Why Executions Are Being Stayed

[skyfire]

Mar 7, 2009 23:34:20 GMT -5 ausador said:

Easier to kill them with a pencil...

A spoon you have to shape into a shank first.

Yes I have first hand experience, not book learning.

Don't even need to shape it; you just need raw force.

A cop went to answer a domestic disturbance call. As with many such calls, even though the husband had been beating the hell out of the wife she didn't want the cops to actually arrest him; the wife responded by stabbing the cop with a spoon, puncturing his heart.

And yes, he had a vest; she got him just to the side of it.

[MaybeNever]

Mar 7, 2009 23:42:32 GMT -5 skyfire said:

And yes, he had a vest; she got him just to the side of it.

As I recall, some vests don't do much against things like knives. Bullets they'll stop, but knives/shovels/shrieking zombies they're no good against. But that's just a vague memory. I could be way off.

[ausador]

Damn, how much does that suck, killed with a spoon? Thats...uhh...amazeing...

I was talking about how people kill each other inside, which was what the conversation was about, I thought anyway, but apparently I was wrong. Go figure...

[skyfire]

Mar 8, 2009 1:07:34 GMT -5 ausador said:

Damn, how much does that suck, killed with a spoon? Thats...uhh...amazeing...

I was talking about how people kill each other inside, which was what the conversation was about, I thought anyway, but apparently I was wrong. Go figure...

The entire CJ field is littered with tales such as that.

If you've got the time or inclination, track down a series entitled "Homicidal Humor." This is a series written by assorted police officers (I have the "South Texas edition" which covers Houston and the surrounding area) and retelling incidents from their careers. The series is filled to the brim with black humor because some of the things the officers have encountered over the years were so shocking or inhuman that humor was one of the few ways to deal with it.

[JonathanE]

Mar 8, 2009 1:07:34 GMT -5 ausador said:

Damn, how much does that suck, killed with a spoon? Thats...uhh...amazeing...

I was talking about how people kill each other inside, which was what the conversation was about, I thought anyway, but apparently I was wrong. Go figure...

This is the preliminary groundwork Skyfire is laying to justify our societal use of the DP as a deterrent to crime, or removing the homicidal maniacs from society. You're right, it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand, ie the morality and justification of society's killing in the name of "justice", even though the DP has been proven to NOT be a deterrent to murder, and despite the evidence that law enforcement and the courts often convict the wrong person.
Reactionaries often use anecdotal evidence of violent crime as justification for the DP, the hard truth is that violent crime, nationwide, is decreasing and doing so rapidly, particularly so since the federal abolition on the DP. The DP is a political tool, to exploit fear of violent crime, at a time when violent crime is actually diminishing.
Go figure...

[dantesvirgil]

I'm enjoying reading this thread. I'm not going to contribute too much of my own personal opinion because A) I tend to be highly biased in certain situations and B) I'm not really sure what it is. I know a lot about prison conditions, conviction stats, recidivism and all that. And so I have an opinion about prison in general based on that. But certain groups of people I do not respond to rationally, and so my opinion is just an emotional reaction. So all this rational discussion is interesting.

[The Lazy One]

I'm a little late getting to my own thread, but here's my take on the matter.

Imagine, if you will, a sadistic killer. This person has been put on death row, and by some miracle, gets executed in a reasonable amount of time. Bam. He's gone. No more consciousness. He's dead, and there's no way that he will ever reflect on what he did.

But let's take that same person and put him in an empty room in solitary confinement. He has a cot and a toilet. That's it. No Internet access, no books, no paper to write on, nothing. He gets a meal a day pushed through a flap- no human contact. He has been condemned to live out his life in silence, with nothing to do other than contemplate what he's done. To me, that's a harsher punishment than death. Killing someone ends their thought process. Leaving someone with only their thoughts, now that's a real punishment.

[schizophonic]

Mar 8, 2009 13:09:55 GMT -5 The Lazy One said:

I'm a little late getting to my own thread, but here's my take on the matter.

Imagine, if you will, a sadistic killer. This person has been put on death row, and by some miracle, gets executed in a reasonable amount of time. Bam. He's gone. No more consciousness. He's dead, and there's no way that he will ever reflect on what he did.

But let's take that same person and put him in an empty room in solitary confinement. He has a cot and a toilet. That's it. No Internet access, no books, no paper to write on, nothing. He gets a meal a day pushed through a flap- no human contact. He has been condemned to live out his life in silence, with nothing to do other than contemplate what he's done. To me, that's a harsher punishment than death. Killing someone ends their thought process. Leaving someone with only their thoughts, now that's a real punishment.

Of course, that still assumes a reasonable amount of time and a swift enough death.

[headache]

Here is how a prison should be: Bastøy prison

Most of the problems seen with people released from prison, is due to the crappy prison system which does nothing in order to prepare the released prisoners for integrating back into society nor do you have any follow-up outside. The US justice and penal system is basically on level with an 18th century system and producing 18th century results. Garbage in - Garbage out.

[The Lazy One]

Mar 8, 2009 13:31:12 GMT -5 @schizophonic said:

Mar 8, 2009 13:09:55 GMT -5 The Lazy One said:

I'm a little late getting to my own thread, but here's my take on the matter.

Imagine, if you will, a sadistic killer. This person has been put on death row, and by some miracle, gets executed in a reasonable amount of time. Bam. He's gone. No more consciousness. He's dead, and there's no way that he will ever reflect on what he did.

But let's take that same person and put him in an empty room in solitary confinement. He has a cot and a toilet. That's it. No Internet access, no books, no paper to write on, nothing. He gets a meal a day pushed through a flap- no human contact. He has been condemned to live out his life in silence, with nothing to do other than contemplate what he's done. To me, that's a harsher punishment than death. Killing someone ends their thought process. Leaving someone with only their thoughts, now that's a real punishment.

Of course, that still assumes a reasonable amount of time and a swift enough death.

Well, true. It's unlikely that the person would be executed fast enough for that scenario to really work.

[caretaker]

I'm with Lazy (I was actually surprised to see my thoughts so well-expressed >>). My mother and I discussed it when some utter numpties tried to bring it into force in NI a while back.

I don't care how long it takes to get the prisoner executed - they still know that no matter how torturous their prison 'life' is, it will end. Sure, some are petrified and will dread it, but the ultimate end can be a relief to some people - like the convicts who commit suicide because they just can't stand being in prison anymore.

It's much more satisfactory - to me - to have them spend decades shut up in a cell with no human contact, nothing to do all day, and no end in sight but eventual oblivion in some max security prison hospital. There are many things worse than death, and that's one of them. I'd take a swift lethal injection over that lifelong hell anytime.

If what they did was bad enough to make people want them dead, then spending a lifetime in a concrete box is surely just as appealing. Never let them out. Create stacks of these tiny, bare concrete boxes and stack the worst of the worst inside them. Let 'em rot, and hold up a banner of "at least we're not lowering ourselves to their standards by killing them". Melt down the key and watch what happens to a person whose lifelong highlights are waiting for death and seeing what their food is today. I guarantee that after ten - fifteen at a push - years of living like this, never hearing a human voice, having long-exhausted every possible means of tiny entertainment - every one of those bastards will long for oblivion.

I am not always a fluffy bunny. Getting rid of the death penalty is not always to be nice.

[Sandafluffoid]

What is the point of punishing someone if they don't learn? The only lesson learnt frm the DP is that it's okay to kill people if everyone hates them, with prison, and being forced to reflect on their actions then there is at least a possibility that people will see why what they've done is wrong, and maybe they'll change. That said this is never goign to happen whilst prisons heavily antagonise prisoners.

I think the problem is that humans have it ingrained in our consciousness that people need to be punished because they have done something bad. People need to be mad to see that what they have doen is bad, and come to regret it, and they need to be punished to make them regret it. Punishing someone 'because they deserve it' is pointless, no one can gain anything from it.

[caretaker]

I'm all for rehabilitation in most cases, but when it comes to the worst offenders - like Myra Hindley - then I just don't see why they should ever be released (whether they've 'found God' or not). Letting serial murderers out of prison because they've learned to mend their ways depends - both on whether the board think they've really adjusted, and on whether the crime allows it. Hindley's crimes were so abhorrent that letting her out would not only have been hugely traumatic for the families of her victims, but would have completely infuriated the public.

Prison should facilitate the rehabilitation process, but it should also be used to secure the public from homicidal crazies. There are some crimes, imho, that are off the scale - crimes that, when knowingly and cold-bloodedly committed, should result in nothing less than the perpetrator's life spent behind bars. In which case, rehabilitation in order to produce an upstanding member of the community is somewhat unnecessary.

Maybe after twenty years of thinking about their lives, they'll be allowed to play solo-scrabble.

[Shano]

Mar 8, 2009 18:36:50 GMT -5 caretaker said:

I'm all for rehabilitation in most cases, but when it comes to the worst offenders - like Myra Hindley - then I just don't see why they should ever be released (whether they've 'found God' or not). Letting serial murderers out of prison because they've learned to mend their ways depends - both on whether the board think they've really adjusted, and on whether the crime allows it. Hindley's crimes were so abhorrent that letting her out would not only have been hugely traumatic for the families of her victims, but would have completely infuriated the public.

Prison should facilitate the rehabilitation process, but it should also be used to secure the public from homicidal crazies. There are some crimes, imho, that are off the scale - crimes that, when knowingly and cold-bloodedly committed, should result in nothing less than the perpetrator's life spent behind bars. In which case, rehabilitation in order to produce an upstanding member of the community is somewhat unnecessary.

Maybe after twenty years of thinking about their lives, they'll be allowed to play solo-scrabble.

Of course here you assume that performing abhorrent crimes is strongly/completely correlated with impossibility of rehabilitating the perpetrator.
While I agree that currently we don't have the means I do not support the general statement.

I am happy that at least sandafluffoid is sharing my opinion on the matter.

[ausador]

Well gee, somehow locking people up with hundreds of other criminals, giving them minimal supervision, and not giving them anything productive to do has somehow *gasp* failed to rehabilitate them. I have no idea at all why this is true. (well, actually I do)

I was sentenced to 36 months in prison two weeks before my sixteenth birthday, I served 28 months of that in a maximum security Florida prison. I was 16 and weighed about 125lbs when soaking wet. Two years later I did another 13 months in prison, I actually know how things work inside.

The justice system is a frigging joke, the death penalty is even more of a joke, nobody cares, I never heard one inmate say anything like, "damn I better not do that because they might execute me". No one cares! Society simply attempts to do it as revenge, nothing else, there is no other reason to do it. Give me one reason to execute someone that doesn't involve revenge and I might listen but you cannot do it.

Being in prison opens your eyes that there are some that are simply anti-social, they need to be locked up and kept segregated from society. But that doesn't justify killing them, keeping them locked up for life is a much harsher and more appropriate punishment.