The majority (not
vast majority of sentiment concerning the death penalty is "pro".
The majority of people interviewed by
pollsters say they favor capital punishment.
More often than not, however, when given the choice, juries spare the lives of murderers -- even the alleged "worst of the worst."
The electorate, therefore, supports death penalty
laws. They don't actually support executions.
In other words, one for every 250.
You have yet to explain to my satisfaction why we execute THAT guy and not the other 250.
You can't blame the antis, you can't blame the courts, you can't blame the lawyers. This vast majority of yours has ultimate control over all that through the political process.
Furthermore, there is no moral justification to punish someone for a crime not yet committed. You punish someone who has murdered for what he has already done, not for what he might do.
If you're not angry enough to properly punish someone's
first act of murder, why are you upset if he murders again?
It's moral cowardice.
It is immoral to arbitrarily execute someone, whether you're a Nazi in a WW2 labor camp, singling out and killing a prisoner because you don't like the way he looks, or whether you're a voter who needs to be titillated by the details of a murder before you can decide how to punish it.
That's not what frustrates me. I know my fellow citizens are too racist and selfish to draw a line in the sand against murder.
That's just never going to happen. That doesn't mean I have to like it, or be quiet about it.
First, there is no pro-death penalty cause. People like you have strangled the death penalty to the point of irrelevance.
It started when you presented, with a straight face, the laughable premise that an act of murder would have to be "heinous" before you decided appropriate punishment.
Forty years have passed and you brilliant moralists still haven't decided what that means.
Secondly, blaming you "pros" for the recidivism of murderers is entirely appropriate. You people comprise the majority of the electorate. You people aren't marching in the streets demanding harsher punishment of murder. You just want to sentence to death the tiny handful of murderers that make you feel extra yucky.
Even when legislation is proposed to streamline the execution process -- to SPEED UP the execution of people you've already CONDEMNED -- you balk. You aver over and over again -- no we can't do that, we don't want to execute the wrong guy. Executing them when they're eligible for Medicare isn't so bad. We don't want to be rash.
You can exempt assisted suicide from murder laws, if you like, if you're prepared for the consequences. It's a slippery slope, which is why Californians won't make that exception.
In most states murder is defined as a premeditated killing that is malicious. Killing someone who is terminally ill matches that definition whether you like it or not. You're just as much a killer as any gangster shooting from his Endo.
If something is the right thing to do, its rectitude survives repetition.
If assisting the blind is the right thing to do, helping 16,000 people who are blind is no less moral.
Likewise, if killing a man for what he's done is the right thing to do, killing every one that does the same thing is just as right.
That's a moral position, George. You take a stand and defend it. You don't seem to have one.
If you don't want to execute innocents, don't execute anyone.
The end of capital punishment is already here. Fulminate all you want about evil baby killers, people like you refuse to execute them. You can't make up your freaking
MIND. At best, you are among less than 1% of the DP advocates. I will never agree with you on this issue, but I respect your effective posting on behalf of the need to execute murderers.......
We don't need to execute anyone. I'm trying to raise awareness of what murder is and why it ought to be punished harshly, and people like you stand in my way.
