Death Penalty (warning Graphic photo may disturb some readers)
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death penalty
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Debating the Death Penalty: Should America Have Capital Punishment? The Experts on Both Sides Make Their Case
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The Death Penalty: An American History
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The Death Penalty: America's Experience with Capital Punishment
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The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence
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Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty
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The Top Ten Death Penalty Myths: The Politics of Crime Control
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A few reasons to abolish the death penalty
- Reasons the Death Penalty should be abolished
First and foremost the death penalty is a barbaric act of murder. We teach our children very early on that two wrongs do not make a right. The crime of murder carries our harshest of sentences such is...
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Law 101: Everything You Need to Know about the American Legal System
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Law School Confidential (Revised Edition): A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience: By Students, for Students
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Ladies And Gentlemen Of The Jury: Greatest Closing Arguments In Modern Law
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Law For Dummies
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The Death Penalty is Murder by Appointment, according to a Timetable.
One of the factors that makes life bearable for all of us is the uncertainty of the hour of our deaths.
The United States today remains one of the few Western nations to maintain the Death penalty as as sentencing practice...
The last man hanged in Australia was Ronald Ryan in 1967.
The case became the last Death Penalty case carried out in Australia! Fortunately so! As there is still now, 42 years on, considerable doubt that Ryan was the guilty person that pulled the trigger that killed a Prison Warden.
Ryan had the chance to live and possible clear his name for this offence. However he was put to death at the discretion of the then Premier of Victoria; Henry Bolte.
Despite much public outcry, demonstrations and considerable legal doubt from those involved in his trial Ryan died by being hung from the gallows in Pentridge Prison...
On 6th of April 1857, Leo Tolstoy saw a 'Guillotining' in Paris which haunted him for the rest of his life: "When I saw the head part from the body and each of them fall separately into a box with a thud, I understood not with my mind but with my whole being--that no rational doctrine of progress could justify that act..."
Two novels The Trials(der prozess 1925) by Franz Kapka and The Outsider by(Le Estranger 1942) Albert Camus both sensitize the imperfections of the Criminal Justice System. Me, I am convinced that the best societies are based on a firm unyielding position to all forms of violence conducted by all including instruments of the State.
During his term as prisoner Oscar Wilde wrote; The Ballad of Reading Gaol(1898) in which he invokes the emotions surrounding a hanging:
"And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die."
George Orwell's Essay on a Hanging(1931) is a recollection of his year's as Policeman in Burma when he took part in an execution. He wrote of the condemned man being walked to the gallows:
"At once in spite of the men who gripped him at each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on a path. How incredible a sight, the feeling of such sensitivity from a man about to meet his maker...
Of course one might including myself and many others argue in certain extreme circumstances a person should be killed. Barry Jones in his book A Thinking Reed notes: " If a man held a child at gun-point, threatened to kill him/her I would probably order him to be picked off by a sharpshooter; if their was no alternative. But this is not the equivalent to the situation where an offender is captured, rendered harmless, put into a high security gaol, tried, convicted, sentenced and goes through the appeal procedure, in which his death becomes a matter of choice rather than necessity to those imposing it. "
I and many others have come to reject the notion of the eye for an eye, death for a death approach which is implied a moral equivalence between the criminal and the State: "If he can do it Why can't we?"
In Australia often the decision to hang was up to the mind set of a Premier's of each State at the time. South Australia's Thomas Playford authorised several hangings between 1944 and 1964.
Capital punishment provides a reinforcement to what are sometimes regarded as common sense views about life. In the United States retentionists argue:'The community has to defend itself. We kill the enemy in war and crime is a war on society." Well yes and no under the Geneva Convention, once captured, Prisoners of War are securely held; As signatory to The Geneva Convention they do not execute them.
On the 19th of February 1951, there was triple-hanging at Pentridge Gaol in Melbourne, Australia, of Jean Lee, Robert Clayton and Norman Andrews for the atrocious murder & torture of an illegal bookmaker, William(pop) Kent in Carlton in November,1949. Convicted by a jury with no recommendation for mercy, the judge sentenced them to hang. They appealed successfully, on the admissibility of certain evidence against their conviction and sentence to the Victorian Full Court, and a new trial was ordered. However the High Court of Australia reversed the full court decision and the original verdict was restored. Eight months were spent under the shadow of the gallows. On execution day Jean Lee was the first to go at 8.00am in an understandable state of collapse, strapped to chair. She was the last woman to hang in Australia. The two men were hanged simultaneously at 10.00 am. Clayton's execution was bungled, and he twitched on the rope for more than fifteen minutes. (Barry Jones(2007) A Thinking Reed. )
William Makepeace Thackeray wrote after witnessing a hanging in 1840. "In abstract form we understand , what Blood demands Blood means ! " But after seeing the hanging Thakeray was left with an awful feeling of terror & shame. "It seems to me" he wrote, "that I have abetted an act of frightful wickedness & violence and I pray God that it may soon be out of the power of any man to witness such a degrading sight."
In the United States between 1930 and 1967 there were 3859 civilian executions(54 per cent were blacks) & 160 were military.
The Sentencing of Death is also racially biased. It's racist, and the statistics show it. Two-thirds of any case involving a black or Hispanic killing a white result in the death penalty. Overall, a black person is 5 times more likely to get the death penalty than a white defendant in similar circumstances.
In the 1960's the death penalty seemed to be facing extinction internationally. Most countries in Western Europe ad long been abolitionist. New Zealand in 1961; Ireland in 1963; Great Britain in1965.
Abolition of the Death Penalty is well advanced in Western democracies with the exception of the United States. The Death Penalty was last conducted in Spain in 1975 following the death of General Franco.
A major reason for the United States NOT to ratify the United Nations convention on the Rights of the Child(1990) was that it prohibited the execution of children. A protocol regarded as an 'unwarranted interference' in domestic law.
Judgements normally inflame themselves towards revenge out of horror for the crime. That is precisely what tempers mine:my horror for the first murder makes me frightened for committing the second, and my loathing for the original act of cruelty makes me loathe to imitate it... (Micheal de Montaigne:"on physiognomy" )
Post script to this story; It was revealed today the the body of Ronald Ryan will be exhumed forty years after his death and be reburied near his family; The link is here: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22671366-662,00.html
If white people were executed in the numbers that black and hispanic people are which is about 'nine times' the rate of ordinary White Americans would there be a public outcry to remove the Sentence of Death from the sentencing options of a judge and jury ?
The answer would quite clearly be. Yes !
Death Penalty
- Pretrial hearings set in death penalty caseAthens Banner-Herald15 hours ago
JEFFERSON - An Auburn man, who faces the death penalty on charges that he killed his family in 2006, will appear in Jackson County Superior Court next week for pretrial hearings.
- Officials seek death penalty for Binghamton man charged in deathPress & Sun-Bulletin18 hours ago
Maricopa County prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for a Binghamton man charged with slaying his ex-girlfriend with a screwdriver.
- Death penalty deniedThe Daily Iberian27 hours ago
Prosecutors will not seek the death penalty against any of the three men charged in the death of New Iberia gun shop owner Sidney Long Jr.
- Bring back death penalty, says dadBolton News30 hours ago
THE father of murdered teenager Amy Barnes has appeared on national television calling for the death penalty to be reintroduced.
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Comments
Thanks for your comment...
Thumbs up for a sensitive approach to such a controversial issue. This is the kind of thing most of us do not even want to think about, as if blocking it from our existence would mean that it does not happen. Shocking picture!
Great Hub. I am also against the death penalty and you have my support here.
In my definition one can not claim to be civilized if one uses violence. Even if there is guilt beyond any doubt a civilized society does not kill. There is a clear difference between defending, shielding society and willingly ending the life of a person.
We do not have the death sentence in South Africa. it was abolished by the institution of of our new constitution. However , on the flip side, we have the highest number of rapes in the world (1in 4 woman will be raped in their life time). Violent crime, that is house breaking allied to murder and rape of the victims is reaching epidemic proportions. Hijackings with accompanying violence is extremely common. These figures have grown exponentially since 1994 when capital punishment was abolished.
However, a long jail sentence is almost equivalent of a death sentence because of sodomy, and rape resulting in Aids. Violence in the prisons is a problem . Gang activity and murder in the prisons do occur. Rehabilitation is not that successful.
So what is the real answer?
So what is the real answer? there is no real answer . Except we know by fact that there are now many innocent people being relaesed from Death Rows due to DNA evidence !
Yes it is quite scary how many so called "cold cases" are tracked down by DNA and as you say many people are being freed (in some cases after many years) bcause of DNA evidence. I suspect that in the past, a lot of cases are "solved" to keep crime statistics down and not neccessarily to find the real perpetrator.
As you say there is no real answer. Incidentallly there are some statistics which show that everytime an excution takes place in the US , violent crime and murder increase! So or every argument there is a counter argument and statistics to back it up. BTW I am against capital punishment in principle too.
another scary though along with the one million dollars wasted in capital cases...-+
Those figures are concerning, Sixtyorso. One could come to the conclusion that the existence of capital punishment has a preventive effect. On the other hand, is that worth it? I think not. The real answer? I think the real answer is utopian. We will always be fighting symptoms rather than causes, as the root cause is somewhere in childhood in the vast majority of the cases (sometimes mental illness is the cause).
Ananta I think you are right but primarily it is a lack of moral consciousness that is the root cause. This seems to be the common denominator in high crime societies starting with government and big business
Moral consciousness is learned in childhood, Sixtyorso. Research in th Netherlands has showed that children who grow up in neighborhoods with more crime tend to become criminal too (let me rephrase that: the ratios are higher). Abusers were often abused themselves. The seeds are sown (or not) in childhood.
The reaearch here is prettty much the same but this profile will change over time as society levels out and more previously disadvantaged people have access to jobs, education and funds. Their children will then gain the benefits of that, but skip a generation or two and the rich spoilt kid syndrome will kick in as it has done in the USA.
History repeats itself... Wel.. hopefully you in South Africa learn from this history and do better than we have done :)
That picture is definitely a hard one to get past, and in my opinion, it serves as evidence against the death penalty. I have to admit that I'm from Texas, the state with the most executions in 2007(26) and it's winning so far this year too, but while most Texan politicians see the death penalty as a means to reach a civilized end, I strongly disagree. If you break a law, there is a consequence and the death penalty is meant to be the strongest consequence, however, for a person to commit an act so heinous that death is the consequence, that person is apparently the least concern about their fate. Due to this fact, it's ridiculous to think that fear of death would stop the criminal. Now for those who feel that the death penalty protects citizens from these criminals, how can we justify violence to promote peace? A person kills someone else and so the only retribution is to murder that person? Sooner or later, the executioner becomes no better than the criminals they execute. Even with everything I have said, I have yet to mention what I believe is the most important one and that is the fact that "Thou shalt not kill" is one of the ten commandments. I'll get off my soapbox now, but this is a good hub.
Excellent hub, very thought provoking. Glad folks are reading this.
Wow!! That was a shocking realization and sad at that, I am not for the death penalty however life in prison without parole works for me. It does amaze that here in the U.S. we still impose it, however I believe it is a rarity or maybe the maybe doesn't broadcast it to everyone in the U.S. I believe there are many innocent men and women on death row , as our goverment can be corrupt and they always tend to look for a warm body to close a case. What is frightening is that the ones who should be behind bars are roaming our streets, and some of them are innocent in prison fighting for their lives. I believe are country still has racism flowing through their veins or they would eliminate it altogether. :)
Hmmmm, interesting hub, but I have to ask, why should someone who murders another person, be the victim a child or an adult, get to spend the rest of their lives living in prison at the taxpayer's expense? If you have a mad dog that attacks people, you put it down, why should this situation be any different if you are sure the person committed the crime? These-days prison offers far more luxuries than many people innocent who live on the street. Regular meals, TV, heating, etc, this just doesn't seem right to me.
Misty - In India although sentence hasn't been abolished but it is awarded in the rarest of the rare cases. Now my take on this is that animals when they are terminally sick or mad as you mentioned then they are put down. This is because we humans have a higher consciousness and can decide what is less painful and appropriate for an animal.
But when it comes to a very "bad" human being we still can't speak for that person and can still hope that at some point of time in future that person may be reformed. And by the way a person's life if taken away then he/she doesn't have enough time to pay for that punishment if given death sentence which is a quick end instead of life long process of atonement. Their should be adequate carrot/stick policy like bad behavior gets isolated wards with more work and so on. And good behavior gets all the luxuries you mentioned. And what if in the future it was found he/she was wrongfully framed then that person's life can't be returned. All said and done we should hate the "mischief" & not the "mischief maker" and through a reformation process if a change is bought than that should give greater happiness than punishing someone with a death penalty.
As long as people are still innocently imprisoned (which will always happen!) then the death penalty should be banned. How many times have we seen people released from prison years after being incarserated? With the newest technology one after another people are being proven innocent of past crimes which have stolen many years of their freedom wrongly from then. If they are given the death penalty then it is too late to free them. You don't come back from dead! I would rather a murderer live incarcerated until they die a natural death, than for one innocent person to die.
Even though Tim McVeigh was guilty, both by admission and by proof of evidence, I did not rejoice when he was executed by lethal injection. It is a dilemma because should law abiding citizens be made to pay for a criminal's incarceration for life? Just the same it costs a lot of money to prove guilt and then execute.
We no longer have capital punishment in Spain, even though there are times when some people demand it. I stand on the side of life without parole for vicious crimes, and no luxuries for the condemned. No TV, books, yes, but no luxuries.
Still, in the U.S. there have been many people sent to their deaths even though later it was proven they were not the one who committed the crime. that happened in England and here in Spain under Franco, when political prisoners were executed at the whim of the state.
Tough question, great hub. Thanks!
Profound!
Thanks for your comments much appreciated !
Hey Barry! Great Hub! Well done! The only issue I have is the fact that a criminal has more rights than a baby. Killing is killing and alot of the opponents of execution still support abortion. We have to fix this or we are the hypocrites we fear we are. Peace.
Wow what a well done hub, I am please at such a thoughtful way you present these arguments. it is a controversial subject, but presented well, can be made "easier" to talk about with people of differing views.
It's unfortunate that your hub evokes sympathy for serial killers and rapists, rather than sympathy for the innocent, the victims of crimes. The "racism" claim is dubious at best. Let's say it's not racist. Would you favor the death penalty then?
If a man rapes and kills a child he should be apprehended, tried, and killed by the government. No amount of hand wringing over murderers is going to change the necessity of the death penalty.
Bibowen. If the only people that were executed you might have a valid point but I would still favour life with no possibility of parole. The racism claim is not dubious the facts speak for themselves. And yes victims of crime deserve better support but that better support should not come in the form of a million dollar death penalty !
I tend to agree with bibowen, in some case's death would be the only true justice for victims of some crime's.....it's done in a much more humane way then the victims death no doubt,also I'm not positive but I do believe the last to use the electric chair was in Florida (ole sparky)as it was known and now I think that's gone and lethal injection has taken its place.....
As for racism, for the most part that's really a thing of the past, yes it still lingers about but for the most part gone, I have and can say proud to have good friends of color and my son has many.....
Sadly thats a label that we will always be stuck with in the U.S. for the rest of time, much like Germany with Hitler...
Glen G
Thanks for your comment! But you might have good freinds who are coloured but that is irrelevant to the fact that colored people and hispanics are overepresented on Death Row
hard to answer that without sounding like a racist but perhaps they did most of the major crime's...
Hispanics here mostly stem from Illegal's that have no regard for our laws to begin with and if you look at the U.S. census reports the minority's soon will be the majority, in some states they already are with Hispanics leading the way
maybe thats why there more of them on death row...but these are just my thought's that im sure can have hole's poked threw from every side..
Unfortunately, racism is alive and well in the U.S. It is indeed common for a Black or Hispanic on White crime to be pursued with more vigor than a White on White crime. Also, the afore-mentioned minorities, living in our still-racist society, are fighting their way up the social ladder as did the, say, Irish, in the nineteenth century. The propensity to commit more violent crimes would,indeed, make more sense than for Whites. However, State-sanctioned Death is still Murder.
So Denno66 are you saying the reason why they commit more violent crimes is because they are fighting their way up the social ladder ? something for me to think about...
I kinda think it was because they are coming here and forming gangs or I guess (mini country's) would be better wording within our borders instead of simulating into our society....
Mind you when I say "they" I dont mean all latino's I mean most of the one's on death row...
racism I guess depends on where you are in the country, I still think it's just about gone, seeing the friends my kids have and seeing my friends children also, they all inter mix, not like when I was a teen in the 70's, we have all come a long way and me personally I see light at the end of the tunnel.....
Barry once again EXCELLENT and VERY WELL DONE! The picture brought tears to my eyes. Why does the state kill people to show that killing people is wrong? The logic escapes me. And your comment on the imbalance of race in the execution equation is right on the mark. Your articles are very moving, and heartfelt. I am also passionate about this topic (check out some of my articles and feel free to comment). Our most recent execution in Texas was of an accomplice who got execution, while the actual shooter got life and will be eligible for parole in forty years. Where is the justice there??? Texas is big on many things including executing offenders. We have earned the shameful title of "Texas the Execution Machine". I for one am ashamed that the beautiful state I live in has the highest execution rate in the nation, and yes, mostly blacks and hispanics.
Regards, christal
teeray says:
2 years ago
I rated your hub. Kind of speechless at the moment (graphic picture!).
Thank you for the details and critique of an heinous punishment. I'm not sure how anyone could believe that it is reasonable to kill another person who is, as you said, "rendered harmless." I hope this hub will be read by many people, even if some of the content is rather 'raw.'