Death Penalty is a cruel and inhuman punishment in the name of justice.


Abolish the death penalty.

Amnesty International said marking the 10th World Day against the Death Penalty on 10 October:

The last decade has seen significant progress towards abolishing the use of the death penalty worldwide, but serious challenges remain before capital punishment is relegated to the dustbin of history.

But there is a hope.

In 2011, only 21 countries carried out executions – down from 28 countries at the time of the 1st World Day against the Death Penalty. To have 17 countries abolish capital punishment for all crimes in this period is a sign of significant progress.But despite this success, the battle against the death penalty is a long one and there is a lot of work to do to convince the remaining governments to stop the practice once and for all.

Comments

  1. left0ver1under says

    If you don’t mind (and excuse the length of this), here’s the link to the Innocence Project who take the cases of people who were wrongly convicted, including state murder (so-called “death penalty”) cases:

    http://www.innocenceproject.org/

    Every “argument” I’ve heard for legalized murder is ridiculous:

    “Innocent people don’t get accused or put on trial!” – If you believe that one, why bother with a trial at all? Let’s just take the person out back and lynch them, and save the country a few dollars.

    “The accused shouldn’t get legal aid or funding!” – Those accused of the most heinous crimes are least deserving of a proper defense? They don’t deserve to have expert witnesses who can prove the accusations are false? (A fire expert proved that Cameron Todd Willingham didn’t set his house on fire, but the “courts” refused to hear it.) What a great way to guarantee the murder of the innocent.

    “There should be fewer appeals! The process takes too long and costs too much!” – So, those who are wrongly convicted deserve less opportunity to prove their innocence when new evidence comes along? That irrefutable evidence proving innocence will be ignored if it is presented after 30 days (which is true in at least one US state)? And as for cost, it costs less to put someone in prison for life than to go through seven appeals.

    “There is no racism/sexism/politics in these convictions!” – Such people aren’t just deluded about prima facie, they’re primal fascists looking for excuses to kill people they don’t like.

    “Overturned cases are single events, not a pattern!” – How many hundreds of innocent people have to be released before it becomes a pattern? Because it already is in the hundreds and perhaps thousands, not a handful. And it doesn’t matter if it’s five or ten people; even one innocent person being killed by the state is one too many.

    But the single most important one is the one that the “death penalty advocates” (read: sociopaths) don’t want to answer: How do you bring an innocent person back from the dead? They can’t answer because they know they’re wrong. The best they can only come up with is, “Well, it doesn’t matter now if they’re dead.” Wrong. It matters to the families of the wrongly convicted, to the person’s reputation.

    An innocent person who gets a life sentence can still get out. An innocent person who was murdered by the state has suffered the greatest injustice. As I read somewhere once:

    Civilized countries do not have the “death penalty”.

    Corollary: Countries that have the “death penalty” are not civilized.

  2. sonofrojblake says

    I’m a firm believer that the introduction or continuance of the death penalty should be subject to public referendum. There should be two questions:

    1. Do you support the implementation/continuance of the death penalty?
    2. Given that in a justice system administered by fallible humans, sooner or later for one reason or another, it is 100% certain that an innocent person will be executed – do you, personally, volunteer to be the first such person?

    Anyone voting yes to the first but no to the second doesn’t get their vote counted, because they obviously don’t really MEAN yes, they mean “yes, but only for OTHER PEOPLE”.

    In the event there are any people who actually do vote YES/YES (and frankly I’d be more surprised if there were none), we can grant their wishes and execute them, increasing the average IQ of the nation significantly, then run the poll again.

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