gordondaviesmoustache
Well-Known Member
The law has to broadly operate within the confines of logic and common sense. It’s why banning guns in the US would never be feasible, however desirable that may be. I’m surprised you fail to appreciate this.
Double digit sentences don’t modify their behaviour now, why do you assume the death penalty would deter them from committing these offences? Based on the murder rate in the US, the presence of the death penalty palpably does not deter people from killing others. Why do you therefore think it would serve to control someone’s extreme sexual urges?
What do you mean ‘are murderers’? Are you suggesting that people are either murderers or they are not? That doesn’t make any sense. Many people are driven to kill others because of circumstance (provocation, anger, concealment of other crimes) which they could not foresee and over which they had little or no control as events overtook them.
Talking of the two crimes (sexual offences against children and murder) as being wholly different fails to appreciate the nature of the many of the offenders who perpetrate these crimes. They are only concerned with themselves and will do what it takes to preserve themselves. That is their motivation, and different labels for different manifestations of that behaviour are not really the point.
So of course, many paedophiles, having acted on their desires, and faced with the reality of the aftermath would contemplate and act upon killing the child who had been the subject of their urges. It’s what Ian Huntley did, and faced with the possibility of being executed for that offending of course many would go down that route for reasons of self-preservation. Abusing a child is the ultimate act of selfishness; to suggest that significant numbers of people who are prepared to act in such an antisocial and inconsiderate way towards innocent children wouldn’t be prepared to kill those children even though they have nothing to lose by so doing, is utterly preposterous.
In your world the murder rate against victims of sexual abuse would unquestionably rise.