The Jury says no for the Parkland, FL school shooting.
I’m against capital punishment as well.
What say you
VA-mod edit: clarified JSM’s post to reflect his original idea based on the original thread title.
The government shouldn’t have the power to execute its own citizens, imo.
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I wouldn’t mind if Norway adopted the death penalty just to get rid of that anders guy
I don’t have time to mess around with guys who think it’s okay to go around murdering a whole bunch of people.
Plenty of people have bad upbringings, but they don’t take it out on others.
Hard to say without knowing the mental capacity issues discussed.
I am not a huge proponent of capital punishment (and I feel life imprisonment is a worse punishment)
But, if the punishment exists, I would need a strong argument as to why someone who committed mass murder, would be exempt.
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Given that life sentences are cheaper than death sentences in the US, I’d say life in prison.
I generally disagree with death sentences for things like simple murder when it’s not overwhelmingly obvious. The US has executed too many innocents. If not for the cost and given how overwhelming the evidence, I wouldn’t care about the death sentence here. In many cases it concerns me, especially for those people who are proven innocent after execution.
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That’s a good argument.
Capital Punishment is an extension of punishment, so we should certainly discuss if any form of punishment should be allowed.
That said, there is a difference between natural numbers and infinity (or 0, depending on how you wanna look at it).
Death penalty was usually thought of as a deterrent . . . and deterrents only work if it’s known that it’ll be carried out.
Problem now a days is people who wish to end their lives, but don’t want to go the “suicide” route.
I wonder if bringing back some form of “40 lashes” would be effective in terms of deterrence.
Death sentence would have meant several years of appeals, and in each of those appeals the families/friends of those killed would be reliving the trauma of the massacre. Life sentence would take that away, especially since there would be no parole board hearings.
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Yeah, I’m not a mass shooter but I would imagine that they would all prefer to die. At least, during the planning stage.
Death is so convenient and easy to to romanticize. Life in prison, not so much.
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i am not against a death penalty in theory. how we seem to apply it sucks IMO given all the evidence that it is applied unevenly.
could accept it with this guy. but the appeals (which are needed) and the impact they have on the victims’ families and survivors…I don’t know.
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It’s a shame that there are so many mass shootings, I don’t rightly recall which one “Parkland” was and what the circumstances around the culprit were.
I could look it up, but in principal I am not going to do so. I say “Fry him”
The cost of a life sentence sounds like an actuarial problem to solve . . . primarily, I don’t quite agree that it’s necessarily “cheaper” than a death sentence.
And to my earlier point about deterrence, I’m not sure that neither death penalty nor “life sentence” are going to be all that great of a deterrent given that the latter is basically “free room & board” given the current prison environment(s).
Which brings me back to some form of “40 lashes” being re-introduced.
Note that I’m not advocating bringing back the cat-o-nine-tails or some such; but physical pain inflicted to a degree that it becomes a useful deterrent but not getting into the realm of cruel punishment.
I modified the thread title to be a bit more generic (given the discussion taking place).
@John.S.Mill: I did edit your OP to add in the source of the discussion you started with. Hope you don’t mind.
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In many states this is not true and you CAN be paroled from a life sentence after so many years.
Some states have both “life” and “life without parole”. And while it wouldn’t shock me to learn of some way to get paroled on a “life without parole” sentence, I think generally “without parole” really does mean “without parole”.
“Life” frequently does NOT mean “for the rest of your life” though.
I Googled “parole from life sentence” and the first two hits I got were Georgia and Massachusetts pages, each describing how many years you have to wait before you are eligible for parole (depends on when you were convicted and what for in Georgia… ranges from 7-30 years, Massachusetts is 15 years).
so the judge released a question from a juror with the name in view indicating that this juror was part of the cause for the non-death sentence. the juror is now apparently doxxed and threatened.
the juror’s stance was that the convicted was mentally ill. so that’s understandable in general. who is not ill and commits such crimes? but hard for me to argue against such a reservation.
maybe that power should belong to the citizens
what if we let the victims’ families decide on the punishment?
I don’t think I’d be in favor of any human having authorized power to end the life of another.
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That’s my reasoning as well.
Though, I’m not sure where I stand on punishment by extension now.