Justice has always been the reason for the death penalty, not deterrence.

Deterrence is an outcome of the death penalty, not the reason for it.

Who would want to unjustly execute someone just to achieve a deterrent effect? Hopefully, no one.

The death penalty is supported because it is just for some crimes.

Many anti death penalty folks explain their opposition based upon the probability of executing an actual innocent.

This is my response to them:

Because innocents are at risk of executions, some wrongly presume that innocents are better protected implementing a life without parole sentence, instead.
 
What many forget to do is weigh the risk to innocents within a life sentence. When doing that, we find that innocents are more at risk with a life sentence.
 
First, we all know that living murderers, in prison, after escape or after our failures to incarcerate them, are much more likely to harm and murder, again, than are executed murderers. Obvioulsy, a truism.
 
Secondly, no knowledgeable party questions that the death penalty has the most extensive due process protections in US criminal law. Therefore, it is logically conclusive, that actual innocents are more likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment and more likely to die in prison serving under that sentence, that it is that an actual innocent will be executed.
 
Thirdly, 10 recent studies find for death penalty deterrence. Some believe that all studies with contrary findings negate those 10 studies. They don’t. Studies which don’t find for deterrence don’t say no one is deterred, but that they cannot measure those deterred, if they are.
 
Ask yourself: “What prospect of a negative outcome doesn’t deter some?” There isn’t one, although committed anti death penalty folk may say the death penalty is the only one. However, the premier anti death penalty scholar accepts it as a given that the death penalty is a deterrent, but does not believe it to be a greater deterrent than a life sentence. The evidence is compelling that death is feared more than life – even in prison.

In choosing to end the death penalty, or in choosing not implement it, some have chosen to put more innocents at risk.
 
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Furthermore, possibly we have sentenced 20-25 actually innocent people to death since 1973, or 0.3% of those so sentenced. Those have been released upon post conviction review.
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There is a very succinct and powerful essay by Fred Thompson on this topic at http://www.townhall.com. The essay is dated June 27, 2007 and is titled “Common Sense on Capital Punishment.”

I encourage you to read it.

The most powerful paragraph in his essay is the 2nd to last:

“I guess the most surprising thing to me was seeing an article about these findings just a few weeks ago by the Associated Press. The most interesting quote was from a well-known opponent of capital punishment who looked at the evidence and said, ‘Abolitionists or others, like me, who are skeptical about the death penalty haven’t given adequate consideration to the possibility that innocent life is saved by the death penalty.’”

In my comments to Mr. Thompson’s article, I noted that the statistics showed each execution deters anywhere from 3-18 other would-be killers. However, the number of innocent lives saved is actually much higher. How many executed criminals of late were Johnny-One-Notes? Almost always, they are repeat offenders who took down multiple people, either in a single crime spree or over many. So let’s say that each execution deters 10 killers from doing likewise. The number of lives saved is probably not 10 because there isn’t a 1:1 ratio. It is probably more like 20 or 30 lives saved. For each killer that is deterred, many more kills have been deterred.

Would that more people who are called as jurors had your demeanor and wisdom. You’ve restored at least some confidence in me that all juries aren’t as brain-dead as those who returned the O.J. verdict. Thanks you for your comments.

Juries were instituted because the law in early England was often arbitrated, and in need of resolution that satisfied all parties. Juries, therefore, were often chosen from among nobles or community leaders who stood between the crown (or church) and subject or between peers such as would satisfy contending factions. They not only provided a resolution or verdict, but dictated punishments, made arrests, arraigned defendants, summoned witnesses, conducted all discovery into the facts, &c; comprising all the modern functions of detective, jailer, grand-jury, judge, petite-jury, bailiff, lawyers, and (occasionally) legislator in one body. The first juries were instituted to resolve property disputes, but soon branched out to other areas of redress. Over the centuries, lay juries were replaced in most of these functions by professional jurists and lawyers. However, the power to overrule a bad law (or the misapplication of a good one) is one function that has never been surrendered, and it is only by omitting this fact that judges get away with instructing juries to the contrary. There is no Constitutional article or amendment surrendering the right to jury-trials; nor suspending any part of a jury’s functions, state laws overturning the functions of juries notwithstanding. Ergo, jury-nullification remains in force.

Trial-by-jury was a sore point between the British crown and colonists (see the 1735 case http://www.historybuff.com/library/refzenger.html, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/zengeraccount.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenger in which a jury disputed the legitimacy of a crown law outlawing seditious libel). The Zenger case was still fresh and a key event in late 18th-century discussions of rights; making it unlikely the founders meant anything less than retaining in juries the power to alter the outcomes of technocrats (as was increasingly common in English courts of the time). Note the last of the sources I give for the Zenger case. Wikipedia is an excellent source of information, but is often guilty of providing incomplete (i.e., biased) information. The Zenger case ‘is’ important for its 1st Amendment significance, yet Wikipedia completely ignores Zenger’s much greater significance (particularly to our founders) of jury-nullification, and has other specifics of the case wrong (e.g., Zenger was not acquitted by reason he told the truth as a defense against libel, he was acquitted despite a ruling precluding his attorney from introducing evidence supporting his ‘truth of the libels’ argument altogether) Despite the importance of the ‘truth’ test to later libel cases; Zenger was acquitted mainly because the jury understood the judge to be corrupt (in the pocket of Governor Cosby, the plaintiff) and using the courts improperly. Therefore, statements made at the time regarding ‘truth’ as a defense against libel could only have been a smoke-screen to prevent the jury from being overruled.

Most of us have been carefully taught that among our most precious citizen-rights are a right to vote, a right of speech, the press, a right to worship according to conscience, protection against self-incrimination, and protection against cruel & unusual punishment. All of these are passive rights without any power to them with which to counter government. Think about it for a moment and you must admit your vote is lost in a sea of voices and overridden by those with real power, we have a fresh outlet for speech (the Internet) but speech and the press have been monopolized by a handful of publishers, our pulpits – once powerful voices for course correction – are largely silent and obliged to government for their tax status, self-incrimination has been made irrelevant by sciences capable of making our DNA witness against us, and the logic of punishment has been inverted to the point our laws have no teeth left in them. Our more assertive rights include our right to bear arms, unrestricted assembly, petition, and, most especially, in our right to trials by jury, most of which are rarely mentioned and never by government. Few ever have cause to complain of our passive rights because government does not feel itself particularly constrained by those. It is only in our assertive rights government feels threatened; and has succeeded in marginalizing most of those to a point they are ineffective. Only the jury still has any real punch left, and it is there we can do something to reassert our independence. But to do so, we need to wrest control of our juries (both their functions and selection) back from the legal professions.

recommended reading: http://www.fija.org/

To partly answer Retluocc’s question, the distinctions between what is murder and what manslaughter, what is intentional or accidental, what bearing personal history or circumstances has or ought to have on punishment, and limits to power are reasons we have judges and juries. If it were a simple case of behavior-X automatically warranting punishment-Y, we’d have no need of courts. Our police would simply arrest and punish. This was tried and found unsatisfactory, often with gross miscarriages of the justice to which both society and individuals are entitled.

On almost every jury, there are some who are quick to judgment, some reluctant to judge at all but are bullied into it, and one or two who insist on a full review of the evidence and circumstance before passing judgment. It takes only one of this latter type to force the rest into deliberating properly; avoiding the pitfalls of a hasty judgment, not least of which is the later overturning of a judgment on an irrelevance. Those who want a quick verdict will argue the evidence is clear and deliberation a waste of time. However, the very term ‘judgment’ implies we consider more than what the law prescribes, that we also consider the ‘justice’ of the verdict in specific cases. For example, the two border patrolmen recently convicted of wounding a Mexican drug-runner are technically guilty; yet many consider the two innocent of wrong doing and their treatment a travesty of justice. A rash jury can easily be convinced a year or two later to repent and repudiate a verdict, sometimes giving real criminals an opportunity to escape justice. The jury that takes the time to deliberate properly is uniformly certain of its verdict and harder to budge from certainty later on. We also sleep better nights knowing we nailed the right bastard and not a poor schmuck some hot-to-make-a name prosecutor wants to convict.

Judges frequently instruct jurors to find in strict accordance with the law and the evidence, and not get sidelined by questions of fairness or justice or, even more importantly, any scrutiny of the law violated (jury-nullification, see http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/nullification.html). Everyone today accepts the Supreme Court has ultimate power to review and strike-down laws they see as unfit, but few realize this power is vested principally in the people as one of the functions of lay juries. The power of a jury is insufficient to overturn a bad law, but does give the people power to suspend a law in practice and bring its defects to our attention. In the case of government grown too powerful and insular, the power of juries to nullify is our last bulwark against tyranny. Liberal and institutional sources of information on this topic (see Wikipedia reference, below, as typical) repeat the claims made by lawyers and the courts that our ‘modern’ juries no longer retain this power, and support the courts in their contention juries are restricted to finding on fact and not judging the law. However, if finding on the evidence alone was the sole and proper function of juries, there would be little need or demand for them; and no reason for having enshrined trial-by-jury as a protected right. Juries convict far more often than judges (who are much complained of by communities repeatedly subjected to the same criminals), making them undesirable to those actually guilty of crimes. If nullification is not retained, then the verdicts of judges are superior to those of any juries based on greater expertise; and we long ago would have dispensed with juries and the added expense they entail. Yet, our founders and several centuries of English jurisprudence thought them important to the preservation of liberty.

(cont.)

Murder is defined as killing a person with malice aforethought. Only first degree murder (planned, specific intent) carries the death penalty (and not in all states). That would exclude the examples you gave. Killing in the heat of passion comes under second degree murder and in practice it sometimes results in even a lesser sanction.

The real test is, can you think of any person who was executed in the last 20 years who you think didn’t deserve it, considering all factors (aggravating, extenuating, and mitigating)?

And what of intent? Does murder ‘a’ automatically equate to murder ‘b’? A driver who runs someone down unintentionally on a dark and foggy road has just as surely killed someone as has a paid assassin. Do they both deserve the death penalty?

I may have missed it if the author intended only premeditated murder to be in question here.

The number one use of the death penalty is as a deterrant. If people know that, if they kill someone (and are caught), they will be executed, crime will go down. If we’re not worried about the message to future criminals (or the lack of danger of the criminal getting out), then there is zero reason to kill the criminal.

Thus, deterrance is a HUGE factor.

The number one use of the death penalty is as a deterrant. If people know that, if they kill someone (and are caught), they will be executed, crime will go down. If we’re not worried about the message to future criminals (or the lack of danger of the criminal getting out), then there is zero reason to kill the criminal.

Thus, deterrance is a HUGE factor.

People ask, why is the extreme left opposed to capital punishment?

Are they? or are they just opposed to it when they are not in complete control of a nation?

The Bolsheviks were opposed to capital punishment until they took over. Then their use of it became SOP. And they were not the only hard leftists to do that. Just go down the list and you find that capital punishment, usually summary or with a sham trial, is routinely and excessively used.

What the hard left rails against when they are on the outside become SOP when they are in control…giving them absolute control. Freedoms become a thing of the past under them; laws become draconian, penalties more severe.

The bottom line, the hard left never shows its true face until it comes to power. In the meantime it relies on lies and false arguments to worm their way into the emotions of a gullible public. With them most of what they preach is not what they’ll practice.