Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Capital Punishment: Where is the line drawn

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/04/20/terror.suspect.charges/index.html?hpt=T1

This article brings up a big question about retribution and what is morale right. This terrorist was accused and found guilty of being a part of a deadly terrorist attack on a US navy ship. Does this mean that he should be killed? What does one life mean when compared to another? how about 17, which is how many people he was accused of killing. How can you quantify a life and say that if you kill this many people then that means you deserve to die. Who even decides these things. This ties into our discussion on Buffy because during her years as a slayer, she has killed many beings. They may have been soulless vampires but does that make it right to kill them? They obviously show human emotions, so how can we really say they can die yet killing a human is off limits.
However, as im writing this I am realizing all of the intricacies of this situation and how anyone can come to a sound conclusion about it. does it matter how the people are killed or does it just matter how many. what about the killers intentions, dont those matter. Its a pretty hard issue to think about and an even harder one to make a decision on.

7 comments:

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  3. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dlu96/new_si_unit_one_hitler/

    The SI unit of one 'hitler' has been proposed to settle such questions. One Hitler is approximately equal to 6.0 x 10^6 deaths. The actions of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri therefore constitute 2.83 microhitlers. Can we say from this that he is deserving of a death penalty? He surely falls short of the unit's namesake, and his achievements pale in comparison to those of Joseph Stalin, who racked up a whopping 5 hitlers during his lifetime. However, since the original post where the hitler unit is described, it was calculated that a 35 dollar bank fee is equivalent to a mere 84 picohitlers. On the scale of daily economic transgressions, al-Nashiri's actions are off the chart.

    We can take this analysis a step further, and quantify al-Nashiri's in Hitler seconds. Over the time Hitler spent in office, the Holocaust claimed 0.018 of its 6 million victims every second. Therefore, taking 17 / 0.018 = 944.4 seconds, we see that al-Nashiri's actions were equal to about 15 minutes of Hitler's time in office. Surely a terrible crime, but nothing in the grand scheme of things.

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  4. Capital punishment is a supremely difficult issue to discuss. Some people are straight for biblical retribution but other aren't. Some promote life sentences, some complain about the prices of keeping prisoners alive to serve their sentences. It's all ridiculous; hopefully, we can find a suitable answer in the future because I sure can't think of one

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  5. I think the justice system is in place first to prevent crime, not necessarily to bring correction for crime. Yes, court proceedings and such are in place in order to bring justice to some extent, but a crime has already happened. It is pretty much impossible to have true justice is in this world. The closest thing I could define as true justice would probably be some form of quid pro quo. For example, if a killer killed 17 different people, he should probably killed 17 times in the same exact manner. Obviously, that's not possible and people seem to have moral objections to such punishment. Therefore, the government has standards and methods, albeit they are quite imperfect ones, in order to try to bring some form of social justice. Otherwise society would be in chaos and crime would be even more rampant with no form of determent.

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  6. I agree that the issue of capital punishment is an exceptionally difficult issue to handle. I suppose one of the things to consider is the additional marginal utility of subjecting a criminal to the death penalty. For instance, there have been stories of notorious Nazi war criminals resurfacing when they're in their 90s. Yes they should be penalized for their prior actions, but the chief question is whether it is sensible to go through the trouble of sentencing and processing these criminals. I find that for such grave punishments, precedents are questionably applicable; thus, these cases should be considered on a case by case basis. Ultimately, the role of the justice system is motivated by the use of punishment as a deterrent for crime, and decisions should be made in light of this consideration.

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  7. On the issue of capital punishment, people will never unanimously support one side or the other, which puts pressure on a government that attempts to wrk in favor of the people. In this specific case, it appears that the complexities of capital punishment are present. The facts presented in the article place equal blame on the terror suspect as well as the US military/CIA. Waterboarding is not a pleasant experience and under repeated use, undoubtedly a form of torture. The violent tactics used by military interrogators against terror suspects is clearly out of line. Unless you have solid evidence against an individual, I feel that it is immoral to freely use such techniques to obtain information that often is revealed to be faulty. The justice system needs to once and for all lay down a solid set of laws that deal with such situations. Because these supposed terrorists have yet to be proved guilty, we are hypocritical in our unethical treatment. Social justice cannot be obtained through an unequal treatment of prisoners and questionable system of punishment administration.

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