I should point our first that I feel for you for having a bad experience like that with a family member, that's something no person should experience, ever. Having said that however, I feel like a lot of people are confusing justice with revenge. Also, protecting the community and the people isn't an excuse to kill people causing harm to other people. Muderers and other serious offenders should be sent to prison, without a doubt, but killing...that just goes too far. That's what prison is for, protecting the community against dangerous individuals. However prison should be more than that, a prison should rehabilitate these individuals, show them how to live a peaceful life after they finished their time. I agree there are some realy bad apples, people we often refer to as monsters. We call them monsters so we would not think of them as human beings, just like we all are. The thing is ... these people are still human beings! It shouldn't matter how evil they are and how horrific their actions were, they are still human, and we should never forget that. As for the military: Soldiers are there to protect us and we need them, certainly with the threat if ISIS the past year. Having said that, I would like to stress the word PROTECT. Protecting should not be about invading countries and arming rebel groups, it should be about peacekeeping. Peacekeeping like the UN peacekeeping force, but with authority to engage if villages are being slaughtered. I partialy agree with you there, if, by not the same, you mean one is illegal and the other is legal. I feel like they should be equal. The right to live is te greatest right we have, and yet you would allow the authorities to exclude certain PEOPLE, because they stay human, from this right to live. This post is becoming a bit too long now I want to finish with this question: What would you say if you are falsely accused of horrible crimes and are put on death row? You might not want to believe it, but it's happened before.
I just really think that if you're an extreme danger to people around you, if you're bigoted with a sense of enough racism/sexism/ageism/ableism/etc to where you literally don't give a crap about anyone except white, heterosexual men, and where you go out killing people that either don't agree with your views or that you've been brainwashed to believe are bad people based on the color of their skin/what they're wearing/what they're mentally capable of doing or not doing/their heritage... then you've officially revoked your rights to live as a human being and are literally the scum of the Earth. Do people really want these harmful others alive and freely causing harm to others? "It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are." So, does this mean that if you treat others like crap and even go so far as to kill other people because of this "gift" that was given to you, then you still deserve to live a nice and healthy life while other people are suffering from the wrongdoings you've inflicted on your fellow human being(s)? I still stand by my thoughts earlier where I mentioned that people will do extremely harmful things to another if they know that no action will be taken against them. They may have killed many people and destroyed others' lives making those people not want to live anymore, but at least the killer gets to live another day! Or month. Or year. Or decade. Because it's okay to keep these people alive since we're all deserving of life, right? Nevermind the lives these aggressors take away from others because of how selfish they can be. I will say this though: I do, in fact, believe that the justice system, like a lot of "systems" here in the U.S, is flawed without any conceivable doubt. That being said, I believe that the wrong person can be put on trial and accused of being the murder victim just for being a mere bystander because someone didn't get their facts straight. If something like that ever happened to me, I wouldn't want to live anymore─ by then, I'd have seen it all already and lost complete faith in my fellow man.
People sentenced to death will be kept alive for another month, or year, or decade. The process is nothing near swift justice and isn't the instant removal of bad people. They continue to live for a very long time. Removing the death penalty doesn't mean criminals will be allowed back onto the street and allowed to kill others. It means that they will spend the rest of their life in a prision with no hope of getting out unless new discoveries in their case prove they were wrongly convicted. The lengthy process of the death penalty just makes it a less moral version of life in prision where after being kept alive for years in prisions, we end their life early when they have no way they can hurt anyone ever again.
And yet it costs less to do this than to kill them with a lethal serum. If we go on killing people because they killed others, what are we doing? "Punishing them?" We don't lock people away in prison for punishment. We do it so that they will never be able to get out to do it to someone else. The reason they used to have helpless hanged is because that was a cheaper way (in comparison to prison) to get rid of them so they wouldn't do it again. "Key word unlawful." This, just no. (I am really sorry about being so critical, this is a sensitive topic for me) Lawfulness is decided by the people who make the laws. So if the people that are killing the other people make the laws, then there is a serious problem because you have biased laws. Those are never good. Abortion was legalized when it became a relatively popular thing to do, and law is decided (indirectly) by popular opinion. So even though justice in that definition deals with legality, it is not TRUE justice, where the laws are decided by what is right and what is wrong, and to be honest, this world has some pretty screwed up morals. Please, if you are going to be like this, just don't come to the thread. I don't care what you think should be discussed here, we are a community. Communities have the right and the wish to discuss whatever they please. There is a reason that there is a miscellaneous section for threads. This is appropriate contend, it is PG, all rules are being followed here. The only times that these threads get closed down by the "Forum police" is when people either get off topic, above PG, or drama ensues. And drama is what you are producing. So please, if you have any further comments about the legality of this thread on EMC forums, take it up with a moderator (or higher staff member) in a private conversation. Don't doom the thread like this. There are plenty of people who aren't "pro-life" but still don't like the death penalty. You went on about how it costs so much to keep people locked away for their life in prison, feeding them bad food, making them pee in the open and sleep on concrete slabs. Not true (comparatively speaking) the death penalty costs a whole HELL of a lot more to do for one person. $90,000 a year? No thanks, I'd rather not empty my wallet. Yes. I do agree with you in some ways here. But the death penalty is often driven by the same thing that drives what you described as "manslaughter." The problem is that people think it is okay to do this when "everybody else is doing it." It's sorta comparable to bullying in the sense that you see it happening, know it's morally wrong, and then walk away or join in because you don't want to be the odd one out. I'll leave it off on that note because I have some stiff to do, but I WILL be back to make another post or two.
The death penalty is actually more expensive than life in prison because of how expensive appeals are
If California gave everyone on their death row life in prison without appeal, they would save 200,000,000 a year!
That is the original purpose of a prison. People are meant to be sent there to be rehabilitated so that they can go back out into society without having to worry about them committing another crime. Obviously this seems to have been forgotten (and obviously won't work for every criminal).
Just saying, in my country, we still use the rope to end off (for a lack of a better term) our prisoners on death row...
Or Debtors Prison which was used to force people to work and or pay their debts. (generally it is counter intuitive to have this model, however) Many of the things that trouble society would be fixed if everyone simply had the ability to work honestly for themselves. For the small minority that would do wrong, even when they have plenty and no strife, there is likely something wrong physiologically. It is kindof the responsibility of all of us to care for people that cannot care for themselves. Children, The Elderly, and the Infirm. Moreover, that is the purpose of a society, to take care of one another. TL; DR I agree more or less with the above assessment.
