How do you feel about … the DEATH PENALTY? Should it be outlawed? ( Archived) (79)

It seems unfair that people should have to die just because you can't tell the difference between fact and fiction.

Well, I was thinking mostly turn about fair play for England today and make it a penal colony and work camp for people like they did in Australia centuries ago. Just joking again.

In order to even start thinking about that, one would need to know what purpose the punishment was meant to serve.

Would it be to satisfy some concept of justice that demands he suffer something equivalent to that which he has inflicted?

Should it be something that would act as an effective deterrent to others who might be considering committing a similar crime?

Should it be to make him suffer to such an extent that would satisfy the hatred and hostility of the public, so that we could get those feelings out of our systems?

I mean what do we want to achieve?

I don't know what principles we should base the punishment of criminals on. But, back to the death sentence: I don't think it is just a matter of what the criminal/murderer deserves, it's also about how we, as a society, behave. To set a date for a man's death, lock him away to think about the coming event, and then finally come for him at the appointed time; it seems barbaric, which adds a bit too much tragic irony to the affair for my liking. And the way it is often carried out is even more barbaric. Electric chairs, gas chambers, a rope over a trap door; they are not just apparatus of death, they are instrument of psychological torture. It could easily be said that some people deserve to go through that, and I wouldn't disagree, but I still find it worrying that a so-called civilised society could sanction it.

If public lust for revenge or joy at seeing the death sentence being carried out were true, open public executions would have become as popular sporting events long ago.
I'm all in favour of enlarging the criteria for the death penalties demanding at the very least public executions, no fees charged to attend, and televised live with no commercial breaks. Enlarge the criteria to include stupidity, crimes of economic terror waged on the poor, having hill-billy accents, wearing mullets, belonging to any Republican organization singing any country western songs in public, killing any non-white person, social predators, sechs perverts religious extremists be they Zionists and any Evangelicals; all believers in the Apocalypse or the rapture, i.e. religious nuts; NRA fanatics and members...like who actually needs any of these types to make a healthy and sane society. Really.