re-imprisoned for possession of child porn is evidence of why we should have the death pelanty.
This mystifies me. He was 11 when he committed murder. Are they actually suggesting we should've hanged an 11 year-old child? :rubchin:
re-imprisoned for possession of child porn is evidence of why we should have the death pelanty.
This mystifies me. He was 11 when he committed murder. Are they actually suggesting we should've hanged an 11 year-old child? :rubchin:
I must admit I waver on the death penalty thing. I can see the arguments for and against, but am ultimately repulsed by many of its advocates' apparent bloodlust. I suppose that I ultimately am sufficiently squeamish and liberal to feel that it just isn't the sort of thing a civilised society ought to be doing. :shrug:
Obviously, I make an exception for people who don't indicate at roundabouts. I would personally shoot them in the back of the neck and sleep peacefully.
Oh, yes. People who order coffee in pubs would definitely get the old 'Genickschuss' as well. But that's pure, legitimate fury. It's the cold-blooded judicial type of killing I find distasteful.
More seriously, the aptness of the punishment is less important to me than what it does to the society and people who endorse it.
Good Lord! I find myself in a position actually to the right of AWIMB's swivel-eyed-loon-in-chief.
I hold that certain crimes are so unforgivably heinous that only the chop will do. My critics at he dinner tables of leafy Buckinghamshire point at that it is a retributionist ideal that will always fail intellectual scrutiny and I agree wholeheartedly. The need for retribution, on those who have callously murdered your children for example, is primal and innate and is the seed of justice itself.
I doubt that the revolting bellicose **** Mladic would be bellowing from the dock in The Hague if he faced the rope.
It's not really, though, is it? It's fair to say that their adherence to the death penalty might also make them a wee bit callous in other areas of their society, don't you think? For instance...
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I don't know anything about Bulger's parents, other than the fact that his mum was distracted when he got snatched, which does seem rather unforgivable. I mean, you can sometimes lose track of the movements of a 4 or 5-year-old, but a two-year-old? Nah, you *always* have one eye on a two-year-old when out in public.
I agree about the desire for personal justice, but that is personal. Frankly, if someone takes personal vengeance for the murder of a child and kills the perpetrator, I for one would generally applaud them and hope they would be treated leniently by the judicial system. That, as you say, is a very natural right of justice that exists outside the law.
However, once you forego that option and leave it up to the state to enact justice on your behalf, you can basically fùck off as far as I'm concerned. At that point, your feelings no longer have anything to do with anything. It's just cold, dispassionate law.
Exactly. I remember kids at that age and the idea that you could lose track of them for more than a few seconds without going into panic mode seems unthinkable to me.
However, I'm sure her conscience has punished the poor woman enough for the last 24 years, so I'm not going to kick her.
On a related note, people generally speaking are weird when it comes to ethics. If someone moderately drink drives and gets away with it, they'll be considered little more than naughty scamps. yet if someone moderately drink drives and kills a kid, the opprobrium goes through the roof. Why? The 'crimes' were identical on a moral level.
Precisely. The worst road to go down is to confuse justice with vengeance. In this we separate justice in society from justice in the individual. We also separate justice (the notion) from law (the process).
The greater argument for capital punishment, or at least the most logical, is the notion of deterrence. Unfortunately, this doesnt work, particularly at the level of crime where the greatest support for capital punishment exists- treason, drug lords, etc. Those involved in these actions live their lives under a death sentence in their professions. A government rope isnt going to scare them.
Yes, I've always felt dubious about the principle of scaling punishment on the basis of its consequences. It's always seemed to punish bad luck to an unfair degree. I remember that chap who fell asleep at the wheel a few years ago and somehow managed to cause the Selby train crash. He got five years. If he'd given into sleep a few minutes earlier, there's every chance he might just have veered onto the hard shoulder and gone up the bank. Result? A few points on his licence, maybe. The disparity between those punishments for essentially the same offence has always seemed arbitrary and unfair to me.
Your first paragraph there is almost verbatim what my younger more liberal self frequently argued whenever the death penalty was discussed. Given it is nigh impossible for most people to take their revenge I figure bollócks, let's just hang the ****s.
And none of this squeamish lethal injection nonsense. The grim placement of the noose; the terrifying pause before the pull of the lever; the audible snap of the neck and the occasional decapitation when the hangman has miscalculated the drop distance. An execution should be dramatic b.
Because we measure both outcome and intent. Hence attempted murder is a lesser offence than murder.
In a moral sense you are right, there is little difference. You may drive home completely ****faced but without incident. Another night you may tip slightly over the limit and kill a child through no real fault of your own.
The former is a far worse offence but the latter involves a dead kid.
Even its advocates don't bother with the deterrence argument anymore. In 18th Century London, most people who were hanged or committed capital crimes had witnessed executions themselves. Did it deter them? Did it fück as like. America is the only civilised society left with the death penalty and I don't notice their murder rates dropping significantly.
For me, the better arguments are recidivism (an awful lot of killers get out and kill again) and finance. Why should the taxpayer be burdened with the millions it costs to keep a murderer alive for decades when a quick trip through the trapdoor would settle their hash cheaply and quickly?
Quite WES. How dare they enact their right to be in the same queue as you and make their perfectly lawful purchase. The next time I'm in the queue at Costa, just as I reach the till I'll scan the queue behind me and holler "any super entitled faux yanqui canuck knobheads wanna jump in before me here?"
Oh, I think advances of our understanding of brain chemistry and the extent to which we are genetically pre-determined to be a certain way is going to make an absolute mess of notions or law, crime and punishment in years to come. After all, how do we fairly punish someone who is born with abnormal levels of aggression for being abnormally aggressive?
Well our ethical framework is related to our legal one. THere is no denying that our collective view of something is influenced by its legality.
I have made a similar point on trips to Amsterdam on seeing friends openly going to prostitutes when they would never dream of doing so at home. As though the law somehow validates the process and makes it more morally acceptable.
I am not sure the different approach to the incident free/dead kid scenario is completely irrational. In one instance you have broken the law but nothing has happened. In the other you have killed a kid. If you wish to show that a certain behaviour is likely to cause a specific effect it is far easier to do so if it actually happens. I would argue the reaction to the dead kid is not essentially a moral one, its a reaction to the fact that you have killed a kid.