Originally posted by Fishu
Theres nothing wrong with death penalty in the case someone has taken away someones constitutional rights by cruelly murdering him, therefore murderer has refused and abandoned all his constitutional and human rights.
Therefore, without a doubt of guilt, should he be executed.
There is no sense to let someone whos purposely and cruelly murdered someone, to live in a prison for rest of his life and be burden for the tax payers nor respect his rights, that he abandoned when he knowingly took away someone elses rights by cruelly murdering someone.
(sigh) Fishu, I could look up and site the statistics about the hundreds or thousands of convicted Death Row inmates who were ultimately cleared by the advent of DNA testing in the last few years or I could speculate on how many innocent people we've errenously executed, but what would be the point? The pro-death penalty forces are willing to accept the wrongfully executed as some sort of sick socitial "collateral damage."
Also you're dead (like the pun?) wrong about the costs of housing a convict vs. the cost of executing them and in fact it costs more to kill a Gary Gilmore or a Ted Bundy than it does to house a Charlie Manson. LOL "fiscal expediency" was a problem the Nazis had executing the Jews. I shudder when I hear it used as a reason to eliminate our own undesirables.
Your statement "without a doubt of guilt" is also errenious as to the standards to judge guilt or innocence in a criminal proceeding. The standard in America is beyond a REASONABLE doubt, not a shadow of doubt. As a matter of concience, what standard do we wish to execute people?
One hundred years from now the people of the future will look back on this era and shake their heads in amazement at how barbaric our judicial system is in the fact we execute convicted in light of our human infalibilities which disqualify us the right to sit in ultimate judgement of the taking of a human life.
