capital punishment

[fertileblackfemale]

Regarding cost of death penalty vs. life imprisonment -

"A New Jersey Policy Perspectives report concluded that the state's death penalty has cost taxpayers $253 million since 1983, a figure that is over and above the costs that would have been incurred had the state utilized a sentence of life without parole instead of death. "
http://www.njadp.org/forms/cost/Final Exec summary.html

"In its review of death penalty expenses, the State of Kansas concluded that capital cases are 70% more expensive than comparable non-death penalty cases. The study counted death penalty case costs through to execution and found that the median death penalty case costs $1.26 million. Non-death penalty cases were counted through to the end of incarceration and were found to have a median cost of $740,000."
http://www.kslegislature.org/postaudit/audits_perform/04pa03a.pdf

"Total cost of Indiana's death penalty is 38% greater than the total cost of life without parole sentences"
http://www.in.gov/cji/special-initiatives/law_book.pdf

"The most comprehensive death penalty study in the country found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million more per execution than the a non-death penalty murder case with a sentence of life imprisonment "
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/northcarolina.pdf

"According to state and federal records obtained by The Los Angeles Times, maintaining the California death penalty system costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping the convicts locked up for life. This figure does not count the millions more spent on court costs to prosecute capital cases."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/18/n...b5b32ed6fbeffd5c&ex=1261112400&partner=rssnyt

Thank you, thank you, Ro. I was expecting a lot more emotionalism. Instead there is a thoughtful and fully cited response! Don't ever let it be said that Dark Cavern members are all a bunch of ding dongs!


Unfortunately you only quote those parts of these studies that support your view. The questions your citations evoke, then, is "And why should that be?" I propose the answer to that question follows the path of that money. Who stands to gain? Its ALWAYS about who stands to lose or gain, Ro. The humanism, the justice, all those are smokescreens.

Dick the Butcher had the right idea.


I invite all the members interested in this thread to go ahead and really read closely these cited reports. They don't stop at decrying the costs of the death penalty and advocate doing away with it as an economic solution.


Their overriding point is that the process of imposing and executing the death penalty in this country is the cause for its outrageous cost. Endless delays and appeals, farming various aspects of the process out to private sector sources, on and on.


Would that their victims had the resources dedicated to them by Supreme Court mandate that these animals enjoy.

Again, why should this be so. Follow the money.



Sorry, Ro. A misapplication of the principle doesn't invalidate the principle. It would cost a lot less to rid ourselves of these individuals if our primary focus was on protecting society rather than protecting the parasites (judicial and criminal....)

 

[fertileblackfemale]

Regarding cost of death penalty vs. life imprisonment -

"A New Jersey Policy Perspectives report concluded that the state's death penalty has cost taxpayers $253 million since 1983, a figure that is over and above the costs that would have been incurred had the state utilized a sentence of life without parole instead of death. "
http://www.njadp.org/forms/cost/Final Exec summary.html

"In its review of death penalty expenses, the State of Kansas concluded that capital cases are 70% more expensive than comparable non-death penalty cases. The study counted death penalty case costs through to execution and found that the median death penalty case costs $1.26 million. Non-death penalty cases were counted through to the end of incarceration and were found to have a median cost of $740,000."
http://www.kslegislature.org/postaudit/audits_perform/04pa03a.pdf

"Total cost of Indiana's death penalty is 38% greater than the total cost of life without parole sentences"
http://www.in.gov/cji/special-initiatives/law_book.pdf

"The most comprehensive death penalty study in the country found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million more per execution than the a non-death penalty murder case with a sentence of life imprisonment "
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/northcarolina.pdf

"According to state and federal records obtained by The Los Angeles Times, maintaining the California death penalty system costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping the convicts locked up for life. This figure does not count the millions more spent on court costs to prosecute capital cases."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/18/n...b5b32ed6fbeffd5c&ex=1261112400&partner=rssnyt

Thank you, thank you, Ro. I was expecting a lot more emotionalism. Instead there is a thoughtful and fully cited response! Don't ever let it be said that Dark Cavern members are all a bunch of ding dongs!


Unfortunately you only quote those parts of these studies that support your view. The questions your citations evoke, then, is "And why should that be?" I propose the answer to that question follows the path of that money. Who stands to gain? Its ALWAYS about who stands to lose or gain, Ro. The humanism, the justice, all those are smokescreens.

Dick the Butcher had the right idea.


I invite all the members interested in this thread to go ahead and really read closely these cited reports. They don't stop at decrying the costs of the death penalty and advocate doing away with it as an economic solution.


Their overriding point is that the process of imposing and executing the death penalty in this country is the cause for its outrageous cost. Endless delays and appeals, farming various aspects of the process out to private sector sources, on and on.


Would that their victims had the resources dedicated to them by Supreme Court mandate that these animals enjoy.

Again, why should this be so. Follow the money.



Sorry, Ro. A misapplication of the principle doesn't invalidate the principle. It would cost a lot less to rid ourselves of these individuals if our primary focus was on protecting society rather than protecting the parasites (judicial and criminal....)

 

[blktallone]

Ro,

B U S H and Texas executions go hand in hand.

 

[fertileblackfemale]

Rarity for U.S. Executions: White Dies for Killing Black

Don't disagree about the disparity, ThickBlack... but be sure you get your facts straight.



"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." ---Arthur Schopenhauer

"He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science."
---Carl Sagan on Johannes Kepler in "Cosmos"

"Follow the evidence, no matter where it leads." ---Dr. Gil Grissom, CSI


THE NEW YORK TIMES
By DAVID MARGOLICK
Published: September 7, 1991

Nearly half a century and at least 1,000 executions since it last happened in the United States, a white person was executed yesterday for killing a black.

Donald (Peewee) Gaskins was put to death in Columbia, S.C., early yesterday for the 1982 hired killing of Rudolph Tyner, a fellow inmate and a black man who had himself been convicted of murder. The son of Mr. Tyner's victims hired Mr. Gaskins to kill Mr. Tyner, which he did by giving him a bomb disguised as a radio.

Not since 1944, when a Kansas man was executed for killing a black in an attempted robbery, has a white person in the United States been executed for the death of a black. No white has been executed in South Carolina for such a killing since 1880. The total number of executions in the state since that time is unclear, but 245 people have been sent to the state's electric chair since 1912. Systemic Racism Is Seen

Opponents of capital punishment have repeatedly asserted that such disparities reflect persistent, systemic racism in the application of the death penalty. The death of Mr. Gaskin in an electric chair seemed to some opponents to underscore just how rare it is in this country for a white to be executed for killing a black.

Mr. Gaskins had already been convicted of nine other murders, all of them of whites. For one murder he had previously been sentenced to death, a conviction that was commuted to life imprisonment; for the others, he was serving consecutive life sentences. Mr. Gaskins had been linked to several other killings as well.

"That's apparently the sort of criminal record a white man needs to be executed for the murder of a black," said David Bruck, chief lawyer of the South Carolina Office of Appellate Defense, who represents many death row inmates.

Although Mr. Gaskins was an avowed racist who said he killed Mr. Tyner in part because he was black, death penalty experts inside and outside South Carolina contended that race played little part in Mr. Gaskins's sentencing by a jury. The victim was another inmate; any failure to impose the death penalty in such a case would deprive the state of its only meaningful deterrent to prison killings.

"As a matter of state correctional policy they had to give death in this case," said Richard Burr of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York. "If you're going to let the families of murder victims murder their murderers, you've got a serious problem. The racial combinations mean very little in light of the kind of homicide it was."

According to a 1989 study by a sociologist at the University of Florida, of 15,978 executions in the United States or the American colonies since 1608, only 30 -- one in every 533 -- were of whites who killed blacks. Several of the instances involved the murder of slaves and were, therefore, treated as economic crimes against slaveholders. In many others, including the 1944 Kansas case, the murderer had long criminal records. Statistics on Slayings

Since executions were resumed in the United States in 1977 after a decade-long hiatus, 42 of the 153 people executed have been blacks who killed whites; until yesterday none have been of whites who killed blacks.

"The scandalous paucity of these cases, representing less than two-tenths of 1 percent of known executions, lends further support to the evidence that the death penalty in this country has been discriminatorily applied," the sociologist, Michael Radolet, wrote.

Statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that more than 90 percent of people convicted of murder or manslaughter in the United States are intraracial, whites killing whites or blacks killing blacks. The statistics suggest that in the last three years cases in which blacks killed whites were about twice as common as cases of whites killing blacks.

That would mean that slightly less than 3 percent of such slayings in the United States involve whites killing blacks, far more than the two-tenths of a percent of the executions of whites who killed blacks. 'The Tony Cimo Story'

 

[Josetta]

There is an organisation in the U.K that has successfully overturned the convictions of more than 200 men who had been wrongly imprisoned for 10-23 years. DNA proved they did not do the crimes.

I do not know enough about crime to have a strong opinion on punishment, but before you execute someone you need to be convinced they actually did the crime.

It may be better to take criminals to a new land where they can't escape but are not locked up in tiny cells at enormous cost to the taxpayer. It would be a form of banishment from their old life (mentioned in the Bible) If they can't obey the rules of society, then they need to be placed in another society where they can no longer do harm to decent people.

Many states of America pay pittance of a few dollars a day of compensation for wrongful imprisionment. A Black President could address this discrimination.

 

[RoSquirts]

Fertile,
Your argument implies that those convicted of capital crime that merit the death penalty should be hustled off and quickly executed without further ado.
The Supreme court and the very foundations of our legal system don't permit this. Wishing it was this way won't make it happen. It will always cost more to execute than to incarcerate because the law must be absolutely sure that every legal remedy has been afforded the convicted before we take his life or we undermine the basis of our legal system.

Although our knee jerk reaction may be to execute quickly, we must insure that no innocents are punished by our courts. This applies to all laws. If we don't always strive to protect the innocent who will? It's a basic tenet of freedom that it's better for a guilty person to go free than an innocent to be punished. When we toss that out the window, we ALL may as well throw away our freedoms. This is why imprisonment without legal recourse is unconstitutional, why convicted murderers have extensive right to appeal before execution, why we have a court system in place at all.

Back to the point, the cost will not go down by speeding up the execution process, since we cannot speed it up and make it cheaper to satisfy the public bloodlust for vengeance. So, the reality is that it's more expensive to execute.

The argument that it saves money to execute has repeatedly been shown to be incorrect. So those that use it as a basis for supporting the death penalty are just plain incorrect.

 

[muleman]

I know that it does not save money to kill a person in the prison systems in the US. Now I truley think that a person that has killed a child a adult with a deadly weapon and DNA proves it without a fact that these people ought to be executed in a timely manner as I do not see where they are a asset to society at all. Is ten years and parole enough of a hand slap for someone that takes a life. With all due respect I think Ro's ,pooch mhall buzzy will and all of your lifes if taken is worth more then this sentence. It happens right here in Iowa a man was released with seven years served for a killing this is wrong. I don't know if alot of you know this but when the person is up for parole the family of the victim has to appear before the parole board and express their views if they do not want him or her set free on parole that is the way it is here in Iowa.

 

[muleman]

So your for capital Punishment, lets say your mother murdered your brother should would you still be for capital punishment. How about just life in jail or better yet putting these people on an island so we don't have to pay 50,000 a year and htei rowul dbe no chance of escape I mean alittle far fetched but I think it would be better. What do you think.

I think if we put them on a island it would cost to much to feed them. I'm for capital punishment if the DNA proves it without a doubt for certain crimes. The correctional system in this state is busting at the seams. There are so many drug related crimes that fill the system that they are letting alot out on parole. So in this state if they would have capital punishment and use it they could weaken the prison population some.

 

[muleman]

Now here is why we need capital punishment if the gunman in Dekalb Ill would of lived the man should of been put to death in a weeks time. Seven dead this morn and the wounded recovering what the hell is the matter with people walk in with a shotgun and start firing away. Could of I killed this person on death row if he was a live yes

 

[SaltandPepper98]

Seems like the death sentence hasn't worked as a deterrent up to now, the argument that it's a deterrent doesn't seem valid to me.

Absolutely its a deterrent Ro. It deters those same murderers from murdering again.

I am an avid anti far leftist and an equally anti far rightist but I have to admire one thing about both and that is that when either comes into power, they know how to take care of criminals. Hitler? Stalin? The Chinese still on occasion take 10,000 or so criminals, put them in a stadium, and shoot them. Then they send the bill for the bullet to the family of the criminal.

I believe that society has a right to protect itself. You shoot a rabid dog. No difference. I don't care why someone is the way they are, whether it be genes or upbringing or insanity. SOCIETY HAS A RIGHT TO PROTECT ITSELF FROM THESE MONSTERS!

Once you believe that criminals have rights then you begin to give them greater rights than good and innocent people.

Case in point. Here in Mass the law says that if a criminal breaks into my home I have to do everything in my power to get away. If I just shoot the bastard I am the one going to jail. The reasoning is that a human life is worth more than whatever he may steal. BULL FUCKING SHIT! Criminals lives aren't worth a dime a dozen.

Also the law says that a gun must be kept in a locked safe or strongbox. My locked house is not good enough. If some criminal breaks into my house and steals my gun and commits a crime with it and they find that it wasn't in a locked safe then I can be sued by the new victims. Not the fucking criminal, ME!

My feeling Ro is if you don't want to get shot, don't break into my house. But laws making it more difficult to protect yourself from criminals are passed every year. To me that is giving criminals more rights than the average person. And thats not right.

 

[Josetta]

If the worst criminals were banished to a secure island, a few bags of seed and a small number of animals would enable them to grow their own food. They would become pioneers with no modern comforts. They could build their own houses from trees they chopped down with a small range of tools. To survive they would have to work quite hard together as a team effort, and make their own laws and punishments. In the process, they would come to understand why a society needs to set minimum standards of behaviour. Occasional inspections of the island would reveal whether they were making a boat to try and escape back to the mainland.

 

[Josetta]

It would be better to give $253 million dollars to the families of the victims rather than carry out executions. You don't need prison guards on "Murderer Island". It doesn't matter if they wipe each other out, they can't leave, so at some point they will have to knuckle down and work to grow the food needed to survive.

 

[HornyInSeattle]

OK as the Supreme Court is ruling on a lethal injection case how do you people feel as for Capital Punishment or against and by what methods if for such as lethal ijection, hanging, elrectric chair, shooting or by what method? Myself I'm for it the method lethal injection.

If I was sentenced to capital punishment and had a choice, I would hope they would strap me to a bed, and have a woman I am attracted to put a pillow or two on my face and just sit until I check out. Of course she and everyone else would be monitoring the ekg....

 

[njcpl67]

What tha??

Kill them ALL, so the world is NOT threatend!! Give it a year and ANYONE could walk down ANY street and feel safe!!

 

[btmbabipoi]

If the worst criminals were banished to a secure island, a few bags of seed and a small number of animals would enable them to grow their own food. They would become pioneers with no modern comforts. They could build their own houses from trees they chopped down with a small range of tools. To survive they would have to work quite hard together as a team effort, and make their own laws and punishments. In the process, they would come to understand why a society needs to set minimum standards of behaviour. Occasional inspections of the island would reveal whether they were making a boat to try and escape back to the mainland.

The English tried that in the 1700's. Names the place "Australia"

Robert A Heinlein also discussed that in his book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Actually it was a very good book. Check it out.

 

[Josetta]

The problem with Australia was that they did not release the prisoners to fend for themselves as I suggest.

And quite a few had stolen a loaf of bread to feed their starving family and were sent to Australia for 5 years punishment.

Murderers were executed in England and not sent to Oz. The "convicts" continued to receive harsh discipline and a lot died from not being fed properly or excessive whipping.

 

[Josetta]

Over in the UK, once a criminal had been put to death, the hangman had to be charged with murder in a secret formal hearing, and be found not guilty by the High Court Judge.

Each prisoner feels pain differently, so punishment can be very severe for some and "not too bad" for another.

I would not like to be a prison guard and look after prisoners on death row, talking to them and then seeing their execution dates drawing closer, maybe a last minute reprieve. I think guards are very brave to handle that kind of stress, to watch guys die.

 

[njcpl67]

AGAIN, Muleman is roght!!

Josetta, Australia was a place to put the muderers and non conformist.. Well, what happened The most loyal country to the english"other than the US" was created!! Why because when they were alone they remember LAWS, RESPECT, pretty much where they where in life.. Now Australia is NOT a PRISON ISLAND, but a beutiful country. Built by criminals!!

PS Kangaroos are ALWAYS PACK'IN!!!!

 

[muleman]

we just had a case here in Iowa last week a 27 year old man had shook his girlfriends 12 day old baby so hard it broke its neck and is now dead a whole life of 12 days yeah this son of a bitch of a meth head should spend all the rest of his time locked up no he should be put to death pronto.

 

[SaltandPepper98]

we just had a case here in Iowa last week a 27 year old man had shook his girlfriends 12 day old baby so hard it broke its neck and is now dead a whole life of 12 days yeah this son of a bitch of a meth head should spend all the rest of his time locked up no he should be put to death pronto.

Put his head in one of those automatic paint can shakers.