Trump reinstates death penalty for federal crimes

Threepwood said:
Do you feel that, every time a soldier kills its totally okay and in no way at all murder? I would say that yes - there have been many times when a soldier is a paid murderer. But sometimes no, they are not.

Surely a lot of this has to do with the choice to kill or not to kill. Killing in self defence, or to defend another I would say is not murder.... because there is no real choice.

If there truely are other options other than to kill a person, and the choice that is chosen is to kill, well that is murder really.
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Then you're contradicting yourself, since there are always other options than to kill a person, including in the examples you said weren't murder. You can choose to surrender. You can choose to die. You can choose to let other people die. There's always a choice. What you're doing is what most people do - call it murder if you disagree with the choice and not murder if you agree with the choice. Different people draw the line in different places, but they're using "I agree/disagree with the choice to kill" to define whether a killing is murder or not.

Also, the person I was replying to defined murder as planned killing, so they were including all war and all defence in which killing is intended.

I honestly believe that capital punishment does more harm than good in the long run, it does not deter crime if anything it makes it worse because crims then act as if they have nothing to lose and either behave smarter or wilder because of that.
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I think the same thing. The saying "may as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb" is an old one for a very good reason. Besides, most criminals don't make their plans on the basis of being caught. Some do, but most don't. They either don't think at all or they expect to not get caught. A perceived increase in the chance of getting caught is a far better deterrent.
 
I believe the British empire tried exile as a legitimate attempt to see if it was better than hanging people, so even in the time of a crude justice system they knew it wasn't working.

(that said we lost colonies because of that...)
 
I believe when polled something like 60% of the UK support the death penalty for the worst crimes.

I can't see it ever coming back here, although as technology moves on it's less and less likely we execute the wrong person.

I'm on the fence about it, it doesn't undo the crimes so to my mind by that point it's too late.
 
Not exactly uncommon for US politicians to kill a bad guy or two in order to make sure they look tough on crime etc... I see Trump has learned from the mistake of Bill Clinton and decided to keep PR angle good by making sure those people were white guys.
 
Funny how all these anti government conservatives think giving the government the ability to legally kill a citizen is fine.

Mistakes happen & innocent people will be executed, it's happened many times before & will happen again. For that reason alone I couldn't support it.
 
StriderX said:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs

Admittedly a bit biased, but i doubt theres much better.
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This information presents a good argument for streamlining the legal processes involving death penalty convictions and appeals to reduce their overall cost. It doesn't prove that the death penalty is more expensive than incarceration.

The point about solitary confinement is irrelevant, since this is a measure widely applied to non-death penalty convicts as well.
 
elmarko said:
Funny how all these anti government conservatives think giving the government the ability to legally kill a citizen is fine.
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We're allowed to kill other people's citizens during wartime. Why can't we kill our own when they commit heinous crimes?
 
Evangelion said:
We're allowed to kill other people's citizens during wartime. Why can't we kill our own when they commit heinous crimes?
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Well this particular point is rather straightforward to answer.

You generally try to kill other countries citizens when they're military members who pose a potential threat, if you capture them then they no longer pose a threat (other than if they try to escape) and killing them at that point is generally considered to be a warcrime.

Likewise in order to carry out the death penalty the convicted criminal is generally already behind bars and therefore no longer much of a threat. I'd therefore not compare the death penalty (from a moral pov) to the sort of killing the military or police sometimes engages in, that would be a flawed comparison.
 
G-MAN2004 said:
Not a fan of the death penalty. No matter how much evidence they have, there will always be the possibility of sending the wrong person to death.
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How would you feel if a murderer in the UK was released on parole and then murdered a member of your family ?
 
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