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Post by fuglyville on Aug 14, 2014 17:26:32 GMT -6
Perhaps the appeal process would be faster for all capital cases with the passage of the Streamlined Procedures Act. Instead of allowing courts to cuddle convicted murderers, we would be putting a few more of them in the ground where they belong. We need some hard pro judges in the appeals courts that will not side with the murderer & not allow frivoulous appeals or motions that will drag cases out. In that case, you also need severe sanctions against those involved in miscarriages of justice. In cases where unlawful behaviour from the prosecution, jury or judge results in innocent people being executed, those responsible should be prosecuted for murder. And as always: Innocence=significant doubt. Guilt has to be proven, innocence need only be indicated.
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Post by whitediamonds on Aug 14, 2014 17:38:07 GMT -6
We need some hard pro judges in the appeals courts that will not side with the murderer & not allow frivoulous appeals or motions that will drag cases out. In that case, you also need severe sanctions against those involved in miscarriages of justice. In cases where unlawful behaviour from the prosecution, jury or judge results in innocent people being executed, those responsible should be prosecuted for murder. And as always: Innocence=significant doubt. Guilt has to be proven, innocence need only be indicated. Same should apply to not just the prosecution side, how about defense attny's too?
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Post by miguelmendoza123 on Aug 14, 2014 17:56:58 GMT -6
I am not going to argue what my uncle did ok. The death penalty is not a punishment it. The life sentience is a punishment. The reason for this is that the D.P is a way out. Now life imprisonment is a punishment becouse you are kept alive but, you are just waiting to die and nothing to do but think about what he did was wrong. ??
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Post by miguelmendoza123 on Aug 14, 2014 17:59:36 GMT -6
You see my point know? ?
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Post by whitediamonds on Aug 14, 2014 18:04:07 GMT -6
I am not going to argue what my uncle did ok. The death penalty is not a punishment it. The life sentience is a punishment. The reason for this is that the D.P is a way out. Now life imprisonment is a punishment becouse you are kept alive but, you are just waiting to die and nothing to do but think about what he did was wrong. ?? That is seen by some as torture, especially when one goes in so young.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2014 18:06:13 GMT -6
We need some hard pro judges in the appeals courts that will not side with the murderer & not allow frivoulous appeals or motions that will drag cases out. In that case, you also need severe sanctions against those involved in miscarriages of justice. In cases where unlawful behaviour from the prosecution, jury or judge results in innocent people being executed, those responsible should be prosecuted for murder. And as always: Innocence=significant doubt. Guilt has to be proven, innocence need only be indicated. WD hit the nail on the head. You want all the people that are on the side of JUSTICE to have to answer for their actions. What about the actions of the Defense attorney, witnesses that lie for the defendant? What about all the anti sites that put out lies to get the thug off death row? Why shouldn't they have to answer? something I brought up over a decade ago and I still stand by it. Someone said that if an innocent was executed that a pro dp person should be executed. I said I would volunteer to be the first but that I would only do so after the people responsible for getting him/her sentenced to death be executed too. I, also, had one more little thing and that was if a person that should have been executed gets off and murders again then an anti would have to be executed. I asked for volunteers. THERE WERE NO VOLUNTEERS. In fact, I would be able to sleep quite soundly at night if this went into effect. I wonder how sound some antis would sleep?
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Post by miguelmendoza123 on Aug 14, 2014 18:35:49 GMT -6
I am not going to argue what my uncle did ok. The death penalty is not a punishment it. The life sentience is a punishment. The reason for this is that the D.P is a way out. Now life imprisonment is a punishment becouse you are kept alive but, you are just waiting to die and nothing to do but think about what he did was wrong.
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Post by miguelmendoza123 on Aug 14, 2014 18:36:38 GMT -6
You see my point now?
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Post by whitediamonds on Aug 14, 2014 18:43:44 GMT -6
Without the name calling & cussing, yes.
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Post by miguelmendoza123 on Aug 14, 2014 18:56:23 GMT -6
Well thanks for hearing me out.
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Post by whitediamonds on Aug 14, 2014 19:02:17 GMT -6
Well thanks for hearing me out. Your Welcome
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Post by kma367 on Aug 15, 2014 23:10:03 GMT -6
Whoever wrote that article is mistaken. Mendoza has only completed the direct appeal process. He still has state post-conviction and federal habeas corpus claims available, which will take 5-7 years. I think the average for Texas DR is 10-12 years between conviction and execution in most cases.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 23, 2014 6:38:42 GMT -6
The man you guys are talking about is my uncle so suck a dick. Such language! And quite frankly, I don't see the connection between this criminal uncle of yours and fellatio. Is he a homosexual, or what?
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Post by Deleted on Aug 23, 2014 6:54:02 GMT -6
The "life sentence is a better punishment because the murderer gets to spend the rest of his life thinking about what he did" nonsense has been debunked so many times it's getting really old. Murderers are sociopathic. They don't think like you and me. If you or I killed someone, either by accident or in the heat of an argument, we would feel remorse about it until the day we die. Murderers, i.e. people who planned to kill, or kill during the commission of a crime in order to eliminate witnesses, do not have this emotion. They could not care less if someone else dies, as long as they get what they wanted from the crime. Placing them in prison instead of executing them is doing them a favor, unless they were put in a supermax. That's too expensive.
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Post by cinnabear on Mar 15, 2016 0:16:50 GMT -6
It's been almost 12 years since this horrible monster took Rachelle away from us. I've been away from these boards for awhile. It's nice to see his nephew on here cursing at us and telling us to suck things. Gee not surprised there was not one mention of Rachelle, her daughter who was just a baby and who was in the house while this guys piece of *crap* uncle stole a mother who was home alone doing nothing wrong but taking care of her baby? Not one mention of Rachelles family? Her mom and dad? Her brother? Her entire family? All her friends? The days and days and days we searched for her? Hoping to find her alive? Then just hoping to find anything? Her mom couldn't see her one last time because your uncle burned her so bad! This family is still so hurt and broken to this day. I respectfully disagree with you. He deserves the death penalty. Why don't you go look at the pictures of what he did to Rachelle? If you don't like my opinion *f---* you *bi+ch*.
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Post by deathcub2000 on Mar 15, 2016 18:43:31 GMT -6
I think this has been said before, but if it hasn't, it needs to be. If the death penalty is so much more humane than life in prison, why do so many of the criminals fight it so much???
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Post by whitediamonds on Mar 15, 2016 18:55:21 GMT -6
I think this has been said before, but if it hasn't, it needs to be. If the death penalty is so much more humane than life in prison, why do so many of the criminals fight it so much??? Because majority of people do not want to die. Or even think about their own demise. Fear of.
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Post by bernard on Mar 16, 2016 9:18:41 GMT -6
I think this has been said before, but if it hasn't, it needs to be. If the death penalty is so much more humane than life in prison, why do so many of the criminals fight it so much??? Because majority of people do not want to die. Or even think about their own demise. Fear of. The great philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that because of man's excessive terror of death the death penalty provided the highest ratio of fear versus actual suffering, and hence was more humane while being a better deterrent than life imprisonment. Is this the kind of argument you have in mind?
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Post by oslooskar on Mar 16, 2016 12:33:39 GMT -6
The great philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that because of man's excessive terror of death the death penalty provided the highest ratio of fear versus actual suffering, and hence was more humane while being a better deterrent than life imprisonment. Condemned criminals fear the possible physical suffering they will experience when being killed, not death.
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Post by whitediamonds on Mar 16, 2016 19:21:10 GMT -6
Because majority of people do not want to die. Or even think about their own demise. Fear of. The great philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that because of man's excessive terror of death the death penalty provided the highest ratio of fear versus actual suffering, and hence was more humane while being a better deterrent than life imprisonment. Is this the kind of argument you have in mind? What I posted was not for argument, seems your trying to start one, as you always do.
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Post by bernard on Mar 17, 2016 11:51:48 GMT -6
The great philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that because of man's excessive terror of death the death penalty provided the highest ratio of fear versus actual suffering, and hence was more humane while being a better deterrent than life imprisonment. Condemned criminals fear the possible physical suffering they will experience when being killed, not death. Did you do a survey?
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Post by bernard on Mar 17, 2016 11:53:39 GMT -6
The great philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that because of man's excessive terror of death the death penalty provided the highest ratio of fear versus actual suffering, and hence was more humane while being a better deterrent than life imprisonment. Is this the kind of argument you have in mind? What I posted was not for argument, seems your trying to start one, as you always do. Mill was of one of the greatest minds to ever address this topic. If I compare your reasoning to his, say thank you.
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Post by oslooskar on Mar 17, 2016 12:22:18 GMT -6
No, absolutely not. Why would I need to do a survey to come to the conclusion that it's impossible to fear that which does not exist. (Note: I use the word "that" only as a figure of speech.)
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Post by whitediamonds on Mar 17, 2016 13:16:09 GMT -6
What I posted was not for argument, seems your trying to start one, as you always do. Mill was of one of the greatest minds to ever address this topic. If I compare your reasoning to his, say thank you. Well, I never heard of Mill, & that is my personal reasoning. Not to argue about it. That is the conclusion I come to. So, Thanks.
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Post by bernard on Mar 17, 2016 14:56:25 GMT -6
No, absolutely not. Why would I need to do a survey to come to the conclusion that it's impossible to fear that which does not exist. By that logic you must believe in the bogeyman. After all, children fear him, and they cannot fear what doesn't exist... I'm embarrassed I had not detected your philosophical training sooner.
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Post by bernard on Mar 17, 2016 15:47:12 GMT -6
Mill was of one of the greatest minds to ever address this topic. If I compare your reasoning to his, say thank you. Well, I never heard of Mill, & that is my personal reasoning. Not to argue about it. That is the conclusion I come to. So, Thanks. When you have time, I recommend his speech (below) in favor of capital punishment delivered before the parliament of the United Kingdom in 1868. SPEECH IN FAVOR OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT John Stuart Mill. It would be a great satisfaction to me if I were able to support this Motion. It is always a matter of regret to me to find myself, on a public question, opposed to those who are called—sometimes in the way of honour, and sometimes in what is intended for ridicule—the philanthropists. (A laugh.) Of all persons who take part in public affairs, they are those for whom, on the whole, I feel the greatest amount of respect; for their characteristic is, that they devote their time, their labour, and much of their money to objects purely public, with a less admixture of either personal or class selfishness, than any other class of politicians whatever. On almost all the great questions, scarcely any politicians are so steadily and almost uniformly to be found on the side of right; and they seldom err, but by an [267] exaggerated application of some just and highly important principle. On the very subject that is now occupying us we all know what signal service they have rendered. It is through their efforts that our criminal laws—which within my memory hanged people for stealing in a dwelling house to the value of 40s.2—laws by virtue of which rows of human beings might be seen suspended in front of Newgate by those who ascended or descended Ludgate Hill—have so greatly relaxed their most revolting and most impolitic ferocity, that aggravated murder is now practically the only crime which is punished with death by any of our lawful tribunals; and we are even now deliberating whether the extreme penalty should be retained in that solitary case. This vast gain, not only to humanity, but to the ends of penal justice, we owe to the philanthropists; and if they are mistaken, as I cannot but think they are, in the present instance, it is only in not perceiving the right time and place for stopping in a career hitherto so eminently beneficial. (Hear, hear.) Sir, there is a point at which, I conceive, that career ought to stop. When there has been brought home to any one, by conclusive evidence, the greatest crime known to the law; and when the attendant circumstances suggest no palliation of the guilt, no hope that the culprit may even yet not be unworthy to live among mankind, nothing to make it probable that the crime was an exception to his general character rather than a consequence of it, then I confess it appears to me that to deprive the criminal of the life of which he has proved himself to be unworthy—solemnly to blot him out from the fellowship of mankind and from the catalogue of the living—is the most appropriate, as it is certainly the most impressive, mode in which society can attach to so great a crime the penal consequences which for the security of life it is indispensable to annex to it. I defend this penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked—on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime. If, in our horror of inflicting death, we endeavour to devise some punishment for the living criminal which shall act on the human mind with a deterrent force at all comparable to that of death, we are driven to inflictions less severe indeed in appearance, and therefore less efficacious, but far more cruel in reality. Few, I think, would venture to propose, as a punishment for aggravated murder, less than imprisonment with hard labour for life; that is the fate to which a murderer would be consigned by the mercy which shrinks from putting him to death. But has it been sufficiently considered what sort of a mercy this is, and what kind of life it leaves to him? If, indeed, the punishment is not really inflicted—if it becomes the sham which a few years ago such punishments were rapidly becoming—then, indeed, its adoption would be almost tantamount to giving up the attempt to repress murder altogether. But if it really is what it professes to be, [268] and if it is realized in all its rigour by the popular imagination, as it very probably would not be, but as it must be if it is to be efficacious, it will be so shocking that when the memory of the crime is no longer fresh, there will be almost insuperable difficulty in executing it. What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards—debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of bodily restraint, or a small improvement of diet? Yet even such a lot as this, because there is no one moment at which the suffering is of terrifying intensity, and, above all, because it does not contain the element, so imposing to the imagination, of the unknown, is universally reputed a milder punishment than death—stands in all codes as a mitigation of the capital penalty, and is thankfully accepted as such. For it is characteristic of all punishments which depend on duration for their efficacy—all, therefore, which are not corporal or pecuniary—that they are more rigorous than they seem; while it is, on the contrary, one of the strongest recommendations a punishment can have, that it should seem more rigorous than it is; for its practical power depends far less on what it is than on what it seems. There is not, I should think, any human infliction which makes an impression on the imagination so entirely out of proportion to its real severity as the punishment of death.
The punishment must be mild indeed which does not add more to the sum of human misery than is necessarily or directly added by the execution of a criminal. As my honourable Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Gilpin) has himself remarked, the most that human laws can do to anyone in the matter of death is to hasten it;3 the man would have died at any rate; not so very much later, and on the average, I fear, with a considerably greater amount of bodily suffering. Society is asked, then, to denude itself of an instrument of punishment which, in the grave cases to which alone it is suitable, effects its purpose at a less cost of human suffering than any other; which, while it inspires more terror, is less cruel in actual fact than any punishment that we should think of substituting for it. My honourable Friend says that it does not inspire terror, and that experience proves it to be a failure.4 But the influence of a punishment is not to be estimated by its effect on hardened criminals. Those whose habitual way of life keeps them, so to speak, at all times within sight of the gallows, do grow to care less about it; as, to compare good things with bad, an old soldier is not much affected by the chance of dying in battle. I can afford to admit all that is often said about the indifference of professional criminals to the gallows. Though of that indifference one-third is probably bravado and another third confidence that they shall have the luck to escape, it is quite probable that the remaining third is real. [269] But the efficacy of a punishment which acts principally through the imagination, is chiefly to be measured by the impression it makes on those who are still innocent: by the horror with which it surrounds the first promptings of guilt; the restraining influence it exercises over the beginning of the thought which, if indulged, would become a temptation; the check which it exerts over the gradual declension towards the state—never suddenly attained—in which crime no longer revolts, and punishment no longer terrifies. (Hear, hear.) As for what is called the failure of death punishment, who is able to judge of that? We partly know who those are whom it has not deterred; but who is there who knows whom it has deterred, or how many human beings it has saved who would have lived to be murderers if that awful association had not been thrown round the idea of murder from their earliest infancy? Let us not forget that the most imposing fact loses its power over the imagination if it is made too cheap. When a punishment fit only for the most atrocious crimes is lavished on small offences until human feeling recoils from it, then, indeed, it ceases to intimidate, because it ceases to be believed in. The failure of capital punishment in cases of theft is easily accounted for: the thief did not believe that it would be inflicted. He had learnt by experience that jurors would perjure themselves rather than find him guilty; that Judges would seize any excuse for not sentencing him to death, or for recommending him to mercy; and that if neither jurors nor Judges were merciful, there were still hopes from an authority above both. When things had come to this pass it was high time to give up the vain attempt. When it is impossible to inflict a punishment, or when its infliction becomes a public scandal, the idle threat cannot too soon disappear from the statute book. And in the case of the host of offences which were formerly capital, I heartily rejoice that it did become impracticable to execute the law. If the same state of public feeling comes to exist in the case of murder; if the time comes when jurors refuse to find a murderer guilty; when Judges will not sentence him to death, or will recommend him to mercy; or when, if juries and Judges do not flinch from their duty, Home Secretaries, under pressure of deputations and memorials, shrink from theirs, and the threat becomes, as it became in the other cases, a mere brutum fulmen;5 then, indeed, it may become necessary to do in this case what has been done in those—to abrogate the penalty. That time may come—my honourable Friend thinks that it has nearly come.6 I hardly know whether he lamented it or boasted of it; but he and his Friends are entitled to the boast: for if it comes it will be their doing, and they will have gained what I cannot but call a fatal victory, for they will have achieved it by bringing about, if they will forgive me for saying so, an enervation, an effeminacy, in the general mind of the country. (Hear, hear.) For what else than effeminacy is it to be so much more shocked by taking a man’s life [270] than by depriving him of all that makes life desirable or valuable? Is death, then, the greatest of all earthly ills? Usque adeone mori miserum est?7 Is it, indeed, so dreadful a thing to die? Has it not been from of old one chief part of a manly education to make us despise death—teaching us to account it, if an evil at all, by no means high in the list of evils; at all events, as an inevitable one, and to hold, as it were, our lives in our hands, ready to be given or risked at any moment, for a sufficiently worthy object? I am sure that my honourable Friends know all this as well, and have as much of all these feelings as any of the rest of us; possibly more. But I cannot think that this is likely to be the effect of their teaching on the general mind. I cannot think that the cultivating of a peculiar sensitiveness of conscience on this one point, over and above what results from the general cultivation of the moral sentiments, is permanently consistent with assigning in our own minds to the fact of death no more than the degree of relative importance which belongs to it among the other incidents of our humanity. The men of old cared too little about death, and gave their own lives or took those of others with equal recklessness. Our danger is of the opposite kind, lest we should be so much shocked by death, in general and in the abstract, as to care too much about it in individual cases, both those of other people and our own, which call for its being risked. And I am not putting things at the worst, for it is proved by the experience of other countries that horror of the executioner by no means necessarily implies horror of the assassin. The stronghold, as we all know, of hired assassination in the eighteenth century was Italy; yet it is said that in some of the Italian populations the infliction of death by sentence of law was in the highest degree offensive and revolting to popular feeling. Much has been said of the sanctity of human life, and the absurdity of supposing that we can teach respect for life by ourselves destroying it. But I am surprised at the employment of this argument, for it is one which might be brought against any punishment whatever. It is not human life only, not human life as such, that ought to be sacred to us, but human feelings. The human capacity of suffering is what we should cause to be respected, not the mere capacity of existing. And we may imagine somebody asking how we can teach people not to inflict suffering by ourselves inflicting it? But to this I should answer—all of us would answer—that to deter by suffering from inflicting suffering is not only possible, but the very purpose of penal justice. Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal freedom? Just as unreasonable is it to think that to take the life of a man who has taken that of another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself, and that while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his right to live, this shall. There is one argument against capital punishment, even in extreme cases, which I cannot deny to have weight—on which my honourable Friend justly laid great stress, and which never can be entirely got rid of. It is this—that if by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected; all compensation, all reparation for the wrong is impossible. This would be indeed a serious objection if these miserable mistakes—among the most tragical occurrences in the whole round of human affairs—could not be made extremely rare. The argument is invincible where the mode of criminal procedure is dangerous to the innocent, or where the Courts of Justice are not trusted. And this probably is the reason why the objection to an irreparable punishment began (as I believe it did) earlier, and is more intense and more widely diffused, in some parts of the Continent of Europe than it is here. There are on the Continent great and enlightened countries, in which the criminal procedure is not so favourable to innocence, does not afford the same security against erroneous conviction, as it does among us; countries where the Courts of Justice seem to think they fail in their duty unless they find somebody guilty; and in their really laudable desire to hunt guilt from its hiding-places, expose themselves to a serious danger of condemning the innocent. If our own procedure and Courts of Justice afforded ground for similar apprehension, I should be the first to join in withdrawing the power of inflicting irreparable punishment from such tribunals. But we all know that the defects of our procedure are the very opposite. Our rules of evidence are even too favourable to the prisoner: and juries and Judges carry out the maxim. “It is better that ten guilty should escape than that one innocent person should suffer,”8 not only to the letter, but beyond the letter. Judges are most anxious to point out, and juries to allow for, the barest possibility of the prisoner’s innocence. No human judgment is infallible: such sad cases as my honourable Friend cited will sometimes occur;9 but in so grave a case as that of murder, the accused, in our system, has always the benefit of the merest shadow of a doubt. And this suggests another consideration very germane to the question. The very fact that death punishment is more shocking than any other to the imagination, necessarily renders the Courts of Justice more scrupulous in requiring the fullest evidence of guilt. Even that which is the greatest objection to capital punishment, the impossibility of correcting an error once committed, must make, and does make, juries and Judges more careful in forming their opinion, and more jealous in their scrutiny of the evidence. If the substitution or penal servitude for death in cases of murder should cause any relaxation in this conscientious scrupulosity, there would be a great evil to set against the real, but I hope rare, advantage of being able to make reparation to a condemned person who was afterwards discovered to be [272] innocent. In order that the possibility of correction may be kept open wherever the chance of this sad contingency is more than infinitesimal, it is quite right that the Judge should recommend to the Crown a commutation of the sentence, not solely when the proof of guilt is open to the smallest suspicion, but whenever there remains anything unexplained and mysterious in the case, raising a desire for more light, or making it likely that further information may at some future time be obtained. I would also suggest that whenever the sentence is commuted the grounds of the commutation should, in some authentic form, be made known to the public. (Hear, hear.) Thus much I willingly concede to my honourable Friend; but on the question of total abolition I am inclined to hope that the feeling of the country is not with him (hear, hear), and that the limitation of death punishment to the cases referred to in the Bill of last year will be generally considered sufficient.10 The mania which existed a short time ago for paring down all our punishments seems to have reached its limits, and not before it was time. (Hear, hear.) We were in danger of being left without any effectual punishment, except for small offences. What was formerly our chief secondary punishment—transportation—before it was abolished,11 had become almost a reward. Penal servitude, the substitute for it, was becoming, to the classes who were principally subject to it, almost nominal, so comfortable did we make our prisons, and so easy had it become to get quickly out of them. Flogging—a most objectionable punishment in ordinary cases, but a particularly appropriate one for crimes of brutality, especially crimes against women (cheers)—we would not hear of, except, to be sure, in the case of garotters, for whose peculiar benefit we re-established it in a hurry, immediately after a Member of Parliament had been garotted.12 (Hear, and laughter.) With this exception, offences, even of an atrocious kind, against the person, as my honourable and learned Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Neate) well remarked, not only were, but still are, visited with penalties so ludicrously inadequate, as to be almost an encouragement to the crime.13 I think, Sir, that in the case of most offences, except those against property, there is more need of strengthening our punishments than of weakening them: and that severer sentences, with an apportionment of them to the different kinds of offences which shall approve itself better than at present to the moral sentiments of the community, are the kind of reform of which our penal system now stands in need. I shall therefore vote against the Amendment.
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Post by whitediamonds on Mar 17, 2016 16:11:06 GMT -6
Well, I never heard of Mill, & that is my personal reasoning. Not to argue about it. That is the conclusion I come to. So, Thanks. When you have time, I recommend his speech (below) in favor of capital punishment delivered before the parliament of the United Kingdom in 1868. SPEECH IN FAVOR OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT John Stuart Mill. It would be a great satisfaction to me if I were able to support this Motion. It is always a matter of regret to me to find myself, on a public question, opposed to those who are called—sometimes in the way of honour, and sometimes in what is intended for ridicule—the philanthropists. (A laugh.) Of all persons who take part in public affairs, they are those for whom, on the whole, I feel the greatest amount of respect; for their characteristic is, that they devote their time, their labour, and much of their money to objects purely public, with a less admixture of either personal or class selfishness, than any other class of politicians whatever. On almost all the great questions, scarcely any politicians are so steadily and almost uniformly to be found on the side of right; and they seldom err, but by an [267] exaggerated application of some just and highly important principle. On the very subject that is now occupying us we all know what signal service they have rendered. It is through their efforts that our criminal laws—which within my memory hanged people for stealing in a dwelling house to the value of 40s.2—laws by virtue of which rows of human beings might be seen suspended in front of Newgate by those who ascended or descended Ludgate Hill—have so greatly relaxed their most revolting and most impolitic ferocity, that aggravated murder is now practically the only crime which is punished with death by any of our lawful tribunals; and we are even now deliberating whether the extreme penalty should be retained in that solitary case. This vast gain, not only to humanity, but to the ends of penal justice, we owe to the philanthropists; and if they are mistaken, as I cannot but think they are, in the present instance, it is only in not perceiving the right time and place for stopping in a career hitherto so eminently beneficial. (Hear, hear.) Sir, there is a point at which, I conceive, that career ought to stop. When there has been brought home to any one, by conclusive evidence, the greatest crime known to the law; and when the attendant circumstances suggest no palliation of the guilt, no hope that the culprit may even yet not be unworthy to live among mankind, nothing to make it probable that the crime was an exception to his general character rather than a consequence of it, then I confess it appears to me that to deprive the criminal of the life of which he has proved himself to be unworthy—solemnly to blot him out from the fellowship of mankind and from the catalogue of the living—is the most appropriate, as it is certainly the most impressive, mode in which society can attach to so great a crime the penal consequences which for the security of life it is indispensable to annex to it. I defend this penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked—on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime. If, in our horror of inflicting death, we endeavour to devise some punishment for the living criminal which shall act on the human mind with a deterrent force at all comparable to that of death, we are driven to inflictions less severe indeed in appearance, and therefore less efficacious, but far more cruel in reality. Few, I think, would venture to propose, as a punishment for aggravated murder, less than imprisonment with hard labour for life; that is the fate to which a murderer would be consigned by the mercy which shrinks from putting him to death. But has it been sufficiently considered what sort of a mercy this is, and what kind of life it leaves to him? If, indeed, the punishment is not really inflicted—if it becomes the sham which a few years ago such punishments were rapidly becoming—then, indeed, its adoption would be almost tantamount to giving up the attempt to repress murder altogether. But if it really is what it professes to be, [268] and if it is realized in all its rigour by the popular imagination, as it very probably would not be, but as it must be if it is to be efficacious, it will be so shocking that when the memory of the crime is no longer fresh, there will be almost insuperable difficulty in executing it. What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards—debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of bodily restraint, or a small improvement of diet? Yet even such a lot as this, because there is no one moment at which the suffering is of terrifying intensity, and, above all, because it does not contain the element, so imposing to the imagination, of the unknown, is universally reputed a milder punishment than death—stands in all codes as a mitigation of the capital penalty, and is thankfully accepted as such. For it is characteristic of all punishments which depend on duration for their efficacy—all, therefore, which are not corporal or pecuniary—that they are more rigorous than they seem; while it is, on the contrary, one of the strongest recommendations a punishment can have, that it should seem more rigorous than it is; for its practical power depends far less on what it is than on what it seems. There is not, I should think, any human infliction which makes an impression on the imagination so entirely out of proportion to its real severity as the punishment of death.
The punishment must be mild indeed which does not add more to the sum of human misery than is necessarily or directly added by the execution of a criminal. As my honourable Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Gilpin) has himself remarked, the most that human laws can do to anyone in the matter of death is to hasten it;3 the man would have died at any rate; not so very much later, and on the average, I fear, with a considerably greater amount of bodily suffering. Society is asked, then, to denude itself of an instrument of punishment which, in the grave cases to which alone it is suitable, effects its purpose at a less cost of human suffering than any other; which, while it inspires more terror, is less cruel in actual fact than any punishment that we should think of substituting for it. My honourable Friend says that it does not inspire terror, and that experience proves it to be a failure.4 But the influence of a punishment is not to be estimated by its effect on hardened criminals. Those whose habitual way of life keeps them, so to speak, at all times within sight of the gallows, do grow to care less about it; as, to compare good things with bad, an old soldier is not much affected by the chance of dying in battle. I can afford to admit all that is often said about the indifference of professional criminals to the gallows. Though of that indifference one-third is probably bravado and another third confidence that they shall have the luck to escape, it is quite probable that the remaining third is real. [269] But the efficacy of a punishment which acts principally through the imagination, is chiefly to be measured by the impression it makes on those who are still innocent: by the horror with which it surrounds the first promptings of guilt; the restraining influence it exercises over the beginning of the thought which, if indulged, would become a temptation; the check which it exerts over the gradual declension towards the state—never suddenly attained—in which crime no longer revolts, and punishment no longer terrifies. (Hear, hear.) As for what is called the failure of death punishment, who is able to judge of that? We partly know who those are whom it has not deterred; but who is there who knows whom it has deterred, or how many human beings it has saved who would have lived to be murderers if that awful association had not been thrown round the idea of murder from their earliest infancy? Let us not forget that the most imposing fact loses its power over the imagination if it is made too cheap. When a punishment fit only for the most atrocious crimes is lavished on small offences until human feeling recoils from it, then, indeed, it ceases to intimidate, because it ceases to be believed in. The failure of capital punishment in cases of theft is easily accounted for: the thief did not believe that it would be inflicted. He had learnt by experience that jurors would perjure themselves rather than find him guilty; that Judges would seize any excuse for not sentencing him to death, or for recommending him to mercy; and that if neither jurors nor Judges were merciful, there were still hopes from an authority above both. When things had come to this pass it was high time to give up the vain attempt. When it is impossible to inflict a punishment, or when its infliction becomes a public scandal, the idle threat cannot too soon disappear from the statute book. And in the case of the host of offences which were formerly capital, I heartily rejoice that it did become impracticable to execute the law. If the same state of public feeling comes to exist in the case of murder; if the time comes when jurors refuse to find a murderer guilty; when Judges will not sentence him to death, or will recommend him to mercy; or when, if juries and Judges do not flinch from their duty, Home Secretaries, under pressure of deputations and memorials, shrink from theirs, and the threat becomes, as it became in the other cases, a mere brutum fulmen;5 then, indeed, it may become necessary to do in this case what has been done in those—to abrogate the penalty. That time may come—my honourable Friend thinks that it has nearly come.6 I hardly know whether he lamented it or boasted of it; but he and his Friends are entitled to the boast: for if it comes it will be their doing, and they will have gained what I cannot but call a fatal victory, for they will have achieved it by bringing about, if they will forgive me for saying so, an enervation, an effeminacy, in the general mind of the country. (Hear, hear.) For what else than effeminacy is it to be so much more shocked by taking a man’s life [270] than by depriving him of all that makes life desirable or valuable? Is death, then, the greatest of all earthly ills? Usque adeone mori miserum est?7 Is it, indeed, so dreadful a thing to die? Has it not been from of old one chief part of a manly education to make us despise death—teaching us to account it, if an evil at all, by no means high in the list of evils; at all events, as an inevitable one, and to hold, as it were, our lives in our hands, ready to be given or risked at any moment, for a sufficiently worthy object? I am sure that my honourable Friends know all this as well, and have as much of all these feelings as any of the rest of us; possibly more. But I cannot think that this is likely to be the effect of their teaching on the general mind. I cannot think that the cultivating of a peculiar sensitiveness of conscience on this one point, over and above what results from the general cultivation of the moral sentiments, is permanently consistent with assigning in our own minds to the fact of death no more than the degree of relative importance which belongs to it among the other incidents of our humanity. The men of old cared too little about death, and gave their own lives or took those of others with equal recklessness. Our danger is of the opposite kind, lest we should be so much shocked by death, in general and in the abstract, as to care too much about it in individual cases, both those of other people and our own, which call for its being risked. And I am not putting things at the worst, for it is proved by the experience of other countries that horror of the executioner by no means necessarily implies horror of the assassin. The stronghold, as we all know, of hired assassination in the eighteenth century was Italy; yet it is said that in some of the Italian populations the infliction of death by sentence of law was in the highest degree offensive and revolting to popular feeling. Much has been said of the sanctity of human life, and the absurdity of supposing that we can teach respect for life by ourselves destroying it. But I am surprised at the employment of this argument, for it is one which might be brought against any punishment whatever. It is not human life only, not human life as such, that ought to be sacred to us, but human feelings. The human capacity of suffering is what we should cause to be respected, not the mere capacity of existing. And we may imagine somebody asking how we can teach people not to inflict suffering by ourselves inflicting it? But to this I should answer—all of us would answer—that to deter by suffering from inflicting suffering is not only possible, but the very purpose of penal justice. Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal freedom? Just as unreasonable is it to think that to take the life of a man who has taken that of another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself, and that while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his right to live, this shall. There is one argument against capital punishment, even in extreme cases, which I cannot deny to have weight—on which my honourable Friend justly laid great stress, and which never can be entirely got rid of. It is this—that if by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected; all compensation, all reparation for the wrong is impossible. This would be indeed a serious objection if these miserable mistakes—among the most tragical occurrences in the whole round of human affairs—could not be made extremely rare. The argument is invincible where the mode of criminal procedure is dangerous to the innocent, or where the Courts of Justice are not trusted. And this probably is the reason why the objection to an irreparable punishment began (as I believe it did) earlier, and is more intense and more widely diffused, in some parts of the Continent of Europe than it is here. There are on the Continent great and enlightened countries, in which the criminal procedure is not so favourable to innocence, does not afford the same security against erroneous conviction, as it does among us; countries where the Courts of Justice seem to think they fail in their duty unless they find somebody guilty; and in their really laudable desire to hunt guilt from its hiding-places, expose themselves to a serious danger of condemning the innocent. If our own procedure and Courts of Justice afforded ground for similar apprehension, I should be the first to join in withdrawing the power of inflicting irreparable punishment from such tribunals. But we all know that the defects of our procedure are the very opposite. Our rules of evidence are even too favourable to the prisoner: and juries and Judges carry out the maxim. “It is better that ten guilty should escape than that one innocent person should suffer,”8 not only to the letter, but beyond the letter. Judges are most anxious to point out, and juries to allow for, the barest possibility of the prisoner’s innocence. No human judgment is infallible: such sad cases as my honourable Friend cited will sometimes occur;9 but in so grave a case as that of murder, the accused, in our system, has always the benefit of the merest shadow of a doubt. And this suggests another consideration very germane to the question. The very fact that death punishment is more shocking than any other to the imagination, necessarily renders the Courts of Justice more scrupulous in requiring the fullest evidence of guilt. Even that which is the greatest objection to capital punishment, the impossibility of correcting an error once committed, must make, and does make, juries and Judges more careful in forming their opinion, and more jealous in their scrutiny of the evidence. If the substitution or penal servitude for death in cases of murder should cause any relaxation in this conscientious scrupulosity, there would be a great evil to set against the real, but I hope rare, advantage of being able to make reparation to a condemned person who was afterwards discovered to be [272] innocent. In order that the possibility of correction may be kept open wherever the chance of this sad contingency is more than infinitesimal, it is quite right that the Judge should recommend to the Crown a commutation of the sentence, not solely when the proof of guilt is open to the smallest suspicion, but whenever there remains anything unexplained and mysterious in the case, raising a desire for more light, or making it likely that further information may at some future time be obtained. I would also suggest that whenever the sentence is commuted the grounds of the commutation should, in some authentic form, be made known to the public. (Hear, hear.) Thus much I willingly concede to my honourable Friend; but on the question of total abolition I am inclined to hope that the feeling of the country is not with him (hear, hear), and that the limitation of death punishment to the cases referred to in the Bill of last year will be generally considered sufficient.10 The mania which existed a short time ago for paring down all our punishments seems to have reached its limits, and not before it was time. (Hear, hear.) We were in danger of being left without any effectual punishment, except for small offences. What was formerly our chief secondary punishment—transportation—before it was abolished,11 had become almost a reward. Penal servitude, the substitute for it, was becoming, to the classes who were principally subject to it, almost nominal, so comfortable did we make our prisons, and so easy had it become to get quickly out of them. Flogging—a most objectionable punishment in ordinary cases, but a particularly appropriate one for crimes of brutality, especially crimes against women (cheers)—we would not hear of, except, to be sure, in the case of garotters, for whose peculiar benefit we re-established it in a hurry, immediately after a Member of Parliament had been garotted.12 (Hear, and laughter.) With this exception, offences, even of an atrocious kind, against the person, as my honourable and learned Friend the Member for Oxford (Mr. Neate) well remarked, not only were, but still are, visited with penalties so ludicrously inadequate, as to be almost an encouragement to the crime.13 I think, Sir, that in the case of most offences, except those against property, there is more need of strengthening our punishments than of weakening them: and that severer sentences, with an apportionment of them to the different kinds of offences which shall approve itself better than at present to the moral sentiments of the community, are the kind of reform of which our penal system now stands in need. I shall therefore vote against the Amendment. Interesting, thanks for posting that. Does not matter what year, guess great minds think alike. And it sure applies to today !! Maybe even more so now, than back then.
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Post by oslooskar on Mar 17, 2016 19:23:24 GMT -6
By that logic you must believe in the bogeyman. Oh come now, don't keep me in suspense, do elaborate on that just a wee bit. children fear him, and they cannot fear what doesn't exist... No, children do not fear what does not exist, they fear what they believe may exist. Hence, it is impossible to fear nothing. I'm embarrassed I had not detected your philosophical training sooner. No need to feel embarrassed. After all, no one here had any great expectations of you.
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Post by bernard on Mar 18, 2016 3:12:09 GMT -6
By that logic you must believe in the bogeyman. Oh come now, don't keep me in suspense, do elaborate on that just a wee bit. Er... below. But if they fear what they believe may exist, and what they believe may exist does not exist, then what they fear does not exist. I must be bored.
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Post by oslooskar on Mar 18, 2016 12:18:02 GMT -6
But if they fear what they believe may exist, and what they believe may exist does not exist, then what they fear does not exist. Almost correct. What they actually fear is a creation of their own imaginations. The same goes for the condemned criminal regarding death. Surely you meant, boring.
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