One third support 'some torture'

[Karlos]

anyone will say anything to avoid pain, truthful or not

Exactly. There's no way to guarentee the validity of any information obtained in this way. So even if you can put aside any moral qualms about willingly inflicting harm on someone in the hope they'll tell you something (and frankly that says a lot more about you than the suspect), the information you obtain isn't likely to be useful anyway.

[Karlos]

I suppose if your victim is a pain loving masochist, you'd just have them sat infront of a smorgisbord of deeply unsettling torture equipment. Then simply keep making him cups of tea, chatting and ignoring them...

[Karlos]

There are several problems with this but I'll touch on two:
1. Other than some primitive revenge fulfillment, how would that be in any way a better solution for society at large than locking you up until you die?

Well, revenge is a motivator enough for many people but I agree it's insufficient and shouldn't ever be used as justification for a particular punishment.

For the most dangerous criminals guilty of the worst classes of crime, removal from society is the best thing. You have two choices for that: death penalty or life imprisonment.

The problem with the latter is that eventually you reach saturation; there simply isn't room to house criminals. Consequently, very few people are imprisoned for "life". You can't rely on imprisonment as a punishment for all serious crimes and if you did, what would you do for all the lesser crimes where imprisonment for a period of time would be the best punishment?

When convicted murderers/paedophiles etc walk free from prison only to commit whatever crime they were imprisoned for again, what are you going to do?

I do think that there are some crimes for which the death penalty ought to be considered as an option, but it would have to rely on the soundest possible conviction.

2. How, if you wish to implement the death penalty, do you ensure that no one is ever wrongly convicted?

You can't. No system of justice is perfect.

However, suppose you implemented true life imprisonment. If you lock up an innocent man for his entire life until he dies, other than the time taken for his death, how is it different?

I don't think telling ourselves "well, at least we never killed the poor bugger" is going to appease our conscience over the fact his life was effectively taken from him.

[Karlos]

@Wilse

I don't think the lack of prison space is an excuse either. I was just highlighting an obvious problem with the status quo. You'd have to enforce the death penalty for everything up to and including council tax non-payment to free up sufficient prison space to house all the next batch of criminals for which we deem imprisonment punishment enough.

I used to agree but I've slowly come to believe that no human has the right to take the life of another human.

In the perfect world nobody ever would and we'd not even have to have the discussion :-/

[Karlos]

@AgaFaster

I agree but, like the extreme corner case of executing a wrongly conviced person in a system endorsing the death penalty, what do yo do in the equivalently extreme case of letting a wrongly convicted person rot in prison until they die in a system which doesn't?

Most people I know that are set against the death penalty are quick to add the proviso that "...but life imprisonment should mean life"

In both cases the person is dead and found innocent afterwards. Granted it's less likely in the life imprisonment case but it can still happen. They don't even have to die of old age. Depression leading to suicide, illness, getting set upon by other inmates, whatever.

What I am trying to say is that not having the death penality doesn't remove the problem of destroying or even ending the life of a wrongly convicted person.

[Karlos]

@Wilse

Yes, it is illogical. However I was actually trying to demonstrate that neither view has it "perfect", hence the paradox.

What I mean is, so many people insist the death penalty is wrong because fundamentally, you might kill an innocent person and that would be a huge miscarriage of justice and something no amount of recompense could ever put right. They also insist that life imprisonment should be the alternative and mean life as in "until death".

In doing so, they overlook that people can still die in prison whilst wrongly convicted and there is no guarentee of any kind that it won't happen (especially if life imprisonment means literal life imprisonment) for the exact same reason the death penalty is not infallable.

I don't see how sitting in a cell for 40 years until death overcomes you simply because you can't prove your innocence to the satisfaction of a group of people, in the final analysis is any more just than being executed for it.

The only solace is that this person has however much time to try and prove their innocence and wait for justice to prevail. But what do you do when it doesn't?

I don't see that true life imprisonment can be the logical alternative to the death penalty if the risk of taking the life of an innocent person is the deciding factor. You'd have to opt for... well, what we have now. Life meaning say 15 years or whatever it is.

And yet, few people seem to think out present system is any good, so what is the ideal?

In the end I'm not saying either life imprisonment or the death penalty are better - each carries the same problem and if "one innocent person killed" (be it executed or dying in a cell) is enough to morally preclude the punishment then you really do have a dilemma.

However, aside from this, my personal opinion are that there are certain crimes that are so extreme that one of these must be applied. The guilty party must never be free to threaten society. This comes back to which of the above courses do you take?

[Karlos]

Most people I know who have this view are well aware of this but, far from overlooking it, accept it as the lesser of two evils

I personally find that view a touch hypocritical, really. Either way you have destroyed someones life beyond repair, the only difference is how long you dragged it out for.
Even when some guy is lucky enough to be released, you can't give them back their life if they were incarcerated for decades.

I'd also like to point out here that, whilst I disagree with capital punishment in any circumstance, I don't neccessarily fall into the "life should mean life" category either

A rational view. I absolutely agree that each case should be judged on its own merit. Where we differ is that I also think that life imprisonment and the death penalty should both be available should the case merit it, despite the risk carried. However, they would have to be the last resort in a situation when there is no reasonable doubt, thereby minimising that risk of wrongful life imprisonment or execution as far as is possible.

[Karlos]

I guess we have to agree to disagree on the subject. I think that the death penalty should be an option (note not mandatory) for the courts to decide given the nature of any given case. As it is irreversible, extreme care must be exercised in sentencing.

I don't agree that locking someone up for 50 years then giving them any amount of cash afterwards comes close to making up for the fact that it happened to them, so again life imprisonment should be extremely carefully decided upon.

However I don't think that either punishment should be barred on the grounds that one is less evil than the other. Both are equally bad if a wrongfully convicted person dies, be it by execution or just old age in a cell. Any allusion to one being worse than the other is a comforting denial that we allow ourselves to reduce any sense of guilt on the part of society.

[Karlos]

Wasn't it Ghandi that said "An eye for an eye leaves us all blind"?

The man was unique. Pity, the world needs a lot more people like him.