Should capital punishment be brought back?

I am going to repeat here what I have said in other threads before. I believe that some crimes are just so heinous that the perpetrator forfeits their right to live in and be supported by a civil society and for those crimes capital punishment is the right solution.

However, I want the bar for the application for capital punishment to be set so high as for it to be really, really hard for it to be applied. There should be literally zero doubt as to the guilt of the person(s) involved and the crime should clearly be a crime of malice.

There is only one crime I can think of in recent history that would meet this criteria in my mind and that is the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, I would be quite satisfied to see his killers swinging from the end of a rope.

This is the standard I require for the penalty to be applied.
Living is a punishment.

If the idea of a mercy killing is an appropriately moral response to end someone's suffering then the opposite is surely also true?
 
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Living is a punishment.

Even locked in prison you can enjoy walks in the fresh air, the taste of a coffee, a roast dinner on Sundays, read books, play chess and watch your favourite sports on television. This is less of a punishment than the killers of Lee Rigby - and others of their ilk - deserve.
 
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my knee jerk reaction, esp when you consider the costs of housing a person in prison never ever to be let free is yes.

However you look at how many cases which later get over turned either due to new evidence or, due to corruption / incompetence at the time it does make me pause.

IF a case is 100% beyond any doubt what so ever, with literally some one caught red handed then sure, maybe.

but overturning a wrongful conviction after someone was locked up for 5 years for instance is terrible........... but there is no coming back from giving a lethal injection.
 
I am going to repeat here what I have said in other threads before. I believe that some crimes are just so heinous that the perpetrator forfeits their right to live in and be supported by a civil society and for those crimes capital punishment is the right solution.

However, I want the bar for the application for capital punishment to be set so high as for it to be really, really hard for it to be applied. There should be literally zero doubt as to the guilt of the person(s) involved and the crime should clearly be a crime of malice.

There is only one crime I can think of in recent history that would meet this criteria in my mind and that is the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, I would be quite satisfied to see his killers swinging from the end of a rope.

This is the standard I require for the penalty to be applied.
Totally agree with this. There have been several cases over the last few decades where proof has been proven beyond doubt and the killers are still alive and kept in the public eye so to speak. Yet the victims of those crimes are largely forgotten by the system. No justice at all for them.
 
Victims. We should then consider the victims of State sanctioned murder when they discover an innocent person has been executed.

It would happen. I'd rather see abhorrent individuals in prison than one innocent person executed.
 
I disagree, I don't think we have the right to choose life or death. I don't even want that on my conscience and i'm not in the murder crew. I have no ******* clue what that person was thinking, nothing good; that person is very mentally ill and should be locked up for the rest of their life to prevent harm to others. I also suffer schizophrenia, but am generally am not a menace.
 
I disagree, I don't think we have the right to choose life or death. I don't even want that on my conscience and i'm not in the murder crew. I have no ******* clue what that person was thinking, nothing good; that person is very mentally ill and should be locked up for the rest of their life to prevent harm to others. I also suffer schizophrenia, but am generally am not a menace.
for me IF it were to be bought back and ONLY for the slam dunk cases with zero doubt.... it would be a practical choice not a moral one.

ideally I would rather not kill people either , however it's just the practicalities of housing someone in a prison for the rest of their lives.

there are a lack of prison spaces and it costs ab eye watering fortune to house them.
 
for me IF it were to be bought back and ONLY for the slam dunk cases with zero doubt.... it would be a practical choice not a moral one.

The problem with suggesting we bring it back, but only for cases of zero doubt isn’t as simple as it sounds.

If someone commits a crime and the evidence is so strong, for example there’s CCTV, DNA and witness testimony.

In such a case, any defence barrister is going to explain to the defendant that they’ll be found guilty, in which case they’ll be executed.

To get around the death penalty - plead guilty, spare the trial and heartache, pleading guilty is always a big mitigation tactic, even in the US pleading guilty will almost always have the prosecutors exchange the death penalty for a prison term.
 
The reality is it will never be bought back anyway (in this country **)... and this IS probably for the best despite there being cases where in theory I would not be against it

** that said a few years ago I would not have thought we would be trying to ship off asylum seekers to Rowanda or shove them in floating prisons either so never say never I guess.
 
The reality is it will never be bought back anyway (in this country **)... and this IS probably for the best despite there being cases where in theory I would not be against it

A while back I read a lot about the murder of April Jones - a little girl with cerebral palsy, abducted and never found, the only trace was her bones were found in the killers wood burning stove…. I studied the whole case, it’s chilling.

He admitted he killed her, her forensic remains were in his house, and there was witness evidence, but he denied he murdered her - and dragged the family through a pointless trial, which is obviously lost.

I personally think that morally, the killer had committed a crime which warranted a punishment of death, and I think that would be a fair, just and balanced punishment.

Where it fell down for me, revolved around the practicalities of handing the government that much power. It would only ever take one misstep, and the whole thing would fall down, it could never be done properly.

There’s just too much at stake, and the system would never be good enough for it to be correct 100% of the time, because no system ever can be that good.
 
for me IF it were to be bought back and ONLY for the slam dunk cases with zero doubt.... it would be a practical choice not a moral one.
Nothing is ever a slam dunk and there's always going to be doubt, no matter how certain we may think something is there's always a possibility, even if it's infinitesimally small, that we maybe wrong.
 
Nothing is ever a slam dunk and there's always going to be doubt, no matter how certain we may think something is there's always a possibility, even if it's infinitesimally small, that we maybe wrong.

Could you suggest in what regard the identity and actions of the murderer of Rigby might be put in doubt? Even infinitesimally small doubt?
 
Could you suggest in what regard the identity and actions of the murderer of Rigby might be put in doubt? Even infinitesimally small doubt?
Really? You can't think of any reason, no matter how wild, why such a thing maybe put into doubt.

Because if you can't you lack imagination and are very closed-minded.
 
Not closed minded, if I remember correctly the evidence was irrefutable in the Rigby case.
No, very closed minded. If you think you know everything there is to know then you're a walking, talking, example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
That'll be a rambling no then....
No it would not, as much as you may find it comforting to put words in my mouth that's not what i said, it's not even remotely close.

If you don't think there's any reason, no matter how wild, why "the identity and actions of the murderer of Rigby might be put in doubt" then you've wildly overestimated your ability.
 
The jury decided not me
Yes. On the evidence presented they judge them guilty, they did not judge them guilty until the heat death of the universe and they did not judge them guilty on all possible evidence that may or may not arise in the future, due to the fact that we've not invented time travel yet.
 
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