Views on death penalty

[Spelca]

Originally posted by Cerek the Barbaric: I support the death penalty. I also support human rights. The two are not mutually exclusive.

But, the death penalty means taking somebody's life, and one of the basic human rights is the right to life. And then there's also the right to not be subjected to cruel punishment. But I guess that depends on what you see as cruel punishment. [img]tongue.gif[/img]
So I don't see how they can't be mutually exclusive. I understand that a murderer breached the human rights by taking somebody's life, but how does that allow somebody else to breach them also? Because if you kill that person, you're still breaking the rights. Unless you're saying that murderers aren't human?

Edit - just some grammar.

[ 03-05-2004, 02:05 PM: Message edited by: Spelca ]

[Timber Loftis]

But, the death penalty means taking somebody's life, and one of the basic human rights is the right to life.

As well, freedom from imprisonment is a basic human right, yet sending someone to prison does just that. Theft is illegal, but many crimes are punished by fining the person.

Be it imprisonment, fining, or executing, any instance where the state/society punishes a wrong is by its very nature a situation where the state is doing something otherwise legally impermissible to the person.

[Masklinn]

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: only a life can pay for a life

Are you sure of that ? I mean, can anything really pay for a life ? Is one's life valuable ?

And there comes my favourite quote ever : "An eye for an eye only makes the world blind."

And that's so true...

[Illumina Drathiran'ar]

::sniff:: The most offensive part of America's stance on the death penalty is this desire we seem to have to execute our teenagers. Are you aware we were kicked off the UN's human rights council (Of which we WERE founding members) because we refused to ratify a treaty on the grounds that it would mean we couldn't execute minors? Even China ratified that! CHINA!

Unbelievable!

The death penalty does nothing to stop crime, does it? It *might* in some slight way, but in general criminals aren't afraid to die. They know what the punishment is, and they don't care. And we execute far too many innocents for the death penalty to ever be considered moral.

Hell, I'll go so far as to say it's all pageantry to satisfy the figurative angry mob's desire for blood and revenge. That's all it is. The death penalty is a revenge-based tool of 'justice' and is quite barbaric, in my oh so humble opinion.
Of course, not all feel that way. Not all have to. That's just my take on things.

[Rokenn]

Here are a few reason I'm against the death penalty...

Death row inmate aquitted a decade later
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Estes Thompson

Feb. 18, 2004 | WINDSOR, N.C. (AP) --

A prisoner taken off death row after a judge ruled prosecutors withheld key evidence in his murder trial was found not guilty Wednesday in a second trial.

Alan Gell, 28, has spent a decade behind bars in the 1995 murder of retired truck driver Allen Ray Jenkins, who was shot twice during a robbery. After the verdict, Gell hugged his attorneys and his mother wept in the courtroom.

He was immediately allowed to go free. When asked what he was going to do, he responded: ‘‘Go home, where I should have been years ago."

Later, at the Lewiston home of his mother and stepfather, he said: ‘‘I'm actually kind of confused. I had long-term plans, but I didn't have short-term plans."

The case has led to calls for North Carolina to impose a moratorium on executions, and the verdict likely will fuel the debate.

Prosecutors who handled Gell's retrial were not seeking the death penalty, but Gell faced an automatic life term if convicted. Prosecutors left court without comment.

Attorney General Roy Cooper released a statement saying he was ‘‘confident that a thorough presentation of the evidence was made" by both sides.

‘‘The jury has spoken and we respect its decision," Cooper said.

Asked whether he harbors hard feelings against the state, Gell replied, ‘‘No comment. As you all know, there was some misconduct."

Jenkins' body was found on April 14, 1995, inside his home in Aulander. Prosecutors built a case against Gell based on the testimony of two teenagers, Crystal Morris and Shanna Hall, Gell's former girlfriend, who testified that they saw Gell pull the trigger and kill Jenkins during a robbery on April 3, 1995.

But prosecutors in Gell's original trial withheld from defense lawyers a secretly taped phone call in which Morris, who was then 15 years old, did not answer when her boyfriend asked her twice whether Gell killed Jenkins. She also told her boyfriend she had to ‘‘make up a story" about Jenkins' death.

Also withheld by prosecutors were statements from more than a dozen witnesses who said they saw Jenkins alive after April 3. Gell was either out of state or in jail on a car-theft charge from April 4 until after Jenkins' body was found April 14.

During the retrial, three scientific experts testified that Jenkins' body and the scene of his killing were not consistent with the prosecution's argument that he was killed 11 days prior.

Defense lawyer Joseph Cheshire V said the case shows why defense lawyers need open access to prosecution files and investigations of withheld evidence.

‘‘A prosecutor wins when justice is done, not when there's a conviction," he said.

Charles Jenkins, the older brother of the murder victim, said watching Gell go free was ‘‘hard on everybody." His wife, Maxine Jenkins, remained convinced of Gell's guilt.

‘‘The bottom line is, we know who pulled the trigger," she said.

Investigators found no physical evidence such as hair, blood, fingerprints or fibers linking Gell to Jenkins' death. Police found the shotgun and other items in July 1995 after Morris and Hall told them where they had been hidden.

Both Hall and Morris reached plea bargains with prosecutors in which they promised to testify truthfully in return for being allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder and receive sentences of nearly 10 years in prison.

Gell's acquittal came less than two weeks after Darryl Hunt was cleared of all charges in a 1984 rape and killing in Winston-Salem. Hunt, who was found guilty of the murder of Deborah Sykes at two jury trials, was freed in December after a DNA test pinned the crime on another man, who has since confessed.

On that same day, Feb. 6, the state Supreme Court overturned two death sentences, ordering a new trial in one case and a new sentencing in the other.

The state Senate approved a death penalty moratorium bill last year, but the bill was never taken up by the state House.

[Timber Loftis]

Well, yeah, Rokenn, there's the rub. I am all for the DP in theory. In implementation however, it is the person wrongly executed that makes me oppose the DP. How accurate must our system of justice be when a life is at stake. Is a 1% (1/100) rate of "innocent execution" acceptable? What about 1 in 1000, 1 in 10,000? What margin of error can we accept?

So, in theory, kill 'em all, in reality, some of 'em may be innocent -- and even if the innocent are a small minority it ain't worth it. This is why Illinois' former Governor started reviewing all the clemency cases and finally decided the mistakes were too prevalent -- so he granted clemency to all of them.

Anyway, I guess my wiews on the DP are a little veird.

[Night Stalker]

I agree with Timber in this stance. It is not the theory of the Death Penalty that is the problem, but the implentation of it. If feel that the justice system employing it has been corrupted over time. We have cops that exaggerate evidence to help convict crimials, then use the arguement before the jury "who would you believe? A law officer or a suspected murderer?" committing a very serious fallacy of debate.

Unfortunatly, justice is not blind in this country (even though it is founded on the concept of blindness), and it is not applied equally. One thing that would curtail the wrongfull convictions would be to issue the same penatly to cops caught tampering with evidence that led to a Death Penalty conviction, but there are many permutations and such.

[ 03-05-2004, 05:54 PM: Message edited by: Night Stalker ]

[Chewbacca]

Maybe when we develop infallible telepathic abilities to accurately discern the guilt of a person %100 percent everytime the DP is at hand I would maybe favor it.

Being a beleiver in reincarnation I can maybe see it like taking a player out of the game for unneccessary roughness (to paraphraes my favorite fictional martian). They can try again next season.

As long as the accuracy of a guilty verdict can be questioned across the board the DP should not be used. Killing an innocent man in the name of justice is hardly just.


Executing teenagers, the mentally ill/retarded is something I will never favor.

[Timber Loftis]

Originally posted by Chewbacca: Being a beleiver in reincarnation I can maybe see it like taking a player out of the game for unneccessary roughness (to paraphraes my favorite fictional martian). They can try again next season.

Now that, my friend, is a wery veird wiew indeed. [img]graemlins/heee.gif[/img] But, it gets an A+ for creativity. I think I'd share that view if I shared your belief in reincarnation.

For me, though, because this life is all I think we have, I see life as priceless -- meaning that if you elect to take it from another, you can only repay your debt to society by forking over your own life. And, for me, so long as the law is known to all, it's a price you CHOSE to pay -- it's not something being done to you by society; society is merely making you honor your deal.

Anyway, we live in the real world -- which is flawed -- and that ultimately dictates my wiew of the DP.

[Rokenn]

Personally I'm completely against the DP. Since giving the State the ultimate power of life and death it has been and will be again abused for political reasons. Remember what a wise man once said, "Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?
Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. Even the very wise can not see all ends."