Death Penalty: a means of Justice or self-interest?

I agree with Hypr on most of his points, but disagree that the death penalty is the answer. Taking a life is always wrong, unless it's absolutely necessary. The only time I can see the death penalty being needed is if there's someone who makes repeated escape attempts or causes disruption whilst taking their punishment. Having said that, the current system of giving them shelter, food and excersise is ridiculous! Homeless people get worse treatment, and they probably haven't killed anyone!

 

Anyone without common sense would need solid evidence to back this. Its simply a Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. People commit crime because they want money, they want revenge, they want whatever- why should I dig into information to prove that people kill others for this kind of stuff?

You're saying this as a matter of opinion. The death penalty is usually practically painless, in the case of a lethal injection or some kind of quick death. Secondly, just because the majority of the reasons for giving the death penalty are for murder, not all of them are, which means your

is not completely accurate.

Like you said, this isn't the first time you tried to send this point across. But you are basically saying this in your general opinion as well, without anything to support it (I wonder how you could, anyway). If a person kills someone else, that does not necessarily mean they are giving up their right to live. Its a Dicto simpliciter fallacy, even though we are talking about a larger population. If you want to steal candy from a candy store, are you therefore implying that you don't care if someone steals from you?

You still aren't getting MY point and babbling about yours. I said already, it is true that a prison guard cannot work 100% and prevent all their criminals under their duty from escaping, but it still is his duty to make sure that they do not escape. Not all humans are not flawless (should I back this up?) and it is true that we are running the risk that a prisoner can escape and commit crime again. I FULLY ADMIT THAT YOU ARE RIGHT. BUT I was stressing that it is also the judge's responsibility to make sure that the right people are put to the death penalty. Again, not all people are flawless and the judge is bound to make mistakes. I was comparing a jailer's responsibility to a judge's responsibility. Again, in a utopian (is that a word, btw?) world where both could work to 100%, I would not even come up with this comparison. Regardless of whether there are more slaves to prison guards, whether the slaves are mad smart, would you agree that a prison guard has the responsibility of guarding the friggin' convicts?

 

Yeah, so what does this prove? It might still be his duty, but a principle of work won't keep criminals in their cells. If he can't do it 100% they will escape or riot. No middle ground. No 'but'.

A judge can't make mistakes if the evidence is solid. It is the fault of the investigation team if they cannot provide damning evidence as to why the person committed a crime without a shadow of a doubt, and if that is not there the death penalty is impractical to implement.

Assume that the 55-1 ratio is correct for this hypothetical situation of a prison riot. You are armed with a baton and a gun with 8 shots. 8 shots will bring down 8 men at best. That's still 47 men running at you.

Yeah, see where your responsibility gets you when you're beaten to death on the concrete floor, idiot.

 

Two things: you're still not answering my question on WHY the graph statistically shows the regression trend where murder crimes are up when number of executions are down and vice-versa. Of course those motives you mentioned are reasons why people commit murder, but that still doesn't explain the regression trend. Also, I'm aware of the Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy (referenced for those who don't know what it is), but that still doesn't make you exempt from providing evidence to make your point, not to mention that I find your 'anyone without common sense would need solid evidence to back this' remark quite arrogant. In a Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy scenario, there is usually a third event or causal relationship that provides missing information in which one side fails to cover or, in this case, what those graphs fail to tell us, and it was your job in this debate to provide it. Debates are and always have been stating and making your point with reason and evidence to support it regardless along with, of course, avoiding fallacies.

Now, going back to the graph, I didn't specifically state anywhere in my posts that the amount of murder crimes are directly connected to the amount of execution and/or vice-versa; I was simply asking the question why the graph statistically shows that trend out of my own curiosity as I certainly know that the amount of murders committed are not directly connected to death sentences carried out (as that would be jumping to the wrong conclusion by a Regression-Mean fallacy as well.) I've looked into this matter and came across the "brutalization effect" which possibly could be one of the causal relationships to those graphs I found. Perhaps you can look further into this and find something that proves something else is going behind those two graphs provided. You can also look closely and see there are indeed outliers within certain ranges of those graphs that exceed too far from the regression trend.

I can admit that I overlooked the fact that there are some places that issue death sentences for crimes other than murder, and that is my fault. I should perhaps be more specifically clear in the beginning that I support the death penalty under cases of first-degree murder, nothing else. For child-rape cases (mentioned in the site you provided), I wouldn't recommend anything beyond lifetime-imprisonment in a "SuperMax". But that's a bit off-side from this debate.

Getting back on topic:

That's quite a skeptical claim to make, as no one absolutely knows for sure whether executions by electrocution, firing squad, and even lethal injection is supposedly painless. That is up to the ones who are executed to say and judge, which they can't.

Take a look at this site and read this paragraph:

Who knows what Charles Brooks experienced at the last moment before he slipped into unconsciousness? What did he feel when he clenched his fists? That is something not even we can answer for sure, but we can conclude one thing is certain: Charles Brooks felt something at that moment while undergoing lethal injection.

The quote you mentioned above is NOT a Dicto Simpliciter, but my claim in this post is:

The fragment I highlighted in red is definitely erroneous on my part. I respond to these posts late at night when I get home from work, but that's not an acceptable excuse. The quote of mine you mentioned above is actually the point I want to get across, in which, no, the Dicto Simpliciter does not apply:

Let's go back to your original argument:

Of course I don't doubt it is the jailer's responsibilities to make sure that no prisoner escapes from jail. However, since you brought up the 100% concept, good point, but that depends on how we define what 100% means in terms of jailer's responsibilities. You also brought up a point that humans are never 100% perfect, something I totally agree. But let's suppose that a single jailer works at 100% of his/her human capability while doing the job of guarding 55 inmates (since there is around 55-to-1 prisoner-to-guard ratio.) Can we guarantee that not a single prisoner out of those 55 escapes under a watch of a single jail guard working at 100% of his/her human capacity? The answer to that is obviously no as in order for the jailer to make sure no one escapes, the jailer needs to monitor 55 inmates constantly and simultaneously and that is humanly impossible. In order for a scenario in which not a single inmate out of 55 escapes under the watch of a single jailer, the jailer would approximately have to operate at least 1600% (or 16 times) of his/her human capacity (assuming that a single jailer can monitor 2-4 inmates simultaneously at 100% capability.)

You're ignoring the concept of due-process in which the accused suspect can get legal representation in court with an attorney against the prosecution team. The prosecution has the responsibility of providing evidence that the suspect on trial is guilty beyond the reason of doubt while the defense representing the suspect has to provide evidence that casts doubt that the suspect did the crime. From that point on, it is up to the the jury to decide whether the suspect is guilty of the crime committed, not the judge. The judge in these cases are responsible for administering the sentence to the defendant in these cases, that's it. And of course, a jury comprised of 12 members can make mistakes when they come to the unanimous decision.

 

Yeah, after Hypr proved me wrong, I realized that life imprisonment isn't necessarily "killing" someone, unlike the death penalty itself. So I have that point straight and all and can't deny that fact.

Oops, that must have spilled from gobbly gook *hides* I thought the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc meant the mistaking of correlation for causation or something.

Yeah, but I'm not usually into long debates like this. I thought I'd be making one post to mess you up, but I guess it turned out to be a little longer than I thought. But YES, you are right. Please excuse my laziness.

Oh, good point! Getting rid of them quickly would mean saving jail cells, lol. I completely never thought of that. As for money... I would instead ask you to look a little deeper into that part of your argument. Just think about the amount of money it costs for those additional appeals, longer trials and whatnot. But, I actually haven't found where the money for that comes from o.0

Well, that's right, but I think there is some kind of scientific reasoning behind these executions. Like if you take out the neural system (or whatever its called), you won't be feeling anything.

I think its funny how you guys have to go about typing up a huge paragraph to get one point across, but this isn't really all too important. Okay, I played Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney and forgot about the jury (or the investigators in this case

). I mean, I know the court and all is really literal about everything, but when i said "judge," I mean that whole system of finding out whether the defendant is guilty or not. That is not 100%, and yes because of the investigators, the evidence, and a whole lot of factors. The same way it is not possible for a jailer to keep those inmates from escaping. But, Hypr does make a nice fine line saying it is completely inhumanly possible with this:

And that, I do agree with. Since it would actually be humanly possible for a judge (the judicial thing, gosh) to actually make the correct verdict if he were all-knowing or something (well, not really, but its in no way possible to sprout a billion arms if every single convict were clever enough to escape).

I really like Hypr's way of putting this, but I could easily say that it would be more humanly possible to use amazing martial art skills to exterminate the 47 people running at you rather than sprout a billion arms and stop the prisoners from digging holes in their cells.

So anyway, all of that is not necessary to be said, since I am now only challenging Winterreise's statement that it costs more money for convicts on the terms of life imprisonment compared to the convicts on the terms of the death penalty.

 

What the fuck? How is this relevant? A simple agreement or rebuttal would have worked, I have no idea what you're trying to say.

Common sense. Keep a man in jail for five years and kill him via, say, lethal injection. Compare that to fifty years or more imprisoned and tell us again that it's more expensive.

 

Life is not a luxury.
To say that is to assume humans can actually own each other and that 'punishment' is a real thing.

It's all in our heads.

 

meh,chopping his head of with a sword will be cheaper, you couldn't use a syringe more than one time

 

Well of course, killing a man is much less expensive than feeding him for the rest of his life, but maybe you should take a closer look into what I said and stop getting aggressive over the matter. If you're so smart, why don't you actually look for information about the costs needed for the convicts put on term for death penalty and come back to me and tell me if you're rich enough to pay for one single person.

@DevilDinah - Well, you could actually use the syringe more than once since it doesn't matter if its infected when you're about to kill someone. Plus, I think its you can't use a needle more than once in a regular situation, but I'm not even 50% sure about that ^_^ Besides, the stuff you need to kill a man probably costs more than the axe, when thinking about more than one execution.

 

I think the point was, even though it costs a lot to put a man on death row, it costs more to imprison him for life.

 

estimated cost for keeping a criminal for 1 year: over $500/month
cost for a broadsword: just over $250

maybe they should make a chair with knives instead of electricity, it'll be cheaper to kill people with the 'stab chair', plus, it doesn't take money from the electric tax

 

Yeah because some people can survive electric shocks, but still there is never a proper way to tell if someone is innocent or not unless we could delve into mind reading, even lie detectors are wrong...

 

Torture doesn't work, people will say whatever they can just to get it stopped, so that's out of the question, there isn't accurate enough ways yet so there shouldn't be a death penalty yet....

 

are you refering to psychological torture?

 

Offer sex?

 

Try googling something like "cost of death penalty." It doesn't only involve the plain and simple killing, like I mentioned before.

 

It costs more to get the criminal charged with the death penalty, not quite the same as the death penalty costing more. Most of the cases are probably just messier and so need more legal mumbo jumbo than smaller, non-death sentence cases anyway, so it's a bit of a biased example.