Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

The only thing that would improve with capital punishment is prison spaces being freed up. Is that good enough reason to get the wheel spinning? Factor in reproduction of offspring falling into the same circle of life

Yesterday when it was announced 3 new prisons will be built and offenders kept out of prison just made me sick with the thought of sentences to death being logical for more space. Whether I agree with it or not means little. Is there any other way other than heading towards a disaster, back to square one with prisons being once again full.

Theres no prospects other than hard graft. This isn't how life will prosper.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Please could you add an anonymous poll

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce809e3gd1xo

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

If the Police want to kill innocent people that's up to them. They are who arrest and charge people for crimes. I don't see it as a death penalty issue.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

That’s not how it works…

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Please tell me more. Is it the CPS who charge individuals? May be they should be held accountable.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Police arrest, CPS give a thumbs up or down, judge directs, jury decides. A possibility of a death penalty sentence could potentially make jurors less likely to convict, regardless of that I think it's a terrible idea as illustrated by Hugh above.

Should Capital Punishment be brought back?
 

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

And if that were the case (which it isn’t) how would you hold them accountable ?

Execute the CPS for authorising the charge ?
Execute the forensic scientist who screwed the DNA evidence up ?
Execute the jury for convicting based on the evidence that they made their decision
Execute the judge for passing the death sentence based on sentencing guidelines.

Unless you can ensure that 100% of convictions are safe then the death penalty has no place in a modern civilised society.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

I'd blacklist them. Go back to the drawing board amateurs playing with life.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Yes, but should be limited to very clear cases.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

And therein lies the problem.

Criminal guilt is established in court ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. What higher legal test would you propose to be even more certain? And if there is a higher test that can reasonably be applied, why is it not applied already to all cases, so that we are certain we are not incarcerating innocent people?

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

These are largely solved problems. You can put multiple charges to the jury, explain which the death penalty can be considered. It is then the judge who decides the punishment - with multiple levels of appeal.

It is of course always technically possible you kill an innocent person, but that is probably far less likely than getting murdered in prison at this point. The objections to it are largely hand wringing or some very committed pacifist principle.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Not reinventing the wheel is critical. None of that we live we learn nonsense. People is positions of power should know their place in society otherwise bring about a criminal case as well as blacklisted.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

The easiest way to make sure we don't kill an innocent person is to avoid the death penalty in the first place.

It's not cheaper, given all the appeals you would need to have and the circumstances in which it would both apply and reach a standard where you feel confident enough to give it as a sentence.

As the Americans have found, convictions aren't always are clear cut as they seem. Confessions can be forced or made by the mentally ill, eyewitnesses lie or misremember and you can find evidence was flawed decades on from the case.

Wikipedia has a list of exonerated death row inmates. These are people who would have been killed, or were killed, by the state for crimes they didn't commit. Innocent lives taken by the justice system. For nothing.

Thankfully, ours doesn't go into recent decades because we abolished it, although that is little comfort to those on that list who were killed.

Really, what do we gain in the end for the risk we would be introducing? Are there people whose crimes are so awful that they would be better off dead? Yes. But I don't think we or the state should have the power to make that decision.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

No! The best decision was to do away with the death penalty.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Not sure what your point is here ?
This conviction would not happen now, for the very reason it was overturned.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

no

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

The point is, in general terms, it’s a case that could easily have resulted in the death penalty had it been available, due to apparent confession evidence during questioning. The case was convicted without DNA evidence in 1987, and a rape/murder could still be convicted without DNA evidence today.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Can you provide evidence to support your statements in your second paragraph ? I’ll wait

A consideration and a question for you

1. Does the death sentence act as deterrent to potential offenders ? (And yes obviously it does at an individual)

2. If it doesn’t then what would the reintroduction of the death penalty solve? Is it justice ? Or, is it as i believe more about vengeance

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

It would potentially act as a deterrent for people with certain psychologies but even if it doesn't you are then not forcing people to babysit a monster for the rest of their life.

It wouldn't be vengeance unless the crime was against me personally so I'm not sure how that is relevant. It would be justice yes, you can cite different conceptions of justice and this would be one of them. Also certain types of reoffending criminals are rarely reformable, this is information that can be considered during sentencing.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

One innocent executed is enough for me to never want to see capital punishment return . The guy just released after 38 years is a prime example of a miscarriage of justice and you can not trust the Police in its entirety to not fit someone up even today with DNA and the like so No No No No No

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

I’ve read some claptrap (and I’ve authored my own considerable share) on here , but the above is right up there.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Which part is claptrap? The part of multiple murderers not being reformable or the part about execution being a conception of justice?

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Those were the reasons for the conviction. It wasn't based upon non-existent evidence on a random person.

---------- Post added at 20:30 ---------- Previous post was at 20:25 ----------

Having laws, police forces, and prison doesn't act as a deterrent, so what does? Should all those be scrapped?

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

"Human rights" lawyers would be all over any suggestion of a tougher regime.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

You forgot the other shibboleths of "woke", "left-wing", & "tree-hugging"…

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

oo … ah .. oo .. ah .. that’s the sound of the men, workin’ on the chain ga-a-ang …

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

It's a hard question. What if you lived somewhere without any social provision so that if you had nothing and were convicted of murder and gaoled for life at least you have board and lodging and not starving on the street? In that situation would the death penalty not be a more real deterrent to killing while committing a lesser crime?

True this does not quite apply here, so I would be against the death penalty. There is far too much chance of a wrong conviction which is very hard to overturn. Plus add all the time spent with appeals on death-row you could end up with long term incarceration and then a death penalty. We may need an approach that better rehabilitates those convicted with appropriate longer terms as needed.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

I flip flop on this, but todays the wind is blowing towards YES.

Re: Should capital punishment be brought back?
 

It's one of those emotive subjects. If something happened to one of my kids, don't worry about Court justice, just put me in a room with him/her for 10 minutes and if anything is left of them, they should be allowed to leave and carry on with whatever sorry life they have left.

Taking that level of emotion out of it, I would want to see them suffer in jail for many, many years. Rehabilitate if the authorities deem it appropriate, but while they are in this plane of existence, I want their life to be hell while behind bars.

I picked I DONT KNOW because they cannot be 100% sure someone murdered someone and thus they should not do it themselves!


Its a bad system to do this..... If I could I would change my answer to NO on the poll...