Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

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No. The death penalty is wrong, end of. I dont care who we are talking about, if it is wrong to kill, then it is wrong to kill. That has to be n absolute or we just get mission creep in the application of the law. And you know what happens, juniors get to shoulder the blame while the people at the top get away with it.

Ever seen a rich powerful person get the death penalty in a western democracy? Look at the US. Its pretty much all economically poor minorities on death row. No politicians, businessmen, bankers, senior military officers, just poor people.

I understand your motivation, I "feel" the same way, but I have to disagree with any one who supports the death penalty, for any reason. It is wrong. And for me, that is an absolute.

Put it this way, are you prepared for you, your partner, or children to die at the hands of a court in a miscarriage of justice? Are you prepared to even risk that? Do you trust the system enough top gamble your own life or that of your loved ones? Yeah, politicians and associated scum are humans as well.......... unfortunately.

I am (by some definition) a politician. (approved parliamentary candidate, political blogger, what have you. never actually won, mind.)

I am happy for anyone who seeks power over others as absolute as political power (and military power, since they can also commit war crimes which are international crimes) to be subject to the death penalty if they misuse that power. Including me.

I am not gambling the life of my "loved ones" on such a system, nor am I defending the death penalty in 99.99% of the cases where it is used today (I am just as appalled as you at the way it, and the prison system in general, are used to subjugate ethnic minorities in America.)

EDIT: some more clarifications.

I hugely respect alan_cx's position, which was mine for many years.

I also want to point out that I don't want to change UK law - I want to augment the powers of the ICC (international criminal court) to allow it to punish crimes by death, where the current maximum is life imprisonment. I actually thought they already used the death penalty, but I've just checked and I was wrong.

I think the point that was being made is that when you make the rules you have to assume that there will occasionally be mistakes in the application of those rules and sometimes the whole purpose and intent will be corrupted given enough power and opportunity.

Given that, even if you support the death penalty for certain crimes or kinds of individuals (crimes against civilians during war or prisoner abuses can test my own anti-death penalty stance) it can still make sense not to support the death penalty as an institution.

Death penalty is also a problem when seeking extradition. There are provisions in many national legislations to avoid extraditing persons if they could be imposed a penalty that doesn't exists in the country.

"The death penalty is wrong" - that's all you need to say, not because of the possibility of someone innocent being executed, for me it's just plain wrong.

[And yes, this applies to all the genocidal murderous maniacs of history - if it was my call I wouldn't execute anyone ever].

Doesn't that mean all wars are immoral (irrespective of the justifications like defense)? Would you say that the military too should not be allowed to ever kill anyone? If no, I see an inconsistency that needs to be explained.

If someone will not submit to the judgement of the law then it's permissible and indeed often necessary to kill them. But if someone gives themselves up or is captured then they should not be killed. In the same way soldiers in a war have a right to surrender, and those who surrender should not be killed - but it's permissible to kill those who don't.

This seems like sound reasoning. Thanks for wording it so clearly.

No inconsistency whatsoever - the discussion is about executions as a penalty in a judicial context.

Police, militaries and individuals should all have the right to employ potentially deadly force if required and justified within a legal context.

Yes, that makes sense. I like lmm's comment below that clarifies why these contexts are different.

If there is no way to save a life (or several) other than to use lethal force against the attacker, then I wouldn't consider it murder, but (self-)defense. Otherwise, I couldn't care less if it's legal or who does it, it's not justified.

Aren't they? Shouldn't there always be at least one side in the war that isn't just trying to protect their own life?

Killing someone in self-defense (if your own life is in danger and there is no other way out) is quite universally accepted I would think.

Of course this will get quite interesting very fast if an invading army just walks around not trying to shoot anyone.

The challenge here is to help create a world where militaries who kill people are no longer necessary.

I don't agree with the death penalty as I see it as an easy way out. What sounds like a better option to you:

* Spending the rest of your life in solidarity with terrible food and no entertainment * Death

Any penal system should focus more on rehabilitation/reintegration than pure punishment. The idea is to make society safer.

Of course. I believe in that too. But I'm talking about the criminals that are beyond help (massacring etc)

So if they're beyond help you want to torture them? Why not put them into a mental hospital and try to work out what went wrong? They'll still have a sucky life, but at least we might get something useful out of it.

No not at all! I don't believe in torture. When I mentioned torture in my previous comment, I was referring to spending the rest of your life in prison, not actual torture.

I consider spending your life behind bars as a form of torture as well, or very close. It's certainly incredibly barbaric and I can't think of any advantage it has over a mental hospital.

The European Court agrees with you - life in prison with no chance of release is inhumane. This is causing some outrage in UK politicians because 3 murderers took their cases to the court and won.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23245254)

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23251197)

>Spending the rest of your life in solidarity with terrible food and no entertainment

That sounds like torture to me.

What about treating everyone, even convincted criminals, with a degree of respect, decency and compassion?

You might have missed the part where he said the maximum sentence is 30 years. And that escapes are common.

Death penalty is wrong when you can afford it being wrong.

Here in Brazil most of the population want death penalty back, simply because we are expending enormous amounts of money in dangerous criminals (murderers, rapists, thieves that murder, drug lords...) and it is not fixing anything, crime continue rising, and the more people we lock up, the more people show up.

Worse, some people even after 30 years in prison (our maximum prison sentence), as soon they get released, they commit crimes again.

To not mention escapees... Every time a mass escape happen, there is a surging crime wage.

So people here outright think criminals must be killed, the problem is that without death penalty, people then kill instead of criminals, suspects, voiding the "innocent until guilty".

In that perspective what is better, death penalty, but you have a trial first, reducing (but obviously not eliminating) miscarriage of justice, or a angry population that might impale the head of a soccer judge on a stake?

Yes, that happened here!

This week, during a amateur soccer game, one particularly violent player got kicked out of the game, unhappy he decided to attack the judge. The judge after getting kicked a couple of times and fighting the guy, pulled a knife and stabbed in one single stab the guy chest (seemly the heart, since the guy died with that single stab).

The team of the violent player was extremely unhappy with that outcome, tied the judge to a tree, stoned him, and then they removed his limbs (I forgot the term in english)and impaled his head in a stake.

And the most absurd this might look, the population is HAPPY this happened, and want to prevent the police to catch the perpetrators, because the population WANTS more stuff like this to happen, because the commonly spelled belief here that: "A good bandit, is a dead bandit."

I must disagree - the death penalty for civilians is not acceptable.

The important thing for Brazil (this is my personal opinion as someone from a developed nation, so by all means ignore me!) is to build the economy so that crime doesn't pay anymore. The new economies (BRIC) are doing a great job of this, and you need to stick at it!

You should also know that here in the UK "most of the population" want the death penalty back (I don't know if this is true anymore, but it certainly was until relatively recently) - but the political establishment understand that this is not a vote winner. Much like EU membership, most people who want hanging, or to leave the EU, won't vote against you if you disagree with them on that - they will choose who to vote for on something else. Woe betide any pro-death penalty politician though - as many people would vote against them for this reason (maybe not so much with the EU,) thus, politicians in the 80s and 90s were by and large anti-death-penalty, even though a referendum on it would have brought it back.

This, by the way, is not "undemocratic" or anything - it's about what issues are important to people, as well as their direct opinion (this is why many polls about the EU in the UK are misleading - people don't like it, but it's not very important to them.) I suspect that even in Brazil people would (or will eventually) place economic policy ahead of death penalty stance when choosing who to vote for - and so it won't change.

'in the UK "most of the population" want the death penalty back'

I suspect that is usually the case in the immediate aftermath of some horrible murder. I wonder what percentage of people would be in favour of capital punishment immediately after being reminded of the Guildford Four.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seve...

More or less...

Here the few pro-death penalty politicians are extreme far right... So noone want to vote for them (specially because here most of politics are around the left... we have no really power right-wing party, the mainstream party that most people consider "right" is the socialist party (that obviously is still left, even if center-left).

But it is obvious that the population DO put killing criminals in high regard, otherwise they would not kill them quite frequently (and I must confess, if I could, I would kill a bunch of guys too, my parents house got robbed 8 times already, and because of some broken laws these people cannot be arrested, and for other reasons the police even refuse to come visit a crime scene, they just ignore it... thankfully, I don't need to kill all of them, one of them already got a sword on his gut after a failed robbery, and others are going toward the same path, considering they also even tried to rob house of cops, even a SWAT cop once...)

And it is not just matter of... economics. Here it is cultural, the amount of rich people that are criminals here is very high too, Brazil has the famous Gerson Law in effect ("Gerson Law" is how people nicknamed here the theory that most people here will do ANYTHING to achieve personal advantage...)

I remember when a pool was made here, that asked two questions: "Are most politicians corrupt?" and "If you were elected, would you be a corrupt politicians?"

The reply to the first was around 90%, no surprise here...

The reply to the second, was 60%

that last poll - that makes me very sad. From this, and the news recently, it seems like Brazilian politics needs a fresh start - either by a genuinely impressive electoral challenge from a credibly honest party, or by some extra-electoral means (which are always of questionable morality, even if they do "work".)

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