Kitteh Wrote:Maybe I came off a bit belligerent. I meant more that I was trying show you an example of misplaced punishment and of the massive flaws that erupt from human institutions. From the way you've been posting, you seem to believe in an almost infallible system where revenge is served to only those that deserve it. Yet...that's not always the case. When you put an innocent man to death, what more value can be found in this system?
In any case, if revenge was truly the point of the justice system, we'd be allowing vigilante rule and/or letting the families of victims put the convicted murderer to death. But we don't. In fact, we even have an amendment in the Constitution itself prohibiting such acts to be done. This is moot, of course, if you view general incarceration and such to fall under society's "revenge" for law-breakers, which is actually funny, considering that most prisoners are poor, minority, etc. Like they haven't been punished enough
But that's just the bleeding-heart liberal inside me talking.
I took criminal justice classes, one taught by a very high-ranking cop, one taught by the prosecutor who convicted John Wayne Gacy. They told me that the vast majority of people accused of a crime are guilty of it. That's becuase the prosecutor's track record is based on SUCCESSES. If a prosecutor gets a case that he feels he cannot win, most of the time he will not press charges, because winning = his livelihood. If you take that into account -- the fact that they only prosecute cases which they are very likely to win -- you get the simple fact that most of those convicted are guilty. I am sorry, but when you are convicted by a jury "beyond a reasonable doubt," or when your defense attorney feels that pleading guilty is preferable to go going to trial, you probably ARE guilty. There ARE innocent people derailed by the system, but not nearly as many as the liberal media claims. Keep in mind, there are people that hold candlelight vigils for 1st degree murderers that are about to be executed, without any regard to the murder victims. Such people are liberal to a loony extent, to where they will try to make the murderer look innocent when he clearly isn;t. Look up the case of Mumia Abu Jamal, who murdered a police officer in cold blood in front of 4 witnesses, he made a mockery of his trial... and then the extreme left made him an international "victim," "journalist," and "hero." The facts all say he's guilty, but his supporters are too liberal to care.
Grog Wrote:Revenge and hatred should be considered base emotions ranking on about the same level as greed and envy. Such emotions need to be kept under the control of rational thought processes. The death penalty doesn't deter crime and murder, so what does it do? Like Frank Castle once said, "IT'S NOT REVENGE... IT'S PUNISHMENT."
Of course, society needs to protect itself from criminals. This is done by improving law-enforcement methods, correcting social conditions that contribute to crime, incarcerating those who are a danger to society, rehabilitating criminals who aren't incorrigible, and deterring people from becoming lawbreakers. The death penalty is not a solution to anything. Instead, it's a violent and hateful act that makes the world worse. Really, anyone who's pro-death penalty just wants to see someone die for what they did, or they just flat-out don't care.
Civilization exists for the sake of civilization, not for the sake of those who would destroy it. There is in each human being the conflict between his mind and his animalistic impulses. We emerged out of caves 10,000 years ago, which in terms of biological evolution is not even a moment. In the society of skyscrapers, some of the instincts that were needed 10,000 years ago just cause problems.
You do have certain societies, (Middle East comes readily to mind,) which solve their problems through violence, and you cannot speak reason to them, you must speak with your own violence, or they will destroy you. On a grand scale, if you capture someone like Hitler, how do you punish him with anything but the death penalty? The fuucker took 22 million lives, he invented a doctrine that is the mantra of psychos and murderers throughout the world, and as long as he lives -- even in a cell -- he will act as a beacon to those like him in our society. So then you narrow the scope a bit. You got a Colombian warlord that took 10,000 lives, is he any less of a monster than Hitler? Then you narrow down further... so at what point do you conclude that the guy is "just" a murderer, not like Hitler or the Colombian warlord? How many lives must a man take before society MUST conclude that death is the only proper punishment? To me, it's one. To you it may be one million. But to each person -- even the liberal person -- there exists a point where a person is beyond life in prison, and within the scope of the death penalty. Israel does not practice the death penalty even on the terrorists that it captures alive, but in the beginning of its history, Israeli commandos captured Eichmann, (one of those directly responsible in orchestrating the Holocaust,) and after a thorough trial, he was executed. To this day he remains the only person executed by the state of Israel except in combat operations.
A murderer is by definition a creature whose existence violates the rules of society. Living in a civilized society means obeying the laws of that society, and there is no crime greater than murder. The only reason not to take a murderer's life is the theory -- right or wrong -- that killing a criminal casts a taint on the civilization that he violated. It's really nothing more than that. The criminal's life is not itself precious or sacred, because a man that is depraved enough to kill another in cold blood is not himself anything but living meat. If you think that killing a criminal is improper because civilized society must exist above that, that's one thing. But please, don't tell me that a murderer is somehow equal to a civilized human being. Your actions dictate who you are, they can sanctify you or denigrate you. It seems a bit disingenuous to speak of the abstract human soul, completely ignoring what the person has DONE.