bring back hanging yes or no?

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by 3745 Laddie

It's not only unfair,it's also downright dangerous.It encourages sloppy investigation and prosecution and,in the hands of an unscrupulous government,a gilt edged chance to persecute any persons they have no fondness for,for whatever reasons.

It puts a lot of onus on the Court of Appeal (presided over by three Law Lords) to be politically independent. I sense the danger of which you speak, but it's not just as simple as that to exploit the rules. The DPP risks his career every time he makes an application; and these applications always attract publicity. The Law Lords have their own credibility on the line as well and are well aware that their rulings will be scrutinised in the legal journals as well as the press. Ministers are not involved; it is the death knell to their careers if they are caught trying to be involved. I don't say this isn't open to abuse, it sure is, but I don't the chance to abuse it as "gilt edged" because there are all sorts of ways in which any such scheme could explode in the face of those trying it on.

I do agree though that it unjustly insures the state against the incompetence and worse of its police and criminal investigators. Where evidence should have been detected and wasn't, that's not a good enough excuse to overturn double jeopardy. I am not anxious to defend this measure, it's merely that I also think that when a murderer is acquitted that is also a serious and dangerous injustice. Let's never forget that civilisation needs a competent and respected judicial system. If people lose their confidence in the courts because they see the murderers walking free, they have other remedies.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to the more ought law to weed it out.
~ Sir Francis Bacon

[electile disfunction]

It is unlikely that capital punishment has any deterrent value, today.

Any wrong-doing must have consequences and those consequences must be near enough chronologically to the crime to be directly associated with the crime in the minds of both the perpetrator and victims.

Therefore, by waiting for months or years for an accused person to be found guilty of a crime by courts make the consequences meaningless;
and
the consequences must be performed upon all perpetrators of that same crime regardless of social and economic status. As simple examples: celebrities can't be excused and nor can political leaders who kill tens (hundreds, thousands, etc.) of their own citizens even if they are "our" leaders ...

e.d.

[billybunter]

I doubt any murderer is thinking about getting caught when they embark on their crime. Most think they are smarter than the rest of their community.

[Davemetalhead]

Originally Posted by 3745 Laddie

I don't want to see people killed,I want to see convicted murderers at least face the possibility of going to the gallows to be judicially and humanely executed,and only then after a fair trial with a fairly selected jury delivering a unanimous verdict and with the avenues of appeal and reprive open.

Now yes,mistakes were made before and could be made again,But they have been made in the meantime and innocent people spent a lot of time in jail.No one can give them that time back or wipe out the trauma for them.

But can we guarantee a "fair trial with a fairly selected jury delivering a unanimous verdict"? Humans are fallible with emotions that are played upon by both camp's lawyers. Evidence is missed, tampered with, misread. People have prejudices.

And taking away an innocent's time is surely better than taking their life? You say you can't give them back their time? Of course that's true, but just what can you give them back if they're dead?

[scoundrel]

FWIW, I changed my views in the death penalty the day I watched the Birmingham Six being released on the BBC News. All the much boasted of strengths and safeguards of British Justice (the finest justice system in the world) did not prevent those men form being fitted up like Everest Double Glazing. The police desperately needed someone to pin the Birmingham pub bombings on and it was only many years later that the crass incompetence of the forensic scientist Frank Skuse became known. He mistook the chemicals from the playing cards the men had been playing poker with for traces of gelignite. On the strength of this finding, the West Midlands Regional Crime Squad, which later became notorious for its incompetence and dishonesty, beat the men until they confessed; in so many words, they were tortured.

Everyone knew it. Even I could see from the newspaper photos when the men were named as accused of the crimes that they had been beaten a lot. At the time I shared the common view in the UK mainland that they had been caught redhanded with explosives on their hands and that they richly deserved the beating they took. 21 people died in the bombings and 182 were injured, some grievously. It's hard to remember now how full of rage people were about the crime at the time.

The only one I remember commenting adversely was my late father, who looked at the photos and said "They beat them!" in a voice of total disgust. When I advanced my own callow teenaged opinion that the men had had it coming, he was calm but very firm. "That is not the point. If they can beat these men and it's OK, who will they beat next? Me? You? Thay had no right to beat them." It took me all the years of their incarceration to realise how wise my father was.

You can't trust the authorities with the power to hang people. They will inevitably abuse that power; it's what they do.

[Venus2]

Two words...Stefan Kiszko.

[Sam Spade]

Capital punishment = "It's wrong to kill, and if you do it we will kill you".

[tamsmith]

I understand what many of you guys are saying here and as I have got older my views on this subject have changed, a little. However, I still hark back to an old schoolfriend who's Grandad, who was an elderly man of 63 and a nightwatchman, was murdered, during a break in. The killer got life but was out in 12 years. When he got out he came back to the same area my schoolfriend and his family lived. They saw him regularly. Imagine how they felt.

However, three years after he left prison, he killed again. A young man murdered in front of his pregnant wife. The guy died in jail a few years back but to this day my old schoolfriend and his family totally blame the system for allowing a second murder to happen.

It was a big thing in the papers at the time for two or three days. After that nobody cared, EXCEPT all those people who had their lives ruined by a very evil man.

For some people things certainly would have been different if he had been hung.

[scoundrel]

I do take your point as well Tamsmith. Although I have no faith in the deterrance principle, which assumes a too great degree of rational forethought, I think the health of society needs a convincing system of punishment. One great attraction of the death penalty is that it makes a statement which law-abiding folk need to hear. It says "We are not used to this extreme of violent bad behaviour and we don't intend to get used to it either. We know how to deal with it when it happens."

I think however that the death penalty is not the right way to make that statement. As well as the fallibility of justice which I have mentioned, I have a darker point to make. We all have to die one day and most of us will not die quickly or cleanly. Nature is cruel.

No matter how we drag it out, even if we hang, draw and quarter the convicted felon or burn the felon at the stake, it's soon over. Some crimes are so extreme a terrible punishment is needed, not to deter them (you can't deter human nature) but to make the statement: "This is not tolerated." I would argue for perpetual imprisonment on terms as harsh as legally possible. Rudolph Hess eventually hanged himself to escape the terms of his sentence, where he had no fellow inmates to talk to and the guards turned their backs on him whenever he came close by. He wasn't just incarcerated, he was shunned, sent to Coventry, boycotted. I would argue for a similar approach of the silent treatment for the likes of Brady, Huntley and similar extremely depraved criminals. But they must not be killed and they must not be allowed to kill themselves. Their lives should be a burden to them which they must bear in silence until a higher authority takes them away.

This is a really harsh and cruel punishment. I would not use it for anyone who has shown that he or she has even a shred of humanity left. Only the worst of the worst should be made to suffer this.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

You can't trust the authorities with the power to hang people. They will inevitably abuse that power; it's what they do.

So much good in what you say.

I'd just amplify one thought: trust.

We're trying to build political structures that bind us together as a community. The death penalty can only do damage to this. One wrong execution -- and there will inevitably be many more than one-- and the goodwill that binds is corrupted.

The Birmingham Six story is a shabby piece of business -- but how much shabbier would it have been had they been hanged?

By my lights the UK has done a very good job in one of the toughest political struggles there can be . . . resolving an insurgency.

Had innocent men been hanged, the task would have been infinitely harder, at a cost not just to them, but to the community.