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Capital Punishment
What are your views on capital punishment and the death penalty? Should the be allowed? And to what extent? Torture? Hanging? The electric chair? Lethal injections?
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I mean, on one hand I think that people should get what they deserve. Under 99% of the circumstances the defendant will know the punishment for the crime they're about to commit prior to that.
However, some cases may be a bit more difficult. There's always the risk of killing off someone innocent. I think if they claim innocence and there is that chance, however small, the authorities should be catious as they proceed.
One other point I'd like to make is that sometimes life is prison can be a worse punishment than death. Death can often be a way out - whereas life/time in prison can be a torture unto itself.
Two wrongs do not make a right. (Logical conclusion)
Let their living be their punishment. (Unknown)
An eye for an eye will leave the entire world blind. (Gandhi)
After multiple charges of homicide, I'm pretty sure living in jail won't be much of a punishment for them, anyway. When they committed the crimes, they're usually premeditated and emotionally prepared for the consequences. It might even seem like an opportunity for them, since there's strong evidence of organized crime having ties with criminals in jail.
An eye for an eye may leave the world blind, but at least it'll be brutally fair...not that I promote such a philosophy.
Do you know what's a real punishment? Letting them die and pay for their sins in hell. Now there's a thought.
Anyway, I've changed my opinion on capital punishment over the years. While it used to seem like a great, easy way to get rid of people who apparently couldn't live properly in our society, now I think we need to find ways to not only rehabilitate these people but PREVENT them from becoming this way in the first place.
No one is born evil. Go to the hospital and look at babies there and pick out the ones who will rape someone, or become a serial killer, or create a bomb that takes out most of a city. It's impossible because they aren't born that way, they are made that way.
We are learning more about what circumstances cause people to do these awful things (poverty, abuse, bullying, etc.), and it is there that we need to focus our attention, not on waiting for them to harm a bunch of innocents and then killing them.
Would it make more sense to abuse a dog from the time it's a puppy, let it loose in a preschool and then kill it, or to raise it right and not have a bunch of injured children too...?
And when they aren't raised right, or you the prevention methods aren't yet perfect, then you have to find ways to rehabilitate these people. Really, most of what they do now is ridiculous. Prisons are still used as punishment and rarely do they teach people how to behave in society. They need to be re-evaluated as an institution.