Posted on 05/08/2014 6:42:20 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
After the recent mishandled execution in Oklahoma, in which the murderer ended up dying from a heart attack, death-penalty opponents pounced.
Not surprisingly, the Sunday-morning talk shows focused on whether we should keep the death penalty. ABC News’s This Week was hardly a balanced panel, with four members wanting to abolish the death penalty and the fifth wanting “maybe a halfway point between eliminating it” and what we currently have.
Let’s analyze the three main arguments made on ABC against the death penalty.
Has support for the death penalty fallen since 1994? Sure, but what ABC News didn’t explain was that the years chosen were carefully cherry-picked. Support for the death penalty in 1994 was the highest ever recorded, according to Gallup. But consider instead all the 43 surveys from 1936 to 2012. Those surveys showed that an average of 63.8 percent of Americans supported the death penalty. Sixty percent in 2013 is down slightly from the average over the preceding 76 years, but it was hardly an earth-shattering change.
And why has support dropped? Probably because crime has fallen. In 1994, the murder rate was 9.0 per 100,000 people. By 2012, it had fallen to almost half that, 4.7.
This is simply false. In murder cases, whites are executed much more frequently. Nationally, from 1977, when the death penalty was reinstituted, to 2011, the last year for which the FBI has compiled data, 64.7 percent of those executed were whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of the murders.
Nor do individual states stand out in the way this statement claimed. I went through the totals for each individual state over the seven years from 2005 to 2011, and none have the imbalance the ABC News panel complained about. Missouri was close, with five blacks and two whites executed. Only three other states, including heavily Democratic Maryland, executed more blacks than whites, and in each case only one more black was executed. (To see state-by-state data for a given year in this range, search for “capital punishment [insert year] statistical tables.”)
An honest evaluation has to start with explaining why white murderers are executed at a much greater rate than black murderers.
Nobody wants an innocent person convicted. The Innocence Project claims that, since 1989, 34 people convicted of any type of murder have been exonerated by DNA evidence; of these, 18 had been sentenced to death. In that same time, about 260,000 Americans have been convicted of murder, with DNA evidence being used in about 12,000, or 4.5 percent. The error rate then was less than 0.3 percent, and it is actually much lower than that, since many of the exonerations came from convictions that were made before 1989. Furthermore, DNA evidence has improved its accuracy in trials over the past couple of decades, as it has become more commonly used. There is an old saying that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person. But the current system seems to be doing much better than that.
Finally, all this ignores one extremely important point: There is overwhelming evidence that the death penalty deters murder and saves lives. Combine that with the fact that errors, few to begin with, are becoming ever less common, and objections to the death penalty are basically eviscerated.
— John R. Lott Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of More Guns, Less Crime.
Average time on death row is what? 15 years? 20 years? Too Damn long. Justice should be blind and swift. But the biggest reason is, I could not drop the trapdoor, trigger the guillotine or start the drip. Too cold blooded. I just do not think I could live with my self after wards.
Death penalty opponents have basically eliminated the practice. Only a few states practice it, and those use lethal injection. When it isn’t carried out absolutely perfectly, the idiots then come with their main point, that their pets shouldn’t be executed at all.
At no point is justice for the victims considered. Liberals are pure evil, and defend evil. At no point are they more hideous and deranged than when defending murderers.
Average time on death row is what? 15 years? 20 years? Too Damn long. Justice should be blind and swift. But the biggest reason is, I could not drop the trapdoor, trigger the guillotine or start the drip. Too cold blooded. I just do not think I could live with my self after wards.
__________
I could. and you are correct, justice should be swift.
I surprised my self when I said that I could. I guess there are hard things that people need to do in a just society.
My reaction to this death sentence issue is: so what?
The objective is that he die.
The long waits are the result of endless foot dragging by the legal system and numerous appeals. These are also deliberately used by death penalty opponents. They create the delays and then bemoan the practice because of the delays they create. This has gone on since the Warren years. It isn’t new.
Again, no one against the death penalty cares a hoot about the victims, just the damn murderers, who in my opinion forfeit their rights to breathe.
” I guess there are hard things that people need to do in a just society.”
I guess, I am just a wussy.
“Inert gas asphyxiation is a form of asphyxiation which results from respiration of inert gas in the absence of oxygen rather than atmospheric air (a mixture of oxygen and the inert nitrogen). The experience is painless, as it is caused merely by lack of oxygen, and not due to carbon dioxide buildup up in the bloodstream, which is the cause of pain in suffocation.”
It’s what should be used.
There are worse things than death. Put at hard labor for life and any surplus they generate be paid to the victim’s families.
I propose a quick and bloodless version of the Guillotine:
Angled blade-check
200 lb blade-check
cradle so head doesn’t drop-check
blade heated to 815 degrees for instant cautery-check
Place blindfolded executionee faceup on platform, secure forehead and chin straps, secure chest, waist and knee straps. Make appropriate announcement e.g. “May God have mercy on your worthless soul.”
Trip blade release.
Neat, quick and bloodless so as not to provide gory photos for the pantywaists to get outraged about.
I can manufacture these for a couple of grand each and they can easily be installed at every Maximum security prison.
Increasingly the death penalty is not worth having, as increasingly states are going to become reluctant to enforce it.
I believe that getting their hands on execution drugs is REALLY going to become problematic for them now, and frankly I don’t think they have the guts to go back to firing squads or electric chairs.
I’d rather they just impose a life sentence without parole than continually bluff about executions.
I would go along if that means without access to TV, reading materials, access to weight rooms.....basically make them live in solitary confinement.
Once again, let me advocate for states to adopt the firing squad as an alternative means of execution. Huge advantages.
1) Inexpensive and technologically easy and cheap.
2) Very hard to appeal on grounds of “bullet failure”.
3) Write the law so that if there is a “substantial appeal” against using another means of execution, without any further hearings the state can vie for the firing squad. This would actually make *other* means of execution more viable and defeat their opponents tricks.
I strongly suspect that they didn’t offer “life without parole” to their victims, which is why they got on death row.
Agreed.
I gave up on it a long time ago.
Long term stays on Death Row, the expense of never ending appeals process, the execution of innocent people and now botched executions....
...It is just not worth it, in my opinion.
The worst being the execution of innocents. There is no going back and correcting it.
Imagine the heads exploding if some conservative state decided that “In light of the great efforts and organizations devoted to finding proof of innocence for prisoners sentenced to death, The great state of (fill in the blank) has decided to make those efforts applied to not just the few prisoners sentenced to death, but to every prisoner convicted of rape or murder, and sentenced to life in prison. Therefore all such life sentences will be converted into death sentences, since the ultimate outcome no different, and it is a travesty to deny lifers the same opportunity for exoneration.”
Okay. I’ll bite. No more death penalty IF there is NO CHANCE EVER of parole, SOLITARY Confinement, No healthcare, NO TV, AND each of these prisoners is given a strong length of rope with instructions on how to tie a noose.
I don’t want to be extreme about it.
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