I have mixed feelings about the death penalty, but if I had to state an opinion I would say I'm for it.
It also depends on the crime, the reason for the crime, metal health of the criminal.
an authoritative decision; a judicial judgment or decree, especially the judicial determination of the punishment to be inflicted on a convicted criminal:
note the determination of punishment - that is not the same as imprisonment
I do not think that capital punishment has any place in a civilised society.
The concept that captial punishment acts as deterent is clearly flawed, and has been shown to be so over many years and cases.
No-one who sets out the pre-meditated idea of killing someone does so with the expectation that they will be caught and executed.
If a government who used CP was honest enough to admit that it is the concept of revenge that applies, not deterrent, than I would feel that was at least more honest.
I find the notion of setting out an execution proceedure to be utterly abhorrent, and before anyone jumps in with "What if it was your wife / child ..." - I would still feel the same.
Revenge is a primitive emotion - I try not to be primitive if i can help it.
sentence of X hours comm service should mean working for the whole X number of hours, a life sentence should mean you stop in prison until you fall of the twig.
No matter what the evidence, there is inevitably a chance, however miniscule it might be, that the accused is innocent. There are those who say that's tough luck - the death penalty would help reduce crime. Yeah, sure, and what if it were your innocent son or daughter who was the accused?
You diverted it Alba by saying with alarming predictably the old cliche about Life meaning Life.
you then said
//I never understand why someone is sentenced to life with a minimum tariif of say, 15-17 years for example//
I simply explained the difference (again)
It comes out *every time* from someone and I just took the time to point out that a sentence is a pronouncement of punishment and is not necessarilly all imprisonment
In Australia they passed a law where they abolished parole - the imprisonment time was the time served (sentences were cut to account for this)
This does have difficulties -for example when someone is released on parole they are subject to monitoring which obviously does not happen if there is no parole
How many murders have there been since the death penalty was abolished?
As the way the numbers are defined and figures collected keeps changing, the stats base is a bit wobbly and, imo, there's really no way to prove deterrent cause and effect between the two
For all crimes, although bicycle theft seems stubbornly persistent, it just depends really on whether you think you are or not: the murder rate seems to be dropping though