Wed May 22, 2013 8:48am 
Apr. 8, 2012 at 9:24 pm
Personally, I'm against the death penalty, so go ahead and scream at me all you people who are for it, and I'll give it my best shot to argue against you.
Apr. 8, 2012 at 9:31 pm
I'm agaist punishment and "rehibilitation" I'm for repayal to the one who was aggressed against. If you steal from me, you owe me.
Apr. 9, 2012 at 12:08 am
No. Two wrongs don't make a right and an eye for an eye will make the world blind. I rest my case.
Apr. 9, 2012 at 6:36 am
I am against it morally, and the more I learn about it the less pratical it becomes. Every human being has the fundemental right to life, that's the way I see it.
Apr. 9, 2012 at 7:57 am
I'm for the death penalty, if you kill someone, you shouldn't be locked up in a cushy prison for the rest of your life, while the tax payers pay for you to sit on your duff and watch TV. You should be punished justly. Now I think only something like 1st degree murder, and being a traitor to your country should get the death penalty, but it should be used. Or our jails should be made less cushy, and comfortable, so life sentence isn't like sitting around in a comfortable building doing nothing, but is actually not fun...
And then there is the option of making our prisoners to work, not just community service, and picking up the trash or something easy like that. I mean real work, like MANUAL labor, that way they serve society while they serve out their sentence.
Apr. 9, 2012 at 10:51 am
semper: society/government creates the criminal, when a person is starving and he shoots a guy and steals his wallet, thats not a real crime. The death penalty should be for crimes of passion, mass murder, and r.ape.
Apr. 9, 2012 at 10:54 am
Actually, the death penalty should NOT be for rap.e. It's a horrible crime, perhaps worse than murder. But if it has the same penalty as murder, or a worse penalty than murder, then that incentivizes the rap.ist killing their victim to avoid witnesses. It's not like they're going to be punished any harder.
Apr. 9, 2012 at 11:51 am
Personally I think prisons are ample punishment, to the best of my understanding they're truley horrible places to be and frequently violate human rights. To me though, the point of prison is not only to punish but to keep crinimals away from socity. human6: why is shooting someone not a real crime?
Apr. 9, 2012 at 11:59 am
I'm all for it, I just hate the way criminals are given repeals for ten years before they kill them. Just kill them already. I think it should be a punishment for premeditated murder and ra.pe. By being violent and harming others, people give up their rights as human beings, so their lives don't matter. They are nothing more then animals when they turn against their own race, and they should be treated as such.
Oozeworld: But if a ra.pist kills their victim, then they will not only be punished with ra.pe, but with murder, so it doesn't matter. One victim getting killed is better then a whole mass of victims being ra.ped.
Anima: If the criminals are a danger to society, why not just kill them so we don't need to worry about them.
Apr. 9, 2012 at 12:46 pm
The occasional criminal "represents by far the largest class of our prison population, hence is the greatest menace to social well-being." What is the cause that compels a vast army of the human family to take to crime, to prefer the hideous life within prison walls to the life outside? Certainly that cause must be an iron master, who leaves its victims no avenue of escape, for the most depraved human being loves liberty.
This terrific force is conditioned in our cruel social and economic arrangement. I do not mean to deny the biologic, physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous germs of crime. Granted even that there are innate criminal tendencies, it is none the less true that these tendencies find rich nutrition in our social environment.
There is close relation, says Havelock Ellis, between crimes against the person and the price of alcohol, between crimes against property and the price of wheat. He quotes Quetelet and Lacassagne, the former looking upon society as the preparer of crime, and the criminals as instruments that execute them. The latter find that "the social environment is the cultivation medium of criminality; that the criminal is the microbe, an element which only becomes important when it finds the medium which causes it to ferment; EVERY SOCIETY HAS THE CRIMINALS IT DESERVES."*
The most "prosperous" industrial period makes it impossible for the worker to earn enough to keep up health and vigor. And as prosperity is, at best, an imaginary condition, thousands of people are constantly added to the host of the unemployed. From East to West, from South to North, this vast army tramps in search of work or food, and all they find is the workhouse or the slums. Those who have a spark of self-respect left, prefer open defiance, prefer crime to the emaciated, degraded position of poverty.
Apr. 10, 2012 at 1:13 pm
I disagree with the death penalty because appeals and such cost taxpayers buckets of money...For example, in Texas, each death penalty case costs an average of 2.3 million dollars in taxpayer money, about three times more than imprisoning someone for life in prison. Purely for financial reasons, I think the death penalty should be abolished.
Apr. 10, 2012 at 5:53 pm
That is the exact quote that I use for my case against the death penalty! Ghandi has some really good points :)
Apr. 10, 2012 at 5:59 pm
Well we could change that. If we stopped giving monsters a chance for retrial, we wouldn't be spending all of that money. This sounds sick, but I wish we could go back to the days where the law was enforced by morals, and not what was written down in a rule book. People blindly follow laws, when sometimes the laws aren't worth following. And there are also injustices that no one attempts to stop, things that should be outlawed and are not. When will the civilians step up and start to weed out the bad people in society, the world would be a simpler place if citizens would do their part instead of letting some "justice system" work for them. And yes, I'm implying that we should kill murderers and ra.pists as the citizens to protect ourselves, our families, and our neighbors. It's for the greater good.
Apr. 10, 2012 at 6:00 pm
I mean the "an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind" quote that CarrieAnn13 used is a very good one.
Apr. 10, 2012 at 6:13 pm
sorla: Yes, there are lots of rules the government enforces that shouldn't be there (such as, in my opinion, the death penalty) and there are some rules that shouldn't even be there in the first place. But, okay, yes killing criminals does sound good at first; it sounds like the easy way out of the problem. And that's how many people look at the death penalty. But you have to think of all the cons of having the death penalty:
1) Innocent people can be killed. Many death penalty cases aren't proved beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt because it costs too much money, because of prejudice, or unexperienced lawyers. Also 99% of death row criminals are poor. What do you think that tells us about our justice system?
2) It costs more to put someone to death than to put them in prison for life.
3) Some people put to death are mentally ill or were not first degree crimes.
If these criminals are "animals" as you say they are, then aren't we animals too for killing them? The death penalty makes us forget that we are all humans who were granted life, and that taking the life of those convicted to a terrible crime is the same as brutally killing each other, just as the criminals have done.
Apr. 10, 2012 at 6:34 pm
I think that it's appropiate in some extreme circumstances, but the system needs to be streamlined and sped up. The verdict is final and the sentence shoudl be carried out in a few weeks. Mostly for financial reasons- death row these days is really just very expensive life imprisonment. But also for humanitarian reasons- I, for one, cannot think of anything worse than spending most of my life constantly knowing I'm about to die and then having an endless series of appeals delay the inevitable.
Apr. 11, 2012 at 3:26 am
I find the whole consept of the death penelty very strange. It's simply lowering yourself to the level the crinimal you want to punish is at. I know this may sound strange, but crinimals are still human beings. They don't loose that when they commit a crime. Research shows that countries with a death penelty acctually have higher rates of crime, apparently it isn't a very strong deterent. To me the death penelty just makes more death. Often making a crinimal live with their own guilt is far worse than the death penalty in the first place.
Apr. 11, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Assuming, of course, that they will feel guilt. That's not something that will happen in all cases or one that can be conclusively proven has occurred. And while deterrence is one reason we punish criminals, it's not the only or the best reason. If deterrence was the only reason for punishment, there would be no point, since if it worked perfectly the mere threat of going to prison would completely eliminate crime. Aside from deterring, we also have to protect society, bring peace to the victims (or the families), and ensure fairness.
