Capital Punishment.

We live in a civilised society that gives a mother who abandons her four children 10years today because they all died in a house fire when she went to the shops.

My question is do we lock up the right people as the children were living in squalor and were known to social services sometimes I’m angry with the system that allows things such as this to happen
 
metalblue said:
Right. So the next part of the question is should people who are serving prison sentences for certain crimes be able to choose to end their lives using the same method as an alternative to spending the rest of their lives behind bars.

Isn’t that the mark of a civilised society?
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Err ?
Completely different scenario but i'll give it a go.
No is my answer.
They can't go to Switzerland cos they're locked up.
They have a sentence to complete
While we're playing this game, should people who commit certain crimes be refused health care in the nick?
 
Trevor Morley's Tache said:
The rate of wrongful conviction where the death penalty was given is around 1 in 8 in the USA. That is a rate of failure you wouldn't accept anywhere else in society.

Imagine for every 8 apples you buy, 1 will be poisonous, or for every 8 times you press the brake pedal on your car, it will only work 7 times?

That aside, it's pretty barbaric, and has no place in civilised society, no matter how heinous the crime.
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So it was you who sold me that 2004 Ford mondeo.
 
mancity2012_eamo said:
Nobody would mourn the guy’s death and it would satisfy our worst human urges…..
But is that the answer to why this shit happens?

Cases like this, to me, are not the model you judge the capital punishment issue on. I understand those that think otherwise.

One innocent man dying is not worth the lives of one hundred guilty. Etc etc.

It’s a very complex issue and I don’t claim to have the answer but my personal instincts have me against the barbarity of it.
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I think you missed my point?
 
Whilst I have no fixed opinion on this issue, my dad, who was a liberal councillor later in life, was in the parachute regiment who had responsibility for guarding the Japanese prisoners in Changi after the war and escorting them, literally, to the gallows trapdoor. The guards were on a charge if the prisoner managed to kill themselves before being hung which many of them tried to do and a few succeeded. He always maintained that, if you'd seen what the Japanese did to the patients and nurses at the hospital in Singapore, you'd have had no qualms about hanging them.

He was asked, once, in an interview, whether he felt sorry for the prisoners and he replied "no, I felt sorry for the people that had to hang them".

Is war different to peacetime ? I don't know. And, if you don't know, it's probably better to avoid extremes.
 
dunno what the universe has to do with the price of fish... but I'm calling VAR on this one
 
Damocles said:
We live in the most civilised society in the entire history of the Universe as far as we're aware and certainly in the history of life on the planet
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The word 'civilised' is a made up concept though, there is no single example of anything civilised in nature, it is something made up by humans to give a moral high ground over other humans.

Places like Singapore have the death penalty and Singapore is a perfectly civilised place, it's actually a far better place to live than the UK. Crime is also MUCH lower there than the UK because they prioritise dealing with crime harshly over how you may feel about punishing people for crime.

Take the Southport mass-murderer, if he was executed tomorrow then what does society lose? I don't see any benefit whatsoever in keeping him alive other than to satisfy ourselves that we live in some better, civilised society. The fact is though that's completely false, it makes no difference to society if we have capital punishment or not.

Would anybody on here lose sleep if the Southport murderer was killed tonight? No. I might be alone but if my child was murdered then I'd want that murderer dead and that's purely why I'm somewhat in favour of capital punishment.

The biggest problem really is the burden on the authorities. They will have to first prove that somebody is definitely guilty and then eventually execute them, both of those are an incredible burden.
 
Trevor Morley's Tache said:
When I worked in NI we had a Mondeo Estate (1.8i) as a works car. The brakes were shocking.
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What scared me most was that every now and then the whole electrics would die, which included the power steering - and i'd have to restart the car whilst driving to get the ability to turn to come back! My father-in-law helped find that car...
 
madloaf said:
What scared me most was that every now and then the whole electrics would die, which included the power steering - and i'd have to restart the car whilst driving to get the ability to turn to come back! My father-in-law helped find that car...
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Had you upset your father-in-law?

To be fair, the build quality on the early Mondeo's was shocking.
 
madloaf said:
What scared me most was that every now and then the whole electrics would die, which included the power steering - and i'd have to restart the car whilst driving to get the ability to turn to come back! My father-in-law helped find that car...
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This happened tome whilst driving, at night, through the Arizona desert in a chrysler neon which looked like a mondeo.
i thought about claiming alien abduction until i realised i just had a shit motor.
 
stonerblue said:
Err ?
Completely different scenario but i'll give it a go.
No is my answer.
They can't go to Switzerland cos they're locked up.
They have a sentence to complete
While we're playing this game, should people who commit certain crimes be refused health care in the nick?
Click to expand...

Given assisted dying will be lawful here soon enough no need to go to Switzerland.

The premise of my question isn’t to “play games” but rather to suggest an alternative to the traditional death penalty where perpetrators could choose death if they wish and the crime is sufficiently heinous. A sort of half way house if you like.

I don’t agree with the death penalty but I’d have no objection to situation where a prisoner was able to choose death if they couldn’t live with the consequences of what they had done given the sanctity of life is no longer primary, that Rubicon has been crossed with assisted dying. I don’t think prisons should be considered only in the context of punishment however I can also appreciate why some people do and would object to such a proposal by saying “fuck them, let them live with the consequences in prison for the rest of their lives”.

Of course prisoners should have healthcare - it would be inhumane otherwise.
 
metalblue said:
Given assisted dying will be lawful here soon enough no need to go to Switzerland.

The premise of my question isn’t to “play games” but rather to suggest an alternative to the traditional death penalty where perpetrators could choose death if they wish and the crime is sufficiently heinous. A sort of half way house if you like.

I don’t agree with the death penalty but I’d have no objection to situation where a prisoner was able to choose death if they couldn’t live with the consequences of what they had done given the sanctity of life is no longer primary, that Rubicon has been crossed with assisted dying. I don’t think prisons should be considered only in the context of punishment however I can also appreciate why some people do and would object to such a proposal by saying “fuck them, let them live with the consequences in prison for the rest of their lives”.

Of course prisoners should have healthcare - it would be inhumane otherwise.
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This is tricky ground legally as to be offered such a thing somebody would need to plead guilty first and that might affect the right to a fair trial. IE, somebody could plead not guilty or guilty with the sway between either not relying upon the facts at trial but instead upon the idea that they could always avoid prison and just commit suicide.

This also impacts victims because do they want the convicted to snatch an easy way out of a long prison sentence? Personally I think you'd have to add a clause where victims could overrule such a decision. It then gets into a bit of a human rights nightmare to be honest.
 
Kinkybyname said:
...we live in a civilised society?

asking for a friend
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Almost definitely not but shouldn't we aspire to do so? What defines 'civilised' is perhaps a whole new debate. Regardless, once the wider population stops striving to act in a civilised manner, the very fabric of society starts to break down as was evident with the rise of the Third Reich when summary executions became the norm. Never say it couldn't happen here as that was precisely what ordinary Germans told themselves in the 1930's. We only need to look across the pond right now to see the nascent stirrings of a totalitarian regime where the rule of law counts for nothing. Witness recent events when those calling for the hanging of Mike Pence on Capitol Hill in 2021 are pardoned with the stroke of a pen. By so doing, Trump has, in the minds of huge swathes of the American population, normalised the concept of summary execution of an elected official by an angry mob for simply doing his job.
 
metalblue said:
Given assisted dying will be lawful here soon enough no need to go to Switzerland.

The premise of my question isn’t to “play games” but rather to suggest an alternative to the traditional death penalty where perpetrators could choose death if they wish and the crime is sufficiently heinous. A sort of half way house if you like.

I don’t agree with the death penalty but I’d have no objection to situation where a prisoner was able to choose death if they couldn’t live with the consequences of what they had done given the sanctity of life is no longer primary, that Rubicon has been crossed with assisted dying. I don’t think prisons should be considered only in the context of punishment however I can also appreciate why some people do and would object to such a proposal by saying “fuck them, let them live with the consequences in prison for the rest of their lives”.

Of course prisoners should have healthcare - it would be inhumane otherwise.
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what happens if they choose “ old age”
 
Ifwecouldjust....... said:
what happens if they choose “ old age”
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Not sure I’m following… do you mean if the person decides to spend the rest of their lives in prison? Or decide after 20 years they’d had enough?

The first one no issues that’s their choice and really what they currently have, if you meant the second one that is interesting - it’s almost like the proverbial get out of jail free card. I’d likely err on the side of saying if they have been granted the right to choose death if they wish there is no time limit on when they can take the option.

I suppose the risks are people who want to die might commit a particular crime just to get the choice so you’d have to end up with a much broader scope of people who could opt for assisted dying but that’s likely going to happen at some point in the future if the bill passes IMHO.
 
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