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Member (Idle past 1432 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Death Penalty and Stanley Tookie Williams | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
Here is me - trying to come up with clever reasons not to have the death penalty - good answer.
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bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
As a lifelong opponent of the death penalty I find any discussion of the rights and wrongs of killing your own citizens bizarre. What are the reasons? What are the motivations? And I am not referring to the initial crime.
Reason 1 - Justice - otherwise known as the eye for an eye defenceJustice is only served when the victim of the capital crime is brought back to life when the perpetrator is executed. THAT is justice. Anything else is revenge. Reason 2 - deterrant - otherwise known as the watch out defenceMost murders are committed in the heat of the moment - no amount of future punishment will stop their being committed. And since 1976 have capital crime levels dropped? I didn't think so. Reason 3 - economic - otherwise known as the conservative rich defenceIt costs more to keep someone on death row with all the appeals, stop-start execution on-off, and all that the death penalty entails than just to lock them up for life. Reason 4 - Biblical - otherwise known as the small-minded defenceBecause it says to kill those that kill in the bible is ok, just so we understand that my wife wears cotton, wool and polyester at the same time it is ok that I arrange her stoning this weekend (leviticus 24). Right! Reason 5 - Political - otherwise known as the you are as fucked as they are defenceIt is seen as politically expedient to be tough on crime. Fair enough. But when a life is a political issue and the politician sees favour in promoting a death then the politician is as morally bankrupt as the criminal in question. I find the current situation in the US embarrasing. Surely you can see this. You have the highest crime rates in the developed nations. You have the highest murder rates. You have the highest gun crime rates. KILLING MORE PEOPLE IS NOT THE FUCKING ANSWER!!!!!!
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bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
of course not! Well maybe a little
The death penalty is a reaction not a solution.
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bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
Capital punishment is seductive!!
You have a case of child murder, terrorism or any other heinous crime and any poll taken in the aftermath would suggest a massive surge of support for the death penalty. So what. Hell, I sometimes grit my teeth and wish death on the evil-doers when I hear some stories on the news. Then I calm down. Murder can be in cold blood or in the heat of the moment. Execution is always in cold blood. And as a punishment, who has learned the lesson?
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bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
Call it a system of revenge then, not justice.
Revenge is after the event retribution. It is redundant, as the main event has occurred, and one of the the major participants is beyond reparation. We could open a coliseum and make revenge a major entertainment as well as an important salve for the inadequacy of society to progress ? It plays to our most basic needs/wants. 'I do not like it' - 'Stop it, Ban it, Kill it!' Capital punishment seems to fill the same niche. I would point to deterrant as one of the flawed arguments for capital punishment - it just does not work. All we are satisfying is our age-old thirst for blood. And playing 'God', as if he/she, should he/she exist, would give a shit.
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bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
If you don't see a downside, I feel sorry for you.
As for justice, well reparation is a good start. In legalese 'Making good'. As for Court TV, you are advocating the system being televised, what I was suggesting was the end result being televised. We could even dispense with the trial bit and round up the usual suspects and the one who performs (televisually) the best will be innocent.
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bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
That is one hell of a graph!!
I do have a few problems with it. Could we put a few other statistics on there as well. Economic growth rate. Gap between top 20% and bottom 20% economically. General crime rate. Capital crime as a proportion of crime rate. Price of oil. Price of a colour TV. As a statistician in a former life I can see that the the graph is supposed to be incendiary and I will dismiss it as such. Perhaps if I saw lag times leading to a general overall fall in capital crimes or that the vertical axis reflected accurately the same proportions. Absolute numbers and nos. per million on the same axis, shame on you!
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bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
I did not assume diddly squat - I just accused use of wilful misuse of numbers.
Graphs!! More graphs!!! I am beaten into a corner with visual depictions of reality - help me!!! What do the greyed out parts of the graph mean? What does adjusted mean in adjusted figure? As an example graph 2 - does this indicate that 3/5 of all households in the mid-70s were victimised each year? Wow - were you ever in trouble. You obviously are a great place to be now, only 1 in 5 properties are victimised every year. Graph 3 - violent crime isn't recorded crime - is it hearsay crime? Anyway - time for bed - but a quick note - the stats in the graphs, what are the criteria, what is the data collection method, who asked the questions, who answered them? - I only ask because I would never, ever use a graph unless I had compiled the data myself, and my intention was never to call you a liar, a proponent of anything, other than random drive-by graphics.
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bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
Sorry Holmes but what!!!
Of course being a Brit will lead me to be accused of many things (of which I am guilty of some), but killing citizens of Iraq, well no! My government does things I do not approve of, the invasion of Iraq being one. It is not my fault, nor any reflection on me that the current government has done the things that it has done. In the same way that you are not Bush and I do not accuse you of being a class A1 idiot. Of that I am sure. Any attempt to deflect my criticism of a graph, which was dishonest in it's graphical representation of the facts, with childish nationalistic rebukes is, well, childish. Yes, I am proud of the non-capital nature of punishment in the UK, and the murder rates (as a proportion of all crime) over the last 40 years convince me of this. As for the 'other' reason for capital punishment, removal of a threat to society. Surely on arrest the threat is already removed. As a reason for capital punishment it fell below my radar. Sorry.
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bobbins Member (Idle past 3640 days) Posts: 122 From: Manchester, England Joined: |
Apologies perhaps for being flippant.
I do not apologise for attacking the graphs themselves. OK you have no way of depicting the no. of executions against the homicide rates on a 1:1 rate, but to depict it so on a graphic is dishonest. There is an obvious correlation in that graph. But if you were to represent the figures more realistically then the correaltion and your conclusion quote "However, the fact that this data was taken over a period of 50 years should be enough to indicate that it is too good to be a coincidence." would be less than obvious, and not "too good". An increase of 5 executions lead to a decrease of 20% in capital crime is apparently what you are saying with the original graph. (100 homicides per million to 80 homicides per million, 0 to 5 executions over the same period 82ish to 84ish). As for my questions with regard to data collection et al., they are legitimate and a government source is no indicator of reliability if the intention of the source is not known. An independent source would be preferable. My point really was that graphics are a great way of representing dry data, thay are also the easiest way to misrepresent data, be it by scale, false comparison or even absolute numbers. The graphs were presented baldly, and your comments were perhaps ignored by me, but what struck me was the intention of the graphs, and they were if not dishonest, then misleading. As for taking anything seriously, the death penalty is something I take(possibly too much) very seriously.
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