What is your stance on the death penalty?

27 comments

  1. I’m conflicted on it. I think it is appropriate in many cases but I don’t trust our government and its personnel to administer it appropriately or to the right people.

  3. Against it. There’s too great a chance for incorrect convictions, and the state shouldn’t have the power to kill prisoners.

    Additionally, it’s more expensive than other forms of punishment or rehabilitation, and there’s no evidence to suggest it deters crime.

  4. Too many wrongful convictions for me to feel comfortable sending people to death at the hands of the state.

  7. Ignoring my moral opposition to capital punishment, I’m still left with the practical aspect of it: I don’t trust any government with the power to legally kill its citizens. So from both perspectives I think it needs to be abolished.

  10. I think it’s just not worth it by the time you add in necessary legal safeguards. I’m fine with the theory that some crimes are so heinous that some people deserve to die. But most cases aren’t that clear cut, and killing someone who’s innocent would be horrible. Given that no system is 100% accurate, it’s actually more expensive to give someone the death penalty rather than put them in jail, and it doesn’t seem to be an effective deterrent, it just seems like a poor choice.

  11. I don’t believe in the death penalty. I think it’s an easy punishment that doesn’t serve the justice it’s suppose to be serving.

  12. I’m a proponent of consistent life ethic. Killing people, roundly, is wrong.

  13. Opposed for the reason that the Government makes mistakes. Ethically, some folks dont deserve to live. But, the Goverment makes mistakes so, that is my reason of opposition.

  14. Staunchly opposed. If even one innocent person is put to death then we are all complicit, I am not and will never be complicit to murder. It’s so easy to call for death when we don’t even understand what that means. Besides our loss of humanity, it means an automatic appeal process where the victims have to relive and recount what has happened, and each death penalty racks up millions of dollars paid by the state. I get the feeling for vengeance, that’s human, but death isn’t a punishment it’s a resolution.

  16. Adamantly opposed. It’s no benefit to anyone, and there’s no way to correct the many mistakes. Right now there’s a case in Missouri where the courts are refusing to stop an execution while the *prosecutor* is arguing that later DNA testing has proven the man on death row innocent. We should be better than this.

  19. All people are equal and therefore no one should have the authority over someone else to decide whether their life should continue or not. Especially the government should not have that much power over its citizens. Also murder is wrong even if you try to justify it.

  20. *cracks knuckles*

    Okay, here we go.

    This is always a difficult and lengthy topic to come up, because my opinion is formed not only on the entire criminal justice system itself, but the prison system and society as a whole.

    I worked as a Correctional Officer in a state prison for about 4 years. Prison is an alien planet. Unless you worked in a prison or you did time, you won’t get it. I can explain it to you as if it were a college class, I can explain it in as great detail as anyone possibly could. It’s just one of those things that you won’t truly grasp unless you spend some time inside. People are different, both the COs, the prison employees, and the offenders themselves. The way someone acts inside is not how they act in “the real world” as we called it. I did things I wasn’t proud of and I’ve seen some very, VERY terrible things.

    TL;DR: I am pro death penalty, but I’m also for rehabilitation over incarceration.

    I didn’t agree with the death penalty originally when I started working as a CO. However, I was a firm believer that if you break the rules, you do the time. Fuck around and find out. It’s clear cut, black and white. However, I am religious, and to me, the “true” title of judge belonged to one being, the JC man himself, and that man shouldn’t hold the title of executioner. That was my stance coming in. I was young (19), naive, and inexperienced with life.

    About 8 months in, and my views were starting to shift a bit. A moment that I think is a highlight is when I processed this guy that was the same age as me. I was just a month older than him, and he had been sentenced to 6 years for joyriding.

    6 years for joyriding. He’d get out at 25 years old and labeled a felon for the rest of his life.

    Before I continue, I’m going to paint the picture of Texas prisons with a few key detail points:

    1. There is no AC in Texas prisons. Exceptions apply for what we called “cold bed” facilities. There is AC there, but these facilities are typically reserved for offenders that are prescribed medication that doesn’t mix well with the heat. Think elderly people taking heart medication, as well as psychiatrically troubled people taking medication for schizophrenia.

    2. Contrary to popular belief, prisons don’t separate you by the crime you commit, but instead separate you depending on how you act during your time in prison. If you arrive as, say, a gang leader, or your case was very high profile, then you might be initially separated, known as “Administrative Segregation”, but other than that? You had G1s, which were known as “trustworthy”. These would be guys with the most kush jobs, can basically go anywhere unsupervised, had a squeaky clean record during their incarceration, and never caused any drama or trouble. In some prisons, they were even allowed to stay off prison grounds in camps. Some places allow them to have phones/personal TVs/etc. G2 and G3s are what people think of when they hear “Gen pop” , they’re a mixed bag and make up the majority of offenders in any prison. Gang activity, drug trafficking, rape, extortion, and other prison shenanigans is high in these blocks because freedom of movement is still there. It’s important to note this is where most of any prison’s population is going to reside. G4/G5 are as close as you can get to “solitary confinement”. These offenders either attacked a CO or employee, started a riot, had a phone or drugs, or just did something insane. They’re only allowed out of their cells to shower, eat, and do hard labor. If they are out of their cells, they’re in cuffs.

    With that picture painted, let’s continue.

    Most offenders aren’t going to be administratively segregated. No offender is going to be “trustworthy” enough to immediately be a G1 worker. So, as soon as they are processed and given a cell, they’re released out into the prison. A 19 year old busted for joyriding is now cellmates with a 28 year old serial rapist. What do you think happens? Is that justice? As a CO, at 19 years old I was still doing stupid shit that could’ve gotten me in trouble. Maybe not joyriding, but was the answer really throwing a kid in a 90 degree cell with a rapist? Oh well, do the crime pay the time, right?

    No, my view started to shift after this. There were many other similar instances, and when I realized that prisons received funding based on how big their population is, it all clicked to me how fucked the criminal justice system is as a whole. We ruin young lives over generally petty shit. Prison is not rehabilitation. Prison is a place where people go to learn how to be a better criminal, making the government money as they go. Our incarceration rates are disgusting when you look at the rest of the world. A 17 year old arrested for slinging weed shouldn’t be tried as an adult and then shoved into the prison system. They need help. They need therapy. Most criminals are victims of circumstance and shitty environments. Mental health in America is a fucking joke and it’s been making thousands upon thousands of career criminals for years.

    Regardless, I met very, VERY evil people during my time in prison. I still believe that there is only one being that can judge us at the end of the day, but I also believe that there are people who will never be able to be apart of our society, and generally the world will be better off without them. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles, I’d sleep better at night if I knew that they were all standing in a line waiting their turn. But our criminal justice system is so botched that it takes YEARS to dispose of them, and a lot of them are able to get appeals regardless.

    With all of that being said, I’m only for the death penalty if we could get it right. Wrongful convictions exist, and our CJ system is horrible as it is, I’m not sure I trust it to do the right thing.

  21. It doesn’t make society better. You don’t show killing is wrong by killing people.

  22. Police and judicial system work is nowhere _near_ pure enough to tolerate such.

    [here’s a woman named “Annie Dookhan”, who falsified drug testing evidence in an estimated 34,000 cases](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan), by way of either not testing the drug samples she was supposed to and instead just going with the police report because it was faster, and adding samples of _actual_ drugs to non-drug samples to cover up what she had done in the above case. And this was not due to any malice, racial bias, or any of the other nasty shit people usually think about when they say “we can’t trust the judicial system”; she just wanted her productivity numbers to look good, and her supervisors didn’t want to deal with the possibility of her doing this no matter how many times her colleagues brought up the possibility _because_ her numbers were so good for so long.

    _That_ is the shit we have to accept as possible. Knowing that a case can get _that_ fucked up for such a mundane reason, the state can’t be doing things it has no possible way to reparate.

  26. Some people absolutely deserve the death penalty but our justice system is too plagued by bias and error to justly dispense it.

  27. Even if we knew the person was 100% guilty and the process was completely painless, I would still be entirely against it

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