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I'm pro-life-of-the-innocent and pro-justice. If they killed someone who didn't deserve it, then they deserve to be killed. There needs to be some sort of balance, here.

Frankly, I'd prefer that the execution matched the way they offed their victim. Make it truly fitting.

Society would not be executing an un-deserving victim, but rather, someone who deserved, earned, justified, and provoked retaliation from society. Cause & effect. Force / counter-force. Action / reaction.

What I think is wrong is for society to let a murderer--a person who kills without reasonable cause--get away with it, or to instill a weak punishment upon him. If we let him live, when he didn't let his victim live, then we are on his side.

But I don't want to be on the side of a murderer. I want him off this earth. Let him become worm's food.

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Marge, what if you saw a sign falling toward someone?  Would you shout at them to move, or maybe even charge them, tackle them, and knock them out of the way?

But isn't shouting at someone mean?  Isn't tackling them and knocking them down . . . assault?

But then, isn't extreme action justified sometimes?  Isn't it reasonable?

I think justice outweighs the unpleasantness of execution.  Since I don't believe in any god or heaven or magical karma realm, then I think it falls on us to mete out justice ourselves as human beings, in this life.  Anything less, and we're failing to do our duty, and we're basically helping to make this hell on earth.

mmcutter wrote:

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Of course, I would shout at them and/or tackle them to get them out of the way of danger, Beast.  That is helping them.  Killing someone is not helping them.

My point was that I believed you would find that unpleasant violence can sometimes be justified.  The mere fact that it is unpleasant and violence doesn't automatically make it unjustified, in all cases.

For you, a little unpleasant violence is OK for the purposes of helping the person.

For me, executing a murderer is OK because it helps everybody else.  It rids us of the murderous scum, once and for all.

I care not whether execution helps the murderer.  He forfeited any entitlement to being helped when he committed murder in the first place.

But everybody else still deserves a little help, though.  They should be protected from the likes of that murderous scum, forevermore.

Killing him does that. 

Keeping him in prison, where he might escape or be paroled for some bizarre reason, does not.

Unfortunately, I do believe in God, and I think life is the most precious gift He has given us.

IMO, a murderer gives up any entitlement to any "gifts" he might have received.

But discussing gifts from a god and how much entitlement we have to those gifts and when and how that affects our obligations to one another is probably a bottomless rabbit hole just waiting to happen...

If someone murders another person, or commits some other heinous crime, put him in prison.

But that doesn't help him.  Look at the attrocities that happen in prison.

Nor does it help the rest of society.  Why should the good guys be burdened with paying to support that evil SOB for the rest of his life?

With "help" like that, who needs "hurt"?

Do not lower yourself to his level by murdering him.

Execution does not do that.  Execution punishes a person who has violated the law and the peace of the land in the most horrific way.

But murder doesn't punish someone for doing that--it does that: It violates the law and the peace of the land in the most horrific way.

By not doing the crime, and instead by punishing someone who has done the crime, execution elevates us above the level of the murderer.

Yes, it is unpleasant violence.  But again, it is justifiable unpleasant violence because it helps.

I believe he will get his true punishment in the afterlife.

I don't.

Regardless, in a civil society with separation of church and state, we're not supposed to be basing our laws and public policy on our respective beliefs about supernatural concepts.

We're supposed to base them on observations and reasonable conclusions about the here-and-now, which can actually be verified and repeated.

Afterlives cannot.

I understand that this thinking does not work for anyone who does not believe in a Supreme Being, so I have long ago decided I need to agree to disagree with people who support the death penalty.

Cool beans, Marge.

But, Supreme Being aside, I also know that innocent people have been put to death under out justice system.  If even one person is falsely convicted and put to death, that is too many.  What happens 5 or 10 years after an execution when new evidence or better forensics prove someone else actually committed the crime for which that person was executed?  "Oops" doesn't work.

Punish the people who abused the system and went after the wrong person.

I have long thought that cops get away with far too much in the name of investigating crime and trying to find the right guilty party.

I think judges and juries should be held responsible if they screw over the wrong guy, too.

But don't throw the baby out with the bath water.  Just because the system is abused sometimes, that doesn't mean the system itself is all bad.  Some innocent people are put in prison, too.  But that doesn't mean we should eliminate the prison system, too, does it?  Some innocent people get tickets, too.  Do we eliminate traffic tickets?  Some people are taxed unfairly.  Do we eliminate taxes?  (I already know Nanron's answer to that!)

In those cases, Marge, the precise mistake was wrongly identifying the suspect/accused/defendant/convict, which led to executing the wrong person.  Now, technically, the execution process, itself, was carried out properly.  A person was ordered to be killed, and that person was actually killed.  But the identification process did not work properly.  So we should be directing our consternation, anger, criticism, etc., at the persons conducting that identification process.  The people conducting the execution part actually did their job right, so we shouldn't be as mad at them.

An analogy would be in combat, when a foot soldier acts as a forward observer checking out a target, and he calls in over the radio to report targeting coordinates, and then either artillery or aircraft attack the called-in coordinates. What if the target is wrongly identified with improper coordinates, and so the aircraft bombs/missiles the wrong building?  Who's at fault?  I blame the foot soldier who misidentified the target moreso than the bombardier who followed his orders to a "T".  I do not dismiss the entire process of conducting war, just because sometimes the wrong people are hurt or killed.

Same deal, here.