I am going to have to disagree with you - I think only a very...very small percentage of individuals are ever nominated so it has to mean something.

Could it be in part because the death penalty usually doesn't get carried out for 25 years after the fact? Yeah, could be.

Speed up the retributive justice, and THEN let's talk about a deterrent effect [or perhaps we should say detergent].

That also might be a much more legit reason why some of the victim's loved ones have a hard time "getting over it." Their closure is delayed because we want to be a merciful and just society.

Except for those who suffered at the hands of a cold blooded killer.

actually, the mother was interviewed tonight and she said she was only present because she thought she had to be. Even she didn't think she needed to see someone die to feel "closure."

In response to your quip about the deterrent effect of the death penalty, firstly you should read the scholarly studies on the subject before making firm decisions one way or the other. Secondly, you're wrong on the empirical data on the average length of stay on death row.

For Average length of stay in:
California: 16 to 17 years
Florida: 11.8 years
Texas: 10.4 years.

You can't take one high-profile case and conclude that's the average length of stay on death row, which is what you unfortunately evidently did.

Thirdly, simply because you think the death penatly would deter individuals from killing another human being, or even due to the fact it deters you, does not lead to an inference that killers would be detered. For a number of reasons, you can actually think this through on your own without my guidance, but for the sake of the thread: does the death penalty deter you from murdering? I suspect a wide variety of social factors lead you to conclude you ought not to kill. The death penatly is reserved for particular crimes: none of which are likely to be detered at all. Serial killers, killing in the commission of a felony, killing a public official, killing multiple people, and etc. People in those situations are not, for one or many reasons, bound by their everyday rationale that we expect most people to wind through in their decision making processes. Even in this example of Tookie Williams, we have a case of a young man under extremely high levels of peer pressure, pressure to prove machismo, and highly atognistic and hallucigenic, mind & physiologically altering substances--not a very good recipe for rational thought about the consequences of one's actions. If you want to argue, so what, he's responsible, that's fine and I may or may not agree, although such a stance is particulary irrelevent to what you are claiming: that ordinary, rational people will weigh the cost/benefit of their actions and decide that the death penatly is too great a cost for their actions. This all breaks down further when we consider that a) almost universally criminals don't expect to get caught, and b) even more problematic, the most rational thing a person can do when they are confronted with witnesses to their crimes is to remove the witnesses. Had the police not been able to retrieve the tape from the convenience store, Tookie may well have been out of prison today or imprisoned for a completley different matter. Looking at one of his particular crimes, in fact, his mistake wasn't killing the victim, it was a failure to eradicate enough evidence.

That's a far more scary thought to me personally. You can't have both simultaneously, either you have rational actors, and then they be sociopathic in order to think across social mores and act outside the bounds of normalicy, in which case deterrence would work but then you have someone able to think across variables while committing heinous crimes and act within the same time frame in a completely rational manner and eradicate evidence of their wrongdoing. Or you have irrational actors who would normally act according to the social boundaries, but are unable for one reason or another, in which case deterrence would not work. Have you read Catch-22? I propose the same condundrum is faced by your conception of criminality (a conception that is valid to some degree in criminology, I do have to add to be fair, but vastly outweighed by a number of equally or more plausable explanations for crime).

BTW, when you read those articles on the efficacy of the death penatly, you can also conjunct them with studies on punishment in general. There have been found to be 3 main factors in deterrence:
A) certainty
B) swiftness
C) severity

Certainty and swiftness are the two that explain the most variance. AH HA! you say, I was right--execute the filthy scum swiftly and we set a blatant and stunning example in the town square. Unfortunately, we find that severity doesn't actually do much for deterrence (except in my aforementioned point that it may actually be counterproductive)...that means a lengthy prison sentence, or even any sort of punishment that is bound to be certain and swift, does much more for deterrence than the most severe punishment can ever hope for.

Couple that with the fact that your claim left out--that people are executed fairly routinely, it's not that we have a particular 25 year period where we kill en masse--and we become hard pressed to recognize how a young or old murderer would care about who is murdered by the state. To have any kind of effect we'd have to ensure that every potential murderer knew the cause and effect of someone on deathrow (say commits a murder on Tuesday, goes to the chair on Friday). But then that leads us to one of the most important earlier points I made: if you have someone standing in a convenience store about to pull the trigger, but contemplating whether they are going to get caught at all, you almost never will have a murder to investigate anyway.

[1] Oh, sorry. 10 years. How speedy! My bad.

[2] I should have mentioned my bias. I don't care if it is a deterrent or not. I'm all for retributive justice.

[3] I'm glad the mom didn't need to be there for closure. But I hope you're not slamming those who might need it? No wait, I don't want a response. I can't read that much without pictures.

I'm sure you've guessed it already. I'm just such a neanderthal...

Damn shame, I've got an amazingly sexy picture of my wife's ass right next to this comment, but you still missed it:



The mother confirmed my comments in her interview.

sexy picture - check
insightful comment - check
confirmation of comment's validity by the victim - check

have a pleasant evening, I'm off to finish my thesis...
:thumbsup:


BTW, I think you should look up the definition of retributive justice before claiming to be a proponent of it. I suggest starting with Kant. Your comments indicate you are a supporter of vengeance. They are two different concepts. If you were a retributionist, you would have to weigh the negatives of Tookie's life against the positives...and then you would join the ranks of the category I named that hinge their opposition to his death on the net benefit he has produced since his incarceration...a position I hold...and I'm almost positive you don't want to be in the same category as me ;)

Again, a comment stating we ought to be faster with putting people to death on death row. I'd like to know, do you not care about putting innocent people to death then? This is truly an honest question. Since 1973, 116 people have been exonerated from death row, only 14 of them were exonerated due to DNA evidence, and their average length of stay on death row before exoneration was 9 years. As a total, there have been 1042 years of innocent imprisonment on death row - and that's only counting those who have been discovered. In my state, Illinois, 18 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973 and the system was shown to be so flawed that our former Republican governor, and former supporter of the death penalty commuted every single death sentence in Illinois to life in prison! (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/arti...id=45&did=1149)

If we were faster at administering the death penalty, most of those innocent or likely innocent people who were exonerated would have been put to death. Is this something you just don't care about? Do you consider this collateral damage? Are you willing to be put to death while innocent of the crime in order to maintain a speedy death penalty in the name of revenge against killers? I know I'm not.

A lot of comments in this thread refer to 'putting innocent people to death' as a reason for abolishing death sentences.

I'd like to make my position clear by stating that I don't believe in killing people 100% guilty of any crime.... and I mean any crime.

Like Yasser Arafat?

I agree, but I think the focus is on innocent people being put to death when debating about it because you either believe it's right to kill people who are guilty or you don't, and the fact that you and I don't isn't going to do anything to point out the problems with the death penalty to those who do. There are enough other serious problems that the debate can be had on many different levels. All of which come out in favor of removing the death penalty.

Canadian: I don't believe in the death penalty. Ever.

I used to be a strong beliver in the death penalty, from about age teen something to mid twenties. (I used to be strongly pro-life also). But since then I have mellowed, and I have realized that the world can be a fucked up place. I don't think that it serves humanity to execute a criminal, no matter how heinous (sp!) their crime. It only serves to lessen us as a species a little bit lower than we already are.

Besides, there have been too many incidences of the wrong guy being convicted for murder when they didn't do. I can think of several...

Steven Truscott, 14 convicted of muder in Ontario, sentenced to hang. Turns out, he didn't do. Spent 10 or so years in jail.

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/truscott/

Donald Marshall, Nova Scotia, convicted of murder. Turns out, he didn't do it. Released, died a few years ago.

http://www.cbc.ca/lifeandtimes/marshall.html

David Milgard, Saskatchewan, convicted of murder, spent almost 30 years in jail. Turns out the cops framed him, crown hid evidence that could have cleared him. DNA proved he didn't do it. Probably one of the most tragic cases EVER.

http://archives.radio-canada.ca/IDD-...ople/milgaard/

Guy Paul Morin.

Convicted of killing a young girl in 1992. Exonerated by DNA in 1995.

http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view...2/morin980202a

Can't imagine the hell he went through.

I saw a documentary on this one. Again, cops and crown attournies worked to frame him because the cops were "sure" that they had the right guy. Absolutely sick.

The one thing I will never ever ever forget was this fat woman who sat on the jury telling the show that she "knew" he was guilty because when he was testifying, he didn't look the jury in the eye.

Fuck the evidence, I "KNOW" he is guilty, my instincts tell me so.

There's four that I can think of in 5 minutes.

Oh, and add Reubin "Huricane" Carter to that list. There's 5 guys I can think of that were wrongfully committed of murder.

If it had been the United States, most of them would have probably been dead. And when the truth came out, it would have been, "whoops, sorry about that."

No fucking way do I trust juries to be infalable. Most of them are made up of morons too stupid to get out of jury duty.

No, keep them in jail for the rest of their lives, I don't care. But executions are just wrong. No different than the muslim extremists hacking off heads in my opinion.

Glad he's dead, sad it took so long.

As a Californian it pisses me off that it takes so long for a convicted murderer to be put to death, while I pay super high taxes on everything. Somebody says it costs more to execute someone than keep them alive in prison, bullshit! If it was up to me it would be a $.25 bullet in the head of this scum. 750 gang related murders last year, and that's only counting Los Angeles!! How are we as a society going to stop this freight train of violence? Can we deter these little scumbags? Maybe get there crackwhore mommas to start disciplining their children when they're young? How bout we start executing murderers, rapists, and child molestors (convicted with DNA evedince) within minutes of the gavel dropping. It should be televised on TV for everyone to watch. Maybe if these little fuckers realized that there is a consequence to their actions they'll get out and look for a job instead of killing each other and innocent bystanders over drug territory. At least once a month there is a story on the LA network news about some innocent child sitting in a car or playing in there yard and getting capped by some pussy gangster who runs away and probably never gets caught.

Our justice system is FUCKED right now. A couple years ago I sat in the jury on a murder trial. We convicted the guy of 2nd degree murder, he was sentenced to 15 years I think. But anyway because of some bullshit technicality, there wasn't enough minorities on the jury or something like that, the conviction was reversed and he is a free man now. Free man that beat his wife with an axe, admitted it, and was set free.

This pretty much makes me disregard anything intelligent you might otherwise have had to say.

crfpilot, It's been mentioned many times and no one has bothred to address it, and since you're the latest person to say we should be speedier at executing people, I'll ask you. What about the people who are convicted - by juries - and are actually innocent? It is a fact - executing someone costs more than keeping them in prison for life. Now, if you had your way, then executing WOULD be cheaper. It would also be unconstitutional (shooting someone in the head with a gun falls under cruel and unusual punishment, especially since they could survive) and faster. On top of that, those 100+ people who have been sentenced to death despite being innocent in the past 3 decades or so would all be dead. Every single one of them. Would it be cheaper? Yes. All I want to know is, are you willing to kill those 100+ innocent people? The question has been ignored by many in this thread and all I'm asking is for you to either admit that you feel killing 100+ innocent people is a valid price for speedy and cheaper executions of murderers, or to admit that it's better to give those people a chance and accept the consequences which include it being more costly to execute than imprison for life.

First of all it is not a fact that executing someone costs more than keeping them alive. The high cost is in the pretrial and during trial ofa capital case

Now I understand that back in the 60's-80's there were people wrongfully convicted, and no those people should not be executed. But today, anyone convicted by DNA or Video evidence that is 99.99% correct should be executed within 6 months. California has only executed 12 people since 1976. We need to speed up the process.

There is probably over 600-700 now. I doubt that 100+ of them are innocent, I really doubt that 5 of them are innocent, that's <1%. Now I might be sick and twisted on this but yes, I think that would be an acceptable loss if it would mean a reduction in violent crime and possibly save thousands of other innocent people killed, raped and mosested every year.

Like I said before, our justice system is fucked right now. The process of a capital trial should not take 2-3 years. I've sat in court as a witness ALL FUCKING DAY before and not even taken the stand. When I sat on the murder trial it took about a month and I swear we sat in the hallway more than we were in the courtroom. If the justice system was more efficient it wouldn't cost more for a capital case than keeping someone in prison for life.

what makes me pause is the thought, "what if you were one of the 100+ innocent????"

would you make the sacrifice for the "greater good" or would you want the process to be changed so that you have all the opportunity for appeals and clemency or even life without parole?

That's the question everyone always asks me. I would say if it would save hundreds of others sure I'd sacrifice myself. Besides if I had it my way death would be a better alternative to prison. In prison you would get hardly enough food to stay healthy, you'd work your ass off, hard labor for 10-12 hours a day, and when you were done, you'd shower and hit the rack. There would be no TV, weight room, ping pong, library, basketball, etc. Visits with family would be limited to about 5 minutes a month. Rehabilitation would be not wanting to go back to prison cause it sucks.

he should have been executed 20 years ago

Really?

Guess you haven't heard the intreviews of the members of Guy Paul Morin trial as I did.

Here's a list I found on the net of Canadians wrongly convicted by juries. Still trust the jury system....

http://www.injusticebusters.com/04/Informants.shtml