What aspects of the case are you thinking of when you say "like this"?

Stupid aside to Dana:

If "the quality of mercy is not strain'd", how do you get the lumps out?

I actually wanted to bring facts into the discussion - Again how many people are we talking about here? How many are on eath row right now in the US?

Well utopia doesn't exist. Not that we should strive for it, but we have to deal with reality.

Where suitable, I agree with Lookout.

Please describe how, in "reality," a law can be made to apply only "where suitable" (according to a criteria which hasn't been defined).

Am I allowed to use cheesecloth?

If by 'where suitable' you mean definately guilty: then that in no way resolves the problem of a flawed justice system. ALL convictions are deemed to show that the convicted felon has committed the crime and is definately guilty. At no point is someone found 'probably guilty'. There's no grading system involved in applying the death penalty. Either you've been found guilty or you haven't. Some people who are found guilty are in fact innocent of the crime. Some, as in this case, are most definately guilty. There is no legislative way to differentiate.

... and some found innocent are in reality guilty. <devils advocate>
Yeh I know these are the ones who don't get put to death.

:D

Because the system is flawed. Having the death penalty does nothing to ensure that no guilty person is ever acquitted. It just ensures that the effects of wrongful conviction are more terrible and irreversible.

OK. Let me be more clear - cases of kidnapping, rape, and murder are all worthy of the death penalty in my opinion. yeah i know that is extreme but it isn't some knee jerk reaction i just threw out there for the first time today either.

Dana, I understand your concerns about the possible wrongly convicted death row rider. Quite simply I don't care.

I'm an American, I don't have to care.
- Denny Crane

God, you're sexy when you're cold! :P

I do care. As is probably apparent by now :) I fail to understand why someone would care what happened to the innocent victims of a brutal murderer (enough to wish death upon their killer) and yet not care about an innocent victim of a brutal state execution.

Fair question. I do/would care about a "innocent victim of a brutal state execution".

Trials and appeals are there for a reason. Is it possible that someone wrongly convicted might make it all the way through the appeals and land with a needle in their vein? Sure. Would the lack of a death penalty suddenly make everything lollipops and butterfly kisses for them? No.

You are against the death penalty because there is a chance someone will be tried and wrongly convicted of a crime, receive the death penalty, work their way through years of appeals and maneuvering, then sit and wait their turn on death row which can be decades long, and then actually be executed.

I guess you'd have to show me some statistics on the likelihood of that happening on anything more than an anecdotal basis before I'd really be moved.

I often hear people stating that they do not feel comfortable giving their government the power to end a person's life--the reason being that an institution conceived of and administered by human beings is inherently flawed, and that this power over life and death should not be trusted to such an institution.

Also...

I often hear people stating that they do not feel comfortable giving their government the power to administrate a healthcare system--the reason being that the government cannot be trusted to do a good job at anything, i.e. delivering mail, etc. therefore this power should not be trusted to such an institution.

What happens when you throw all of these assessments together and try to make them work in the same reality?

__________________

You don't think that some objective assessment of whether the person is actually guilty or not should factor into this (other than the original verdict of guilty, the 100% reliability of which is precisely what is at question here)? Let me be more clear: if an innocent person is wrongly convicted of something really bad how does that make them more guilty than an innocent person convicted of a lesser offense?

I guess somewhere in here I've not made it clear that I'm not in favor of killing people who aren't guilty. My starting point on this was 1) the person was found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, 2) that person still had the right to enter the appeal process.

I am NOT saying we should starting killing people accused of these crimes.

My basic position is that unless you can claim 100% reliability of the legal system, then you are "okay with" the possibility of an innocent person being murdered by the state. The same "state" whom we aren't supposed to trust with anything of importance (depending on our level of cognative dissonace).