Unbelievably, I have just lost another post. I shall be using this one to counter the arguments and counterarguments put forward by my opponent.
A lot of the time, people assume that the offenders in these cases are "sent to jail to rot". That's hardly the case. Do you know what awaits criminals once they go to jail? They get the right to have air conditioners, cable television, free meals three times a day, all the porn magazines they can have access to, personal recreation time, all the books they can read, the opportunity to take classes, and visits with friends and family.
I'm going to stop you there. You appear to be confusing minimum security prisons, which hold people like convicted fraudsters and tax evaders with maximum security prisons which hold rapists etc. A typical murderer, which is the only capital offense, either gets sent to maximum security prison or a mental institution, neither of which have any luxuries. It is also worth pointing out that most people on Death Row have a lot more access to privlidges than your standard life termers.
Much of what follows is based on this false assumption of prison conditions, but I shall run with it nonetheless.
They also are given the freedom of conjugal visits. I'm sure the families affected by the murder of a loved one would like to still have the opportunity to visit their deceased family member. All of this is made possible thanks to the taxpayer.
Firstly, as has been shown the cost to the taxpayer for a death row inmate is considerably more. Secondly, very few maximum security prisoners are entitled to conjugal visitation. In fact, it is only open to prisoners in 7 states, only two of which do not have the death penalty, so this is a minority at best of people who would otherwise be on death row.
Let's assume that a person does unspeakable crimes to a young boy. In a state where the death penalty is abolished, that person may have a hard time adjusting at first, but eventually, they get all of the freedoms that are listed above, and to add insult to injury, the parents are basically paying for the opportunity for the child killer to have those freedoms. What kind of a just punishment is that?
Except they don't get the freedoms. Indeed, most prisoners are held in cells for 18 or so hours a day, and the rest of the time is spent doing useful things such as exercise and labour. If you want to reduce the few luxuries they do have, then you will be presented with several thousand potential mental breakdowns. Either way, given the choice of spending the equivalent of 10% of the tax I earn in my whole life to projects like prison books over something like 1000% of the tax I ever pay going to one execution procedure, the choice becomes less clear cut.
If your sister or mother were brutally raped and murdered, would you want the person who committed the crime to have all of the freedoms that I listed above?
No, so it's good they wouldn't get them.
As the liberal agenda continues to infest the justice system, the more freedoms, rights, and privileges the dregs of society are allowed. It's not right. "Rotting in jail" rarely ever happens anymore. After a certain period of time, jail just becomes like home to these people who are in there for life. Besides the chance of getting raped every now and then, inmates are basically allowed to live a normal life.
You know when you go in the shower? Does someone try and put their cock up your arse? You know when you don't turn your light on at night, does someone come and hit you with a stick? You know when you wake up in the morning, do you stay in your room for most of the day, and never go further than about 20 yards away to walk around a yard for 20 minutes? If the answer to all of those questions is yes, then yes, prisoners do have a normal life.
The punishment for petty theft is usually jailtime. People can go to jail for not showing up to jury duty, or driving drunk without actually killing anybody. If the punishment for those crimes is jailtime, then the punishment of taking a life should be worse than that.
You're seriously going with this? They may be of the same kind, but they are not the same punishment. Just because two things are similar, doesn't mean they are the same thing. There's a guy who wipes up jizz from a wank booth in Amsterdam for £3 an hour. There's a guy who buys a lottery ticket and wins £100 million. They both end up with money, so in your eyes their lives are on similar paths.
This is directly akin to your version of crime. You skip jury duty and you go to minimum security gaol for 2 weeks. You leave, get on with your life. You kill someone, you spend the rest of your life in a maximum security prison. Both men die having been to prison, but it is not the same thing that has happened to them.
There's also the possibility that murderers will become repeat offenders while in prison, taking the life of a fellow inmate if he's really a loose cannon and they have a disagreement of some sort.
Highly unlikely, actually, and certainly no more likely than between death row prisoners. Prisoners who are violent to each other are generally moved somewhere like Florence ADX, where there is 23 hours a day of solitary confinement.
Here's an example of someone who should most certainly get the death penalty with all of the lives that he's affected. You cannot tell me with a straight face that this bastard should be given ANY of the freedoms that I've listed above:
This is a quote from Michael Bradbury, who is the District Attorney of Ventura County in California:
Theodore Frank is an excellent example actually of another problem with the death penalty. Nobody can seriously argue that you should kill a man without having been through the necessary appeal procedure. Frank died of a heart attack having spent 23 years on death row. The only difference between what actually happened to him and what would have happened if he got a life term would be that the tax payer would have saved money on all the appeal procedures he went through during that 23 year period.
There is no way that people like this guy should be given any type of right to live another day. My blood is boiling from just reading that statement. He is not entitled to any rights at all, especially the right to life. There is no rehabilitating him, he's so far gone. This is a case that the death penalty is most definitely an affirmation of the sanctity of life.
Is it? What if he was mentally ill? Do you know he wasn't? What if he didn't do it? There can be no argument that a man like Theodore Frank should be punished, but there are so many factors at hand here that you can't just string someone up from a lampost as soon as they are arrested.
In most cases like petty theft, drunk driving, and the like, the person who commits the crime pays their debt to society after serving a prison sentence. Prison is to deter a crime from taking place and to teach a lesson to the perpetrator. In the case of getting life in jail, then there's an outstanding debt to society that will never get paid. Once a person takes a life, they should surrender all of their rights, including their right to live.
But they are surrendering all of their rights to freedom, all they have is basic provision. The outcome is exactly the same, they die in gaol. The only difference is the fact that your way involves paying somewhere in the vicinity of 100 people to be involved in an execution process, and my way involves mother nature doing the biz.
This used to be a valid argument, but the chance of this happening nowadays is very small. Before a person is judged for a crime, twelve people have to come to a decision that beyond a reasonable doubt, the perpetrator is or is not guilty.
Look at the Krone case again. Are you trying to tell me the fact that someone else's fingerprints were on the body and around the scene, the fact that his weren't, the fact that the footprints didn't match his shoe size and the fact he had a sound alibi aren't grounds for reasonable doubt? Juries are swayed by good lawyers, and they are by no means infallible.
With all of the advances in forensic science that are emerging, plus the ability to continue to request retrials, the odds of an innocent person getting executed are very small. This is why the justice system allows the opportunity for perpetrators to continue to appeal their sentence.
Wrong. The world is not some CSI land where science has all the answers. 9 people have been exonorated from death row this year, all of them having been convicted after the advent of DNA. Forensic evidence may have meant that it is more likely to get the right guy, but it hasn't really made it less likely to get the wrong guy, as proved by these 9 cases.
Nobody is disputing that an innocent person getting sentenced to death is terrible, but this is why the appeals process exists. That process anticipates error and if the person is exonerated of the crime, then remedy is provided.
I'm sorry but spending 20 years waiting to be killed for something you didn't do is going to have a psychological effect on anyone. The suicide rate on death row is ten times the US average and 6 times the US prison average. Classic case in point is Frank Lee Smith, who died in 2000 on death row, only to be exonorated later that year.
As far as your second point goes, nobody is saying that the justice system is perfect. Yes, there are overzealous prosecutors who are looking out for themselves. The case of Jesse Tafero was poorly executed, and yes, the other guy perjured in order to save himself. The fact of the matter is that way more often than not, the death penalty works, and it is a deterrent to committing murder. In fact, the death penalty is actually 100% effective as a deterrent to crime: the murderer will never commit another crime once he has been executed.
SO is life in prison. Show me anyone who has spent the rest of his life in prison after being caught that has killed anyone.
Murderers are very likely to become repeat offenders.
Actually, no they aren't. Murderers who are dangerous spend the rest of their lives in prison. Murderers who kill in crimes of passion etc. and are neither sentenced to death or life where it is available, rarely reoffend.
Even in the case of life sentences, not only are fellow inmates at risk to be murdered, but so are the correctional officers. Also, here's a mindblowing situation: What if a murderer commits murder of an innocent person tried for murder while in prison? Murderers need to be given the stiffest of penalties.
You just said there's an appeal process. It's not a trial followed by a death. People sentenced to death also get put in prison for a very long time. A murderer is just as likely to kil someone else on death row as they are in a standard life sentence. Not to mention that instances of this happening are very low.
The case of Cameron Willingham is still up in the air. It's unfair to say that he's innocent in this case when the case is still under consideration. Also, you can't have it both ways. Your argument lacks consistency when you bring up the use of faulty forensic evidence leading to the execution of a possibly innocent man and bring up the use of DNA evidence to defend another case.
Firstly, if he hadn't already been killed, it's almost certain he'd have been exonorated, given the evidence. Secondly, it was fire forensics which has been discredited by fellow fire forensic scientists since. If anything this serves to prove my point that forensics doesn't prove everything. DNA, if available, categorically proves cases, but the problem surrounds the fact that its not always there. When it is there, as with Krone, it can prove innocence.
If anything, it shows that forensic science is having such great improvements that it is getting people who were sentenced to death proven innocent. And it also shows that the advances in forensic science are becoming so great that the chances of an innocent ever getting sentenced to death are incredibly slim.
Like I said, 9 exonorations in a year. Unless you have a decent DNA sample, you can't categorically prove anything which has been the status quo since 1990. There have been almost 100 wrongful convictions since 1990, which speaks for itself.
Here are the results of seven studies that show the death penalty is indeed a deterrent :
For every study, there's a counter study, observe:
I think I've discussed this at length. Prison is pretty much a low class resort of the dregs of society. Murderers still get to live their lives, while the families grieve the death of their loved one... in some cases, they may never get over it. If I had a family member killed, I'd want the person who caused it dead. Like I've said twice already... nobody rots in prison anymore. Not with a liberal agenda making sure these barbarians have rights they should never be entitled to.
People do spend the rest of their lives in prison. This happens very often actually. Most prisoners do not have the things you said they did. I put this to you then: Say Cameron Willingham or some other executed felon is categorically proved innocent in time. Their family have been subject to somebody killing their innocent relative. Should the jury that sentenced him to death be executed? The judge? The prosecution lawyer? the prison guard that marched him to the death chamber? The man who hooked up the IV? The men who pushed the buttons? They all were responsible for killing an innocent. Would you want them to be killed. Because in your eye for an eye world, that is the only solution that isn't entirely hypocritical.
As far as the cost goes... I'm just going to let these quotes do all of my talking...
Say that it costs $50,000 a year to keep a prisoner in jail. Say that he lives 50 years. 50 X $50,000 = $2.5 million. Add in the costs of appeal trials, and that number only increases.
Here are some genuine figures:
California spends $137 million per year on the death penalty. The same cost for their current death row inmates to be LWOP would be $63 million.
Maryland has executed 5 prisoners, at an average cost of $37.2million dollars each. Your figure of $2.5 million isn't looking so big now, is it?
Federal cost of seeking death penalty - $690,000. Federal cost of the same trial without it - $85,000.
New Jersey has spent $253 million on the death penalty system since 1983, having sentenced 60 people, reducing the sentence or exonorating 50 of them and keeping the other 10 alive on death row. The cost of keeping all 60 in prison for all 26 years would have been $140.4 million, inclusive of all trial costs.
In Kansas, investigations of cases that lead to death sentence trials were 3 times more expensive than others for similar crimes. The cost of these trials was 16 times greater than for similar crimes. The cost of the subsequent appeals was 21 times greater than for LWOP sentences.
In North Carolina, they estimate that they spend $2.1 million more on death penalty cases than LWOP throughout the entire sentence.
In Florida, it is estimated that they could save $51 million annually by putting all death row inmates onto LWOP sentences instead.
I'll finish with Texas, by far the most pro-death penalty state, who say "the death penalty is about 3 times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years."
I could go on, but I'm choosing to leave it there, as I think my point has been quite nicely illustrated.
