‘Justice is death’ for alleged shooter in Batman rampage...

[Simon_Jester]

That's probably why Delaware has removed the option. In that state at least it's no longer an issue. Everyone there condemned to die gets the needle now.

Yes, the "strapped to a gurney while the first injection hopefully renders you unconscious or maybe not while you are paralyzed and poisoned to death" option.

All things considered, I think I'll take a firing squad.

[Broomstick]

You believe that constraining people indefinitely for decades is somehow morally superior to killing them.

Yes, I do.

But for some reason you think that removing his actual life is somehow crossing the moral event horizon. Why?

I believe life is preferable to death.

Keep in mind I am NOT advocating keeping anyone in complete social and sensory isolation for decades. The degree of privilege within a prison should be scaled to the person's behavior, and sufficient stimulation for some level of mental health should be provided. That could be books, movies, or (limited and supervised) TV or even internet. Someone who demonstrates an ability to obey the rules of a prison could and should be allowed to interact with other prisoners, receive visits from family, and so forth. The restraint should be sufficient to prevent said person from hurting others and not just gratuitously applied as a form of punishment in and of itself. I think some to the current isolation practices are most definitely cruel and unreasonable and should not be in force, but that's a different issue that whether or not we should kill someone.

Just because the majority opinion has been used to justify unethical things in the past doesn't mean that majority opinion is to be disregarded entirely or given no weight. I love it when people trot out this silly argument - "well the majority used to endorse slavery! etc." Okay? So? So are you then proposing that majority opinion should be entirely meaningless?

Of course not, but that doesn't mean human rights should be subject to majority vote, either. It's a balancing act. Rights are not absolute, your rights end where someone else's begins. Saying "majority rules" isn't sufficient. One of government's duties (in my opinion) is to protect the minority from the majority where appropriate.

Except the ethics of the death penality is the very issue we are discussing, so you can't tacitly assume it's unethical (or morally equivalent to something like slavery and segregation), and then declare that majority opinion regarding the death penality is invalid.

On a practical level it is, of course, very relevant. I currently live in a state that does have the death penalty and my personal opposition to that form of punishment is not going to end it in Indiana. That doesn't mean I have to approve or condone it.

The justification is so that the state doesn't have to indefinitely constrain a dangerous murderer prone to psychotic behavior who puts various prison staff at risk.

By that rationale we shouldn't have doctors treat people with communicable and deadly diseases. People who work in prisons assume some risk as part of their work, just as police, firemen, and yes, even doctors do.

Wrong. Again, people with communicable or deadly diseases haven't forfeited their right to be protected by society.

In some cases they have been denied their freedom - Typhoid Mary, for example. In Cuba people with HIV are imprisoned for life - perhaps comfortably imprisoned but they lose their freedom forever. Your assertion that those with communicable disease don't "forfeit" their rights is not universally held to be true.

Likewise, I don't think even a murderer has lost his right to life. No matter how horrible he's still a human being and see my often-repeated statement regarding justification for taking a human life. If he can't hurt anyone neither is anyone allowed to hurt him. We may just have to agree to disagree on this point.

Mass-murderers have, so there's no reason to go on risking the lives of prison personnel. Yes, people who work in prisons will always be exposed to risk, but there's no reason not to decrease that risk by executing the most dangerous criminals.

Not everyone who kills people, even multiple people, is automatically a hazard to prison personnel. Jeffrey Dahmer lobotomized, raped, killed, and ate multiple people but by all accounts he was a very well-behaved prisoner and there were others far more dangerous to work with. Indeed, it was another inmate who killed him. So while we certainly couldn't let him back out on the street the level of confinement required to render him harmless was pretty mild. The man who killed him, however, probably needed more restraint, not less.

Firstly, I could ask you the same question. Why is it a superior solution to remove someone's freedom and then restrain them for decades indefinitely?

Because I find confining someone alive but indefinitely to be superior to killing them. Again, I'm not advocating a sterile grey cell and complete isolation, only what is required to render the person harmless. For some murderers that isn't a whole lot, and doesn't entail much risk. Another example is Nathan Leopold who unquestionably committed a brutal murder in his youth but actually did some good while behind bars, from educating fellow inmates to volunteering to being infected with malaria to further medical science, to working in a hospital when finally paroled to, finally, being an organ donor after death. That doesn't make him an angel, and it certainly doesn't mean every murderer is a saint-in-waiting, but it shows that being sentenced to life (actually, life plus 99) isn't necessarily hellish or even a waste of life.

My argument for the death penalty is that it is morally superior (both from the viewpoint of the condemned prisoner and the prison staff) to execute a dangerous criminal than to constrain him/her for decades on end.

And I disagree, as already stated. I don't think either one of us is going to budge on that, do you?

I guess you don't believe in "not guilty by reason of insanity", then? Please clarify that, just for the record. Do you think batshit crazy people should be held to the same standard as mentally normal adults?

To be honest, I don't know. I think it depends a lot on the particular case, and the particular form of insanity. If someone is so delusional that they are prone to mass-murder, and there is no known way to treat them, then I think the death penalty should be considered.

So... you view it as a sort of mercy killing? Or am I wrong on that?

[Broomstick]

All things considered, I think I'll take a firing squad.

So far as I know that's only ever been an option in Utah - do they still have that?

[Knife]

All things considered, I think I'll take a firing squad.

So far as I know that's only ever been an option in Utah - do they still have that?

No. They got embarrassed about it some time ago, last guy got grandfathered in IIRC, but it's gone.

[loomer]

Personally, I'd prefer nitrogen gas inhalation, if that's the one I'm thinking of. Quick and verifiably painless, as opposed to the verifiably inhumane nature of lethal injection if the anesthestic component fails. Really, lethal injection only appears humane. Every time we've seen the anesthestic component not work to full effect, it's been pretty nasty to watch.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I thought the anaesthetic part was optional, based on the condemned's choice, or is that not universal?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

No, it's not optional. I consider the lethal injection to be cruel and inhumane punishment. Execution should be performed by guillotine or firing squad, so in that sense I don't really approve of the modern, clinicized American death penalty that tries to pretend death is something it's not at the expense of the condemned.

Personally I suspect that the lack of spectacle in execution and the lack of spectators are the two driving factors behind any lack of deterrent effect. The Guillotine and the firing squad created a moral spectacle of right and wrong to intimidate the simple minded. Uneducated people on the bottom rungs of society will always understand that sort of thing better than logic and law and reason.

[Crazedwraith]

Wow. Just wow. Maybe what we should do is hang people and leave the bodies swinging on the gibbet as a warning to the unwashed masses?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Wow. Just wow. Maybe what we should do is hang people and leave the bodies swinging on the gibbet as a warning to the unwashed masses?

Hanging can lead to prolonged suffering if the drop isn't managed right, though I don't have any particular argument against exhibit of the bodies of slain criminals.

[Metahive]

[...]I don't have any particular argument against exhibit of the bodies of slain criminals.

It's called pornography, satisfying bloodthirsty urges in a basic manner. That's enough to be against it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

[...]I don't have any particular argument against exhibit of the bodies of slain criminals.

It's called pornography, satisfying bloodthirsty urges in a basic manner. That's enough to be against it.

That's a ridiculous statement. Perhaps you're just afraid of the inevitable terminus of the human condition, which is squalid and lacking in any kind of dignity except that which ritual confers to sate our own neuroses. Ask a doctor or nurse about that, sometime. If you sanitize death, you trivialize it. Accusing me of having some kind of pornographic lust for blood is the absurd and desperate diversionary tactic of your own mind when confronted with the prospect of reminders of your mortality.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

We hand out the death penalty for ridiculous crimes I'd never imagine sanctioning it for, every hapless gang banger in the ghetto, while engaging in a method of execution which inflicts severe physical suffering on the condemned. Perhaps a better combination would be to use it rarely for exceptionally severe crimes and then to do it in a way which causes less psychological harm for all involved. Display the bodies of people like Holmes or not, I don't really care.. Parents should be able to choose whether or not their children see them, but once you include that proviso, how is it different from that Bodies! exhibit that's been touring for a while?

[Simon_Jester]

It was done three hundred years ago, therefore it is barbaric.


On a more serious note, it comes down to whether my individual right not to be 'made an example of' trumps whatever perceived social benefit comes from making an example of me. This, I think, is also what killed punishments like holding people in the stocks. It's a very reasonable thing to do from a communitarian point of view- here is this individual who broke the rules, let us expose them to the contempt of the community to shame them into line and serve as an example for others. But from a more typical Western individualist point of view, humiliation is not properly part of my punishment for a wrong action.

So making a public spectacle out of corporal punishment and executions, if you're really thinking about it, is going to be wrong because people have a right not to become a spectacle. No matter what crime they've committed.

Wow. Just wow. Maybe what we should do is hang people and leave the bodies swinging on the gibbet as a warning to the unwashed masses?

While she proceeded to march off into loopy on this issue, I think her original point was more about whether having the execution be a sort of morality play has some public benefit. For civil society to function, people who have no inherent respect for the law have to be taught it one way or the other. Making a spectacle of criminal punishment is one way to try doing that. If successful, makes it harder for an arrogant or foolish person to assume that they are too tough and big and bad to be accountable for their actions.

Whereas making punishment a purely private phenomenon, where people go to jail and become invisible until release, may have the opposite effect: one doesn't see anything bad happening to criminals right in front of oneself, so one may assume there's no real downside to crime.

And that's the thesis there, I think, make what you will of it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Also Foucault wrote rather extensively about the replacement of the society of grand spectacle with the society of the Panoptical surveillance apparatus, and on reading through his works on the subject I don't completely disagree with him that this has taken place--and I regard it as a bad transformation and one that should be undone. A society that relies on the psychological underpinning of spectacle is, in my opinion, more likely to be an emotionally healthy place than one where people self-enforce through mechanisms of psychological indoctrination, and people outside of social norms are pathologized.

[Metahive]

That's a ridiculous statement. Perhaps you're just afraid of the inevitable terminus of the human condition, which is squalid and lacking in any kind of dignity except that which ritual confers to sate our own neuroses. Ask a doctor or nurse about that, sometime. If you sanitize death, you trivialize it. Accusing me of having some kind of pornographic lust for blood is the absurd and desperate diversionary tactic of your own mind when confronted with the prospect of reminders of your mortality.

Wow, how far did you have to reach to deliver this piece of bullshit? If you forgot, you responded to someone who mockingly proposed to let hanged men dangle on the gallows for all to see. What other purpose would that serve than either A: fulfilling some bloodthirsty revenge wish or B: to terrorize people into obeying the law? That you try and excuse this with "not sanitizing the reality of death" is a true miracle of utter sophistry to behold.

Yeah, let's do as Vlad the Impaler and plant staked criminals in public places. That'll teach people to not trivialize death or something...

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Wow, how far did you have to reach to deliver this piece of bullshit? If you forgot, you responded to someone who mockingly proposed to let hanged men dangle on the gallows for all to see. What other purpose would that serve than either A: fulfilling some bloodthirsty revenge wish or B: to terrorize people into obeying the law? That you try and excuse this with "not sanitizing the reality of death" is a true miracle of utter sophistry to behold.

Yeah, let's do as Vlad the Impaler and plant staked criminals in public places. That'll teach people to not trivialize death or something...

I just see things differently than you do, it appears.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm.

I wish I had read Foucault, then I would have something to say about the argument about how enforcement-by-spectacle and enforcement-by-mass-observation rate compared to each other.

Metahive, have you read Discipline and Punish? If you have, I'd be interested to hear your take on it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

That would be rather interesting to hear, yes, Simon.

[Simon_Jester]

One thought:

Bloody spectacle punishments backfire if the people as a whole decide to reject the social order. The French Revolution might not have so brutally purged the French aristocracy, were it not for the memory of generations of brutal tortures inflicted publicly on the peasants by aristocrats in the guise of law enforcement.

That said, there is a real difference between bloody spectacle (bodies in gibbets, drawing and quartering) and ceremony (the rituals surrounding the traditional twelve-man firing squad).


In an execution by firing squad, there is, if not privacy, at least not an attempt to draw in huge crowds to be terrorized by the sight. There is however ritual, there is a morality play which attempts to preserve the dignity of the condemned man while at the same time making his death absolutely final, inevitable, and coming about at the hands of his fellow men instead of a machine.

Someone might favor the firing squad without favoring the gibbet.

[Metahive]

O, just actually noticed this:

Personally I suspect that the lack of spectacle in execution and the lack of spectators are the two driving factors behind any lack of deterrent effect. The Guillotine and the firing squad created a moral spectacle of right and wrong to intimidate the simple minded. Uneducated people on the bottom rungs of society will always understand that sort of thing better than logic and law and reason.

Wow, so there's not only carnal bloodthirst, there's also outright snobbish class warfare. Yeah, we must execute people in a spectacular way so those dimwitted slobs don't get any ideas. I guess you were born two centuries to late to have this attitude and not be seen as a reactionary freak.

[Formless]

More important, Simmo, is that treating punishment as a spectacle sends the wrong message to the public. From a historical perspective, those public punishments were in most cases a perverse form of public entertainment-- sometimes explicitly as in the case of Roman Gladiatorial arenas (which were also used for public executions), sometimes implicitly as in the case of the stocks where people were encouraged to harass the prisoners physically or public executions where they drew huge crowds. And then there were those public punishments which simply made public spaces unpleasant, because you literally couldn't enter town without seeing a dead body nailed to a cross or hanging from a tree. Cause, yaknow, that's sanitary.

Furthermore, looking back through history I think you will find that Duchess is simply full of shit about public punishments having a higher deterrent value. Looking through historical documents should reveal just how frequent these punishments were applied; partially of course because of corruption and unfairness (but that's why we don't use 17'th century standards anymore) but also because there is no evidence that criminals are particularly thoughtful about their own mortality then or now.

Also, for non-lethal punishments, you have now given the criminal every reason to loath society and wish revenge on them. Which kinda sorta completely contradicts modern goals of rehabilitation.

And of course, I must challenge the assertion that teaching "respect" for the law is the best way to instill virtuous behavior in a country's citizens. Even when it works, all it creates are people who approach issues of right and wrong or civil justice in a passive way-- that is, "how can I not do something blameworthy?" rather than "what should our society do better in the future, and how can I participate?"

[Metahive]

Take the Qin Dynasty as example. The Qin imposed such a strict, cruel and barbarian law over the country that it drove people who would have otherwise minded their own business to outright rebellion simply because they had nothing to lose once they broke the law in even just the most minor way. That should put the kibosh on the Duchess' simple-minded idea of "cruel punishment=peaceful populace".

[Formless]

If anyone wants to understand this argument better, the idea that Fear of the Law = Respect for the Law is analogous to one of the basic three fallacies/lies that criminal Gangs use to recruit members, as explained here:



Note that this also qualifies as a direct example of how the justice system's structure can encourage vicious mentalities in the population, in this case youth gangs being drawn towards a subset of society that's not so dissimilar to the larger society despite its well earned negative reputation.

P.S. the edit window is now closed, but I wanted to add that my note about non-lethal public punishments has modern analogies to the way sex offenders are treated. So if you want to see how it works out in modern society, there would be a data source.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Or one can try actively improving the condition of the poor, who are so overrepresented in criminals it's not even funny, by stuff like public services, provisions for them in the law, education to offer them a chance at social mobility... you know, the realistic alternatives to criminality that make the last decades worth living in.

But then one would have to keep one's BDSM fetishes to oneself, or at worst publish them as poetry. A fate worse than death, I'm told.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

But you gentlemen are basing your arguments entirely off the idea that I wish to apply the death penalty to common criminals, which I manifestly do not. I have long proposed its restriction to certain classes of especially horrible crimes which people are not driven to do for economic reasons. The bloody code in Britain provided execution for stealing a loaf of bread, but I am saying that executive even for common first degree should be eliminated in the US. The death penalty should be used as a demonstration of state power in cases of severe crimes that threaten state power. The brothers Tsarnaev are the sort of simple-minded people I was referring to.

I love how the only source provided to match Foucault is a video on gang recruitment, as if this has some kind of connection. In Discipline and Punish we clearly see that the replacement for the spectacle of the ancien regime was nothing fair or reasonable, but rather the construction of an enormous system of prisons, which didn't exist in the era of the bloody code, to "reform" through psychological terror. Of laws allowing the surveillance and censorship of society on a broad scale. Of the definition of deviance as mental illness and its clinicalization to promote standards of uniform morality, based in bourgeoisie notions of morality. All of these things combined to create essentially psychological self-enforcement mechanisms in the mind, and I would contend the logical endpoint of the argument in Foucault is that these mechanisms are why people in first world countries consistently are found to be less happy than in some third world countries where these mechanisms have not developed, despite their vastly improved medical and economic conditions.

Therefore, I drew the conclusions that, really, we would probably all be happier if state power was enforced through blood and iron and brilliant paegentry instead of a sophisticated mechanism of enforcing morality and law through propaganda, mass media, and psychological indoctrination.