Poll: The death penalty, are you for or against?

The death penalty, are you for or against?

  • For

    Votes: 221 42.6%

  • Against

    Votes: 243 46.8%

  • Undecided

    Votes: 55 10.6%
  • Total voters
    519
ubersonic said:
Yes it is, please don't just quote your own opinion as fact.
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No it isn't. There are hundreds of research studies whose findings are contrary to the premise that the Death Penalty acts as a deterrent to the crimes for which it is punishable.

https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~vwang/ps374/Tyree.pdf

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/files/DeterrenceStudy2009.pdf

A recent survey of the most leading criminologists in the country from found that the overwhelming majority did not believe that the death penalty is a proven deterrent to homicide. Eighty-eight percent of the country’s top criminologists do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to homicide, according to a new study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology and authored by Professor Michael Radelet, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Traci Lacock, also at Boulder.

Similarly, 87% of the expert criminologists believe that abolition of the death penalty would not have any significant effect on murder rates. In addition, 75% of the respondents agree that “debates about the death penalty distract Congress and state legislatures from focusing on real solutions to crime problems.”

The survey relied on questionnaires completed by the most pre-eminent criminologists in the country, including Fellows in the American Society of Criminology; winners of the American Society of Criminology’s prestigious Southerland Award; and recent presidents of the American Society of Criminology. Respondents were not asked for their personal opinion about the death penalty, but instead to answer on the basis of their understandings of the empirical research.

(M. Radelet and T. Lacock, DO EXECUTIONS LOWER HOMICIDE RATES?: THE VIEWS OF LEADING CRIMINOLOGISTS, 99 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 489 2009)
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Energizer Bunny said:
Can I in turn just ask why on earth you are coming at this from an angle that death should be the automatic position and leaving the person alive then has to be justified? Your flippant attitude to death rather suggests you do not fully appreciate or understand the value of human life.
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Yes i do. Do you?
 
Why not just send the really bad criminals, murders, Rapists, and Pedophiles to a penal colony somewhere in the South Atlantic and the rest can do some more useful things here, for example make them dig out trenches to install fiber broadband in as BT seem to be far too slow at it.
 
majnu said:
The countries which have them is evidence in itself I guarantee it, but to give some factual evidence I will need to look up the rates from those countries which impose it in the evening.
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The United States would show that those States that have the Death Penalty have a higher rate of offending in those Crimes that carry the Death Penalty than those States that do not.
 
spudbynight said:
What if the killer was simply taking revenge for someone in his own family being killed?
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If it was after the incident yes, if say someone was attacking your daughter and you killed them while fighting them, then no. But that would also need a load new laws, like being able to defend your home and yourself.
 
koolpc said:
But, in this country, they know that the punishment is lame!
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The punishment isn't lame, the inability to maintain it and the parole system is.
If a murderer was given life, meaning life, put in a mostly inhumane environment treating them like an animal, that is far more degrading than just killing them.

This is of course all in my own opinion as not to confuse anyone...;)
 
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