A word to those against the death penalty...

[strredwolf]

Okay, so you've caught and solidly convicted Jack the Ripper.  He's out of appeals, as every angle conceivable has been covered.  So he's going to be there for a long time, well past his natural life span.

Um, there's a problem.  Infact, three problems.

1. The current jails are overcrowded, irrespective of race and gender.  Alot of them are shuffling around, or giving out good behavior credits like candy.  Unfortunately, you can't build any more due to the budget and the usual "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome everyone is afflicted with.
   
2. They are also understaffed due to budget cuts, and the staff there is constantly put into stressful conditions.
3. And in the long term, a lifer (w/o parole or parole past his natural lifespan) will use more financial resources than a death row inmate.  In some cases, the lifer uses much more year-to-year than the death row inmate.

So you want all death row inmates to be lifers?  You need to come up with solutions to the above, without increasing the financial strains and blowing up the budget.  Besides, Maryland's in a long-term deficit, and the feds aren't much better now with a war going on and whatnot.

You can't.  You need more resources, and it's a growing problem.  While you can legislate some of the problem away (adjusting what is a crime, and their penalties), you need to address overcrowding.  The cheapest way is the death penalty.

Is it humane?  NO IT'S NOT.  NETHER IS GETTING KILLED/ROBBED/MAIMED/ETC.  So stop saying it's so.  We know already, and you're missing the other side of the coin.

So?  I'm for the death penalty.  I'm against "life w/o parole" as it's a waste of money and space.  I'm for a law which requires judges to upgrade the sentence to death for any sentence that gives the convicted at least 150 years of jailtime before parole.  And frankly put, I'd give them a time limit of 10 years for direct-from-inmate appeals while raising the bar for third-party appeals.

Comments

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

How many people get put to death a year in the US? (1099 in 31 years; about 36 per year.)

How many people are in prison at the moment? (2.2 million as of 2006.)

Divide the one by the other and you'll see where your argument falls apart. The death penalty is not a major pressure-release valve for the prison system; you'd have to put 20 times as many people to death as the entire total since 1976 in order to reduce the prison population by 1% across the country, and that's not enough of a change to really affect the situation.

And that's not even addressing the moral and ethical issues behind a statement like "We're putting you to death because we don't have room for you."

Frankly, your entire argument is ridiculous. There may be good arguments in favor of the death penalty, but this sure isn't one of them.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

You are right, it's not much of a release valve. However, I can't look at Amnesty International protesting in front of a jail against the death penalty when (my memory will fail here) they haven't come up with a good alternative to the death penalty in the face of what the penal system is undergoing.

I don't address the moral and ethics issues because killing someone at it's core level is immoral and unethical, period. Why should we let someone live out of the compassion of our hearts when that person hasn't, and we've proven that to the ends of the earth and back? No, the murderer's pure evil, kill it kill it kill it!!! As I mentioned, Jack the Ripper. The mass murderers. The Timmy McVeys.

If I came across as "We don't have room for you," then that wasn't what I ment, especially in the first paragraph. It should be "Why should we even let you live after all you've done?"

I think I set the bar rather high -- If parole is denied for a lifer, or if parole is scheduled past 150 years, he's going to die in jail and we should get it over with now. But give him some time to appeal.

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

Darn it, Darth beat me to the argument... Granted, I'm reading my friends page really late.