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04-21-2017 , 04:05 PM
No, it's not a thread on the Trump dossier. As requested...

Death Penalty: your thoughts?
04-21-2017 , 04:06 PM
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends." -- Gandalf
04-21-2017 , 04:07 PM
2/10
04-21-2017 , 04:11 PM
Pussy!

Last edited by AllTheCheese; 04-21-2017 at 04:11 PM. Reason: Just read the title.
04-21-2017 , 04:29 PM
I don't understand why there was so much heated debate in the other thread. Doesn't the majority here agree that killing people = bad, or is it not that simple? Not being facetious or anything. I just haven't given much thought to the death penalty.
04-21-2017 , 04:33 PM
I'm all for it for people who use caraway rye for their P B & J's.
04-21-2017 , 04:48 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Our House
I don't understand why there was so much heated debate in the other thread. Doesn't the majority here agree that killing people = bad, or is it not that simple? Not being facetious or anything. I just haven't given much thought to the death penalty.
I think the debate was more over the dude's possible innocence than over the pros and cons of the death penalty but I did also kind of scroll past it.
04-21-2017 , 05:02 PM
Word.

04-21-2017 , 05:22 PM
I submit to you that the death penalty is racially discriminatory in the way that it's applied, and it's also a cruel and unusual punishment. We are always advancing the science of forensics and we often find that someone we thought was guilty turns out to be innocent, or vice versa. The justice system is inherently imperfect because it relies on people and imperfect laws, but the death penalty specifically is applied in a very discriminatory manner and that violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment of the Constitution.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/equal_protection
Quote:
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from denying any person within its territory the equal protection of the laws. This means that a state must treat an individual in the same manner as others in similar conditions and circumstances. The Federal Government must do the same, but this is required by the Fifth Amendment Due Process.

The point of the equal protection clause is to force a state to govern impartially—not draw distinctions between individuals solely on differences that are irrelevant to a legitimate governmental objective. Thus, the equal protection clause is crucial to the protection of civil rights.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitu...ghth_amendment
Quote:
Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
04-21-2017 , 05:23 PM
At least with life in prison, if we find out later on that the trial was wrong for any reason, that person can be exonerated and released. After a person has been put to death, there's no take-backsies. Should we execute people even if there's a 1% chance they will turn out to be innocent? No. It's not worth it.

There is also a cost argument to be made. I believe it's more expensive to sentence somebody to death than life in prison.
04-21-2017 , 05:30 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by einbert
There is also a cost argument to be made. I believe it's more expensive to sentence somebody to death than life in prison.
That's only because of all the automatic appeals, the people likely to support the death penalty would just cut costs by dropping those appeals from the process.

Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out, don't you know?
04-21-2017 , 05:33 PM
Right but as I would explain to them, if you were being convicted of a serious crime you'd want all the appeals available to you as well. That's just a part of the system and it's not going away.
04-21-2017 , 05:38 PM
Research exposes racial discrimination in America's death penalty capital
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-black-inmates
Quote:
Black defendants facing trial in Houston – the death penalty capital of America – are more than three times as likely to face a possible death sentence than whites, new academic research has revealed.

The study, by a criminologist at the University of Maryland, exposes the extent of racial discrimination inherent in the administering of capital punishment in Harris County, the ground zero of the death penalty in the US. The county, which incorporates Houston, Texas's largest city, has carried out 116 executions in the modern era – more than any entire state in the union apart from Texas itself.

Professor Raymond Paternoster of the university's institute of criminal justice and criminology was commissioned by defence lawyers acting in the case of Duane Buck, a death row prisoner from Houston whose 1995 death sentence is currently being reconsidered by the Texas courts.

Paternoster, whose report is based on the latest quantitative methods, looked at 504 cases involving adult defendants who had been indicted for capital murder in Harris County between 1992 and 1999 – the period during which Buck was charged for murdering his former girlfriend, Debra Gardner, and a man called Kenneth Butler. Paternoster whittled down that pool to 20 cases that most closely echoed that of Buck's own in terms of the factors involved in the crime that were likely to incur a death sentence.

He found that of the 21 men, including Buck, seven out of the 10 who were African American were sent by the Harris County district attorney for capital trial, compared with just one of the five white defendants.

"The probability that the district attorney will advance a case to a [death] penalty trial is more than three times as high when the defendant is African American than for white defendants," Paternoster writes. He adds: "The disparity by race of the defendant, moreover, cannot be attributed to observed case characteristics because these cases are those that were most comparable".

The huge disparity by race is only slightly ameliorated at the stage at which juries deliver their sentences: in Texas it is up to the jury to decide whether or not to send a convicted person to execution. Paternoster found that Harris County juries imposed death sentences on four of the seven African Americans put on capital trial, while also sentencing to death the only white defendant.

By imposing the death sentence on 100% of the white capital defendants in the sample while meting out the ultimate punishment to 57% of the black defendants, the juries to some extent corrected the glaring disparity of the initial charges. But the gulf remains: of the original group of 21 cases, the black defendants were more than twice as likely to be sentenced to death than their white counterparts.

The Paternoster report was filed on Wednesday with the Harris County district court as part of a habeus petition in Buck's case. Buck's lawyer, Christina Swarns of the NAACP legal defense fund, told the Guardian that it formed a pattern with past behaviour in Texas in the administering of the ultimate punishment. "Over generations there has never been a time in Texas when the death penalty did not yield evidence of racial discrimination. Any way you slice our new research, you find it."

The racial element of Buck's case is all the more prominent because his execution in September 2011 was halted by the US supreme court on grounds that his original sentence had been racially influenced. At his sentencing hearing in 1995, the jury heard testimony from a psychologist, Dr Walter Quijano, who told them that black people posed a greater risk to violent reoffending if released from jail than white prisoners.

The habeus petition chronicles the long and controversial history of the death penalty in Texas, particularly in Harris County. Though the county has a black population of 19%, African Americans represent almost 50% of the people detained in its jails, while 68% of the past 34 executions to emerge from the area involved black inmates.

The district attorney at the time of the Buck trial, Johnny Holmes, personally decided whether to seek the death penalty in every potential case. The petition states: "There is an abundance of evidence demonstrating that throughout Holmes' tenure, the Harris County district attorney's office excluded African Americans from jury service because of their race."
https://www.documentcloud.org/docume...er-report.html
https://www.documentcloud.org/docume...-petition.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-supreme-court
04-21-2017 , 05:43 PM
What about serial murderers? Solid confessions? Overwhelming evidence? Just curious.

Side topic sorta: Or euthanasia? (Like confessed killers who actually prefer to be executed)
04-21-2017 , 05:44 PM
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/i...nalty-and-race
Quote:


In a 1990 report, the non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office found "a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing, and imposition of the death penalty." The study concluded that a defendant was several times more likely to be sentenced to death if the murder victim was white. This has been confirmed by the findings of many other studies that, holding all other factors constant, the single most reliable predictor of whether someone will be sentenced to death is the race of the victim.

From initial charging decisions to plea bargaining to jury sentencing, African-Americans are treated more harshly when they are defendants, and their lives are accorded less value when they are victims. All-white or virtually all-white juries are still commonplace in many localities.

A report sponsored by the American Bar Association in 2007 concluded that one-third of African-American death row inmates in Philadelphia would have received sentences of life imprisonment if they had not been African-American.
A January 2003 study released by the University of Maryland concluded that race and geography are major factors in death penalty decisions. Specifically, prosecutors are more likely to seek a death sentence when the race of the victim is white and are less likely to seek a death sentence when the victim is African-American.
A 2007 study of death sentences in Connecticut conducted by Yale University School of Law revealed that African-American defendants receive the death penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims are white. In addition, killers of white victims are treated more severely than people who kill minorities, when it comes to deciding what charges to bring.


"We simply cannot say we live in a country that offers equal justice to all Americans when racial disparities plague the system by which our society imposes the ultimate punishment." --Senator Russ Feingold on Civil Rights as a Priority for the 108th Congress, Senate, January 2003

Read the full report: United States of America: Death by discrimination the continuing role of race in capital cases
http://www.amnesty.org/en/report/info/AMR51/046/2003
04-21-2017 , 05:47 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Our House
What about serial murderers? Solid confessions? Overwhelming evidence? Just curious.

Side topic sorta: Or euthanasia? (Like confessed killers who actually prefer to be executed)
Heinous crimes:
I'm against it for all the same reasons. A constitutional right still applies, even in the most heinous crimes.

As far as euthanasia or like letting prisoners participate in some sort of experiment where they taking an aging drug and get released early, that would be a totally different conversation. That's a crazy idea though, I'm sure they would never put that in a serious TV show or anything.
04-21-2017 , 05:50 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by einbert
Right but as I would explain to them, if you were being convicted of a serious crime you'd want all the appeals available to you as well. That's just a part of the system and it's not going away.
Sure but this situation is similar to abortion: They're all super against it until they need it, and then it's ok but only because they really, truly needed it. Getting rid of appeals would be fine, until one of them was facing the death penalty and suddenly a special law gets passed to allow them to appeal or whatever.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Our House
What about serial murderers? Solid confessions? Overwhelming evidence? Just curious.
Let them rot in jail. Why should they get to take the easy way out as opposed to living in a small cage for 40+ years?
Quote:
Side topic sorta: Or euthanasia? (Like confessed killers who actually prefer to be executed)
I'm pro-euthanasia for the general public, confessed killers shouldn't get a say in how they die unless they made the same offer to their victims.
04-21-2017 , 05:53 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by fatkid
I'm all for it for people who use caraway rye for their P B & J's.
What monster would use rye bread for a PBJ?

Give him the needle.
04-21-2017 , 05:58 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Morphismus
2/10
Capitol Pee would've been a bit too misleading for a death penalty thread's title.
04-21-2017 , 06:04 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by einbert
I submit to you that the death penalty is racially discriminatory in the way that it's applied, and it's also a cruel and unusual punishment. We are always advancing the science of forensics and we often find that someone we thought was guilty turns out to be innocent, or vice versa. The justice system is inherently imperfect because it relies on people and imperfect laws, but the death penalty specifically is applied in a very discriminatory manner and that violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment of the Constitution.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/equal_protection


https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitu...ghth_amendment
I actually don't disagree that the death penalty is currently applied in a (racially) discriminatory fashion. So I would uphold your argument on 14th Amendment grounds.

I do however disagree with your argument on 8th Amendment grounds. The death penalty has been around since the dawn of this country. People were executed in the 1700s. If the intent of the 8th Amendment was to disallow capital punishment it would say so. It doesn't.

Could the death penalty be "fixed" to be racially blind? Probably not in the immediate future while our country still battles racism.

People (voters), in general, like the death penalty, when they are asked. It has won twice this decade in the People's Republic of California, in 2012, and 2016. So it's just not a "conservative" or "red state" thing.

I think people like the idea of the death penalty for "the worst of the worst". Terrorists, serial killers, child killers etc. But when you peel away the layers and rind of how it's currently implemented, well it, fails.

Anyway, those are my thoughts and musings. If I was called to be a juror, during voir dire I would answer in the affirmative that I would be able to apply the death sentence if necessary.
04-21-2017 , 06:34 PM
So people wonder why we have to fight for liberal Supreme Court justices. This is one of the reasons. A majority of liberal supreme court justices could end the death penalty forever. This is something we have to be strong for and fight proudly for on the Democratic side.
04-21-2017 , 09:04 PM
There is a part of me that wants the death penalty for ****s like Timothy McVeigh, the Boston Marathon bombers, or that **** that shot up summer camp in Norway. But I can't figure out what the line is, so I guess I am against the death penalty.
04-21-2017 , 09:22 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by chuckleslovakian
There is a part of me that wants the death penalty for ****s like Timothy McVeigh, the Boston Marathon bombers, or that **** that shot up summer camp in Norway. But I can't figure out what the line is, so I guess I am against the death penalty.
With this kind of level-headed thinking we're never gonna get around to killing people.
04-21-2017 , 10:41 PM
Thread deserves a capital F.
04-22-2017 , 01:00 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by 5ive
With this kind of level-headed thinking we're never gonna get around to killing people.
We can always play the Wheel of Middle Eastern Countries, and decide who to bomb next.

      
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