Do YOU Think Capital Punishment Demonstrates Compassion and Decency?
(somehow I already see you disagreeing with me Jenn)
Yes I do, I think capital punishment is compassionate to the victims of heinous crimes. Many might argue that capital punishment lacks compassion. But, it is compassionate to the victims of murder. Compassion cannot only be seen in the context of the murderer, but must also be seen in the context of those they kill. Besides, who is it more important that compassion be extended to? The victims deserve compassion more than the murderer in my opinion.
The death penalty is about punishment, not vengeance, some argue that capital punishment is about taking our anger out on the murderer. But, it is rather, about dispassionately punishing a criminal in proportion to the crime they’ve committed.
The executed are not deprived of everything; they keep their souls. In my opinion, capital punishment could only be the severest and most horrific punishment if it was able to deprive the executed of their souls and their after lives. But, it only deprives them of their bodies and lives on earth.
Christina Bledsoe
If you liked that post, then try these...
“I DO” NOW PLEASE POKE MY EYES OUT by Christina
Dear God by Christina
Dear God by Christina
Heath Ledger's Families Final Good-Byes by Christina
Heath Ledger Dead at 28 by Christina
Ha ha!! Lmao! I assume you mean me, right? How’d you know?
and so….
It’s going to take me a while to dig into this one and I can’t give it justice (so to speak) today. Too busy. Will have to wait. Sorry.
No problemo.
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog.
Tim Ramsey
Do you know that yours is the ONLY so-called civilised, or developed, country, other than muslim countries, to still have the death penalty?
And no, I don’t think imposing the death penalty shows compassion, either to the victim or to the perpetrator of a crime. I think it is dangerous in the extreme, because the legal system makes too many mistakes, and people are often wrongly convicted (just as they are often wrongly acquitted). I don’t think concepts such as “punishment” or “vengeance” are worth the risk of killing an innocent person.
My solution would be to castrate EVERYONE convicted of any kind of violent crime; that tends to have a calming effect on people. It would serve at once as a punishment, a form of vengeance AND a preventative, since those pesky violent hormones would cease goading the formerly violent person.
It would be quite interesting to know if that would still be your opinion if perhaps one of your children were viciously murdered…..would you feel that way if you were the sister or some other relative of Sharon Tate?
What if YOUR daughter should have fallen victim to, just to name a few, David Parker Ray, Albert Fish, Dennis Rader, Jeffrey Dahmer or worse Ed Gein, the following is a excerpt taken from an article on Ed Gein:
“While the shocked deputies searched through the rubble of Eddie Gein’s existence, they realized that the horrible discoveries didn’t end at Mrs. Worden’s body. They had stumbled into a death farm.
The funny-looking bowl was a top of a human skull. The lampshades and wastebasket were made from human skin.
A ghoulish inventory began to take shape: an armchair made of human skin, female genitalia kept preserved in a shoebox, a belt made of nipples, a human head, four noses and a heart.
The more they looked through the house, the more ghastly trophies they found. Finally a suit made entirely of human skin. Their heads spun as they tried to tally the number of women that may have died at Eddie’s hands.”
I want you to imagine that “funny looking bowl” used to be your daughters head which was previously attached to her body, or perhaps her two nipples were on that belt, god only knows where the rest of her body is, I want you to pretend that he cut your daughter up and made her into a lampshape, are you SERIOUSLY telling me all you would want to be done to him is to castrate him? BULLSHIT - what sort of “compassion” do YOU think Ed Gein or any of the others I listed deserve? Humor me….
I don’t think he or any other murderers deserve any kind of compassion whatsoever. Killing them is giving them the easy way out – they no longer have to live with the consequences of their actions (I don’t believe in concepts such as “heaven” or “hell”), so my opinion is that the death penalty is too easy on them, quite apart from what I said before. And when I said they should be castrated, I meant literally castrated, turned into eunuchs, and still kept locked up with hard labour.
And as for imagining a victim to be my own daughter, it is beyond imagining, but I know that killing a murderer is not going to bring the victim back to life or ease the pain of the relatives left behind. All it does is leave everyone concerned with blood-stained hands.
No murderers don’t deserve ANY compassion that’s one thing we can agree on. I also agree with you on the part where many people are falsely accused however I am talking about “known” murderers like Ed Gein for example. He killed tons of people in ways you couldn’t even begin to imagine. I think it’s a bit naive to think he sat around for a single second feeling “sorry” about any of his killings. What consequences was he having to live with being in prison, not be able to get out and viciously kill any more people? poor guy, tough tough consequences…
Now, on the other hand, Scott Peterson is on death row and I do not agree with that because though I believe he did kill his wife (8 months pregnant Lacy Peterson) the conviction was based solely on circumstantial evidence.
I think it depends on the circumstances.
It’s going to be very difficult to answer just the question posed and not to get into a debate about the morality, practicality and constitutionality of the death penalty. I’ll do my best. I apologize in advance b/c in all likelihood I’m going to fail.
So is the death penalty compassionate and decent to the inmates? No. It is as compassionate and decent as we can make it, but b/c the act itself is not compassionate and decent our actions to make it so fall short. Silk purse v. sow’s ear and all that.
Is the death penalty compassionate and decent to the victim’s families’? For the most part, no. Most of the accounts I have seen or read report that the death of the perpetrator of the crime against their loved one only opened fresh wounds, or in some other way left them feeling empty and unsatisfied. Others are all for it. Consider this, though: Today more than 75 death row inmates have spent 20 years on the Row. If by executing the inmate we are compassionate to family members of the victims then why do we make them wait 20 yrs for that “justice?” If we deny the inmate the appeals process we deny them their constitutional rights and we increase the chance of murdering an innocent man or woman. Not at all compassionate.
Is the death penalty compassionate to you and I? No. Not when we pay 50% (or more) more in taxes to house a death row inmate then we do inmates incarcerated for life. I present the following:
*$2 million in legal fees to try a death penalty case, nearly 4 times higher than comparable murder trials.
*The automatic appeal process costs up to $700, 000 in legal fees.
*$1.2 million in execution costs.
*1973 -1998, Florida spent $57 million on 18 executions.
But wait!! It must deter crime, right?? In that way it must be compassionate to the citizens. Nope. The two states with the most executions in 2003, Texas 24, and Oklahoma 14, saw increases in their murder rates from 2002 to 2003. Both states had murder rates above the national average in 2003: Texas - 6.4, and Oklahoma - 5.9. The top 13 states in terms of murder rates were all death penalty states. The murder rate of the death penalty states increased from 2002, while the rate in non-death penalty states decreased.
Now let’s argue for a minute that it does deter crime. Let’s also say that people are more afraid of the death penalty than they are a life time incarceration of anal rape. Let’s then take it a step further. If say, torture, were a greater deterrent and people were yet more afraid of that than death, would we be morally justified in torturing inmates convicted of crimes? Now don’t get me wrong. If someone touched the hair on one of my children’s heads I would want to disembowel them through their eye sockets. Doesn’t make it right, though.
Is the death penalty compassionate to men or women wrongly convicted? Rhetorical. Consider these statistics:
*Over 113 people on death row have been exonerated since 1973
*68% of the death penalty convictions between 1973 - 1995 were reversed
*Capital punishment is applied to a higher percentage of minorities than whites.
*Out of at least 400 innocent people convicted of capital crimes they did not commit, 23 were executed since 1900.
Is the death penalty compassionate to the family of the inmate? I really hope this one is rhetorical too.
I could go on, but I’m not. This is too long and dry as it is.
Note to Clivia: you’re close, but not correct. There are no civilized nations who still have the death penalty…
Note to Christina: I love you dearly, girl, but I’m giggling just a little bit here. Two reasons. 1) So this comes from the woman too liberal for society? Hey, I don’t fault you there. Lots of people think I’m unbearably liberal myself, yet I hold some very conservative views, but I still think it’s funny. No offense. 2) You guessed off the bat how I would feel about this. We haven’t really ever debated before (other than the prostitution thing) and I don’t think we’ve discussed this particular topic, so I’m assuming that either you have discovered my rosetta stone or I really am that transparent.
Note to Rob: I don’t know you very well, but based on who you married and our few interactions can tell that you’re awesome.
Okay, I can’t resist. Murder is wrong or it’s not. Can’t have it both ways.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this - I am all for the death penalty given the situation, a fine examle would be Ed Gein and Albert Fish. I was surprised to read that one person thinks what he did was an “art” (Gein).
The following is info on Albert Fish:
[edit] Billy Gaffney
A child named Billy Gaffney was playing in the hallway outside of his family’s apartment in Brooklyn with his friend, Billy Beaton on February 11, 1927. Both of the boys disappeared, but the friend was found on the roof of the apartment house. When asked what happened to Gaffney, Beaton said “the boogey man took him.” Initially Peter Kudzinowski was a suspect in the murder of Billy Gaffney. Then, Joseph Meehan, a motorman on a Brooklyn trolley, saw a picture of Fish in the newspaper and identified him as the old man that he saw February 11, 1927, who was trying to quiet a little boy sitting with him on the trolley. The boy wasn’t wearing a jacket and was crying for his mother and was dragged by the man on and off the trolley. Police matched the description of the child to Billy Gaffney. Gaffney’s body was never recovered.[20] Billy’s mother visited Fish in Sing Sing to try and get more details of her son’s death.[21] Fish confessed the following:
I have changed the name to your sons name for deeper effect:
“I brought baby John to the Riker Avenue dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him. I took the boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I shit on his chest. Then I burned his clothes. Then I threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59 Street at 2 a.m. and walked from there home. Then the next day about 2 p.m., I took tools, a good heavy cat-o-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8 inches long. I whipped John’s bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off John’s ears, nose, slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut his dick off and slapped him in the face with it, twice. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him through the middle of his body. Just below the belly button. Then through his legs about 2 inches below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head, feet, arms, hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach. I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His cocknballs had a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears, nose, pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. I put strips of bacon on each ass cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as John’s sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His penis was a sweet as a nut, but his balls I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.[4]”
Fish arrived in March 1935, and was executed on January 16, 1936, in the electric chair at Sing Sing. He entered the chamber at 11:06 p.m. and was pronounced dead three minutes later.
In my opinion, excellent decision….what would you want done if Billy was in fact YOUR John Jennifer? Billy was someones son!
This is terrible beyond description. There are literally no words to describe the depth of human depravity and evil in that story. I would sooner that were me 1000 times over than my own baby John. I would not want that man alive to breath air, eat food or anything else while my baby was gone. If he were hit by a truck or shivved in jail I would not mind in the least and would probably be relieved. However, this kind of emotional appeal does not change the fact that murder is wrong in whatever form it takes.
If someone did that to my son, I would be pushing for the death penalty. I would take complete comfort in knowing that there was at least one less monster out there that could do that to any other child/person opposed to him sitting in jail happily reminiscing over how my babies ass cheeks tasted because lord knows he wasn’t sitting in there with his head in his hands asking himself what the hell he did- sick bastard. I’m done with this, it’s clear where we both stand.
Hurray for you, Jennifer - you did the homework and got the statistics I was only thinking of digging up; and you are completely right, of course: there are NO civilised countries with the death penalty.
Having said that, of course I have to admit that sometimes I think that the world would be a better place without certain people. I count people like Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Howard, Bin Laden, Al Sadr, Mugabe and every single religious fundamentalist on the planet – regardless of which brand of religion they think is the one true religion – among them. However, having thoughts like that does not actually give me the right to do away with these people.
My point is, Christina, if you are going to say that people who kill and maim should get a compulsory death sentence, then those who cause killing and maiming should get it, too, and then all the people on my list above would be on death row. They have each been responsible for many, many, many more deaths and horrific injuries than even the worst serial killer could hope to achieve.
I am not saying it’s my right, it’s just my opinion. And for the record, I don’t think that EVERY murderer should get the death penalty. I do believe Fish and others that kill to that extent deserve it and I would certainly agree that Bush should be on that same list. It’s frightening over half of our genuis poplulation here in America chose him to be our president.
Listen, I am not one of those “off with your head” kind of people, but I do believe that in certain circumstances the death penalty is justified. I fully believe Fish getting the death penalty was fair. What he did was beyond anything I could ever imagine happening to me or someone I know or even someone I didn’t know like poor little Billy.
I agree, Christina, it’s not your right nor is it mine nor ANYONE’S. Only an individual has the right to decide whether to live or die. Nobody else has the right to decide another’s life or death for them, except maybe when a person is so ill that they cannot make a decision for themselves. Which is another topic altogether!
Agreed
Agreed twice over. If only congress could get along this well!!
My thoughts exactly *she shakes her head * tsk tsk
Perhaps the three of us should take over the world?
Ship shape it right up, I say we get on it stat! I’m in
Sorry, will have to delay – I’m off to dinner at a new Thai restaurant, so will have to help with world domination at a later time! Keep up the good work in the meantime.
fallout!
enjoy your meal
Everything is going exactly as I planned *evil grin on face twirling the end of waxed mustache*
I would like to add another layer to this discussion, if I could. Christina posted a blog today I found more disturbing than any I had seen in a while. I don’t know why this struck me so particularly when there are so many instances of evil I could site, but it was about a man that took a child apprx 1.5 yrs old out of the car on a highway and stomped and beat him to death. The man was so intent that he had to be shot in order to get him to stop, unfortunately, this happened too late. The childed passed. Maybe for the best considering the severity of his injuries. Now, I’m not trying to make an emotional appeal here, but I do want to pose a question based on this story.
In this how the man was killed and under the circumstances on which his death was carried out was vastly different than if he was sentenced to die in the chair or by injection. So this is not where I’m going with this question.
I have no compassion for this man. Had he not been killed I would have a very difficult time not wanting to rip his lungs out. Had he gone to jail I would be not so compassionately enthusiastic about the treatment in jail he was due to receive at the hands (and feet) of other inmates. Of course, I feel I am justified in thinking this, but I assume this is how a death penalty supporter feels as well.
So, for the sake of argument let’s hypothetically say that the death penalty does not exist. Let’s take it out of the question entirely. How should we treat our inmates? Should we do more to protect them from one another? B/c, if the death penalty is wrong, then it would follow that my instinctive reaction as described above would be as well. Do we allocate more funds to the penal system in order to have more guards, etc? This is assuming the budget stays the same. We would have to take these funds from other programs. Is this fair? In sum, if you were in charge of the US (or Australian) prison system, what changes would you make and why? What is the foundation for incarceration? Is it only punishment or is it more? Do we owe it to society to focus more on actual, tangible and substantial rehabilitation and education? Or is prison simply a place to separate the dangerous from society? Is it a combo? I would really like to get your insight here.
Christina, this is exactly why you should never ever let me see articles like that
This is a common topic of discussion around our house…..Charles Manson is usually the main person I use as an example so I will do so here as well. Everyone wants to look at Charles Manson like he is a rotten person, now don’t get me wrong I of course think what he had done was horrible, it’s just that people of society always want to just blame, they can’t wait to find someone to blame (and of course it’s always someone else’s fault) rather than trying to find the root of the problem and dealing with it. A major problem in todays society is lack of personal responsibility. Now back to Manson, he was born to a 16 year old prostitute who drug him around the streets at 5 years old, at 14 she told him she just couldn’t afford to take care of him and he was on his own. In order to survive he began to rob places and so started his criminal history. If you ask me, we need to teach people how to take care of their children, mental help needs to be more readily available. Where was the mother of his 16 year old mother and why wasn’t she teaching her daughter about education opposed to running the streets being a whore? How do we really expect people subjected to these circumstances to end up as adults? As confident, well adjusted business men and women? No, of course not right, yet when they do end up grown up and off robbing and killing people we want to condemn them and call them pieces of shit or whatever your particular phrase word may be. I have tons more to say on this, but do you see where I’m going with this?
I believe very strongly in “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”… Period!!!
I don’t want to sound glib, and I’ve said this before: people who commit violent crimes should undergo compulsory castration. Consider this from the Wikipedia definition of castration:
“Physical castration appears to be highly effective as, historically, it results in a 20-year re-offense rate of less than 2.3% vs. 80% in the untreated control group, according to a large 1963 study involving a total of 1036 sex offenders by the German researcher A. Langelüddeke, among others [7], much lower than what was otherwise expected. Compare to overall sex offender recidivism rates.”
I think it is the only punishment that could also serve as a deterrent. Jennifer has already pointed out that serious crime has NOT decreased in those States that have the death penalty, but just think: What is the thing that most men fear more than death? It is “losing their manhood”. Even their language shows it, with phrases like “he squealed/ran like a girl”, “he’s got real balls”, “he’s got no balls”, “he’s a real man” etc.
I’m not talking about chemical castration here, which depends on continuing medication. I’m talking about physical, surgical castration. It is shown to reduce violent tendencies, as well as destroying sexual urges and the ability to procreate. In my mind, anybody who commits a violent crime has lost the right to procreate, anyway.
Other studies have shown that acts of violence trigger an adrenalin rush in the perpetrator, which in turn leads to the production of more testosterone, which both make the person feel good, and so it is a vicious circle. It must be broken, and in my opinion, castration is the way to do it.
Unfortunately, I’m not so sure about the results when it comes to female offenders. I personally do not fear becoming infertile, and many many women spend their entire adult lives fighting fertility in one way and another, so I’m not sure whether a hysterectomy or oophorectomy would have quite the same deterrent effect.
I agree with you Clivia.
I always say, let the punishment fit the crime. And then I say Take it like a man!
Oh heck if someone did that to a child that was mine (what happened to Billy), or even my dogs, I would not only push for the death penalty, very likely I would even be the one to IMPOSE the death penalty on that person!
lmao - me too and I wouldn’t mind going to prison one bit, most would understand.
Me neither!! Prison would NOT scare me at all! At least I would go knowing that killer’s family would know how I felt, and the killer would know how my loved-one felt!!
Well, you may not be afraid of jail, but you would be up for the death penalty yourself, surely? For killing someone? It doesn’t look like the death penalty works as a deterrent for either of you, then!
Yay!!! Timmyfan is here!!!! Woo hoo!! Welcome, lady!
Hey there! Thanks for the referral
I kinda like this group! hehe!