caretaker

What's the matter, carpal tunnel acting up? Why balk at executing the mentaly ill? Prison is full of them and they suffer there so we have no qualms about locking them up. Roughly, um, 0% of prisoners who are executed re-offend; that statistic may skew the results. We rely on parole boards to know when an inmate is safe to re-integrate and when they're not, who is a dangerous offender or a bad risk. They make mistakes sometimes because they're human like all of us. I have a friend who did 15 years mandatory for shooting someone dead in a bar and besides a chronic drug dependancy (which is managed) he functions very well, works, pays taxes, gets in no trouble. I've known a couple of other killers who I wouldn't of minded seeing put down. They got off too easy and the situations were different. Re: summary executions - In the Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr S tells of taking prisoners from the Vlasov detachments - they tried to explain how life was impossible under Stalin so they'd defected and fought for Germany, and they said we must surely understand, but Solzhenitsyn says "We shot them as soon as the first words of Russian came out of their mouths." One of those who wasn't shot was being walked back to a collection point and as a tank passed he threw himself beneath the track, neatly avoiding being chained to a wall for the rest of his life.

Shard

Not sure exactly on what side of the debate you sit, but an interesting read. Like the point about 0% re-offending.

iaink

Its actually a negative % re-offending, because of course some of those executed were later exonerated. Maybe that makes it an even more convincing argument for some

caretaker

Since the original post is about India statistics from other places aren"t really relevant. For all I care they could just throw those guys to a mob of angry women and let them be reduced to their constiituent parts in a matter of minutes. Properly managed and advertised it's hard to believe that would not deter others from doing the same. The case is about taking something heinous that is discretely socially tolerated and making it unacceptable, and I think seeing some people (the arseholes who raped that girl and impaled her on a steel bar) ripped to shreds might achieve that.

iaink

No death penalty in Sweden thankfully.

Confessed to 30 murders and convicted of 8, and released after 20 years in a secure psychiatric unit.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26654316

Shard

Dodgy Swedish justice system. Convicted of some murders which "may not even have been murders".

orly

Being a bit of a statist, I have not much issue with capital punishment. In some cases "rehabilitation" and "punishment" come secondary to simple economics. If you took the clowns who butchered the soldier in the street in London as an example...why entertain and care for them in jail for decades? Just get rid.

Shard

You know what...I think I agree with you.

montreal mike

iaink

I keep hearing this, but the facts are rather inconvenient for that argument as the death penalty based on the US experience (as a broadly analogous society to ours) is far more expensive than incarceration.

Studies show that administering the death penalty is even more expensive than keeping someone in prison for life. The intensive jury selection, trials and appeals required in capital cases can take over a decade and run up a huge tab for the state. Death row, where prisoners facing execution are kept in separate cells under intense observation, is also immensely costly.

Quote:

A 2008 study by the (non partisan) Urban Institute, a think-tank, estimates that the death penalty cost Maryland's taxpayers $186m between 1978 and 1999. According to the report, a case resulting in a death sentence cost $3m, almost $2m more than when the death penalty was not sought.

Quote:

"It's 10 times more expensive to kill them than to keep them alive," though most Americans believe the opposite, said Donald McCartin, a former California jurist known as "The Hanging Judge of Orange County" for sending nine men to death row.

Quote:

Charles Harris, Senior Judge of the Fifth District Court of Appeal..."Most people who support the death penalty believe it is more cost effective than life in prison. Perhaps at one time, when executions were swift and sure, this may have been the case. It is not now. Most people knowledgeable about the subject will agree that the delay now built into the system, more trial preparation, much longer time to get to trial, much longer jury selections and trials, much more complicated and far more frequent appeals, and continuous motions, have increased the cost of capital punishment so that it is now many times the cost of keeping a prisoner in prison for life."

etc etc.

Do some research!

Shard

The eugenics movement of the Thirties was very poorly conceived. It was not for another two decades that DNA structure would be identified and it is only now that it genetic code is beginning to be understood. As a result the sterilizations (particularly forced sterilizations) that occurred back then were a very crude instrument aimed at a reasonable goal. Suffice it to say that in another half century's time eugenics will be widely accepted and demanded.

Shard

The Chinese have a cost effective approach. Of course Western cultural snobbery wouldn't consider anything China has to offer, despite it's civilisation being twice the duration of our own.

iaink

I certainly wouldnt consider their justice system on a par with western standards, thats for sure. Saudi Arabia either, or Japan with its 99% conviction rate!

Shard

Probably not their entire justice system, but their approach to execution is straight forward and cost effective. For the extreme criminal in the extreme case it would circumvent all the excessive costs you worry about.

iaink

How so?

As I understand it you propose CP only in cases of extreme certainty in pursuit of extreme crimes, and extreme certainty is extremely expensive to ascertain. Then you need to pay for a system and facilities that can accomodate capital punishment, which the US has shown to be very expensive,then you need to provide all the legal avenues of appeal etc etc etc, so more expense. I take it you propose denying all the legal faffing around that goes on post conviction?

I would guess that after obtaining confessions to 30 killings and convictions in 8 of those the Swedes would have been extremely confident that they had a sound conviction too.