible way. He never showed remorse for his crime. When sitting in the courtroom listening to the mother recount her 3 year old's screams of pain and for help as she was being brutally raped, he spoke to his attorney with a smile on his face. It was only when he himself was sentenced to die that he showed any remorse; and that was in an attempt to get the sentence commuted by pleading temporary insanity -- which on that scale would be a 17. Should a 17 be allowed to live, while a 22 put to death? At what point in the scale does the death penalty become the only outcome?

Certainly we could all believe that a person who kills someone in self-defense is somewhat justified; had they not killed their attacker, they would be dead. 2 - 6 is more of the same -- people are still dying, but is it really justified? 7 - 14 could also arguably be rehabilitiated, maybe, but there is no way of knowing for sure. 15 - 22 are people who cannot be rehabilitated and should not be out threatening society. Is it worth the chance that they will somehow make parole? Were the lives of the two little boys who were killed within a week of their killer's parole worth his chance to prove he had been rehabilitiated, or were they the collateral damage of the religious right who fight against the death penalty?

I'm for it
I know...Nobody has the right to judge you and decides if you have to die...but I live in a country where too bad things are permitted and, even if you have killed a person, after a short time you are out of prison again. Maybe, the death sentence is too much, but I'd like to see the serial killers, rapists and pedophiles suffer a littel more in prison and not live in a hotel because our prisons are full...

I don't think the death sentence is the answer. Hard criminals just need to STAY in jail. Look at all of the murderers pedophiles who constantly get put back on the street.

HintFEAR08:

I don't think the death sentence is the answer. Hard criminals just need to STAY in jail. Look at all of the murderers pedophiles who constantly get put back on the street.

I dont know were you live, but here in the UK our jails are getting desperatly full and its becoming a real problem.

I believe that the death sentance would solve that, instead of the judges giving lenient sentances (which are like slaps in the faces for the victim/victims family) becauses our jails are packed.

I'm in the US and over here the legal appeals process leads to most people living their entire life in jail anyway. Most people on death row never get put to death.

Does anyone know a statistic as to how much it really costs to put someone to death vs. jail? The appeals process and litigation alone for a death sentence must cost quite a bit.

Ive been given this topic in my street law class to do a debate on.
I was wondering what everyones views on this would be.

Is it better to let 1000 quilty people go free than convict one innocent man?

Honestly I think it is better because no innocent man should be punished for something he did not do. But that is only my opinion...I mean what if he was given the death penalty?

What do you think about it??

(aparently this is suppose to be in the death sentence thread sorry )

^^ Honestly, gotta go with the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. While I agree that we should do everything in our power to protect the innocent, and the criminal justice system has taken great strides to ensure that the person convicted of the crime was in fact the perpetrator, it seems irresponsible and dangerous to allow 1000 guilty people to go free without paying for their crime and putting society in danger. Assume that each of those people you set free commits one murder each. That's 1000 innocent people killed. I think that, while it would be hard for the one person convicted wrongly, in the long run if it saves a thousand, it's the right thing to do for the most people.

tabitha:

^^ Honestly, gotta go with the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. While I agree that we should do everything in our power to protect the innocent, and the criminal justice system has taken great strides to ensure that the person convicted of the crime was in fact the perpetrator, it seems irresponsible and dangerous to allow 1000 guilty people to go free without paying for their crime and putting society in danger. Assume that each of those people you set free commits one murder each. That's 1000 innocent people killed. I think that, while it would be hard for the one person convicted wrongly, in the long run if it saves a thousand, it's the right thing to do for the most people.

Very Good Point! =) sadly I got put on the con side of this debate. Hah. Now im just either or.. ugh. i hate street law...

we dont have it in the uk.

i think its better to leave them to rot and suffer in jail than to only endure minutes of pain in dying. im sorry, i just do... get back to me if you agree/disagree

everyone here has put forward good points.

after reading them all i odnt know what to think.

Im a big reader and in my bfavourite book ever an innocent man gets hung
and the entire time im yelling at the book
so i think that death sentence is wrong
but this only happens to a few
most of the people who are entenced to death actually are guilty.
we dont have it where i am(new zealand) and i hope we dont get crimes big enought o need it

This right here has very, very little to do with the death penalty, considering that it was abolished in Australia decades ago...
It's more a question about 'diminished responsibility' (sometimes called 'temporary insanity') being used as a defence.

Now, I can totally understand that sometimes, mentally ill people cannot control their actions, but I truly believe that innocent people should not have to suffer just to protect the rights of someone who may pose a danger to many, many other people.
I get that somebody who had a mental illness cannot do anything about that. I get that they didn't choose it for themselves, and that they cannot cure it. But I also don't believe that they should walk out of court a free person (usually put on some form of probation or placed in a mental facility for a short amount of time) after, say, taking somebody's life, just because they cannot control themselves. I believe that mentally ill people who have proven they commit violence, should be locked up for longer than people with normal possession of their faculties, because somebody who is healthy has a better chance of rehabilitation - a mentally ill person will always be mentally ill, no matter what. Medication cannot cure it, only control it, and unless someone is watching them and making sure they are taking their meds, another life may be taken.

ANYWAY, that's one part of my 'question'. The other half is a situation that is happening to me right now. I just want to get other people's opinions on how they would feel if this were to happen to a member of their family.
Here's the deal: my mother-in-law separated from my father-in-law early this year, after seventeen years and one child (my husband is actually her stepson, but he has never had any contact with his real mother and Bri had been there for most of his life and so, to us, there was never any question in our minds about her being family). She was as kind, caring and civil to my husband's father as she could possibly be - she made sure he was well-provided for (she earned a very good income while he hasn't worked for years). She accepted a massive financial burden in order to make sure he had some stability - a place to live, etc, when she could have just thrown him out on his ass and told him to figure it out himself.
Anyway, things were fine for a little while, but then my father-in-law started waging a campaign to ruin her life - he poisoned her garden, started stalking her, threatened to kill her, and tried turning all her friends and his sons against her. He wanted her to pay for dumping him, and he wasn't going to stop until she'd lost her job, was broke, and had nobody to turn to.
One night, he drugged their teenage son and left him asleep on his houseboat and went to the house she lived in. As she was leaving the house to go to work that morning, he shot her dead, then attempted to shoot himself. It didn't work, he survived, and he was charged with her murder, among other things (unlicensed weapons offences being some of the charges).

Now, his trial is due to start this week. From what his lawyer tells us, he's planning to employ the 'diminished responsibility' defence. That is, he intends to claim that he was suffering depression and wasn't thinking straight when he killed Briona, that it was a decision he made while he was not himself, and that he should not be held responsible for her murder because he was essentially temporarily insane.
I don't buy it for a second - the detectives working the case told us that he had taken steps to put all his affairs in order long before he killed her, which to me means he was planning this for months and obviously intended to die with her, so he'd cleaned up all his matters to make things easier for us once he was gone. I'm convinced that he didn't just 'snap' and kill her - he took the steps of not only drugging his son's drink to make sure he didn't wake up and notice his absence, but took a loaded weapon with him and hid in her backyard for several hours before she went outside.
He knew what he was doing. He wasn't carrying a loaded handgun just so they could 'talk' about things. He went to her house to kill her, and himself, and wrote letters to his sons as well as leaving envelopes full of cash for them to help them out with things. He'd threatened to kill her weeks before, and he definitely wasn't 'insane' the whole time.

Basically, in my mind, if he is saying that HE wasn't responsible for taking an innocent woman's life, then who was? He may have pulled the trigger, but she 'drove' him to it? No way. As I said, she took good care of him instead of doing what she could have done (and that was leave him with nothing but a bitter taste in his mouth), she tried to get along with him, and in absolutely no way did she deserve to be 'punished' for simply outgrowing their relationship and wanting to cut the tie to a dead weight around her neck.

So, I'm scared that if he does plead diminished responsibility, and is sentenced to a much lesser jail term than he would have got if he'd just accepted his wrongdoing, that he will end up back on the street within a few years and have to come live in my house because the cost of his legal fees means he's got to sell his houseboat and when he gets out, he'll have nowhere to live. I know him well enough to know that he will simply expect his sons to be loyal to him because he's family, and provide for him when he has nothing purely by the virtue of them being his children. This means that he will expect to be welcomed into our home with no questions or recriminations, and will be comfortable for the rest of his life, and will have literally gotten away with murder.

What would you guys do if you were in this situation? Would you demand that he be held completely responsible for his actions? Would you prefer that they seek to get a lesser sentence? Would you believe that he truly had lost his mind for some period of time, or would you be absolutely disgusted that he's using a cop-out in order to save his own ass, no matter how much it hurts his family? Would you sever all ties with him because of your loyalty to the dead family member, or stay loyal to him because he is still a family member, despite what he did? Would you testify for the defence or prosecution (my husband has been asked to testify, he doesn't know who for and he doesn't know which side he wants to testify for)? Would you visit him in jail, accept him into your home on his release, or simply pretend he never existed? Do you think that 'temporary insanity' or 'diminished responsibility' is a valid excuse, or is it just something people try to lean on when they can't face the music? What are valid circumstances where diminished responsibility could be used, or is no excuse good enough? Do you think that a person should have to prove a hisotry of mental instability before being eligible for this defence, or do you think anybody can be driven by another person's actions to kill them?
I know where I stand, but I'm just wondering where you guys would, knowing that one family member has murdered another for no real reason.

Donna, it sounds to me like you father-in-law committed pre-meditated murder, and therefore the "temporary insanity" doesn't apply to him. "Diminished responsibility" seems to me a situation in which your father-in-law would have to prove abuse of some sort in order to successfully argue that she "drove him" kill her (again, premeditatedly.) It doesn't sound like the lawyer has much of a case to me, but then again, every judge and jury are different. I hope justice gets served for your family though, I really do <hugs>

^ It just frightens me because there have been several cases with similar aspects thathave been covered extensively in the media lately. The one that I remember most clearly was the case where a man beat his girlfriend to death with a steering lock and successfully used the 'provocation' defence - he ended up being convicted of manslaughter instead of murder and was sentenced to a paltry eight years in jail (and he will most likely end up serving probably half that time if he behaves himself in prison). Basically, what his defense team claimed was that he was driven to bludgeon his girlfriend to death in his car because she tried to break up with him, and when he told her he wouldn't 'allow' her to, she announced that she had cheated on him - he called it 'bragging' and 'taunting', and the jury seemed to believe that if someone belittles you in that way, it's perfectly acceptable and beyond your control to kill them. So, by their reasoning, she was being a spiteful little cow and deserved to be beaten to death with a blunt instrument?

That's what scares me - on one hand, I know in my heart that he intended to kill her, that he really meant to do it, but there seems to be sufficient evidence, even after the fact, that he may not have been in full possession of his mind. My husband has visited him in jail, and I've read letters he's written to my husband, and while he says he's sorry, he doesn't seem to comprehend the totality of his actions. He talks about things like the scars from his surgery, and needing money to buy things in jail, like he's just off on a holiday and nothing ever happened. His retelling of the events that morning are so far out there I'm honestly starting to think that he really, truly has blown a fuse - but I still don't think that's a decent excuse. He's not schizophrenic or anything like that, I just think he was a sad, bitter old man who was too afraid to face his last years alone, and wanted revenge for being made to feel the way he did.
That being said, I'm really, really afraid that some soft-hearted jury and judge will decide that his excuse of 'temporary insanity' is sufficient, and that he should be given counselling or something rather than being locked up.
Ugh.

I used to believe that the death sentence was THE answer to prosecuting (sp?)killers, but now I'm not so sure. If you killed the criminal, it would be quick and most of the time painless. If you put them, and keep them, in prison for a lifetime maybe it would make life more difficult.

^ It's not so difficult if they don't mind having a TV, radio, organised visits with family, the ability to receive letters, photos and gifts on special occasions, three meals a day and free health care at taxpayers' expense. Oh, that and the possibility of parole or getting out when their sentence is served.

Nope, I don't care if their deaths are 'quick and painless'. If they've done something so bad, they're better off not being on the face of the earth.

Donna, I really hope justice is served for your family, but I admit I'm concerned too, from what you have told me

Listen, if you are out there hacking people up or torturing animals or raping little kids, I want you off the planet, endof.

^ I totally agree. People can harp on about 'rehabilitation' and 'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind' but I don't think that the death sentence is about retribution, at all. It's about protecting the rest of society from a person harming anybody else, and the way I see it, if you are capable of committing such a heinous act against another human (or animal, I'm strongly against the torture of animals by individuals for their own sick pleasure), then you are not truly a member of the human race and therefore don't deserve to be here. It's like, we put animals down if they kill or maim a human, saying that they are dangerous and might do it to somebody else, but they're animals - they don't know any better. Humans SHOULD and DO know better, so to me it's worse that a human could do something like that - if anything, they cannot be rehabilitated because there is obviously something wrong with them.

Agreed. If they feel as though they can harm other human beings or animals just because they feel like it, then they do not deserve life.Period.

You know, more of our tax dollers are being thrown into a bloddy war, where instead of housing criminals, we are slaughtering people mindlessly. Maybe you should complain about that instead?
Sending troops to the Middle East is a means to protect American citizens. Has there been another terrorist attack in America since? No
By the way it's not soldiers who are mindlessly slaughtering, it's terrorists who think everyone not in their religion should die.

It's not about what they did, it's about what we are doing to them at this point. Ever heard of to onto others? Those people sitting there in the American government that allow those people to be killed are also killers, as are those that are injecting them/etc. The thing with criminals is that, when it comes to killers and rapists, none of them are right in the head, regardless of how you want to think of them to help you believe that it's just to murder them. They often believe that what they do is just and right, just like you think THEIR murder is just and right. How is your line of thinking any better then theirs, besides oh, your a completely healthy human being, making your desire to see them dead quite a lot more malicious then their desire to hurt people. Take a look in the mirror
Maybe you should take a look in the mirror, you're the one trying to excuse a murder. It's not as much about revenge as it is protection. Does it really matter if they're right in the head? You can't let murder slide. Society would be a bloody mass of chaos if we did. Which is more important, a killer's rights or an innocent citizen's? Which is worse, murdering a criminal or a child? I admit, neither is truelly right, but society isn't perfect and you have to look at the big picture.
Oh, and I'm not that malicious. It's not like I've actually killed anyone.

Timmothy, the OCB, was a heavy meth user, and ended up a paranoid wreck after his experiments with drugs. He was not in his right mind. He does deserve the right to life, it's not a PRIVILEDGE, it's a right. Actually, we all do, and those he killed did too Liberty's a priviledge too, but nobody has a problem with taking that away under the right circumstances. And how in the world is drug use supposed to excuse killing? 'We'll go easy on you because you were doped out of your mind.' I'm sure that will make the victims' families feel better.

Like I said, we all have the right to live. As odd as it sounds, the idea of not killing and hurting people is a social norm we have created, but it's not THE RIGHT way to think. These people live in different worlds with different ways of thinking then us. They live more like animals, because we all know in nature, animals kill other animals all the time. This is not to justify what they do, I am a pacifist and I hate killing, but what Im saying is that to them, they are living a totally normal, correct life, and it is society that is wrong. You really can't blame someone for that, much like you cannot blame someone for being of a different religion. There's a difference between thinking violently and actually killing. One's a way of thinking, the other ends lives. You're right, you can't blame people for how they think, but you can for what they do.