tim wrote:
I support the death penalty.

Who gives the murderer the right to cruelly decide who lives and dies? Who chooses what to kill? We kill cows and chickens for us to eat, so we're basically being God cause we decided a living things fate?

I also seriously doubt a mental sociopathic murder-fetish serial killer would have the mental ability to conjure up a cure for cancer or have the compassion to save billions of lives when he's probably killed more lives than he may even be able to save.

I believe the death penalty is a necessary evil to keep those who deserve to die for commiting a heinous atrocity to the good of society. Look at Hitler for example, if he was alive when the allies captured him, do you honestly believe the public would want such a bastard to just "rot in a jail cell?". Of course not everybody would want him to be dead.

I find it degrading that an honest hard working person has to pay out of his/her own wallet for someone like a murderer to sit in a jail cell so he can live.

Imagine if someone killed somebody you loved? No doubt anybody would want who is responsible to die. The death penalty is in place to make people think twice about killing another person. But even so, us being humans and savages on the inside, we simply choose to ignore this rule. Death happens all the time. I think the U.S.A. has it easy compared to places like Africa when it comes to death penalty.

ninja wrote:


I didn't say that the murderer has a right either, although that point does reinforce my earlier argument about hypocrisy - if we condemn the murderer deciding who should live and die, we really shouldn't do that ourselves ... unless of course we're going to execute ourselves for murder!
Personally, I don't eat meat so that doesn't really apply to me, but it's a very interesting point and could perhaps be the basis of another debate so I won't go into it here.

The cancer-cure example was as you noticed perhaps a slight exaggeration but the underlying idea is that you're preventing the potential to make amends. Reflection of their life whilst in prison could turn somebody around. They might have a change of heart, or brain - people do recover from mental illnesses. I think it would be immoral to rule out that possibility.

I'm glad that you admit that the death penalty is evil, because it is. We don't need more evil in the world than there already is.

And of course the issue of money. Try a quick Google search for "cost of death penalty" (http://bit.ly/xKTOpt). Almost all of the first page of results that I receive seem to claim that the death penalty costs more than life imprisonment. By means of an example, http://deathpenaltyinfo.org states that in California the cost of the death penalty is at least $130 million per year, whereas lifetime incarceration would be a maximum of $11.5 million. Make what you will of that.

I'm sure you've heard on the news awe-inspiring stories of murderers being forgiven - Mary Johnson for example who's son was killed. I'd like to think I would be able to forgive, although probably not to forget ... the truth is I find that situation difficult to imagine.
Chances are the murderer has family too. Considering that I would know the pain of losing someone I loved, I wouldn't want anyone else to suffer the same pain.

tim wrote:
I've known what it's like to lose someone I love as well. And even if she died of natural causes, if she was murdered I would very much want to see the person responsible suffer.

Maybe evil cancelling out evil doesn't work in a certain view point but I just see it as justice. Even if justice is cruel, it really is necessary in my book. It's pretty much a necessary evil. Punish the evil with evil. In my personal views, a murderer should not be forgiven at all from the victims family. If the murderer had a family maybe he would think twice about destroying another one.

Murderers, even if they have families, destroy others lives and their families, what gives them the right to keep their own? So we can't destroy his family, so he's simply put to death. As terrible as it sounds it happens and it should never cease to stop. The death penalty is in there to keep murderers and rapists in check and show them that this is what happens if you kill another human being that didn't deserve to be murdered.

Killing without a purpose is what murderers do. Killing with a purpose is what the law does. Which is worse? To kill without reason or to kill with one? They both sound absolutely terrible I know, but there is one option that I see is better than the other. Let me refer back to my cow and chicken example, we kill animals for a purpose. We kill those animals every single day and I rarely hear anyone complaining about their lives besides the occasional radical Vegan.

AT LEAST here in America the murderers who are killed die in a way nowhere near the way they probably murdered the person they killed.

And the thing with the money spending, that I was wrong about.

When it's all broken down, it really comes to our nature, we are all savages and murderers at heart. But because we are smarter, we start questioning the morality of death and certain types of killing/murder. There are so many exceptions to stuff like abortion/death penalty/etc. that it should just remain legal in general.

ninja wrote:

Thank you for replying again.
I'm sorry to hear about your loss. I hope she had a good life.

I think I've already rebutted most of those points, but I have a few more things to say.

Imagine, I'm sitting in a room with a few other people. There's a fly annoying me so I pull out my book and deliberately and with reason swat it with the back of my book. I doubt anyone in the room would bat an eyelid. Now, instead, imagine that the person sitting next to me is annoying me so I pull out a pistol and deliberately and with reason shoot the person sitting next to me with the gun. There would probably be outrage from the rest of the congregation, with them asking "why on Earth would you do that?". Hopefully, I'd get life imprisonment.
My point here is that most people don't care about animals' lives, even when they're killed deliberately. They do, however, care about human lives, especially when they're killed deliberately. Surely people should be outraged, then, when a human is deliberately killed such as resulting from the death penalty.

I don't think I would agree that we're all savages and murderers at heart, although it is certainly true that we question morality.

I would like to finish my argument with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi:

tim wrote:
Thanks for the condolences.

You're one hell of a debater man.

And it's true about the whole murdering thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some pro-violence nut job, I truly do think murder is the most horrenduos thing a person can do, but I just can't see a man who murdered another and getting to live fair. Justice is cruel, but hey it's karma.

Or maybe I'm misinterpreting karma...

In Florida, try $ 51 million a year.

That, according to a Palm Beach Post estimate, is how much Florida spends each year to enforce the death penalty - above and beyond what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole.

And at the rate at which Florida is executing its killers (there have been only 44 since executions resumed in 1979), it's costing about $ 24 million per electrocuted murderer. "That is an astounding figure," said Mike McCarron, executive director of the Florida Catholic Conference and, on behalf of the church, a perennial death penalty opponent.

"It's costing the state of Florida a small fortune," said Elliott Metcalfe, president of the Florida Public Defenders Association and the public defender in Sarasota and Manatee counties.
"It is much cheaper to put these people in prison and leave them there until they die. Simple as that."

"One in twenty death row inmates is later found not guilty."

ZA BrickSquad wrote:
What you mean? Please explain.