Clemency for Tookie Williams?

[Molina]

Regarding the promotion of the death penalty for the satisfaction of victims families bothers me. Just because most people would wish the murderer of their family dead doesn't, IMO, make it the correct thing to do.

Not that I can name any examples I'm sure ther are some people who would not want the murderer of their son executed, maybe because they believe 60 years in prison or eventual judgement from a God is preferable.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that by bringing he victims family into these arguments does nobody any favours. The families don't get a say in executions, which is good, as executions are either justified or not, the varying beliefs of grieving relatives should not get to dictate who lives and dies. Nor does it seem correct to presuppose that anyone else will have the same opinion as you, no matter how popular that opinion.

Molina

I hope this is the new 'Question for Iceman' thread, that as totally badass

[BigPhish]

I'm not bringing the families into it because it somehow justifies the execution from some sort of vengeance perspective.

We have laws as a society because it's the society's responsibility to protect itself from... itself. There are two ways to do that, really. One is to wait for the crime to occur and then punish the criminals. The second is to somehow predict the crimes and prevent them. Good luck on the latter...

So, if we're at wait for the crime to occur and punish the criminals, and we know why we need to wait, why are we doing the punishing?

There are two goals of the punishment, really. One is to sufficiently deter individuals who are capable of thinking ahead from committing the crimes. The other might be to ensure that, once someone commits a crime, they'll not be given the opportunity to do it again. I suppose a third, more humanitarian, goal might be to rehabilitate the criminals so they won't do it again, but that doesn't seem to work so let's skip it.

There are different severity of crimes, too, and each level of severity probably deserves its own special level of punishment.

On the low end of the scale, there's driving 5mph over the limit. For this, you get the pleasure of being 15 minutes late while the nice officer runs your plate and decides if he wants to really ruin your day.

Go a bit faster and you get the privelege of paying out some money to the state and more money to the insurance company.

Steal some money or a car or whatever and you might see some jail time. Some countries would have you losing one or both hands for this one.

Fast forward to premeditated murder and what punishment solves both main goals - to deter and to ensure that once someone commits the crime, they won't do so again.

There are only two punishments that fit both criteria: death and life imprisonment in solitary confinement. The latter only somewhat solves the problem because the clever, lucky, or determined criminal could probably find a way to take out a guard.

So where was I going with this? Oh yeah, the family reference. Family / Friends == society. I think that because our society is so large, we may sometimes forget who we're trying to protect and why we're trying to protect them when we enact and enforce these laws. I've never met or even seen Tookey's victims. Don't even know their names. I'm certain the same holds true for most everyone whining about society taking that bastard out.

I believe that distance desensitizes people to the pure evil of his crimes. And probably the only reasonable way to introduce the appropriate appreciation for just how hurtful what Tookey did is to imagine he did it to someone you care about. Only then can you really put it into perspective.

So, yeah. Imagine he took out your sister, her husband, and their two beautiful kids. Think about Christmas this year without them at the dinner table. Without the kids unwrappnig the cool gifts you got them. Think about those kids never graduating from high school or college. Think about all the great things those four people might have done to enhance society or, hell, even just the lives of their family and close friends. Burn it into your mind.

Then tell me the bastard shouldn't have died a long time ago.

[NorthView]

[excession]

The problem with the bomb question is the innocent newborn child you are blowing to bits in order to get to Osama..it is of course a parallel to the 'innocent people will die for certain if you use the death penalty' problem only more focussed as the baby didn't even get a roll of thedice in the justice system..

Similarly the more intelligent mammals who can feel pain are innocent of any moral wrongdoing - outside of some quasi-religious 'soul' argument, it is easier to argue that it's a moral wrong to kill a blue whale than it is to argue it's one to kill a mass murderer

[iceman5]

[excession]

[iceman5]

[NorthView]

Koresh was the Jim Jones-like figure at Waco, wasn't he (showing my age again)?

There's a huge difference between taking advantage of what might well be your only chance to kill (assassinate?) bin Laden as part of an ongoing conflict that both sides, terrorists and the "West" alike, view as a war; and executing a criminal when imprisonment's an option.

On balance I agree that the killing of bin Laden might well prove counter-productive, but it's impossible from where we sit to say with any degree of certainty because we don't know what acts of terrorism are being planned against us.

In a war situation it's generally accepted that nations have to do what they must in order to safeguard the sovereignty and security of their people, including the killing of innocents, as repugnant as that is... but a war situation that sees the temporary suspension of conventional morality is quite different from the issue of whether to kill a murderer during peacetime, which is what this thread was originally debating.

[iceman5]

Back to the orginal point. This is America where we live in a democracy. There are many more people FOR the death penalty than against it so no matter how strong your views against it are and how well you articulate it, youre still outnumbered so I doubt it will ever be overturned.

[NorthView]

[JDLush]

Interesting point Ice. Depending on which statistics you want to believe, the number is either shrinking heavily but still above 50%, or about 50/50 already (and still declining).

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/ - based on quick observation this appears to be highly anti death penalty, but uses stats from outside sources.

http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/defensean ... en2004.htm - pretty interesting article on the decline in death sentences handed out over the last few years. Here's a snippet:

"Public support for the death penalty continued to erode in 2004. When respondents were given a choice between the death penalty and life-without-parole as the appropriate sentence for first-degree murder, 50% of those polled favored the death penalty and 46% favored life without a parole. In 1997, the difference between these two choices was 32 percentage points.

Concerns about innocence continue to be a principal reason for the decline in the use of the death penalty. Five people were exonerated from death row in 2004, bringing the total number of exonerees since capital punishment was reinstated to 117. This crisis has led to a series of calls for either significant reform of the death penalty or a complete cessation of executions. Prominent political leaders, Supreme Court Justices, and law enforcement officials in Texas and elsewhere have come to the conclusion that the present system can no longer be tolerated."