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3 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Governors, DAs, sentencing judges and sentencing juries should be required to attend and watch. Don’t duck around or hide from the reality of what we are doing. I think we’d see the support for this dry up pretty quick.

Considering Season 3 GIF by Portlandia

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8 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

I believe that as long as we insist on doing this, we should use the guillotine. It is idiot proof, fast, and painless to the executed, horrifying and bloody to the people watching or doing the killing. Governors, DAs, sentencing judges and sentencing juries should be required to attend and watch. Don’t duck around or hide from the reality of what we are doing. I think we’d see the support for this dry up pretty quick.

Oh.

You seem to be one of those people who thinks that Idiocracy was a piece of fiction, not a documentary.

How adorable.

We could do live beheadings, and it would be the highest rated program on TV.*

 

* Until "The Bachelor" starts showing full nudity.  When that happens, it will own the airwaves.

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8 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

I believe that as long as we insist on doing this, we should use the guillotine. It is idiot proof, fast, and painless to the executed, horrifying and bloody to the people watching or doing the killing. Governors, DAs, sentencing judges and sentencing juries should be required to attend and watch. Don’t duck around or hide from the reality of what we are doing. I think we’d see the support for this dry up pretty quick.

I think you might be underestimating the mob and spectacle that public executions have always invited. And there's plenty of ghoulish lawyers that will claim to be acting on behalf of their constituency and gleefully splash around in the not-so-proverbial blood.

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59 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

My hot and unpopular take is this:

I do not think the death penalty is humane or just and it doesn’t have a place in a modern society. 
 

I also believe that it is highly inappropriate to use pseudo-medical and “humane” procedures like asphyxiation or injection to take a life. They are not particularly humane to the executed, they are really psychological aids to soothe our collective consciousness about the awful reality that we are taking a human life.

I believe that as long as we insist on doing this, we should use the guillotine. It is idiot proof, fast, and painless to the executed, horrifying and bloody to the people watching or doing the killing. Governors, DAs, sentencing judges and sentencing juries should be required to attend and watch. Don’t duck around or hide from the reality of what we are doing. I think we’d see the support for this dry up pretty quick.

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1 hour ago, Sandman said:

After working in law enforcement for a short time, I realized that many of the people involved just cannot be trusted to do the right thing (or the smart thing) and that the death penalty needs to just go away.

 

You do realize that being assigned hall monitor is not law enforcement.

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12 hours ago, Herbie Hancock said:

Ya know the more I think about it, ol’ Billy was right. Let’s kill all the lawyers, kill ‘em tonight.

While I agree with your sentiment, you may want to reread that passage, especially considering the context of this particular discussion.

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

 

* Until "The Bachelor" starts showing full nudity.  When that happens, it will own the airwaves.

I suggested this very thing to Chris Harrison at lunch a year or so ago.  He laughed like I was crazy.  Then he quickly jotted down a note.

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3 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

If his sentence was carried out, and he survived, why isn’t he walking free?  Is the sentence an actual death, or a procedure meant to cause death?

Curious about that myself.  When the rope broke in the old West, didn't they go free, or is that just fiction?

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5 hours ago, Your Mom said:

Life without parole is a much harsher sentence.  I’d much rather be executed than spend the rest of my life in jail, I bet most people would.  Seeing as how I want the most miserable sentence for people like McVeigh, the short answer to your question is yes.  He got off easy.  

It’s actually not. The majority of death row inmates fight like hell to get to general population. Eating and sleeping with a scythe above your head is a unique torture. 

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1 hour ago, Samson's Wig said:

If we can't get rid of the death penalty, which would be my preference, I would like to see two nuances added to the equation, both involving the victim's survivors.

 

1. Victims' survivors get one get-out-of-jail-free card to deal with the fucker personally.  (I'm half kidding with this one, but the next option is serious.)

2. If they're not interested in the first option, the survivors decide whether the guilty party is executed or spends life in prison.  Many (perhaps most) families of victims would rather the guilty person not be executed.  There are several reasons for this; the most common one is they don't see how another killing will do anything to make right what happened, and another major reason is that death sentences prolong the suffering of the victims' families, dragging out a process for years that almost never leads to any kind of closure.  It only serves to delay the grieving process, sometimes for decades.  The death penalty is not for the survivors, it's for the rest of us.  The rest of us should grow up.

 

A deterrence-based approach to criminal justice doesn't work.  Never has, never will.  It appeals to a certain mindset and sounds reasonable on paper, but it doesn't work.  A reform-based approach has also failed miserably in this country, but it has succeeded in other cultures.  So we're left with retribution based justice, and boy do we lean into this one with gusto in America. The notion appealed to me as a younger man, but I'm getting older and softer and would prefer we start looking at ways to incorporate a reformation-based approach utilizing successes from other nations who are perhaps a touch more civilized than we are.  We should, at a bar minimum, start with prison reform.

Hmmm...I'll take option #1.

 

 

*I've watched "Law Abiding Citizen" too many times. 

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1 hour ago, Samson's Wig said:

If we can't get rid of the death penalty, which would be my preference, I would like to see two nuances added to the equation, both involving the victim's survivors.

 

1. Victims' survivors get one get-out-of-jail-free card to deal with the fucker personally.  (I'm half kidding with this one, but the next option is serious.)

2. If they're not interested in the first option, the survivors decide whether the guilty party is executed or spends life in prison.  Many (perhaps most) families of victims would rather the guilty person not be executed.  There are several reasons for this; the most common one is they don't see how another killing will do anything to make right what happened, and another major reason is that death sentences prolong the suffering of the victims' families, dragging out a process for years that almost never leads to any kind of closure.  It only serves to delay the grieving process, sometimes for decades.  The death penalty is not for the survivors, it's for the rest of us.  The rest of us should grow up.

 

A deterrence-based approach to criminal justice doesn't work.  Never has, never will.  It appeals to a certain mindset and sounds reasonable on paper, but it doesn't work.  A reform-based approach has also failed miserably in this country, but it has succeeded in other cultures.  So we're left with retribution based justice, and boy do we lean into this one with gusto in America. The notion appealed to me as a younger man, but I'm getting older and softer and would prefer we start looking at ways to incorporate a reformation-based approach utilizing successes from other nations who are perhaps a touch more civilized than we are.  We should, at a bar minimum, start with prison reform.

There is a third way, which is simple containment.  I don’t necessarily want these people to suffer. I don’t want them to be miserable. I hate hearing about abuse and sexual assault and living in fear. 

I just don’t want multiple-time felons in my town. For sure not violent felons. Not even property crime felons.  The stats on recidivism are off the charts. 
 

I don’t rage at the nice Swedish and Norwegian prisons.  Keep criminals in places like that. Give ‘em TV, visits, decent food, libraries, schools, college courses. Just keep them there.  Happy to try to reform them, too. In there. 
 

I think it’s a really curious Anglo-Protestant false binary of either reform or punish. I just don’t want criminals near me. 

Edited by 956 Worldwide
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4 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

My hot and unpopular take is this:

I do not think the death penalty is humane or just and it doesn’t have a place in a modern society. 
 

I also believe that it is highly inappropriate to use pseudo-medical and “humane” procedures like asphyxiation or injection to take a life. They are not particularly humane to the executed, they are really psychological aids to soothe our collective consciousness about the awful reality that we are taking a human life.

I believe that as long as we insist on doing this, we should use the guillotine. It is idiot proof, fast, and painless to the executed, horrifying and bloody to the people watching or doing the killing. Governors, DAs, sentencing judges and sentencing juries should be required to attend and watch. Don’t duck around or hide from the reality of what we are doing. I think we’d see the support for this dry up pretty quick.

I agree with your unpopular opinion. The guillotine would also be a fiscally responsible option. You don’t have to pay anyone to administer toxic drugs, so you don’t need a physician. If all you have to do is pull a lever, I’m sure there are many relatives of the deceased who would be very happy to volunteer, thus saving the state money on the cost of an executioner. 

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2 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

I agree with your unpopular opinion. The guillotine would also be a fiscally responsible option. You don’t have to pay anyone to administer toxic drugs, so you don’t need a physician. If all you have to do is pull a lever, I’m sure there are many relatives of the deceased who would be very happy to volunteer, thus saving the state money on the cost of an executioner. 

I was under the impression that no physicians actually administered the cocktail as it’s a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. But could be wrong on that.

Regardless, dressing it up as a medical procedure is grotesque. 

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36 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

I don’t rage at the nice Swedish and Norwegian prisons.  Keep criminals in places like that. Give ‘em TV, visits, decent food, libraries, schools, college courses. Just keep them there.  Happy to try to reform them, too. In there. 

Often lost in this comparison is that the make-up of Norwegian prisoners is different: homicide and serious violent crime is extremely low. 

#1 for recent convicts is drugs/alcohol, #3 is….traffic offenses. Like car traffic, not humans. 

#2 is a broad category they call “violence and maltreatment” which lumps everything from elderly abuse to psychological abuse to strongarming a child (extremely protective in norway) 

homicide is a good proxy for other violent acts like felony assault and homicide are around ~25 a year. 

not many people in there for stabbing and stompin on folks, ie risk to society. 

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1 minute ago, 52-80 said:

Often lost in this comparison is that the make-up of Norwegian prisoners is different: homicide and serious violent crime is extremely low. 

#1 for recent convicts is drugs/alcohol, #3 is….traffic offenses. Like car traffic, not humans. 

#2 is a broad category they call “violence and maltreatment” which lumps everything from elderly abuse to psychological abuse to strongarming a child (extremely protective in norway) 

homicide is a good proxy for other violent acts like felony assault and homicide are around ~25 a year. 

not many people in there for stabbing and stompin on folks, ie risk to society. 

I mean....there's only 5 million people in Norway.  So...Houston.  And their poverty rate is super low.  There just isn't that much violent crime (that said, I have one Norwegian friend, and he was in a serious knife fight when he was younger).  That said, however many violent criminals they have, that's how they treat them.  Which is generally a good thing.

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35 minutes ago, Elvis said:

Comparing anything about America to small countries with homogenous populations makes no sense at all.  

What does homogeneity have to do with the death penalty or harsh prison conditions? Well, you see, we've got all kinds of folks here, so we just need to treat prisoners like shit.

 

Here's the kind of company we keep when it comes to the death penalty: Cuba, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, China, North Korea, etc. I will admit a "WTF" reaction to South Korea and Japan, but those are the only other highly developed democracies that practice it besides us.

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5 hours ago, Samson's Wig said:

If we can't get rid of the death penalty, which would be my preference, I would like to see two nuances added to the equation, both involving the victim's survivors.

 

1. Victims' survivors get one get-out-of-jail-free card to deal with the fucker personally.  (I'm half kidding with this one, but the next option is serious.)

2. If they're not interested in the first option, the survivors decide whether the guilty party is executed or spends life in prison.  Many (perhaps most) families of victims would rather the guilty person not be executed.  There are several reasons for this; the most common one is they don't see how another killing will do anything to make right what happened, and another major reason is that death sentences prolong the suffering of the victims' families, dragging out a process for years that almost never leads to any kind of closure.  It only serves to delay the grieving process, sometimes for decades.  The death penalty is not for the survivors, it's for the rest of us.  The rest of us should grow up.

 

A deterrence-based approach to criminal justice doesn't work.  Never has, never will.  It appeals to a certain mindset and sounds reasonable on paper, but it doesn't work.  A reform-based approach has also failed miserably in this country, but it has succeeded in other cultures.  So we're left with retribution based justice, and boy do we lean into this one with gusto in America. The notion appealed to me as a younger man, but I'm getting older and softer and would prefer we start looking at ways to incorporate a reformation-based approach utilizing successes from other nations who are perhaps a touch more civilized than we are.  We should, at a bar minimum, start with prison reform.

i don't believe you can say a "reform-based" approach has ever been seriously attempted in the US, assuming you mean "rehabilitation" based.

The only things we've really done, on a limited scale, are "diversion courts," such as drug, mental-health, and veteran's courts and they are reasonably successful.  And those are maybe 20-25 years old at the outside.

American criminal law was mostly static in terms of sentencing for the first about 200 years, the major development being movement from common-law to statutory crimes.  At some point, fear developed and politicians moved to exploit that fear with ever-longer sentences, and, of course, the War on Drugs.

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3 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

There is a third way, which is simple containment.  I don’t necessarily want these people to suffer. I don’t want them to be miserable. I hate hearing about abuse and sexual assault and living in fear. 

I just don’t want multiple-time felons in my town. For sure not violent felons. Not even property crime felons.  The stats on recidivism are off the charts. 
 

I don’t rage at the nice Swedish and Norwegian prisons.  Keep criminals in places like that. Give ‘em TV, visits, decent food, libraries, schools, college courses. Just keep them there.  Happy to try to reform them, too. In there. 
 

I think it’s a really curious Anglo-Protestant false binary of either reform or punish. I just don’t want criminals near me. 

Well, as always, they're probably not moving into your upper-middle-class neighborhood, so most (not all) crime is going to be a fairly remote proposition for most of us here.

But, I think your idea of making incarceration completely humane, so inmates are not further broken and criminalized, has a lot of merit.  Just let the fact that they are incarcerated be the punishment.  And put em to work somehow or other.  And treat their mental health disorders.

Yeah, it's going to cost more per capita than what we do, but I imagine the societal savings would be tremendous.

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1 hour ago, royiv said:

For the death penalty proponents, I'm interested to know what drives your position on the matter. Is it deterrent, religious, economic, etc? Just curious how you came to your position.

 

33 minutes ago, Foosters said:

Hammurabi's code, I think 

Yeah, I think it kind of lies in notions of an eye for an eye.

But it is fascinating that people who are largely or entirely unaffected by a heinous crime get so lathered up about putting someone to death.

"Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord" is not some divine power play.  It's one of those instances where the Bible actually espouses good psychology.  I think most psychologists would agree that harboring notions of vengeance on those who offend you, even gravely, is just not a good way to achieve peace and reconciliation in the aftermath of a senseless tragedy. And, as noted here, relying on the government and the courts to exercise vengeance for you is a double-whammy of bad juju.

Even a thoughtful, otherwise (mostly) balanced dude like brisket often espouses death.  

Edited by TwiceHorn
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23 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Well, as always, they're probably not moving into your upper-middle-class neighborhood, so most (not all) crime is going to be a fairly remote proposition for most of us here.

But, I think your idea of making incarceration completely humane, so inmates are not further broken and criminalized, has a lot of merit.  Just let the fact that they are incarcerated be the punishment.  And put em to work somehow or other.  And treat their mental health disorders.

Yeah, it's going to cost more per capita than what we do, but I imagine the societal savings would be tremendous.

I don’t even really look at it as punishment being the primary or even a secondary goal. The goal is to stop crime and make people safer. I don’t see what the type of crime or diversity of the population has to do with any of that. Incarcerating people who can’t stop committing crimes but treating the incarcerated nicely keeps predators, cruel people, and those with no impulse control away so everyone else can get along with their lives. And humane incarceration will likely mean that sometime down the road the people in the poor impulse control bucket can be let out once they’ve demonstrated they learned some instead of turning them into predators. 

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9 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

I don’t even really look at it as punishment being the primary or even a secondary goal

In that regard, you are different from most, certainly when it comes to length of sentence or favoring the death penalty.  Agree with the rest of your post.

I think these notions of diversity maybe drive a little bit of it because that is what seems to underlie the documented American distrust of our fellow citizens that is conspicuously lacking in Scandinavian and more homogeneous societies. 

We seem to be unusually willing to "otherize" people in this country and then demonize them.

Regardless, something is wrong with our culture/society that leads to criminality and our counter-productive response to it.  Part of it is the War on Drugs, but that prompts the question why Americans have such a voracious appetite for drugs.  And that probably relates to our fractured social safety net, which may ouroboros into that otherizing.

And, ultimately, I think the notion of the "american dream" when so many are effectively cut out of it has become increasingly corrosive to our society.

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13 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

In that regard, you are different from most, certainly when it comes to length of sentence or favoring the death penalty.  Agree with the rest of your post.

.

I don’t favor the death penalty, I think it should stop. 
 

There’s just no standard for what the “right” amount of punishment is for killing or raping someone. I don’t know how you begin to calculate that. I get the anger and rage and disgust from the victims, but isn’t that why we turn this over to the cool and dispassionate state? “Consequences” you learn from are for kids. This isn’t time out. 
 

I just think it’s more helpful to frame it differently.  If you hurt people, we aren’t going to let you around people to hurt. If you keep breaking into houses, then you’ve shown that you think this is an OK way to make your way in the world. Sorry, you don’t get to do that. We won’t let you. 
 

Incidentally, I’d keep the white collar types there just as long if not longer. It reveals a predator mentality and other people as prey. You don’t get to do that. It’s not a punishment to deny you access to prey. 

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8 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

I don’t favor the death penalty, I think it should stop. 
 

There’s just no standard for what the “right” amount of punishment is for killing or raping someone. I don’t know how you begin to calculate that. I get the anger and rage and disgust from the victims, but isn’t that why we turn this over to the cool and dispassionate state? “Consequences” you learn from are for kids. This isn’t time out. 
 

I just think it’s more helpful to frame it differently.  If you hurt people, we aren’t going to let you around people to hurt. If you keep breaking into houses, then you’ve shown that you think this is an OK way to make your way in the world. Sorry, you don’t get to do that. We won’t let you. 
 

Incidentally, I’d keep the white collar types there just as long if not longer. It reveals a predator mentality and other people as prey. You don’t get to do that. It’s not a punishment to deny you access to prey. 

ETA:  I didn't mean that I disagreed with that, although my wording may have so indicated.

Exactly my sentiments as pertains to the quantum of punishment.  That's a sort of cosmic question unanswerable by government and individuals.

I'd be thrilled if we calibrated our sentences more according to incapacitation than retribution.   The one problem there is that I think there's a tendency to err on the long side and for retributive notions to creep in.  We have to bear in mind that these people will return to polite society at some point in time.

Therefore, I think we really, really need to do some rehabilitative work in there as well.  And I think your idea of making prisons civil and humane goes a long way to doing that.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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Discipline, training, and proper treatment is the way I would like to see it go. I study what is going on in Central America with their prison system, and it will not fix the long term problems. 15 year olds being locked up for what ever reason still do not give up their human rights. Nor do murderers.

I think Smith should have been given life without parole, which is what 11 of the Jurors wanted. I guess the judge overruled them.

 

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32 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Incidentally, I’d keep the white collar types there just as long if not longer. It reveals a predator mentality and other people as prey. You don’t get to do that. It’s not a punishment to deny you access to prey. 

100000% agree with this. White collar crime is often calculated and pre-meditated over months and years. These people know what they are doing to others and it’s so much more evil to me than a crime of passion. 

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6 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

I mean....there's only 5 million people in Norway.  So...Houston.  And their poverty rate is super low.  There just isn't that much violent crime (that said, I have one Norwegian friend, and he was in a serious knife fight when he was younger).  That said, however many violent criminals they have, that's how they treat them.  Which is generally a good thing.

According to preliminary data from the Houston Police Department, there were 348 murders throughout the city in 2023 — a 20% decrease compared to 2022, when 434 murders were committed within city limits.

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