Transcript
Alabama suffocated a man to death in a gas chamber tonight after starving him so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit as they did it. And this was deemed perfectly legal by multiple courts in the vaunted American legal system.
That’s what happens when you value institutions over people.
Link for more info: https://www.reuters.com/legal/alabama-prepares-carry-out-first-execution-by-nitrogen-asphyxiation-2024-01-25/
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Among many. Extrajudicial Executions are far more common than official ones. And the police rob more money of people than all other criminals combined (excluding white collar crime, of course). So yeah, totally civilised.
And the death penalty is not legal in many states, but cops murdering people in the streets is legal in all 50.
Th crimes these inmates committed are so fucking despicably heinous, and yet the government wants to kill them in the most humane manner and you think that makes them not civilized?
The government regularly executes wrongly convicted people in our name. That’s enough of a reason to ban the death penalty. Even if we granted that some people deserve to die, the government is going to get it wrong with some degree of regularity.
Going beyond that, the justice system should be about preventing crime, not inflicting punishment. So yes, if there’s going to be a death penalty, it’s right to take every possible step to make it humane.
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Would you still feel the same if the person being put to death was responsible for torturing and murdering your loved ones? Is it uncivilized of a government to consider the victims feelings in these kind of cases?
I was always on the fence with it, because I do agree we probably shouldn’t give the government power to kill people, but when I put myself in the victim’s shoes in certain cases, I completely understand the want for corporal punishment. Sometimes people do something so fucked up that it seems healthy for the community to just put them to death for it.
It’s hard for me to say that the death penalty is absolutely never warranted, but I do think it should be very rare, and there should be an extra burden of proof to condemn someone.
Yes. Some of us apply our moral code universally, rather than letting our feelings decide whether killing people is okay, as long as they wronged us specifically.
Yes. Justice systems based on individuals’ feelings are how witch trials work, and it’s how we add more names to this list. Victims’ feelings aren’t evidence, and should not be considered when talking about capital punishment.
Sometimes, the person that you’re 100% certain committed the crime actually didn’t. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if there was even a sliver of a doubt that we didn’t get the right person. How can I ever know for certain? Even eyewitness testimony is often flawed. Did I see that guy, or did I see someone who looked just like him? I’ve seen my own doppelganger in my city, I know better than to think I can flawlessly identify someone 100% of the time. They confessed? That’s compelling evidence, but again, I know full well that police can coerce confessions. If they maintain that they did it and they don’t feel sorry right up until they die, then maybe I won’t feel bad if my testimony gets someone killed, but otherwise life in prison is an equally effective punishment, with the added bonus that if we were wrong, we can release them and try to find the real perpetrator.
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Yes, the government killing their own citizens is uncivilized, no matter what they’ve done. Some people may deserve it, sure, but the government does NOT deserve the power to do it, period.
But are you sure they committed those despicable heinous crimes?
Like 100% sure?
Or will you be killing an innocent?
I think this is an unnecessary complication. Let’s assume we do know 100% they actually did. I believe the other commenter would still believe it is wrong for the government to kill them.
On the one hand, many people who oppose the death penalty, myself included, agree that even in a situation where we know that a person committed a crime with the kind of absolute certainty that’s only possible in thought experiments, we would still oppose the death penalty.
On the other hand, it’s not an unnecessary complication, because that’s one thing that sways some people to this side of the debate–we don’t live in a thought experiment, so we can never be absolutely certain that the person being killed actually committed the crime they’re accused of. We can come pretty damn close–I challenge you to find someone who believe Dennis Rader or Darrell Brooks is innocent–but as long as we’re executing them, we’ll be executing Cameron Todd Willinghams and Walter Bartons and Carlton Micheal Garys. It just isn’t worth it. Let them rot in prison, and if evidence comes out that they didn’t actually commit the crime, release them.
Yes. The depravity of another does not suddenly make it ethical to be shitty. It is only when that shittiness is necessary to prevent further harm and these people are relatively simple to contain. If we had some sort of fucked up super villain scenario where you can’t even contain the person, then it becomes ethical to consider killing them but otherwise it is just the state and it’s population committing a murder for the sake of it. For a show.