Do You or Would You Support the Death Penalty If?

[peejay 327]

Wow - people actually voted for the "can't make an ommelette without breaking eggs" approach.

If those votes are genuine - I'm quite shocked.

Welcome to America. That's the foundation of the Texas justice system, for example. That viewpoint is respected and taken seriously here.

No...that is not the viewpoint or foundation of any criminal justice system in the USA, much less Texas. The justice system does not want anyone that is innocent to be executed or incarcerated. That is not the goal of our criminal justice system in America. Convicted criminals are given due process and access to the appeals process. There is no acceptable tolerance for error. The system is not run on a concept that "X" number innocents executed are tolerated. That is why this poll is stupid.

How many highway deaths are acceptable before motor vehicles are banned from the roads of America? That's your logic? The government builds roads knowing damned good and well that innocent people will certainly die on them? Jeez...give us a break! At some point exercise some common sense.

I hope you're not a Criminal Justice major/grad, or we're in some deep ####. Criminal Justice today is more (and increasingly more as time goes on0) of a representative of "corrections" than "justice", and rightfully so. This Texas Justice BS is on it's way out. Apparently some are incapable of separating logic and the evolving application of social justice with their beliefs, which are clearly stuck in the stone age.

Yeah...as if guys like Kenneth Allen McDuff (profiled above) are actually "correctable"? How about the Jeffery Dahmers and Ted Bundys of the world? Oh well...you can choose to correct them and release them into your community. I prefer them to be warehoused into eternity either in a pine box or in the steel bar hotel. That has worked well for society since the Stone Age when dealing with these types. Why argue with success?

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Wow - people actually voted for the "can't make an ommelette without breaking eggs" approach.

If those votes are genuine - I'm quite shocked.

Welcome to America. That's the foundation of the Texas justice system, for example. That viewpoint is respected and taken seriously here.

No...that is not the viewpoint or foundation of any criminal justice system in the USA, much less Texas. The justice system does not want anyone that is innocent to be executed or incarcerated. That is not the goal of our criminal justice system in America. Convicted criminals are given due process and access to the appeals process. There is no acceptable tolerance for error. The system is not run on a concept that "X" number innocents executed are tolerated. That is why this poll is stupid.

How many highway deaths are acceptable before motor vehicles are banned from the roads of America? That's your logic? The government builds roads knowing damned good and well that innocent people will certainly die on them? Jeez...give us a break! At some point exercise some common sense.

Well you see I agree with you there - it is common sense. But that being the case - why would someone vote for anything else? For whatever reason 24 people who voted in that poll think the death penalty is justifiable if innocent people are killed as a result.

I agree the poll is a bit silly - but seriously, should we have lowered expectations of the justice system as it pertains to the death penalty, especially if those expectations are used to justify the policy? That obviously has nothing to do with the way the system works as much as the ideology of individual people.

[Cassie 8]

no

no

female, non USC

for pretty much the same reasons as jundp

[HAL 9000 96]

Anyone caught the 54 voters that voted 'No' in question #2 and there are only 51 'No' votes in question #1??

[Chica Yeyé 41]

No, no, female foreign

Has anyone seen the movie 'The life of David Gale'?

Same answer as sister Julie

[IAMX 3,055]

Yeah...as if guys like Kenneth Allen McDuff (profiled above) are actually "correctable"? How about the Jeffery Dahmers and Ted Bundys of the world? Oh well...you can choose to correct them and release them into your community. I prefer them to be warehoused into eternity either in a pine box or in the steel bar hotel. That has worked well for society since the Stone Age when dealing with these types. Why argue with success?

It only worked for people who didn't care to actually think about their actions before hanging someone -- i.e. the lynch mob. Really ironic how conservatives want limited government yet you want the government to be in charge of killing citizens. If stone age logic is something you find preferable, I'm sure there are other societies a bit closer to this stone age wet dream. Of course, they didn't really have technology either. Ironic how technology and social progress have come hand in hand. There must be something to it to the evolution of intelligence and social progress.

[Alex+R 0]

Re: PeeJay's comment about people being able to change:

You assume most people on Death Row are "monsters" like Jeffrey Dahmer. Do you realize that most people on death row are there for one incident, often something like a botched robbery? Many are there for gang-related crimes. Many arrived there in their early 20s, for crimes committed at 18 or 19. Some people, in states like Texas, are in there for being party to a murder although they may not have pulled the trigger.

Many, many, many of them are there because they used to be drug addicts and did something insane while high.

The percentage of serial killers on Death Row is tiny, and the number of previously unmedicated mentally ill people with no education on Death Row is pretty high.

So anyway, even if they can't change, I think it's disgusting that anyone would want to kill another human being, horrible as they may be. But that argument isn't just irrelevant to me; it's also based in misconceptions.