I guess this is inevitability going to become partly about the rights and wrongs of 'eye for eye' justice, but I'd like to discuss practicalities.
After the murder of a British police officer the other day a former top policeman has called for the reintroduction of the death penalty for copkillers. I'm beginning to suspect that there is a great deal of support for the death penalty amongst the British public, at least there is in the aftermath of events like this. There is little support for the death penalty amongst almost all politicians, and certainly no party runs with it in their platform.
Taken from wikipedia's article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_Kingdom
1947: On 27 February, Walter Rowland is hanged at Manchester for the murder of Olive Balchin after consistently maintaining his innocence. While he had been awaiting execution, another man had confessed to the crime. A Home Office report dismissed his confession as a fake, but in 1951 this man attacked another woman and was found guilty but insane.
1950: Timothy Evans is hanged on 9 March at Pentonville for the murder of his baby daughter at 10 Rillington Place, north-west London. He had also confessed to killing his wife. A fellow inhabitant at the same address, John Christie, later found to be a sexual serial killer, gave key evidence against Evans. Christie was executed in 1953 for the murder of his own wife. Evans received a posthumous pardon in 1966. In 2004 the Court of Appeal refused to consider quashing the conviction due to the costs and resources that would be involved. See the article on 10 Rillington Place.
1950: George Kelly, who was hanged at Liverpool on 28 March of this year for murder, had his conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal in June 2003.
1952: Mahmood Hussein Mattan, a Somali seaman, is hanged on 3 September in Cardiff for murder. The Court of Appeal quashes his conviction in 1998 and grants him a posthumous pardon after hearing that crucial evidence implicating another Somali as the most likely culprit was withheld at his trial.
1953: On 28 January Derek Bentley is executed at Wandsworth prison as an accomplice to the murder of a police officer by his 16 year old friend Christopher Craig. Craig as a minor was not executed and instead served 10 years. Derek Bentley was granted a posthumous pardon on 30 July 1998.*
1962: James Hanratty is executed at Bedford on 4 April after a controversial rape-murder trial. In 2002, following his family's efforts to have his conviction overturned, Hanratty's body is exhumed and his DNA compared with samples found at the crime scene. However, the Court of Appeal upholds his conviction after forensic scientists link Hanratty's DNA to the crime scene samples*.
* The last two cases are starred merely because there is significant doubt over these convictions, and doubt over convictions where the death penalty is instituted is my point really.
You know people complain about how inmates have cable television and blah blah. I'd rather have them behind bars with a few creature comforts than out wandering in the population.
To me it makes sense, keep the inmates pacified with cable TV and they won't be bored and dreaming up ways to assault the guards.
For many of the inmates, prison is the keep them out of the American population. Many Criminals will not be rehabilitated, once they serve their sentence and are released, do you think they want to work a 9-5 when they can get $ a lot easier and quicker than working? Look at sex offenders, they are released and some are labeled likely to offend again. How are we supposed to call these folks rehabilitated?
I'm not for the death penalty, mostly because you don't replace a life by taking a life and financially because its cheaper to keep someone locked up for life than it is to put them to death under the current system. Yes we have read or heard about about the 19th century where someone was found guilty and sentenced and put to death shortly afterwards, but a lot of innocent people where executed and hence all the long appeals process came out.
I can only imagine that for every inmate that there are a dozen people running around in the population who are committing heinous crimes and will never be caught.
Charby
We agree on some of this, CC.
I also would rather have them locked up than wandering around society. If you can't rehab 'em, keep 'em in chains.
Assault a guard, with intent to kill? Execute the violent criminals. Isn't that what you're doing with your handgun if they assault your wife?
Sex offenders released? 2nd strike, don't worry about rehabilitating them. Execute 'em.
Can I see a reliable citation/source about how it's cheaper to give a convict life in prison versus the death penalty?
and finally, re: unjust executions of long ago: with new, forensic science, DNA evidence, and so on, we should reserve the death penalty for those that have overwhelming evidence against them. But, once that's established, snuff 'em quick like Jeff Probst does torches on Survivor.
The Tribe has spoken. Good night, Goblin scum.
Felonious -
Race was perhaps a bad example. I was basing that statement on the following that was taken from charby's article:
If you are a black killing a white in Oklahoma you are 10.1% more likely to get a death sentence, then a white killing a white. Table a.1 p.235*
In North Carolina with the same scenario a black is 6% more likely than a white to get a death sentence. Table a.7 p.237*
In Mississippi.... 20.8% more likely. Table a.13 p.239*
In Virginia.... 6.9% more likely. Table a.19 p.241*
In Arkansas.... 10.5% more likely. Table a.25 p.243*
*(Death and Discrimination, Racial disparities in Capital Sentencing Samuel R. Gross and Robert Mauro. 1989)
Can't vouch for those statistics at all, but the apparent claim here is that a black killing a white is more likely to get sentenced to death than a white murderer is. This sidesteps absolute numbers with regards to differences in rates of offending amongst different ethnic groups.
But when you err on the side of letting violent criminals walk, you create additional victims, which are as much victims of the SYSTEM as they are of the criminal.
I believe that the judgement has to be made that it is better not to lock up innocent men, and certainly not to execute innocent men. You're right though, it's not a nice decision.
We've had several high profile acquittals in recent years. The Birmingham Six, the Bridgewater case, Angela Jennings. Whilst there is a zero recividism rate, there is also a zero Lazarus rate.
I'm firmly on the side of locking them up forever. Who is them? Arguable death penalty cases I suppose.
richyoung - Remember feeling that Caucescau got what he deserved, hard to argue with Nuremburg too.
we will just have to continue to pretend "we don't believe in the effectiveness of the death penalty". I know the inmates I supervise think it's a deterrent but what do they know?
DING DING DING DING DING...and we have a winner!
Tell him what he won, Johnny!
Felonious -
Race was perhaps a bad example. I was basing that statement on the following that was taken from charby's article:
If you are a black killing a white in Oklahoma you are 10.1% more likely to get a death sentence, then a white killing a white. Table a.1 p.235*
In North Carolina with the same scenario a black is 6% more likely than a white to get a death sentence. Table a.7 p.237*
In Mississippi.... 20.8% more likely. Table a.13 p.239*
In Virginia.... 6.9% more likely. Table a.19 p.241*
In Arkansas.... 10.5% more likely. Table a.25 p.243*
*(Death and Discrimination, Racial disparities in Capital Sentencing Samuel R. Gross and Robert Mauro. 1989)
Can't vouch for those statistics at all, but the apparent claim here is that a black killing a white is more likely to get sentenced to death than a white murderer is. This sidesteps absolute numbers with regards to differences in rates of offending amongst different ethnic groups..
The problem with those sort of raw statistics as a proof of race disparity in sentencing is that they don't factor in all sorts of other issues. For example, were all the convictions in the population pool for the same kind of murder? A person who murders in the commission of rape or armed robbery is typically going to get a harsher sentence than a person who quarrels and murders in a fight. We know that the prevalance of these other crimes are much higher in some communities than others.
I've seen that type of statistic used to "prove" that women are discriminated against by the system because husband murderers get longer sentences on the average than wife murderers. The statistic doesn't factor in that while more men kill their wives overall, of those who do kill, a smaller proportion are proven to be premeditated (for obvious reasons, a man more commonly doesn't need to wait until his wife is asleep to murder her) and the average sentence of the population pool of wife murderers is watered down by all the men convicted of murdering their wives where it was a manslaughter type of killing and if the victim had been larger and stronger than the murderer they wouldn't have died.
You know details of prior convictions when serving on a jury in the US?
Also, if my greatest concern is about putting innocent men to death then why would reducing the number of appeals available help the situation from anything other than a financial point of view? If it takes 10, 15 years to run through all possible avenues that only indicates to me an acceptance that things go wrong and the necessity for multiple checks and balances when it comes to deciding life and death.
Stand_Watie - point taken, I just pulled those figures to demonstrate that I wasn't merely talking about the number of black men on death row as a total figure and more that I was referring to potential bias in sentencing. I shouldn't have touched race, I merely wanted to suggest that there are human factors that decide who gets to fry and who doesn't.
I believe Ian, details of prior convictions vary by US state, and by the Judge in each case. It's much more likely to be considered in the punitive phase of the trial than in the portion of the trial that the jury considers guilt/innocence. Regarding race, the figures are used all the time by DP abolitionists, so I certainly think with that as already out there, race is fair game - the key is to tote up the racial issue fairly. *IF* I were a strong DP proponent and I believed that the dp was unfairly applied against black defendants, my solution would be simple - kill more white murderers. For a person who believes that the DP is an effective deterrent, more black murderers being put to death is simply unfair to whites, given that murderers kill within their own race the vast majority of the time.
Another issue that I have observed, (probably saying it is somewhat politically incorrect), that I admit is based entirely upon anecdotal evidence, I strongly suspect that black defendants are slightly more likely to get the DP, because juries tend to be from the population pool from whence the defendants come. And like it or not, the little old black church ladies that are more likely to sit on the juries of inner city black defendants, tend to be a little bit more of the "hang 'em high" mindset than our more "enlightened" white suburbanites.