Ex-inmate near execution awarded $14 million

[Pockets]

Quote by: bishop life on death row is normally 23 hours a day in the cage, 1 hr for exercise, and you get something like 3 showers a week.. no human interaction and some places practice extreme sensory deprivation - where there is no mental stimuli, interaction, and they never turn the lights off... perfect recipe for creating a situation of utter despair and psychosis. Fight the Death Penalty in USA - Articles Death row prisoner Howard Guidry people in this country like the death penalty like they like their wars, "clean" and out of sight.. anything to cover up the inherent dirtiness of the act. personally, seeing the public all riled up over someone's impending death brings these images to mind... http://www.geocities.com/richard.cla...om/fariba1.jpg http://www.sikhsundesh.net/execution.jpg http://isaacschrodinger.typepad.com/.../stoning_1.jpg

That is the problem-out of site, out of mind. This country is becoming numb becasue of the sanitization of, well, everything. Death penalty supporters like to point out the 'deterrent factor' when it comes to the death penalty. I have never heard anybody invoke the death penalty as a factor regarding their decision not to kill. I don't suppose it's a standard topic, but you would think in all these years you would hear of one. It may work to secure a guilty plea in return for a life sentence. If it is available to the prosecution it will get used as it was intended to be used. The best point I think you can make for abolition of the death penalty is simple. If you have the death penalty and carry it out when sentenced you will eventually kill an innocent person. Simple math will tell you it has already happened. No I cannot prove it.

[bishop]

i usually hear the average joe talk about the death penalty as more for vengence than for deterrence.. only lawyers try to claim that it is a deterrant, because according to our laws, the death penalty could not be justifiable if used for vengence. i.e. there is a legal reason why people claim that it is a deterrant, despite the fact that there is no statistical evidence to support this claim. and, we must bear in mind that debate over the death penalty is typically light on rationality (at least in my eyes it is).

as for the competence of our judicial system, the facts speak for themselves.. (yet people still rabidly support their death penalty in light of the facts.)

American Civil Liberties Union : A Question of Innocence

As of February 2004, 113 inmates had been found innocent and released from death row. More than half of these have been released in the last 10 years. That means one person has been exonerated for every eight people executed. A study by Columbia University professor James Liebman examined thousands of capital sentences that had been reviewed by courts in 34 states from 1973 to 1995. "An astonishing 82 percent of death row inmates did not deserve to receive the death penalty," he said in his conclusion. "One in twenty death row inmates is later found not guilty." The vast majority of those exonerated were found innocent because someone came forward to confess committing the crime; key witness testimony was found to be illegitimate; or new evidence was found to support innocence <snip> Although there has been much attention surrounding the use of DNA testing, only 13 death row inmates of 113 have been exonerated by use of DNA. Many people falsely believe that DNA testing is a panacea that guarantees innocent people will not be put to death. However, it is important to note that DNA testing is not always able to determine the killer. In many cases, there is no physical evidence to test. DNA testing can be a critical tool for proving innocence, but it is still only available in a fraction of cases. For instance, five of the seventeen people released from death row were released because DNA evidence revealed their innocence.

[ZNFYRH]

How can you evaluate if something is a deterrent?

Do you go up to average citizens and ask:

"Have you ever thought about killing or raping a man, woman, or child? Did you decide against it because of the death penalty?"

If you think about it, if you only ask convicted criminals if the death penalty was a deterrent for their actions, you're going to find a 0% success rate.

[bishop]

one way would be to see if changes in murder rates can be attributed to the death penalty.

[ZNFYRH]

But would that be accurate? A change in the trend of one statistic being attributed to a specific change in consequence?

[bishop]

at the same time, i could also ask you if you could prove that the death penalty really is a deterrant. (and you'd have to do a pretty good job considering all of the condemned people who've been exonerated - god only knows how many innocents the system has murdered.)

interesting source:

http://www.nmrepeal.org/Documents/DPICYearEnd05.pdf

[ZNFYRH]

I was actually serious in asking that question. Do you think it would be appropriate to cite changes in murder rates to a state enabling the death penalty?

I agree that recent technology has made it possible for many innocents to be freed and that it would be a horrible injustice for them to die for another's crime.

Then again, I only advocate the death penalty where guilt isn't in question, where it is either confessed or they are caught in the act.

[Osborn F Enready]

ZNFYRH said: Then again, I only advocate the death penalty where guilt isn't in question, where it is either confessed or they are caught in the act.

Aye, I have to agree.