/lit/ - Literature

The death penalty is bad because sometimes we make mistakes and kill innocent people.

The humanism that replaced Christianity is even more spooked about "muh morals, muh ethics". Yes.

>>14428865
Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

>>14428865
Nobody is innocent and everyone dies eventually anyways, so it doesn't really matter. Also, most "innocent" people sentenced to death had a wrap sheet of other crimes anyways, so absolutely nothing of value was lost.

>>14428869
:/
Maybe it's not a good idea to make an omelette if you are using innocent people as eggs.

>>14428882
retard

>>14428869
t. V.I. Lenin

>>14428866
I'm inclined to agree. Christianity at least had something (God) to base its morals upon in a way that made sense within their framework.

Secular humanism doesn't even pretend to justify itself; it just enforces the status quo because it is the status quo.

>>14428882
That's retarded. Even if most people were guilty (they aren't), they wouldn't be guilty of crimes deserving of the death penalty.
"Everyone dies anyway" is literally retarded. The reason death is negative is because they could have continued living, but died prematurely.

>>14428895
Not an argument.

>>14428857
Might have had something to do with women voting. But I think we've moved away from justice and more towards what works out best for society in general (in a utilitarian sense).

>>14428882
Are you lobotomized?

We realized making them stay alive is worse punishment

having prisons become overcrowded is more profitable

>>14428857
because anyone that trusts the police to get it right 100% of the time is an idiot

>>14428857
death penalty only for being black or for being female.

>>14428865
>Any punishment for crime at all is bad because sometimes we make mistakes and punish innocent people

>>14428907
Women's suffrage certainly wasn't our brightest idea.

>>14429111
Death penalty is permanent, irreversible and removes the ability for compensation for unjust punishments. Any other punishment can allow for the individual to be compensated for the injustice they faced - returning fine money, monetary compensation for prison time, etc etc.

>>14428869
I agree, obviously, but what on earth does that have to do with this?

>>14429158
How exactly do you compensate someone for stealing years of life from them or for all the times they got anally raped in prison?

>>14429514
Money seems to work.

>>14428910
Are you?

>>14428857
It robs the individual of their chance to make amends. The assumption that one can can have such a perfect evil in them that they are beyond redemption assumes presumes a perfect innocence that needs to be protected from them, yet there is not.
If there are degrees of guilt-as most people agree- it doesn’t make sense to have an absolute punishment for a crime that can be judged by different standards, depending on the point of view.

>>14428869
What kind of “omelette” do you hope to make? One without crime? There has never been a statistic showing that the presence of the death penalty lowers the rate of violent crime. On the contrary, when it is considered by the criminal at all, it is a motivation in the martyr fantasy of some killer.
The death penalty serves no purpose but make a few people feel powerful and satisfy another’s thirst for revenge.

>>14428865
We have DNA now it's pretty hard if not impossible to fuck up now.

>>14429158
There is no justice in nature. If a lion eats your family, how is he supposed to recompense you? If it had the prefrontal cortex, limbic system and language faculties of a man, it would, in fact, laugh at such a proposal.

>>14429563
You have dna but no means to establish the context in which it is found with a hundred percent certainty.
The process for testing it is not as infallible as cable television will have you believe either. A valuable tool, absolutely. But far from infallible.

>>14429570
This is not a discussion about nature, it is about human law. By your logic the initial crime is just as justified as the death penalty simply because humans are capable violence, thus making it “natural.”
If you equivocate a lion killing for sustenance to a hangman killing based on a court decision, there is really little reason to differentiate between any kind of killing at all.

>>14429519
Except it doesn't. The person always asks for an apology and they never get it.

Just ask Canadians why suing the government for wrongful imprisonment is fucking stupid. The US tortured Kadir in Guantanamo bay and because his father took him from Canada while he was still underage he was considered a Canadian citizen so because the Canadian government didn't fight the US over the release of a terrorist they settled out of court for $15 Million.

>>14429563
lol retard. you know nothing about forensics. its a shitshow

>>14429573
Where I live we have the death penalty. The amount evidence you need to get a conviction is very high.
You more or less have to confess to doing it/be convicted of multiple counts of murder to have a judge sentence you to death. You get appeals and shit to. So what I said before still stands.

>>14428857
Because the first world as it is today is the pinnacle of materialism. There is no higher good to them than human life, which is an absurd thought to me. There are many things that are objectively much more important.

>>14429914
like what?

>>14429791
where you lice?

>>14429918
Teenage boypussy

I DONT WANT TO SMOKE A CIGARETTE

>>14429918
To name a few:
Justice. Aesthetics. Virtue. Freedom. Goodness. Submission towards God. The community itself.

We need to bring it back. Prisons are just an absolute money-sink that we can barely afford anymore. Not to mention we have too many rich fucks that are committing crimes that should get the death penalty and walk because """"""""rule of law"""""""" in the west is an absolute joke, in North Korea nobody is safe from the death penalty - not even at the highest ranks of government.

>but you might kill innocent people sometimes!
The Chinese have the right idea, kill em all and let god sort them out. If you kill enough criminals then the increased security of such a society outweighs the occasional inaccuracy of justice.

>>14428907
>and more towards what works out best for society in general (in a utilitarian sense).
More evidence that utilitarianism is pants on head retarded.

>>14429563
dna is not as fucking solid of evidence as the retard chimps like you and the jury and the persecutor crack it up to be.

>>14429613
You're comparing fucking Guantanamo bay and torture to regular imprisonment.

Because it doesn't work. The evidence is clear that the death penalty has no deterrent effect.

Think about it. If the fine for speeding was $5,000 but nobody ever got caught, everyone would speed. If the fine for speeding was $20 but you got caught literally every time, nobody would speed. Probability of punishment, not magnitude of punishment, is where the deterrent effect comes from.

Plus, criminals don't think they're going to get caught. 2 years in jail or 20 years in jail - they both suck. If you thought you were going to get punished you just wouldn't do it. Criminals commit crimes because they think they'll get away with it - the sentence of the crime they're committing doesn't factor into the decision making because they don't think they'll get caught. (This isn't totally true, criminals do still consider the relative punishment for the crime, but the importance of those considerations are 'discounted' by the effect I outlined).

Lastly, crime is to some extent a symptom of failure of government. If society and the government did their job properly, there would be no criminals (in theory - maybe never "no" criminals but certainly less). The death penalty forces the victim to pay for the crimes of society (all punishments do but the death penalty is manifestly unjust because it has no possibility of rehabilitation).

You don't even need to talk about accidentally executing the wrong people or giving the government too much power to kill people. The death penalty doesn't work and is morally wrong.

>>14430034
It's not about the deterring effect. It's about deciding what you want your society to look like. If you decide that rapists and murderers are not fit to live among you, there's only one logical solution.

>>14430040
>If you decide that rapists and murderers are not fit to live among you, there's only one logical solution.
Take proactive steps to prevent the conditions that inevitably breed rapists and murderers?

Or do you mean do nothing, be """outraged""" when rapists and murderers inevitably crop up, and then murder them yourself.

>>14430063
You can do both. Having the death penalty doesn't preclude you from have any other legislation at all.

Take steps to prevent rapes and murderers before they happen.
Fry rapists and murderers when they do it.
Building a better society in two easy steps.

>>14430034
This is the gayest post I've read in many years. A strong last minute contender for biggest fag of the decade.

>>14430081
Except the personality of the people who support the death penalty precludes supporting initiatives that would reduce its necessity.

>"wow that's a bit of a generalisation"
Yeah but it's true. Maybe you're a perfect enlightened being like me - you probably are - but most people are dipshits who make their decisions based on what "feels" right, and what "feels" right depends on their personality.

The kinds of people who support the death penalty are the same kinds of people who want to cut support services for the poor. They are incapable of doing both.

>"that sounds like partisan pseudoscience to me"
Okay, but then look at the world. The societies that have the death penalty focus less on rehabilitation and social programs, and the societies that don't have the death penalty focus more. This gels perfectly with my personality theory - where people who want the death penalty are in power, they don't fund social programs. They refuse to do both.

Politics is a messy business, anyway.

>>14430117
This is a literally a strawman argument. What you're doing is constructing a fictional belief system that no one necessarily believes solely for the purpose of knocking it down and declaring that a blow to any case for capital punishment. You didn't respond to any of the arguments for it ITT, you just constructed your own deliberately weak and uncharitable argument that you think the kind of person who'd support the death penalty would probably agree with. This is facebook-tier discourse.

And what you've just said has a glaring, critical flaw in it. It's not true at all that people who support the death penalty want to cut services for the poor. You are just a dumb American who imagines the entire world to be like an extended version of your country where there's all politics is divided along Republican and Democrat ideological lines. This is pure mental retardation. In truth the last countries to practice capital punishment were all communist countries, all extent communist-party ruled states still uphold the death penalty. Historically communism and capital punishment have had a very intimate relationship. Even outside of that most other non-communist countries that practice the death penalty are very poor, the abundance of poverty here is not because of niggardly Republicans controlling the government - it's simply because these countries are very underdeveloped and would have huge amounts of poverty no matter what the ruling ideology is.

Globally in the year 2019 the death penalty is mainly favoured by communists and political Islamists (though not exclusively and not necessarily). These are both ideological groups that actually would be quite strongly in favour of greater support services for the poor and greater social programs. Your country's politics are not representative of the greater world, they're the laughing stock of the greater world.

>>14430173
*the last countries to practice capital punishment in Europe

>>14428900
Based post

>>14430173
You understand politics primarily through ideology. In reality the USSR was deeply conservative. You can contort an ideology into supporting anything you want - all that matters is what you want. And that's determined by personality.

For example, the strongest predictor of whether a Briton voted for Brexit is whether or not they support the death penalty. How does this make sense? Ideologically and rationally those are totally unconnected policies. But there is a certain kind of personality that is attracted to both - and this is not a trivial point, it was the STRONGEST predictor. This is more predictive than literally anything else. Personality is a much better way of understanding politics than ideology. The kinds of personalities that support the death penalty will not support expanding social services for the poor, EVEN IF they claim to belong to ideologies that would.

That's why, historically, communist countries have been autocratic tyrannies that have done nothing to liberate the poor. People who support the death penalty lack exactly the same kind of empathy that would otherwise make them concerned about the autonomy and freedom of poor people.

>"but you're just defining conservatism as 'having the death penalty' and progressive as not."
I consider something to be conservative if it's autocratic and hierarchical. Those features have nothing to do with ideology, but when you look at conservative nations those features are always apparent. The more autocratic and hierarchical a society, the more conservative its policies will inevitably be. This is, again, because the kinds of people who value and perpetuate autocratic and hierarchical societies are the kinds of people who like conservative politics.

>>14429943
All of the things you've listen are very subjective values, the only universal to be found is improving the human condition.
I am not implying that it has to only be in a materialist form, but when it comes to materialism it tends to be an universal language that is easier to agree upon than things like "Aesthetics"

>>14428869
Yes, we can. We did it. We live in a society without death penalty. We made an omelette without breaking eggs.

>>14429514
well it's obviously easier than reviving a dead man

>>14428857
Death Penalty should be reserved for the extreme cases. Capital Punishment is done not only for justice but as a display of what happens when you don't respect basic law.
>>14428865
So you're fine with serial rapists, mass killers, and those who've committed treason getting away with what they've done? You think all the lives they ruined will be avenged when a person gets a life sentence?

there is not a single good reason to abolish the death penalty

Japan has the death penalty

>>14430486
Japan isn't first world

>>14430467
>You think all the lives they ruined will be avenged when a person gets a life sentence?
There's a reason we call it the justice system, not the vengeance system, you fucking brainlet.

>>14430542
You call letting molesters live justice?

>>14430549
Yes.

>>14428857
>Why did we effectively abolish the death penalty in the first world? Was it a good idea?
we abolished it because it costs a lot of money. more money via decades of expensive court cases to appeal death sentences than it costs to just imprison someone for their natural life span.
was it a good idea to abolish it? i personally think so yes. theres pretty much zero benefit to the death penalty, and since we get it wrong sometimes its better to just not do it.

Everyone is better than their worse, no one is beyond saving (except extremely mentally ill people which should be put in mental hospitals), we're losing people that could be valuable members of society because we're too up our asses in this blind and outdated moral system.

>>14430486
there's no crimes in japan

>>14430040
>live among you
they don't "live amongst us". we put them in prisons

>>14428913
Based and truthpilled

death isn't the scariest thing