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Originally Posted by highthief
No, it doesn't - in the UK, for instance, there is a small majority (and has been for some years) in support of the death penalty - yet the death penalty was abolished.
It obviously does not exist to satisfy the will of the people. It was abolished in spite of what "the people" may have wanted.
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That's flawed logic arising from an admittedly incomplete statement. In order to be complete, Strange Famous' statement should've read '
where it exists, the death penalty exists to satisfy the will of the people,' thus removing anywhere the death penalty isn't used from the discussion. If the majority of the population in a democratic state supports a policy and that policy isn't enacted, the failure belongs to the governing body of that state and not to the policy itself.
EDIT for Unclephil - that is something of a threadjack as it strays outside of the original stated premise of the thread. The appropriate argument would be whether or not the death penalty is appropriate in that case, which is a different discussion and one that's been done to death. Suffice to say that as I'm against the death penalty I don't think
any form of execution is appropriate. Lock them away for life? Sure. But I will not be a party to murder, state-sanctioned or not. The problem is that this seems to be largely a matter of opinions and the old saying about how opinions are like assholes seems to apply here.