Capital Punishment

No.

There are countless cases of wrongful conviction. Even if one of those fails the appeal process and is wrongfully executed, then that's murder. Meanwhile, those wrongfully convicted who are sentenced to life imprisonment have a chance at someday being freed, and even if they are never freed, they can live out their sentence with the satisfaction that they are innocent. Spiritually that can mean a lot.

For those who deserve punishment, life imprisonment is a harsher punishment. They don't deserve to get off so easy by having their life (and suffering) ended early. Let them rot in jail. Unlike the innocent mentioned above, they have no spiritual satisfaction.

Lastly, in the US it costs more to execute someone than it does to keep them in prison for the rest of their life. And instead of corrections officers benefiting from the incarceration through continued employment, in the case of an execution, the only ones who benefit are the lawyers.

It makes no sense to spend all that money to kill someone who might be innocent, or to kill someone who is guilty and put them out of their misery. Let them stew in their misery. And give the jobs to the corrections staff, not the lawyers.

I don't support the death penalty as a run of the mill punishment (e.g. "the penalty for murder is death"), because human knowledge is imperfect and it's too easy to kill an innocent man.

But I think there are exceptional cases where it can be used. Where the guilt is not in question, and the crime is so horrendous, such as serial killer of children, and he laughs and is proud of it.

This kind of person is so rare, I would expect the death penalty to be used like once or twice a decade.

My country (Australia) is just below Asia, a dynamic and growing continent. But they take drug trafficking very seriously, and will give the death penalty for it. The firing squad. I just mention this for people who want to paint the US as extreme for killing murderers, it's all relative, and the US is middle of the road.

I'm in a country in Asia where they hang you for drug trafficking, and the amounts to "qualify" for the death penalty are extremely low compared to non-death serious punishment in the rest of the world.

I think, it's 2011, killing anyone as a legal, legitimate punishment is, well, certainly archaic. It may be warranted for serial killers and what not but Tonton's points above are sound.

Humanity would take a great stride forward when we don't kill those that don't want to die and we assist those that do want to move on. Imagine the kind of society and spiritual outlook needed for that to happen.

Well said. I agree.

If applied correctly, the today's technology should be be able to prevent wrongful convictions. There should be safeguards, meaning that we should have a different evidentiary standard for the death penalty...if we're going to have it.


Modern prisons are far too good for some.


That's not clear cut (cost). It's hard to determine. We do know that it costs between 1 and 3 million to give someone life without parole.


The chance the person is innocent is very slim. It takes years to go through the process, with every case being reviewed multiple times.

All that said..I'm unsure if how I feel about the death penalty. I don't think it's a crime deterrent, and it's rarely carried out. Many inmates are on death row for 20 years! In essence we don't have a death penalty. My other problem is that our Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual" punishment. Isn't putting someone to death cruel and/or unusual? There's at least an argument it is.

What's cruel and unusual is the overcrowding of our prisons with those who committed victimless crimes--and the idea that prison rape is something normal and to be expected.

As long as non-dangerous recreational drugs are decriminalized.

LSD, Marajuana and MDMA should all be legal and regulated.

All forms of cocaine and heroin and PCP and methamphetamines and Ketamine should remain highly illegal.

No matter how perfect and flawless the technology, its not going to work within a "justice" system which is imperfect and severely flawed. The worst parts of human nature allow for it.


I can name of a few people in public life for whom "modern prisons are too good". But I won't.


But think of the profits for CCA and the other prison industrial companies!


Ethically, (imho) that's not sufficient. The chance would have to be exactly *zero* of innocence before that aspect of capital punishment can be "ethically cleared", if such a term is even appropriate? Then what are the ethics of declaring oneself "God" and taking another's life? But then, do ethics count for anything in today's uber-materialistic society?


Really? And then, how about the extrajudicial killings that have been justified by the war on terrorism? How about the dozens of independent journalists murdered in Iraq?


Agreed about the non-deterrent aspect of the death penalty. When the Constitution was written the death penalty was a very common punishment, and the cruelty of its usual method, by "hanging from the neck until dead" is debatable (death was swift if the hangman did his job properly). Of course, the dead cannot speak re. the cruelty of the method of their demise. Today, capital punishment is either outlawed or under as moratorium in 136 nations. So perhaps capital punishment is now a "less than usual" (unusual?) form of punishment worldwide. The nations that have retained the death penalty almost all in SE Asia, Africa and the Caribbean islands... and the US... the sole Western industrial nation to retain it.

We agree there. There are far too many people in jail for non-violent drug offenses and/or white collar crimes.











Why should cocaine et al be illegal to consume? I think that it shouldn't be illegal for any adult to put any substance in his body. That said, drug use is very harmful to our society. My preference would be to put our "war on drugs" money into treatment and anti-drug education programs. Many say that stopping our war on supply would result in drugs flooding the streets. To that, I reply that drugs already flood our streets. We need to try something different.


All justice systems are imperfect and severely flawed.


Of course you can. Just as you can ignore and dismiss actual murderers.


Getting to zero is impossible. And I love it when liberals try to invoke God in their arguments...


Yes, really. Read your own fucking link. I'm not taking the bait on the WOT thing.


I frankly don't care what other nations do in this case. I really don't.

We'll agree on the drugs. We'll disagree on the white collar crimes. Fraud, especially the kind that led to the economic collapse, should be severely punished. The perpetrators of that collapse should be locked up for quite a while.

Sounds like a politician-

"White-collar crime, therefore, overlaps with corporate crime because the opportunity for fraud, bribery, insider trading, embezzlement, computer crime, copyright infringement, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery are more available to white-collar employees."

Cowards in other words!

First of all, despite what the FDA says about marijuana there are many instances where it can be extremely good for you, such as in controlling the pain and loss of appetite from chemotherapy or AIDS treatment. Get your facts straight.

Second, it's not about what's good for you. Chocolate isn't good for you.

And third, I don't believe you. Toxicity deaths from LSD are extremely rare/almost unheard of. Even if you believe the questionable stories or possible misdiagnoses, LSD overdose resulting in death is Probably about 1/10000th as common per dose as toxicity deaths from alcohol. LSD use resulting in self-harm or harm of others is also negligible compared to the effects of alcohol. And any bad experience can make you nuts. Perhaps we should outlaw love if that's a criterion.

I'm not interested in a "harsher" punishment... I just want them put down so they quit bothering the rest of society.





Source?
I don't have a source to prove otherwise, but I find your statement a bit hard to swallow. If, say, the average life sentence lasts 30-40 years, I find it hard to believe that's cheaper than killing them. They still rack up the same appeals costs, etc as the person being put to death.
The judicial system and associated punishments are NOT about providing jobs.



Air conditioning/Heating. Television. Workout facilities. 3 meals a day. Roof over your head. Unlimited no-cost health care.

How is that "punishment"? It's a better life than many of them lived in "freedom". The threat of rape or a gang beating is the only "deterrent" left to make prison seem like a place you DON'T want to be.

The Taliban reduced the production of opium by 95% and since the US invaded it has skyrocketed. The US plays an important role in the growth of opium and it's distribution. 10,000 deaths in the EU each year doesn't deter them when there's so much money at stake. The yearly street value is somewhere around $500 billion from Afghanistan.

Can the US stop it?

It could buy the yearly crop of opium for the same amount it spends each month fighting the war-

"Rather than fighting the cultivation through military efforts, Kinzer said, the US government should purchase the annual poppy crop from Afghan farmers for an estimated $3-4 billion a year – the same amount spent on the war in Afghanistan every month."
~ http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2011...t-as-ever.html

Your opinion aside. Here are some actual facts on LSD.

http://www.justice.gov/ndic/pubs4/4260/index.htm


http://www.drugabuse.gov/infofacts/hallucinogens.html


http://www.neurosoup.com/schedule1/deathstats.htm

854.1\tPsychodysleptics\tLSD, Mescaline, Psilocybin\t54\t1.14

Not a very poisonous substance. Those deaths are over the course of many years and are the combined numbers of the three drugs listed. However, the death rate due to a "bad trip" cannot be ignored, no matter how you want to pretend it is no worse than any emotional response.

I am done digging on this. I am sure there are many more links to data that can be brought up. Your dismissal of his friends death was rude. He did not say it was due to poisoning, it may have been due to many other side effects. It may be safe related to some of the harsher drugs like crack, however safety is is the eyes of the beholder.

Do you have a source for this?... or are you just making up numbers?

The article you quoted says the production drops were due to agricultural disease... not because of either the U.S. OR the Taliban. (Unless, perhaps, the disease was introduced by one or the other party???)

How is it that the U.S. plays an "important" role in opium's growth and distribution? (Neither idea is covered in the article you DID quote.)

The point is, it's a hell of a lot safer (somewhere along the order of a hundred times safer at least) than alcohol, both for toxicity and for secondary death (e.g. drunk driving death). So choosing one of the two, which should be illegal... or neither?

Obviously I don't always have readily available links but the 95% reduction under the Taliban comes from the BBC-

"Despite its own figures showing the Taleban had cut Afghanistan's heroin production by about 95%, the report claimed that heroin had "financed the former Taleban regime".

The UN International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) report, released on 26 February, said that Afghanistan produced 3,400 tonnes last year, up from 185 tonnes in 2001."
~ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2814861.stm

This is interesting too-

"Do you think that Russia, with its hard-won experience, could lead the global fight against Afghanistan's drug-traffic?

Today Afghanistan produces nearly the world's entire volume of opiates. This is a phenomenon. We invited participants to a Moscow forum to say that the world needs to take responsibility for the fate of Afghanistan; the decision was made to apply military force, so Afghanistan would become a free, democratic, developing state; but since that decision was made, the amount of heroine produced in Afghanistan has grown by 40 times."
~ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored...rugs-tsar.html


And I don't make stuff up, thats for e# and SDW to do in the GW thread.

The size and scope of annual trade in narcotics ranks alongside oil and arms.

extracted:


We have been led to believe that drug dealers keep their profits "under their mattresses". There is no $interest on a mattress investment, only depreciation due to inflation, and a security nightmare to boot. Of course the major dealers and suppliers use the banking system, or other "respectable" (!) institutions... they are all members of the same corrupt system.

Why do you think the US was planning on invading Afghanistan as early as 1999, and specific plans for Afghanistan and Iraq were on the George W. Bush Oval Office desk as early as January 2001? Then there was the issue of the Taliban playing hardball re. the Unocal pipeline.... the war against Afghanistan was a virtual certainty, that is, if Congress and the US public could have been persuaded to support such.

Yeah it's pretty crazy. That's REAL money! Who else has it? lol.

Wachovia and no doubt others are in on the trade-

"Sloman said a systematic failure by Wachovia, now a unit of Wells Fargo & Co , to maintain effective anti-money laundering (AML) controls had led to more than $400 billion in unmonitored funds being channeled to accounts at the bank between 2004 and 2007 by currency exchange houses in Mexico, mostly through wire transfers."
~ http://www.signalnonoise.com/?p=842

And that $400 billion is just Mexico alone in just three years from one bank (I think there were actually two charged, but the article doesn't say that).

Wachovia was providing a great service if you're a drug dealer especially and I suspect of that unmonitored $400 billion most was drug money or funded by drug money (and illegal arms) and made Wachovia far more than the $160 million the government made them pay.

"Investigators said that although Wachovia had been aware since 1996 and through 2004 of the high risk that drugs money was being laundered through the Mexican currency exchange houses, it expanded its business with them, and failed to implement monitoring procedures as required under law.

We count on banks to be our first line of defense, against money-laundering, fraud and financing for terrorism, said Daniel Auer, Special Agent in Charge in Miami for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)."

The point you made was that Marv was lying to you and that his friends death was not what he said it was. That is what i was addressing with actual facts rather than simple dismissal of your position.

To your pooint, Alcohol can be safer, or less safe than any other drug depending on dosage. Same goes for most, not all, other drugs. Even with LSD your results will vary depending on simple surroundings during the use of the drug, the music playing, or your state of mind when you began. The dosage itself is another factor that must be kept in mind, and the side effects speak for themselves. The drug may not be physically damaging overall, but the results can be very unpredictable otherwise which makes the drug disturbing to people and has led to a lot of mythos around it.

So as someone who hates nanny states so much, you should be in favor of legalizing all drugs and letting individuals take personal responsibility. It's sad...drug legalization and prostitution SHOULD be huge conservative causes that many on the left would agree with...and yet, we don't have very many real conservatives in the Republican party.

As Jimmy Carter recently stated, and I paraphrase here, the punishment for doing drugs should not be worse than the effects of the drugs themselves. Full decriminalization is needed at the very least. Full legalization is the dream.

Keeping the thread on topic...

"Drugs" can cause death... it's pretty much the definitive symptom of overdose.
So the punishment for doing drugs could be the death penalty!

I'm sorry to hear about your friend, and I apologize for assuming you meant it was a death due to toxicity. But.. As far as falling from a height is concerned... I know someone who died the same way as a result of alcohol. I'm not kidding. So the question remains... Is LSD more dangerous than alcohol?

Getting In your car and driving down the road to the supermarket has a higher death rate than taking LSD. Perhaps we should have the death penalty for speeding?

Guess I should have added the "winking smiley" to ensure the sarcasm was understood.

Was that directed at me?

There's another aspect of drug pushing that seldom gets mentioned. Turn on your TV and you will see all manner of dangerous substances, requiring a doctor's prescription, being advertised to the general *public*, the huge majority of whom no nothing little about the (side) effects of these chemicals, and implicitly trust in the medical profession to "make them better when they get sick". The same hard sell advertising campaigns are directed at doctors and other health professionals, with generous paybacks and other perks in order "shift the most units", regardless of the necessity of the prescription.

As a result of America's craze for arbitrarily popping pills on (often misplaced) trust, approximately 100,000 people die and 2 million are injured by poisoning/bad reactions to prescription drugs each year. Nobody goes to jail as a result. Punishment (re drugs) is dependent on status... Vioxx for example... the maker (Merck) fabricated efficacy studies, earned $2.5 billion from pushing this stuff... . (from wikipedia: FDA analysts estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were probably fatal, in the five years the drug was on the market. If this analysis of U.S. data is accurate, the worldwide death toll due to Vioxx would be in the hundreds of thousands).

In contrast, grow a few marijuana plants......

I don't know...I think that we can do better than to just throw these people behind bars. I'd rather see them forced to help undue the damage they've caused, participate in public service, etc than sacrifice their freedom in most cases. And who are the "perpetrators" of the economic collapse, exactly?


I'm sorry about your friend. I also see why tonton assumed you meant it was from poisoning. Drugs are not "bad" for you in many cases. It depends on dosage, frequency of use, and of course--the type of drug. Marijuana (as others note) can actually be beneficial, as can many others. Regardless, I still don't think the government should be telling us what we can put in our bodies.


Agreed.


It can be quite good for you, actually.


And third, I don't believe you. Toxicity deaths from LSD are extremely rare/almost unheard of. Even if you believe the questionable stories or possible misdiagnoses, LSD overdose resulting in death is Probably about 1/10000th as common per dose as toxicity deaths from alcohol. LSD use resulting in self-harm or harm of others is also negligible compared to the effects of alcohol. And any bad experience can make you nuts. Perhaps we should outlaw love if that's a criterion.[/QUOTE]

We now know he didn't mean that, but your point remains.




Thanks for hit and run. As for Afghanistan, I understand...but what is your point? Did we deliberately allow more production, or just ignore it, or did it happen for some other reason.


....and we're back. Next up on Conspiracy Hour Today with Sammi Jo Conspiracy: The Secret US Plan to Invade Afghanistan...did it involve deliberately increasing drug supply? Film at 11!




I think it arguably might be. Consider for a moment that people consumed it like they do alcohol. How would it impact their daily activities? What if the two martini lunch became the two hit lunch? I think that would be much more dangerous. That's not an argument for making it illegal, but that's what I think.




We agree there. I have my problems with the FDA allowing TV advertising for drugs since it started in what...1997?


Now you're just making it shit up. As for Vioxx, it's not that simple. First, they didn't "make" $2.5 billion. That was their total sales. And there is no evidence that Vioxx "caused" even close to that number of heart attacks. From wiki:


Translation: Among people with previous cardiac problems, those on Vioxx experienced a greater risk of heart attacks than those taking naproxen. This rate was a .4% in naproxen patients and .1% in Vioxx patients. Where Merck got in trouble was when they claimed the difference was due to the protective effects of naproxen.


Merck should have acknowledged and dealt with the data. That kind of an increase is significant, but it was still a very low number and among people with previous heart problems. Vioxx itself was supposed to be an amazingly effective pain reliever, as was another COX inhibitor, Bextra (which I took). Bextra was taken off the market as well. In the words of my pain management doctor (low back problems for years), it was clearly a safe medication. The point is that Vioxx was not the devil. It was not causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. It simply should have been counter-indicated for people with cardiac history. And Merck should have stepped up to the plate.

And alcohol is harmful. Maybe you're drunk now the way you sound.

Outlawing alcohol is harmful.

And... (fill in the blank).

Its Infantile Hour with SDW2001, yet again, episode 256e.

The plan to invade Afghanistan prior to 9/11 was not "secret". Even the fucking BBC, a media company funded by the UK Government, reported this intent.

MSNBC, the well known crypto-communist conspiracy theorist media conglomerate, also reported that Afghanistan was in the sights of the Bush Administration well before 9/11.

So having established that 9/11 was NOT the reason to invade Afghanistan.. but was hard-sold as the justification for it... what else are we left with?

Oil and Drugs. The two biggest global money spinners... outside of warmongering.

I'm busy,

But briefly the bbc isn't givernment funded. Only the world service is government funded and that may be put under the umbrella of the liscence fee too soon-
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC

Thats open to debate. The cost of a TV license fee, which covers most of the BBC's operating cost, is set by a UK Government Department. It is also against UK law (a criminal offense) to operate, even possess, a television without said license. In other words, the BBC is paid for by the UK public, and the UK Government, being (in theory) a democratic institution, represents said public. The BBC is not a privately run news service, as are the US networks.

Carry on.

You don't have to have a liscence just to own a tv. You are free to watch any of the myriad of tv without a liscence. You just can't watchive BBC programming. Indeed here we can watch the bbc iPlayer without a liscence too, so long as it's not live.

The Bbc is privately owned but it's under a charter so it's not as indepemdent as whoy commercial tv, however how free are they from the advertisers? I reckon the bbc is ironically more free as a result that all those drug ads make the like abc etc.

*walking with iPhone!!


Oops!

It seems you need a tv liscence to watch any live tv whether it's the bbc or not! Learn something new everd day!


For kingsofsomewherehot- http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.u...rogs/tvlicence