Executioner: Death by firing squad is '100 percent justice'

[LAGC]

I'm not a big fan of the death penalty, I think its often more expensive with all the appeals and housing inmates on Death Row than it is to just let them live their lives out in prison general population. But when condemned people admit their guilt and WANT to just be executed, I see little wrong with letting them pass from this world sooner rather than later. Case in point, the Utah man convicted of raping and murdering a little girl. He elected to choose death by firing squad instead of lethal injection. If I were in his place and had to choose a way to go, I'd definitely choose the firing squad too, but that's just because I hate needles. Death is instantaneous either way, so why not go out with a bang?

Here's an interesting article about one of the men who will be performing the execution, assuming it still goes on as planned:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/06/09/utah.firing.squad/index.html?hpt=C1

I do take issue with one of the quotes:

"The death penalty is nothing more than sending a defective product back to the manufacturer.
--Former firing squad member

Only when you're 100% certain the person you are executing is truly guilty of the crime... with as many people on death row who have been found innocent, I'd definitely by wary of executing anyone who didn't freely admit their guilt and elect to die. But when you're 100% certain, I suppose it is 100% justice.

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

1. This doesn't really relate to Gun Rights or the 2A...

Should probably be moved to GD

[LAGC]

3. My bad.

I just thought since it was gun-related, it would have been banished to the Gungeon anyway.

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

4. True... if a thread mentions "gun" it gets shovelled here.

[Journeyman]

2. Just because someone admits guilt and elects to die doesn't guarantee they were the criminal. . .

plenty of people admit to crimes they never committed. It could be your only guarantee is you've put to death a mentally unstable person.

[LAGC]

5. That's true.

There's also the issue of whether the state has a right to take life at all, even if the alleged crime in question is murder. An eye for an eye makes for a blind world, and all that...

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

7. So we're showing that murder is wrong by killing.

[Callisto32]

11. Homicide =/= murder.

[Ian David]

6. What was that Christian TV show where they executed the mime by firing squad? n/t

[Euromutt]

8. Death by lethal injection is anything but instantaneous

The entire process, starting with the insertion of the needle, takes something in the order of four minutes, and there's mounting evidence that the sedative administered beforehand may only prevent the convict from physically reacting, but not actually prevent him from feeling anything. Death by firing squad is a lot quicker.

For the record, I'm opposed to the death penalty, albeit only on practical grounds; for an irrevocable punishment like death, there has to be nothing less than 100% certainty that the person convicted is actually guilty, and there's evidence in spades that that is not the case.

I used to be against the death penalty on principle, but working for the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (which actually cannot impose the death penalty) for over three years convinced me that there are people who commit offenses so horrible that they don't deserve to remain alive. But I don't trust any criminal justice system to get it right 100% of the time, which means irrevocable punishments remain unacceptable.

[Bustercat]

9. well said

I agree with you.
The death sentence isn't the problem. It's the conviction that comes before, that can (and does) kill innocent people.

That being said, if they DO perform executions, there is something to be said for the 'many guns one bullet' process in firing squads. Making doctors anything more than witnesses/pulse-takers in an execution is just wrong, and a violation of the hippocratic oath.

It should be the public that puts a person to death, and no one should know who actually did it. The blood should be on our collective hands.

[charleslb]

13. Do Death Penalty Advocates Have the Courage of their Convictions to Risk Wrongful Convictions?

I'm glad that you're concerned about the real-world risk of convicting the wrong suspect in capital cases. Unfortunately many hardcore capital punishment promoters don't share your conscientious concern.They tend to dispose of that aspect of the issue in a cursory, offhanded fashion and proceed to harp on the heinousness of the crimes they wish to punish with death. While focusing on the bad guy's badness is a smart debate tactic that wins people on the fence over to their side it doesn't really deal, in a forthright manner, with the ethical problem of potentially executing the wrong party in a system practicing the principle of "a life for a life".

So here’s a far-out and heady hypothetical proposition, a provocative and introspective thought experiment to test the depth of belief that death penalty supporters have in the moral math of “a life for a life”. A slightly grim gedankenexperiment to make them question whether or not they have the moral courage of their professed conviction that anyone who needlessly causes the death of an innocent person forfeits his/her own right to go on living.

Imagine that a lunatic-fringe faction of seriously strict-constructionist believers in Deuteronomy 19:21 ( נפש בנפש “life for life” ) has come to power. They are consistent-to-a-fault absolutists who rigidly adhere to a verbatim reading of this verse in Deuteronomy so we’ll call them VDs for short. The VDs devise a disconcertingly clever way of applying their literal understanding of the “life for life” principle so as to make the implementation of the death penalty more just.

Here, in a nutshell, is the ethical dilemma of the VDs and anyone who’s pro capital punishment. One of the inherent moral defects of the death penalty is of course that it’s an irreversible punishment imposed by fallible human beings, a permanent payback dealt out by systems of jurisprudence, judges, and juries who are very much subject to human error. In other words, it’s a foregone conclusion that wrongly convicted individuals will now and then be executed, the innocent will occasionally be unjustly deprived of their lives. And when this happens and we belatedly discover that we’ve visited society’s irrevocable retribution on a not-guilty victim of a miscarriage of justice there’s really nothing we can do to make it right. We can’t release someone who’s been given a lethal injection from his grave. There’s no way to compensate the dead. Even if we catch and kill the guilty party the blood stain of an innocent still remains indelible on our society’s moral fiber.

And furthermore we have no real excuse, because we all know full well going in that when we place capital punishment on the books we’re courting the risk that we might one day, as a society, put to death someone who’s done nothing to deserve it. So how do death penalty advocates atone for the sin of killing the innocent? Of course most don’t think they need to atone, they simply rationalize that the real perpetrator of the crime that a falsely convicted defendant was snuffed by the system for is the one who’s responsible for the system’s tragic transgression against the sanctity of innocent life. That is, death penalty advocates pull a somewhat slippery move and pin all the blame on the “bad guy” without flinching in their self-righteous good feeling about their staunch support of a punishment that sometimes ends the lives of decent human beings.

But it’s society, and more specifically all the members of society who favor the death penalty who really bear responsibility for the unfortunate consequences of the punishment they’ve chosen to espouse and embrace. Criminals and murderers don’t actually compel us to endorse the gallows, the chair, or nowadays the needle, if we do so it’s our own choice. And so the question once again puts itself, when our choice costs an innocent life how do we redeem ourselves? The rub here is that the resolution is patently obvious for true believers in the logic of a life for a life. If they have the cojones to be consistent, that is.

Well, in our imaginary scenario the VDs who’ve won the Whitehouse and a majority in every legislature in the country have the mettle to practice the retributive principle they preach, and so they propose the following. The implementation of the death penalty is to be suspended for the time being, and the only way that it can be reinstated is if there’s a national referendum and the majority of the electorate votes for it. But there’s a considerably disturbing catch, this will be the only election in US history in which the practice of the secret ballot is waived, the name of everyone who votes in favor of capital punishment will go into a computer database.

This is to facilitate the lottery that will be held whenever it’s proven beyond a reasonable doubt that an innocent, law-abiding citizen has been executed. The lottery that will give capital punishment supporters the remission of their sin of casting a vote that ultimately caused the death of an unfairly condemned person.

Everyone who votes for capital punishment will be assuming the risk of killing an innocent, and so everyone who votes yea on capital punishment will also assume the risk of his name one day coming up in a lottery to choose a scapegoat, one individual who will shoulder the collective culpability of everyone whose vote made it possible for the system to legally rob an honest man or woman of his/her precious life on this earth. The unlucky winner of this atonement lottery will balance the equation by being put to death in the same manner as the innocent victim of his vote. The principle of a life for a life will be taken to its logical conclusion. The sacrifice of one capital punishment supporter for one wrongly executed prisoner will once again level the scales of justice and provide absolution to all death penalty proponents.

For capital punishment advocates the nub of the question here is of course how much, really, do you believe in your righteous rationale and rhetoric of “a life for a life”? Would you be willing to put your own life where your revengeful stance is? This is the crucial question since death penalty boosters really only have two planks in their platform, the deterrence argument and the argument that a life for a life is poetically just. And the deterrence argument is refuted by plenty of statistical evidence, which leaves them with only the “justice” plank to stand on. So, if you’re pro capital punishment this little thought experiment is designed to make you ask yourself just how deep and sincere is your conviction that a life for a life is justice, and how much is it perhaps just a convenient moralistic justification for your punitive and pitiless desire to see a cruel comeuppance meted out to criminals?

If as soon as you realized where I was going with the above thought experiment your mind automatically began rationalizing and sophistically squirming its way out of the ethical bind I was attempting to put it in, well, perhaps you should examine how honestly committed you are to the core ethical logic of your advocacy of capital punishment. Perhaps all your Old-Testament ethical logic and lofty talk of justice is just a lot of sanctimonious smoke, perhaps hiding out behind it is just an ethically unenlightened hardness, harshness, vindictiveness, and viciousness?

Yep, maybe being a “civilized” citizen of an “advanced” society and a good, pro-life Christian, Jew, or Confucianist is not all that compatible with being a death penalty enthusiast? And while I’m getting a little personal and polemical, if you would not be willing to vote for capital punishment if doing so involved being held to your own lethal logic then perhaps you’re a bit of a hypocrite aren’t you? Furthermore, if you would be willing to vote for capital punishment only if doing so entails no risk for yourself then perhaps you’re also a bit of a physical coward to boot? A cowardly hypocrite, not exactly the self-image of the average stalwart supporter of the death penalty, but the only alternative would be to come clean and admit that the real reason you don’t have any qualms about executing prisoners is that you simply don’t hold the lives of people behind bars too dear. But if you make that admission then you don’t sound all that beautifully pro-life any more.

What’s a death penalty advocate to do? Well, he could summon the intellectual honesty and integrity to reexamine where his position on the issue really comes from! There’s that stand-up option, or capital punishment supporters can simply get testy when confronted with the ethical shakiness of their views and go on the offensive against their critics. To their discredit the latter is the option opted for most of the time by most pro-death penalty folks. Their anger at those of us who are on the other side of the issue is a response that reveals their subconscious awareness of the weakness of their position. People who are confident and secure about being right just don’t get riled up as easily as capital punishment proponents often do. Their emotiveness betrays their sense that their stance isn’t all that morally elevated.

As for the popular perception of death penalty supporters as the champions of victims, if they aren’t all that terribly concerned about the unfairness of frying the innocent every once in a while then one has to wonder how much they genuinely care about the whole principle of justice they claim to uphold. Perhaps it’s not overly cynical to suspect their pro-victims shtick of being mostly just window dressing on the shadow side of human nature that makes even nice, upstanding people want to hurt and dominate and kill. Pardon me for my pointedness here, but yes, maybe for many of us having the penal system kill “bad people” on our behalf is just a socially acceptable way of vicariously getting our cruel side off.

When enough of us come to terms with this psychological insight, when we face up to this unflattering truth about ourselves capital punishment should promptly fade into history. When we begin to see and cut through our lame rationalizations for allowing the criminal justice system to engage in legalized homicide our qualities of decency, honorableness, and fair-mindedness will not allow us to continue the practice.

But before the progressive and humane upside of human character can win through we have to recognize that there’s a pronounced power-tripping streak in our makeup that enjoys exercising the ultimate power over life and death. The problem of course is that we brighten up this dark drive with high-principled BS, legality, and by judgmentally targeting villains and portraying ourselves as caring advocates of justice for the victims of violent crime. That’s why I devised the gut-check thought experiment presented here, to bring home to pro capital punishment partisans that there’s really very little about their belief in “a life for a life” that’s authentically rational and ethical...

If anyone would like to explore this or other related topics in greater depth please feel welcome to visit my new website. It's quite new and so there's not an enormous amount of content yet, but what content there is should prove to be thought provoking. Just click on or copy & paste the web address below. Thanks. And no, this isn't some sort of spamy advertising, it's a sincere invitation.

www.thetotalrevolutionproject.com

[spin]

10. I oppose the death penalty because of the cost ...

as well as the fact that possibly the individual may be found innocent years after the execution.

Florida Spends Millions Extra per Year on Death Penalty

Florida would save $51 million each year by punishing all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole, according to estimates by the Palm Beach Post. Based on the 44 executions Florida has carried out since 1976, that amounts to an approximate cost of $24 million for each execution. This finding takes into account the relatively few inmates who are actually executed, as well as the time and effort expended on capital defendants who are tried but convicted of a lesser murder charge, and those whose death sentences are overturned on appeal. ("The High Price of Killing Killers," Palm Beach Post, January 4, 2000)

***snip***

Texas
Texas death penalty cases cost more than non-capital cases

That is about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. ("Executions Cost Texas Millions," Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1992)
http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty

Throughout the United States, police are being laid off, prisoners are being released early, the courts are clogged, and crime continues to rise. The economic recession has caused cutbacks in the backbone of the criminal justice system. In Florida, the budget crisis resulted in the early release of 3,000 prisoners. In Texas, prisoners are serving only 20% of their time and rearrests are common. Georgia is laying off 900 correctional personnel and New Jersey has had to dismiss 500 police officers. Yet these same states, and many others like them, are pouring millions of dollars into the death penalty with no resultant reduction in crime.

The exorbitant costs of capital punishment are actually making America less safe because badly needed financial and legal resources are being diverted from effective crime fighting strategies. Before the Los Angeles riots, for example, California had little money for innovations like community policing, but was managing to spend an extra $90 million per year on capital punishment. Texas, with over 300 people on death row, is spending an estimated $2.3 million per case, but its murder rate remains one of the highest in the country.

The death penalty is escaping the decisive cost-benefit analysis to which every other program is being put in times of austerity. Rather than being posed as a single, but costly, alternative in a spectrum of approaches to crime, the death penalty operates at the extremes of political rhetoric. Candidates use the death penalty as a facile solution to crime which allows them to distinguish themselves by the toughness of their position rather than its effectiveness.

The death penalty is much more expensive than its closest alternative -- life imprisonment with no parole. Capital trials are longer and more expensive at every step than other murder trials. Pre-trial motions, expert witness investigations, jury selection, and the necessity for two trials -- one on guilt and one on sentencing -- make capital cases extremely costly, even before the appeals process begins. Guilty pleas are almost unheard of when the punishment is death. In addition, many of these trials result in a life sentence rather than the death penalty, so the state pays the cost of life imprisonment on top of the expensive trial.

The high price of the death penalty is often most keenly felt in those counties responsible for both the prosecution and defense of capital defendants. A single trial can mean near bankruptcy, tax increases, and the laying off of vital personnel. Trials costing a small county $100,000 from unbudgeted funds are common and some officials have even gone to jail in resisting payment.emphasis added

Nevertheless, politicians from prosecutors to presidents choose symbol over substance in their support of the death penalty. Campaign rhetoric becomes legislative policy with no analysis of whether the expense will produce any good for the people. The death penalty, in short, has been given a free ride. The expansion of the death penalty in America is on a collision course with a shrinking budget for crime prevention. It is time for politicians and the public to give this costly punishment a hard look.
http://www.fnsa.org/v1n1/dieter1.html

[DissedByBush]

12. Don't let him!

Historically, hanging was the punishment for common criminals. Lethal injection is the modern equivalent.

Firing squad was the punishment for soldiers, and considered to be the more honorable way to die.

Case in point: The Japanese commander over the Bataan Death March was going to be executed by hanging as they were in Nuremberg, but because he otherwise had an honorable military career he was allowed death by firing squad.

[happyslug]

14. No, no evidence was presented that he knew HOW the POWs were being treated

General Masaharu Homma tried to make sure both the Filipinos and Americans were treated fairly, but his subordinates undermined his orders. Thus he was shot NOT for anything he himself ordered, but his FAILURE to make sure his subordinates did NOT commit such crimes. This is the concept of Command responsibility i.e. commanders are responsible for the acts of the soldiers under their command, even if what the soldier did was against orders. Thus if someone under your command murders someone, you are liable for that crime. As a General Rule this Rule has been rejected by the US Courts, for how can you prevent someone from doing a crime that you do NOT know the Soldier is planning? His execution along with General

For more see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaharu_Homma

General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who defended the Philippine islands against the American efforts to retake the Island in 1945 was executed for the same crime i.e. for the crime of one of his Officers to defend Manila, even after Tomoyuki Yamashita ordered him NOT to, do to the high risk of Civilian Deaths. HE as executed for that defense, for he was held liable for the acts of his subordinates, even when they disobeyed his orders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoyuki_Yamashita

Both were executed so that so that MacArthur could look like they were the people responsible for the hardship the Filipinos suffered, NOT that MacArthur poor Generalship in the days after Pearl Harbor was an additional cause (Please note after the Japanese landed troops, MacArthur stop being a bad General and showed why he had made General in WWI, but that was to late to stop the Japanese from taking the Islands, MacArthur retreat to the Bataan Peninsula was absolutely brilliant, but the problems left over from his poor decision in December 7th, and the days right after ward haunted the War in the Philippines till the US had to surrender in May 1942).