death_penalty nocturnal writing a paper on it. any thoughts? 011117 ... DannyH Quite apart from any ethical issues, death penalties have been shown to be impractical in most civilised societies. firstly, they make juries less likely to convict. People require a much greater level of proof to send someone to their death than to deliver a life sentence, so more murderers get away with it. Secondly the death sentence is the only irreversible sanction a government allows unless you count chopping off parts of peoples bodies which America considers barbaric, so the appeal process has to take place within the period between conviction and sentencing which leads to a massive number of death row inmates and a huge and costly legal and penal machinery to accomodate them. Thirdly distinctions need to be made between types of murder (assuming that murder is the only crime to be deemed worthy of the death penalty) which leads to a tendency towards plea bargaining. people who might otherwise plead not guilty will plead guilty to a lesser charge whether they have comitted the crime or not in order to be sure of not risking their lives. For the reasons given above, the judicial system tends to accept these plea bargains due to both their own unwillingness to send people to their deaths if unsure and their knowledge that juries are less likely to convict. In short, the death penalty skews the legal system at the point of highest sanction an tends to distort the judicial process. It might be worth paying that price if the death penalty coul be demonstrated to act as a deterrent to murder but all statistical evidence shows no correlation between murder rates in countries and death penalties being in force. The murder rate did not increase disproportionately in britain after the abolition of the death penalty. It is nonsensical to suggest that anyone would ever make the marginal judgement that they would commit murder because they would "only" receive a life sentence. Murderers look purely at their risk of getting caught if they are in a position to make a judgement at all. Of course, if you see revenge as an end in itself then you might look at the issue differently, but I would argue that we have a legal system specifically to attenuate the effects of the destructive self defeating cycle of vengeance on society. The death penalty campaigners in this country have been largely silent since the release of The Birmingham Six and The Guildford Four, ten innocent people convicted during the hysteria of a mainland IRA bombing campaign who are now free and would all have been wrongly executed by the state had we had the death penalty at that time. Given all that it hardly seems necessary to go into the arguement that state sponsored killing barbarises society, cheapens our human rights and creates a contradiction at the heart of the ethical framework of the judiciary. 011119 ... nocturnal sweet. I said almost all of that in my paper, except the first part. paper is now due in just over four hours. just doing the citations stuff now. 011119 ... DannyH So you mean I just completely wasted my time. Great. 011119 ... nocturnal no, you did not. you may have educated some of these people. unlikely, I know, but there's a small chance. thanks for the helpful intentions. much appreciated. 011119 ... roomite "Quite apart from any ethical issues," spoken like a true lawyer, but are not the ethical issues the true crux? 011120 ... nocturnal I'm a lawyer to be, and I would say the ethical issues damn well should be. 011120 ... piercedjenny it seems like such a circular arrangement which makes no sense: State sanctioned killing of people who kill people to prove killing people is wrong. 011120 ... nocturnal what you're talking about, p&c, is in reference to the retributive argument. people who kill should be killed. my problem with that issue is that it is primitive and is very much like when a child hits another child because the other one started it. it's unsettling to me that the government of 35 states uses similar logic. 011120 ... nocturnal oops. I meant to say pj, not p&c. sorry. yeah... 011120 what's it to you? who go blather from