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Botched execution in OK

RJKarl said:
tj said it was. Of course he doesn't care about thousands of studies that disprove his point. He doesn't understand that I didn't say "rj says this". I said studies say it.
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I have no idea if the death penalty is a deterrent. Double penetration is a deterrent.
 
At least if the death penalty were a deterrent, there would be a measurable benefit to society in return for the higher cost.
 
Well, the death penalty will certainly deter the individual being executed from ever killing again. So, there's that. With all due apologies to all the studies, which I'm sure are completely scientific and have no political agendas at all, I always thought that the best argument against the death penalty as a deterent was that many murders are crimes of passion, where the murderer does not bother to think at all, much less weigh deterents and consider the death penalty, and just kills.
 
ImTheCaptain said:
does a punishment always have to be a deterrent?
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No, but if you (like most people) ascribe to a utilitarian theory of punishment (punishment is justified only if it is a net benefit to society) the only two ways of justifying the death penalty are deterrence or incapacitation.

empirical studies and logic have suggested that the increase in those two factors is negligible when compared to life in prison without parole
 
RChildress107 said:
No, but if you (like most people) ascribe to a utilitarian theory of punishment (punishment is justified only if it is a net benefit to society) the only two ways of justifying the death penalty are deterrence or incapacitation.

empirical studies and logic have suggested that the increase in those two factors is negligible when compared to life in prison without parole
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So murderers who are convicted never kill any fellow inmates or corrections officers?
 
sailordeac said:
Well, the death penalty will certainly deter the individual being executed from ever killing again. So, there's that. With all due apologies to all the studies, which I'm sure are completely scientific and have no political agendas at all, I always thought that the best argument against the death penalty as a deterent was that many murders are crimes of passion, where the murderer does not bother to think at all, much less weigh deterents and consider the death penalty, and just kills.
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Nice.

As to the second part, that describes "murder" but not in the first degree. A true crime of passion is not committed with premediation and deliberation (our old friend malice aforethought) and thus would be ineligible for the DP.
 
Junebug said:
So murderers who are convicted never kill any fellow inmates or corrections officers?
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I'm sure they do, but I doubt it happens very often, and I doubt they do at a higher rate than other incarcerated violent criminals.


As to jmhd's post it probably happens about as often as voter fraud, and while preventing the death of prison guards is certainly more important than preventing someone from voting twice, the suggested remedy in each case is too broad and probably hurts more people than it helps.
 
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Studies have shown that murderers first try to talk their victims into traveling with them to states that don't have the death penalty, then kill them there.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Murders in prison are likely quite higher than actual cases of voter fraud.
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Of prison guards? I'd guess it's less than 25 a year. Also murder is a little easier to prove than voter fraud.

My point is that the number of prisoners or prison guards killed by murderers serving life sentences is likely very very low and probably does not occur at a statistically significant higher rate than murder in prisons in general, or murder within the population at large.
 
RChildress107 said:
Of prison guards? I'd guess it's less than 25 a year. Also murder is a little easier to prove than voter fraud.

My point is that the number of prisoners or prison guards killed by murderers serving life sentences is likely very very low and probably does not occur at a statistically significant higher rate than murder in prisons in general, or murder within the population at large.
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there are more prison guards killed by inmates in one year than the number of voter impersonation cases proven in TX, PA, MN, CA and probably another 25 states over the past quarter century.
 
I think prison guard deaths are probably low. I think inmate deaths are pretty common in general population. Maybe I'm just biased right now because I've been doing a lot of BOP work lately so of course everything I see is relatively heinous haha
 
RJKarl said:
Murders in prison in one day are far greater than the number of cases of voter in person at the polls fraud.
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Link?

Approximately 8 prisoners a year are murdered in federal prisons http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=194

Approximately 4,400 prisoners a year die in state prisons and local jails. This article did not specify how many of those were homicides but listed the top 3 and then said than no other cause accounted for more than 5%. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pjdc0009st.pdf

That means at the very most 230 prisoners are murdered each year (and that is almost certainly on the high side). How many of those murders do you think are committed by people in prison for life for murder(who make up less than 10% of the prison population and are generally kept in much tighter security compared to the rest of the prison population)?

My point was that both numbers are very low, to the point of being statistically insignificant. And isolated incidents of either do not justify the solution proposed by many (death penalty or voter ID).
 
Here's one that says 10 cases of voter impersonation since 2000:

http://votingrights.news21.com/article/election-fraud/

"Analysis of the resulting comprehensive News21 election fraud database turned up 10 cases of voter impersonation. With 146 million registered voters in the United States during that time, those 10 cases represent one out of about every 15 million prospective voters.

“Voter fraud at the polls is an insignificant aspect of American elections,” said elections expert David Schultz, professor of public policy at Hamline University School of Business in St. Paul, Minn.

“There is absolutely no evidence that (voter impersonation fraud) has affected the outcome of any election in the United States, at least any recent election in the United States,” Schultz said."

That's not ten cases from 146M votes. It's out of 146M registered voters. Over that time frame, there could easily have been 750M-over 1B individuals votes.
 
There are many people that would say 10 cases of voter impersonation has to be a low count. I'm inclined to agree with them, though the number would need to be many orders of magnitude higher to justify Voter ID laws.

In any event the calculus should probably be different when talking about life and death vs. voting.
 
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