Quote:
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Originally Posted by Frosstbyte
Your beliefs are not illegal, but making decisions about any part of a case before you've heard the evidence or the arguments undermines the entire purpose of an adversarial legal system presented to an impartial jury of peers.
I want jurors to do their job in the case at hand and not be activists for causes in an improper venue. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that and hope we're never on one another's juries.
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Which is why the correct answer to Ustwo's question is:
"My personal beliefs on the topic of capital punishment are irrelevent in regards to whether I'd do my civic duty to remain in this courtroom without a predetermination of guilt based on any ideological positions one may hold about any particular punishments."
It's late, and I haven't been around for a while, so it'd probably be best to work on how to word that rather than attempt any amount of trickery to wedge oneself into a potential jury pool.
Some similar variation of the answers given to Congress' questions about abortion to potential supreme court justices would suffice. The gist is the same: it's simply not appropriate to head into court with any set of preconceived notions of how things should be decided before the evidence phase is concluded. In practice, we know this to be bullshit, just about everyone I know has some idea about the big topics in the world. It's perfectly legitimate to tell the court that despite any strong beliefs you have about this complex topic, you're going to do your best to address the evidence in front of you without a bias one way or the other. Oh hey, that's a valid and straightforward response to Ustwo's question, as well.
The whole questioning of willravel about how he'd answer this question is a "gotcha" anyway, because in a real court of law, capital crimes are addressed by two
distinct phases: the trial (evidence) phase and the penalty phase. Your judgement of guilt or innocence isn't supposed to be predicated upon your belief of whether a particular punishment is appropriate for the crime the accused is on trial for--and that goes both ways.
If questions like that were allowed, it'd be the same as allowing the prosecution to stack the jury of all pro-death penalty citizens...which would obviously present a problem if you're trying to approximate anything like justice.
And given that's the whole premise of this debate, I don't know why anyone would want prosecuters to go down that road.
EDIT: I should also mention that I am personally opposed to the death penalty for the reasons already listed by a few people. I have personally experienced the tragedy of crime *as well* as the been on the receiving end of a broken criminal justice system.
I don't think either of those unique experiences grant any more legitimacy of my views on the subject. Without them, and without the rampant errors infused in our legal system, I would still be morally and fundamentally opposed to state sanctioned murder.