smittens, a soft death is one I would prefer capitol punishment to avoid. I'm kinda reconsidering the shoot them in the head solution, it's too painless, burning, slow poisoning, maybe radiation sounds like a much better punishment now that I think of it.

everybody else;
In this country, we have trials by jury. Them and the judge decide who deserves the right to live. I however, am entitled to form my own opinions, as are you, I do not wish to be able to decide that on my own, It's too much power for one man to wield.

Again you miss the point that I don't consider capitol punishment murder. I consider it punishment, and prevention of future harms. I do not believe that prevention alone enough. If you are incapable of considering that concept then I doubt there will ever be an argument that will satisfy you.

As for the people who are wrongly convicted, that is a tragedy. It does not mean we should just let criminals just run free. It'd be a disaster, rehabilitation only rarely works. I've known a lot of people that are just general fuckups, and from what I've seen, they may clean up for a while, but usually, they go back to their old ways. It may take a year or two, or even ten, but the trend is they do.

In some circumstances, I can see rehabilitation working, the guy who tried to rob a convenience store to feed his family. That's a crime committed by somebody who feels they have run out of other options. Assuming he wasn't lying about his situation, he can be made a productive member of society, and I'd be all for that. Sadly, for a lot of people, rehabilitation is only a joke.

And don't try to equate homosexuality and pedophilia. That's as idiotic as PETA trying to equate eating a hamburger with taking part in the holocaust. (yes they actually do try to do that) One is a willing relationship between two adults. The other is between an adult and a child, often an early teen, and often with a great deal of pressure from the adult. I'm not advocating going after people for what they think in their own minds, so don't even try and call it a thought crime, only their actions.

Those that you may say are just ill, they present a danger to society, and currently we do not have a way to cure them of their "illness". Housing them for life on my dime, is not acceptable to me. Not to mention needing to be punished for their crimes.

Maybe housing permanent inmates wouldn't require your dime if the prisons they lived in were self sufficient, as in growing their own crops, producing their own power, and maybe making a product. However, that's too sane for this world...

I didn't know people were sentenced to death by juries. If anything, it makes me oppose capital punishment even more.

And I uphold my opinion that you do not value life, lnh. You may say that you do, but if you value life, you cannot deny the right to live to people, even though they have committed crimes. You'd be no better than them, if they are murderers.

Shadoen, I explained why it is a bad thing to use child pornography as a rhethorical sledgehammer. Whether you use it or not is up to you, but determines the amount of respect I have for you as a debatist.

Whats the point of a debate, Tosh?

Surbius: Dont they already do that in some prisons? Hmmm...Im not sure, maybe I just saw it in some movies where they put inmates out to do some work or something...

Tosh, try and think just a little about this. currently it's pretty fucking obvious when somebody being tried stands a good chance of capitol punishment, just maybe the people who are supposed to be determining guilt or innocence might notice this.

As for valuing life thing, if I didn't I would not be opposed to people just randomly shooting people for any reason, or no reason at all. I certainly wouldn't be suggesting making people go through the work of deciding guilt or innocence in such a case, or even having a police force to try to prohibit such crimes in the slightest. The way I see it, when somebody willfully does extreme harm to somebody else, the value of their life becomes actually negative, I do not value all lives equally. Most people who know me in person will even tell you I'm generally the guy that will do most anything to help anybody he knows, often without asking for anything in return. If I placed no value on any life, I'd be out taking whatever I wanted from whoever I thought I could.

LNH, paedophilia *is* a thought crime. Just because I am sexually attracted to females does not automatically make me a rapist. Rape and child molestation on the other hand are the real crimes. Instead of going for all paedophiles as monsters we should instead help the people in the former group not get into the latter group.
E.g. do we know if a porn stash will help a paedophile avoid real children? Has there ever been any research done into this? No, we are just acting irrationally based on... well, finding the porn disgusting and wrong, with little consideration for the children we are supposed to be protecting (I am NOT stating that a porn stash is good, simply that we don't know, but we made up our minds nevertheless).

Getting back on topic, what gives the judge and the jury the right to decide who gets to live and die? Declaring someone unsafe for society is quite different from ordering their death. I do not think punishment is appropriate in general, as a crime does not make it right to commit another crime.
Yes, LNH, you do not consider it a crime because you believe that a person who has violated another person's right does not deserve that right, whilst I believe that all people should always be entitled to all their rights, and no person or group of people should ever be able to take them away. That is where we disagree.
You are right, rehabilitation does not always work. For some people it is too late, and the society they were shaped by has done them too much damage to be undone by even decades of rehabilitation. For others you have to ask if there ever was a time when it was not too late.
Despite that I believe that the vast majority of criminals are rehabilitable, and trying to help people become productive members of the society as well as minimising negative aspects of society that lead to crime in the first place is not a waste of time and resources.
No, we will never eliminate "fuckups" like that completely, but we may be able to get much closer to it by trying to address the problem instead of ignoring it, or only dealing with it when it is no longer possible to ignore it.

Those that are ill do not realise the consequences of their actions, and are not really in control of their bodies when they commit the crimes. If one morning you woke up next to your dead wife's body, with blood on your hands, and a bloodied knife lying next to your bed with no recollection of what happened would you feel that you needed punishment or help?
It is true that we do not really know that much about treatment of mental illnesses, but we can already mitigate most of the symptoms, and one day we may be able to cure them. If housing them on your dime is not acceptable to you, can you propose a better solution?

LNH, apologies for my harsh words, written in haste. Not knowing you, it was insulting to say that you do not value life. It is hard for me to understand, however, how you can value some lives higher than others.

What I meant to convey was that people who deliberately committed grave crimes such as murder or rape should not be dealt with leniently, quite the opposite.

I just don't think capital punishment is a civilized way of dealing with these people. And if it costs money to punish them, I'm ready to pay for it. But it's important to me to be able to say that the government I approve of (which is the case, in general) does not decide over people's lives in courts.

such a good christain nation we are that instead of turning the other cheek we want slow unusual inhumane deaths for people who are often suffering mental illnesses. the National Institute of Mental Healths study shows that about 10 percent of americans have some sort of undiagnosed mental illness. which will unfourtunatly lead them to some sort sad end as the USA has a shitty time dealing with mental health.

Christianity: Great moral and society beliefs, can't wait to see it in practice.

I'll come back to this later, as I don't have time right now to read this whole thread and put a good response together (homework). Just quickly, smittens, read the Gandalf quote more carefully. I am most definitely for the death penalty, but I think we should be careful about it. It most definitely should never be about revenge, but rather about permanently removing dangerous criminals from society, ones who by not respecting the right to life of others have forfeit that right for themselves. The whole "innocent people are on death row" thing is just another reason to be careful with this penalty, but that is really a criminal justice process argument and has nothing to do with the death penalty. Innocent people go to jail and get parking tickets, too (I know those aren't equal penalties). I also have no desire for my government to steal my money to keep rapists alive, either; though I of course don't appreciate my government stealing my money to pay medical bills of people who don't pay, pay people's loans that shouldn't ever have been issued, pay for "carbon footprints" that don't have any affect on global temperature whatsoever, etc. etc. But that's a big tangent. Back to homework....

I'm busy, but will weigh in later. Smittens, my jumping off point is a firm belief that vengeance is not a wrongful desire, but a just one, and that the justice system exists to limit the myopia that personal victimization can create--that is, it exists to prevent wrongful conviction. It does not exist to shield criminal decisions from retribution (note I'm not discussing rehabilitation here, since for acts warranting death that's irrelevant), and it becomes illegitimate when it departs too far from the basic moral assumption that malice deserves punishment for punishment's own sake.

I hear this line--I think society could/should do better--quite frequently, but have never heard a useful description of what makes unthinking opposition to killing "better" than the judicious application of judgment. It is simply not a morally defensible position to say that killing a convicted criminal for a particularly malicious crime is in any way equivalent to a murder warranting the death penalty.

Adding to the above, I am unpersuaded by the "killing is killing, and a person is a person, no matter what" argument because it represents a complete abdication of responsibility for dealing with malice. An intellectually appealing choice, because there cannot ever be a purely logical distinction drawn between right and wrong, thus it's easier to define a binary choice in the matter--if you never kill, you cannot be doing wrong.

However, there's a problem with that approach: it leaves people, and ultimately a people, powerless to define and protect their civilization. Human beings frequently choose to do things that they know will cause harm of some kind or another to their fellow men; but at some point, a line is crossed. Does the hot-blooded killer of his spouse and her lover, in flagrante dilectio, deserve to die for taking two lives? Likely not. Do the men and women who chose to torture and kill essentially innocent people for purely sadistic reasons deserve to die for that choice? Undoubtably. Does an early morning encounter between two intoxicated and initially interested people, which devolves into something less voluntary at some point, merit death? Too messy for me to line draw. Does the sober, power-loving rapist deserve to die for such an invasion of another sovereign being? Yes. Slowly.

Ultimately, in my view of the world and its workings, it comes down to a three-part analysis: (1) how deliberate the invasion of another person's individual sovereignty was, how intentional the act of disrespect to their rights, (2) how great the harm, with certain kinds of murder, rape, and some other permanently scarring acts qualifying for capital punishment, and (3) how just the cause of the actor, as I believe intent matters in many instances (though I believe in regretfully putting down the mentally ill who commit such acts; they may not be functional adults, but they will be treated as such). This is no more perfect an approach than any other we have to passing judgment on our fellow beings. Like democracy, it is the worst way of doing things except for all the others out there. Not making these choices because they are not perfectly objective, or perfectly right, is both cowardly and damaging to civilization.

To deliberately choose to disrespect another human being's most fundamental rights--to remain alive and unviolated--for no good reason . . . merits the severest punishment. Not to deter, not to teach a lesson, but to balance the scales. To not do so, to count the harm done to the victim as a "sunk cost" and to focus exclusively on the future role of the criminal in society, is to be complicit in the crime against them. It is disrespectful in the extreme. Moreover, while I too find that the direct deterrence argument is largely unpersuasive, I think this approach fits into a more orderly civilization, one that values its inhabitants and takes seriously their decisions about how to deal with their fellows.

As for why death and not life in prison, I offer the following: one cannot imprison a human being, denying them the pleasure of existence. I often think about how much I will regret dying, not because of any particular thing or activity, or even other person--mainly, I will miss seeing the sun, stretching my limbs, taking food and drink, even feeling my chest swell with a breath. In sum, I get a great deal of pleasure simply from being alive. To say nothing of how delightful and not boring life becomes when books and means of communicating with the outside world are introduced. All of which are part and parcel of prison life, and should be: those in prison should be there with some hope of leaving one day and rejoining civilization--to have "lifers" is poisonous to the entire prison population. Better to kill those who would otherwise serve life sentences, though that's not much of an argument for capital punishment, which has to stand or fall on its fundamental rightness or wrongness. But the point is, one can resolve to have quite the long and happy life within a modern prison--and some people deserve to be denied those joys, as their victims who are cold in the ground are denied.

At any rate, this is largely explicative of my thoughts on the topic.

I do not think punishment is appropriate in general, as a crime does not make it right to commit another crime.

This is one of the most blindingly stupid things I've ever read, and I've read a great deal of early twentieth century German philosophy (bonus points for anyone who gets the link between the conclusion Antz expressed and that particular body of work). This sort of moral relativism makes me question the writer's fundamental understanding of the term "crime."

well said lecter, certinly more elegant than anything I can write.

Sadly, I doubt even your words will have much sway over them, what you speak of is simply unfathomable to them.

As for your life imprisionment argument, I agree with you mostly. "I often think about how much I will regret dying, not because of any particular thing or activity, or even other person--mainly, I will miss seeing the sun, stretching my limbs, taking food and drink, even feeling my chest swell with a breath." I have thought a fair amount recently about my own mortality, for reasons you are probably aware of, and I can't say I truly agree with this statement. The thing I will truly miss is being able to make my friends and family happy, not eating, or moving about or breathing, I'm not quite sure what that means about me, and I'm not sure I want to know.

Actually I think we can come up with something far worse than capitol punishment if we were to try at it. However I fear such a conversation, held in a public venue like this, might bring nice young men in their clean white coats to my door.

I can't believe doc didn't break out his signature line: It Depends.

Isn't it cheaper to kill off someone on death row than to let them languish endlessly in prison?

And, as an added bonus to the "society model" folks in this thread: If you are talking about society as a whole, isn't it true that, once in prison for life, that human's contribution to society is essentially nil? Unless the prisoner is in a nice work camp or forced-labor situation, I guess. You know, busting rocks or stamping license plates.

But more seriously: the world is gray. Every court case (especially those involving potential death penalty) is its own animal, and we can sadly only rely on a jury of our peers to establish the level of punishment. The death penalty is warranted in some situations, it's usually up to the jury to confirm that sentencing option. Even then, the Governor or the U.S. President can commute the sentence if they so desire.

I cannot agree with your views, Lecter.

For one thing, far too many errors of justice (either deliberate or accidental) occur for me to be in favor of so decisive a step as taking a person's life. How can you justify the death of innocents? Because the result here is more than monetary loss, for which in my opinion the concept of good faith with regard to the judiciary system applies (I naturally give them the benefit of the doubt concerning prosecution). If a person dies, they're dead, and rehabilitation post mortem is rather pointless, in my opinion.

For another thing, I don't see eye to eye with you on (life-long) imprisonment. If you look beyond the borders of the US (which you undoubtedly have), you will see prisons which are institutionally Not Nice. To bring up the example of Japan again, you do not get nice food (water and plain rice), you have very small cells, and virtually no contact with the outside world, and usually very discouraging surroundings (social, architectural).

You say that you do not think that people in prison can be miserable. I am somewhat doubtful of that evaluation. I am not very knowledgeable about imprisonment in the US, but is it not possible you see this in too pretty a light?

I can however appreciate the idea that even though a person is physically contained, you cannot constrain their thoughts. It even forms a strong point of my personal modus operandi.

In the end, I suppose it is a matter of whether one approves of vengeance (with the limitations you mentioned, of course). I do not.

I justify the accidental death of innocents the same way I justify other accidental punishments--we're not omniscient and yet we must judge. For a forcibly imposed system of "justice" to simply cap the potential punishment for any crime spree, no matter how malicious and heinous, at a paltry 25 years in a relatively comfortable facility, is ... unspeakably barbaric.

I never said that people in prison cannot be miserable, Tosh, I said it is quite possible for them to be otherwise. Something that is not true of the dead, I would remind you.

Dr. Lecter, I define a crime to be a breach of a rule in a society. For example a society that believes in the rights of a person to remain alive and inviolated would define acts that breach those rights to be crimes. If your definition differs significantly from mine please post yours.

You claim that it is not a morally defensible position to say that killing a convicted criminal for a particularly malicious crime is in any way equivalent to a murder warranting the death penalty. Let's apply your own 3 part analysis to capital punishment: (1) Deliberation. You can hardly get more deliberate than getting together in a room, and then carefully preparing and documenting a killing in a specially built structure you erected just for the purpose of killing. (2) Harm. While it is possible to do worse, death is pretty high on harm. (3) Just cause. The victim is not exposed to other members of the society, so by definition does not pose any threat to anyone else. Thus, completely unjust.

So, following your view of the world and its workings it is logical to conclude that planning and carrying out a death sentence merits extreme punishment.

My position does not make it impossible for me to defend myself. I see little wrong with killing for self-defence, or even defence of those around me. Sure, I would prefer to evade or wound a hypothetical attacker, but if they were trying to kill me I would only be thinking of the most efficient way of stopping them, which may involve their accidental death. I might add that if I did kill someone that way I would not want to be "punished" for it (by death, imprisonment in some horrible place, or otherwise), but instead returned to the society as soon as it was happy that I was not going to start killing again.

Like you, I oppose life sentences. Imprisonment should be "until the offender is ready to return to society", i.e. a time at which a criminal will no longer pose a threat to those around them. Releasing people sooner puts members of public at risk, releasing people later is a waste of resources. Regretfully for some people this period may end up being a lifetime.

I do not believe in ignoring the victims either - the offender should of course be responsible for any damage their actions have caused. Balancing the scales on the other hand is a pretty useless activity, not too far removed from hitting computers to "punish" them when they have bugs instead of fixing them: there is very little if any benefit, it harms a person, consumes resources, and often results in damaged people being returned to the society, where they simply commit more crimes. Supporting a system that produces people like that is disrespectful to everyone, not just the victims.

(3) Just cause. The victim is not exposed to other members of the society, so by definition does not pose any threat to anyone else. Thus, completely unjust.

An epic failure of reason, Antz. Feel free to actually address the point I made about why punishment is fundamentally different from an act taken against an innocent. Obviously, the threat of future harm is not the only, or even the most significant, justification for the use of force, even deadly force, against another human being. Why?

Because I actually agree with and give value to this statement: the offender should of course be responsible for any damage their actions have caused. You, however, follow up with this odd little qualification, which is in truth often a contradiction: Balancing the scales on the other hand is a pretty useless activity, not too far removed from hitting computers to "punish" them when they have bugs instead of fixing them. Unlike computers, human beings are autonomous beings with free will--unlike the computer, they choose how they will act, making "punishment" for intentionally malicious choices not only appropriate, but very necessary.

Because under your model, if I were to find someone else (who was quite innocent of any wrong against me) especially offensive and act on that impulse, torturing and killing them, only to hand myself over and say with all honesty "I will never do that again, it really was just a one-time thing," and the mental health experts agreed that I was not ill and would not re-offend . . . well, there's no reason to hold me further, is there?

But we both instinctively know that there is, for the same reason that we both instinctively know that civilization has rules that are ultimately not grounded in pure reason (i.e., it's all morals, sooner or later, and as the "is/ought" distinction proves, there's no logical way to define those; if the "is/ought" thing is new to you, spend some time with Hume's discussion of it... the implications for those of us who have been raised in a culture that takes reason, logic, and "efficiency" for granted are quite profound).

The "balancing of the scales" that you call a pretty useless activity that harms a person is quite important. It does harm a person, but it does not do so unjustly; the focus of punishment is on the choice the criminal made about disregarding an innocent person's fundamental rights. The criminal does not put themselves outside of humanity or automatically lose those rights themselves, but neither are their rights absolute: a sufficiently heinous act can justify the deliberate infringement of them, including the imposition of death.

More interesting is your myopic statement that punishment for punishment's own sake returns very little if any benefit. Presumably, you say this because you do not understand the well-recognized limits of pure economic analysis and lack an understanding of the problem of incommensurability. Without providing you with an extensive education in these topics, I'll just say that punishing deliberate, malicious acts generates a positive return that cannot be measured against the positive returns that could be foregone by not returning the criminal to society sooner/at all or keeping them alive and working in prison. If I wanted to balance incommensurable costs and benefits, however, I'd likely give a more nuanced argument that boiled down to the following: we don't particularly need more license plate makers; we do desperately need for most citizens to have the sense that our civilization provides effective protections in exchange for their following its rules, and that the system will not be gamed by people who choose to ignore the rights of others while crying out for focus on their own.

If you care to disagree, please remember that most fundamental rights, when violated, leave little to no "economic harm"--the State's trampling on your civil rights to speech, assembly, or equality, for example, do not create "harms" as traditionally defined. As a way of dealing with that, we have built in a special punitive element to civil rights law: basically, violations of civil rights, even those that merely offend dignity and leave no economic harm, are compensated with a lot of money.

As to your claim about ill-effects from retributive penalties, I agree, to a point: to the extent that prison terms include a retributive element, as well as a rehabilitative one, we must take care not to make prison such an unpleasant place that rehabilitation therein is impossible. Truly, executing more people who deliberately choose to live outside of our society's rules, who are currently the dominant force in many prison cultures (see Aryan Brotherhood/various South and Central American gangs/etc), would make it possible for prison to be a more wholesome place. However, men who cannot be tolerate being punished for the transgressions they've chosen to commit are children, who cannot live in peace with others. If they cannot see that, due to an inability or an unwillingness to be introspective, their problems will continue to compound.

In the end, I can see that you haven't thought particularly hard about these issues, as is reflected in your half-reasoned writing. Moreover, while I see your heart is more or less in the right place, you simply do not understand that there are, and will always be, people who are not mentally ill, or disadvantaged, or otherwise "fixable" . . . but who deliberately choose to be Bad. Your approach cannot deal with such people, and offers nothing to the innocents they have harmed. Keep pushing for "progressive criminal justice"--I look forward to watching the pendulum swing back in reaction.

Dr. Lecter, I must say I agree completely with your last post, I could not have said it better myself. If you are ever around bucks county Pennsylvania, let me know, I think I would greatly enjoy having a few beers with you.

So we CAN keep eating babies, right?

Chomp on, Tumble, chomp on.

LNH, I'll be sure to drop you a line; you be sure to do the same should life bring you through New York.

Tosh: It is hard for me to understand, however, how you can value some lives higher than others.

Doesn't the conclusion I have reached have more to do with assigning responsibility for actions? Even if I valued all lives equally and quite highly, there could still be some actions so malicious, unjustifiable, and heinous that even valuing the criminal as a person, I would believe that the only appropriate punishment was death. I have no illusions about the inhumanity of those criminals who I believe deserve to die for their crimes, or even about most death row inmates: they're people, too. But they have chosen to do things so unspeakably horrible that if we have any respect for those whom they chose to violate, they must die. Nor can we escape this conclusion by telling ourselves that they are merely "malfunctioning computers." That's disrespectful of them, as they are human beings with free will--and they chose very, very wrongly. I needn't dehumanize them in order to condemn them to death, Tosh; I'm capable of accepting that they have both good and terrible aspects within them, while not flinching from giving them their well-earned punishment.

Regardless, even accepting your claim that I'm valuing lives differently, I don't see the problem there. Simply because I am against the killing of innocents, does not mean I must be against the killing of those who kill innocents. It really comes down to what I find criminal, and it is not the act of killing. Rather, it is the act of killing without any sense or reason that I find offensive. There are plenty of murderers and manslaughterers whose crimes do not, in my opinion, rise to the level of heniousness that merits capital punishment. There are even more acts of killing, be they acts self defense or of war, that do not merit punishment at all.

Focusing on the bare act, on avoiding or minimizing the total instances of violent force, misses what's important. What happened? Who did it? To whom? Why? These are the important questions for me. Fetishizing human life, and mindlessly seeking its preservation no matter what its possessor has chosen to do, is likewise hard for me to understand.