"Death Penalty" is an oxymoron. Death is the ultimate analgesic. The perfect tranquilizer.

Having said that, I think a lot of those convicted are quite sick and should be euthanized. I would suggest that most people on the street or in the forum who favor the "death penalty" favor the sentence and don't really want to hear about the execution.

Amazing!!

Simply amazing!!

The rest of us here need not think as, you have done ALL the thinking for everyone else.

Sure and lets tear up the US Constitution while we are at it. After all, who needs civil protections from a Government that has killed many thousands more innocent citizens over the years than all the murderers combined.

I see you are acting like YOU are the one that wrote the Constitution. Try to remember that when the Constitution was written hanging was the primary method used. Therefore it is logical to conclude that the Founding Fathers felt that hanging was NOT 'cruel and unusual'. Otherwise they would of baned the DP in the Bill Of Rights.

The SC has ruled on this and I don't see them defining the DP as 'cruel and unusual'.

Hey, as I said yesterday anyone wanting the DP to be cruel (i.e. they WANT to have the convict tortured), is a nut job and has 'issues'.

But the use of the 3 cocktail method is an advancement from hanging. I recommend you lobby your local state officals to ban the DP in your state (assuming it isn't already).

And when the US Constitution was written the "rule of thumb" (you can beat your wife with a stick up to the diameter of your thumb) was also not considered "cruel". Nor was slavery, nor child labor, nor indentured servitude.

226 years hence, our conception of what CRUEL is has evolved. The brilliance of the Constitution is that it accomodates such a change of understanding without having to be re-written and amended to death the way the Indian Constitution has been.

IOW simply because hanging wasn't seen as cruel in the past, doesn't mean that given our contemporary understanding of human physiology, that the 3 drug cocktail isn't cruel today.

BTW, absent revenge - which inherently implies cruelty - why have the DP at all?

When you become a SC judge you can rule on this issue. AGAIN, the SC has ruled and the odds that the court will find the DP unconstitutional is very low (even by people that wish they would). With the Roberts court and the GWB apointees the changes are even less.

You can post that they SHOULD as many times as you want. You can even write them to tell them how you feel. So what. Get over yourself on that one.

Why have the DP? Because voters have decided it should be legal. Each voter decides for reasons unique to them.

So why not address REAL issues? Is the DP legal in your state? Has it come up for a vote recently? If the vote was close than join an anti-DP group in your state and use the power of the vote to change the policy.

Note that in CA the vote gets closer each time.

The SCOTUS tends to lag public opinion - and even so Kennedy (the new swing) found it outrageous to execute minors. So the pendulum moves slowly but it moves.

As for voters deciding on its legality, voters also "decided" that slavery was legal, Jim Crow was legal, Women couldn't own property legally. Thus this is hardly a prima facia justification.

Furthermore, the question was leveled at YOU. YOU say you support the DP and have voted in that direction. So explain why you do so please. What is the basis for your decision?

Given that the DP is

• More expensive than LWOP (by about 70% in CA)
• No more effective in reducing recidivism than LWOP
• Has no deterrence effect

Other than advocating revenge, why do you support it?

Degs, the fact that the death penalty is more expensive with life without parole says more about our court and appeals system than it does about the efficacy of the death penalty itself.

It may not be statistically effective in reducing recidivisim: By which I mean, the execution of Prisoner A does not mean that Prisoner B will not return to a life of crime upon his release. Having said that, Prisoner A will certainly not become a recidivist.

The issue of deterrence is hard to resolve. It may not have much deterrent effect, but it may have some -- there are plenty of statistics arguing both ways.

Now, let's discuss it as "revenge" although I prefer the term "retribution." Is retribution always a bad thing? I don't think so. Most laws are about possessions, and its reasonable to say that one's life is such an important possession that if you take someone else's you've risked losing your own.

I'm only a weak supporter of the death penalty, and then only for the most heinous of crimes, but should we ban it entirely? I don't think so.

No it says more about our Constitutional protections rather than about the Court System.

There is no credible study that supports any measurable deterrance effect. None.

I do appreciate your willingness to admit that its about revenge (retribution is just a newspeak version of revenge). And what is wrong about revenge is that the criminal justice system EXPLICITLY precludes that motive and was designed to preclude it. Retributive systems are invariably escalative systems and add to the violence of the society. This is well recognized by all the major spiritual traditions in the world. BTW, The context for the biblical "eye for eye" quote was an attempt to reduce the escalative nature of the MidEast retributive tradition.

Remember that in the equation of "retribution" you have to include things like traditional Honor Killings. and any other culturally driven revenge based actions.

I would suggest that most crimes are NOT property crimes (assault, domestic battery, rape ). In fact, by definition, all violent crimes are crimes that impact one's body. You can even extend this to white collar crimes that bankrupt individual victims. There are plenty of stories of Enron victims who's lifespans have been shortened because their ability to fund their healthcare was curtailed.

Lastly, victims have a process for "being made whole" - its called "Courts of Equity" aka Torts. While you may not agree with the formulations, the courts have very much set down what the value of a limb, limp or death are worth. THAT is their "retribution".

The trouble with saying that there is no deterrent effect is that there is no real way to get a statistical measure of a crime that doesn't occur. It could have NOT happened because of the death penalties deterrent effect, or simply because the criminal didn't feel like it that day, or because the victim had a change of plans and wasn't available to be victimized. Any credible study will have to acknowledge that it can't prove why any crime doesn't occur -- you can't prove a negative.

There are many more types of property crimes than there are violent crimes -- most crimes involve either property or money, and only a small segment involve violent criminal assaults.

As for honor killings, etcetera, we had the death penalty in this country for pretty much 200 years, and we never saw that retributive effect in the general population.

When it comes to retribution, I see your point about a cycle of violence, but I think it is naive to expect human beings to give up the idea of balanced justice, an "eye for an eye" if you will. As a political matter, you can do away with the death penalty (which probably means a higher murder rate among the incarcerated, but I suppose crimes committed inside prison walls don't count), as has happened throughout the western world, but I don't think you'll change most people minds when they think it is perfectly appropriate that a murderer die.

The trouble with relying on the tort system isn't so much a matter of definition -- it lies in the fact that it doesn't matter much if you are killed in an armed robbery at the local convenience store, because when the court awards your family $10 million, the killer is apt to be a crack addict whose overall worth is equivalent to his body's chemical value. This doesn't provide much in the way of being made whole, at least not financially.

I've also seen tort law used as a form of double indemnity -- the best example that springs to mind is OJ Simpson's murder trial. Whether you accept the innocent verdict or not (and I personally believe OJ is guilty of murder), the courts found him not guilty -- and then as a matter of torts he was found guilty. You have either committed a crime or you haven't, and if you haven't, you shouldn't be continued to be held liable for it -- but that is certainly a digression from the topic at hand.

Statistics doesn't work that way. You CAN decorellate for other influences. Not 100% but within varying levels of statistical confidence. This is well understood and pretty much ALL of modern science is based on this. In fact it is so well refined that you can detect data that is "too good" (an interesting read for when this is The Measure of All Things)

So the ability to decorrelate things like economic, drug trade and similar drivers is there. You don't get a 100% answer but you get one that is pretty solid. And when done with the true desire to control for possible influences you get an answer that is historically supported - that the violence and visciousness of the punishment has little to do with the level of deterrance. Deterrance primarily is a case of how vested the members of society feel within the society and violence in general is determined by the general societal acceptability of using violence to resolve conflict.

And while there is annecdotal evidence of the retributive effect in society about the consequence of the DP I don't believe it actually has been studied, so you cannot claime it doesn't exist. But that's not the principle at work. Instead it is the mere acceptability of the DP that raises the level of violence by indicating that violence in the form of execution is an ACCEPTABLE way of resolving conflict.

There is a difference between an individual desire for retributive (not balanced but retributive. Almost anyone who has been victimized has anger much greater than the original victimization) violence. That is PRECISELY why the Criminal Justice system takes the judging and administration of consequence OUT of the hands of those involved and puts it into the hands of the Crown (The Government). But again, I appreciate the honesty that at the core of the DP advocacy is a desire for revenge - I would agree with that. And I would agree that the individual emotional desire for such retribution is not something that will be eliminated.

But it IS the role of the society to limit that sort of escalative circle of violence. And the establishment of an impartial justicie system serves EXACTLY that purpose. And the DP is the ONLY penalty in our criminal justice system that violates this principle.

The arguement of double-indemnity on Tort vs. Criminal is itself an interesting one but not really germane here. And in terms of restititution by a crack addict - how does killing him give the family anything more than the Tort case will?

To take your last statement first, what the family "gets" in the case of the death of the murderer of their family member is something that is among all those laudable psychiatric buzz words so popular on the talk shows -- the family gets "closure."

Talk to a few families of violent crime victims as I did when I was a reporter -- what they want is not just retribution, but that sense of finality, that no matter what, it can't happen again to them or anyone else. This is something they can't get, and that the government can't guarantee, with a sentence of LWOP. Political winds can change, and the person supposedly behind prison bars for life can be released; or that person can escape -- or merely continue to kill behind prison bars. No one we're aware of has ever escaped death.

Believe it or not I've read "The Measure of All Things" and I've also read another interesting and important book called, "How to Lie With Statistics" (the latter being a very useful book for newspaper reporters). "The Measure" presumes that those acquiring and analyzing the data are honest, a specious belief in this day and age when everything political hinges on "what the polls say." As a result, I don't trust statistics, particularly those used to support or debunk any political issue -- the data are seldom gathered without bias, and are even more seldom analyzed without bias. Statistically, you can tell me the state of an electron orbiting an atom and I'll believe you -- but to tell me that statistics are being honestly assembled verifying whether or not crimes are committed based on the deterrent effect of the death penalty stretches my ability to suspend disbelief.

In any case, what I've seen most in regards to the deterrent effect is surveys of incarcerated criminals, about their own attitudes, etcetera. I suppose these would be credible if we thought they were telling the truth, but they are incarcerated criminals and I don't think they're telling the truth.

Finally, stripped of the rhetoric, what your post says is "violence can never solve anything." Violence solved Hitler, and no amount of non-violence would have. Violence sometimes does solve things and we as a society need a controlled level of violence at hand.

The psychology of closure is complex. But suffice it to say that there is more than a preponderance of evidence that closure comes by a change of perspective from within and a LETTING GO of the desire for revenge rather than any external act. There is good work tracking families who have lost loved ones to crime and invariably any "relief" brought on by the DP is temporary in nature. Some contine to be stuck in the cycle of destructive anger and pain, some move on.

Furthermore there are a plethora of examples (not the least being the Truth And Reconcilliation Commission) where forgiveness or acceptance without retribution is the primary source of "closure".

So no, there is no "closure" benefit to the family. Sure when you interview the families in their revenge bloodlust phase, you will get that answer. But the key is what happens afterwards. And I doubt you did 2, 5 and 10 year followups with these families to see what level of "closure" they actually got.

Surveys of incarcerated criminals aren't going to be very helpful because humans rationalize all the time. The only true measure is to look at the actual data and do your best to de-correllate. And when you do this (and on the DP side there is lots and lots of this) - you end up with no consistent deterrence effect (ie one study finds some positive correlation with publicity, but that gets refuted by another study, another finds a historical trend but didn't decorrelate for drug trade effects). And you DO find plenty of examples that are counters to the detterence claim. So it isn't any single statistical analysis. Instead it is the aggregate of all of them and the weaknesses that their biases drive them to underscore.

Add into that the neuro-biology of the OrbitoFrontal Cortex and deterrance doesn't have much basis in to stand on. The problem with arguing deterrance for the most part, is that those who believe in it, are invariably fairly sane, societally invested individuals, who's world view tends to be more fearful than average. Thus they have a hard time imagining that penalties are NOT the deterrance to crime. For example, I doubt they could understand how a well regarded banker might suddenly take to petty burglary on a regular basis. But this is but one clear example of the impact that a damaged or underdeveloped OFC has on decision making (the individual's OFC was pretty much destroyed in a car crash and suddenly his ability to reason about consequences and right and wrong disappeared). But the reality is that most criminals don't believe they will get caught, hence the punishment doesn't deter them.

As for "violence can never solve anything" - that's at best a simplistic strawman of what I was saying. We used violence to stop Hitler, but that violence didn't solve the core issues that allowed Hitler's rise to power: pervasive european anti-sematism, xenophobia, insularity and fear of Russia. Furthermore, much of the violence used to "solve Hitler" was very much unacceptable (the fire and carpet bombings of civillian targets). So a reasonable case can be made that the violence of WWII didn't really "solve" anything. In fact if we had continued with the path of violence and power "solving Hitler" - we never would have instituted the Marshall Plan. And arguably the Marshall Plan is what made the big changes in EU. ( Note that the Marshall Plan is akin to the family of a murder victim providing the incarcerated murderer with weekly care packages ).

Now your belief in a "controlled level of violence" is precisely the large mythos in the American Psyche that leads to broad irrational beliefs in "firearms self-defense", revenge based justice and our taste for things like the UFC, but those are myths.

Well, I've said it before, I sometimes wonder if we're actually living on the same planet.

When you say, "The only true measure is to look at the actual data and do your best to de-correllate. And when you do this (and on the DP side there is lots and lots of this) - you end up with no consistent deterrence effect (ie one study finds some positive correlation with publicity, but that gets refuted by another study, another finds a historical trend but didn't decorrelate for drug trade effects). And you DO find plenty of examples that are counters to the detterence claim. So it isn't any single statistical analysis. Instead it is the aggregate of all of them and the weaknesses that their biases drive them to underscore. "

What you're really saying is, "The studies don't alway agree, but someon with muy superior judgement can sort the good data from the bad and determine that there is no deterrence." If you DO find plenty of examples that counter the deterrence claim, I'm more than willing to bet you also find examples that support it. It's a wash -- besides, you missed my real point. It may not deter others from committing a crime, but the death penalty provides the ultimate deterrence for the person receiving it. That person will never commit a crime again, inside or outside of the prison system.

So, I don't really care if someone with a damaged brain can't see the consquences of his actions, but I do care that certain very dangerous people are not warehoused until they can go on being murderously antisocial in whatever way amuses them. You have dismissed the idea that such a person can go on committing crimes against society when they face a sentence of LWOP but: Crimes in prison are still crimes; No security is perfect and prison escapes are reasonably common; sometimes even those sentenced to LWOP are released by the legal system. I once covered an incident in which a prisoner was improperly released from one county's jail, when he was facing felony charges for assault ina neighboring county -- he walked two blocks, forced a woman out of her car, ignored her pleas to allow her to remove her six-year-old son from the car, ignored the fact that the six-year-old was tangled in the seatbelt, and dragged the child to his death before leading police on a high-speed chase (at the end of which he was ultimately captured, the boys bloody corpse still dangling from the vehicle). I offer this as an example that prisoner who shouldn't be released sometimes are.

I've seen various weapons actually used for self-defense, so I know that firearms can be used that way, too. That isn't "mythology" as much as you'd like it to be -- I've even provided you with citations from major newspapers, showing the self-defense use of firearms, which you chose to ignore. Firearms are "last ditch" when you've run out of other options, but any cop will tell you they are useful instruments of self defense when things get out of hand.

Which is basically my position on the death penalty. I'm a weak supporter and believe it should be available for use only in the most severe cases. You believe it will lead society into a cycle of violence -- but that didn't happen at any time in U.S. history, and the death penalty has been an option for all but a short period of that history.