the_gooch Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 Originally posted by Milton@Dec 13 2005, 10:34 PM A) It is more expensive to execute someone than it is to keep them in jail for life. Quoted post Not if you shoot them in the head or hang them. Cheap, quick and efficient... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dumy Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 haha..but then we gotta shoot the niggas who shot them cuz they're "murderers"..wait they were playing by a rulebook when they shot/hung them..so that means it's "justice" gooch not a shot at you..just wanted to illustrate my point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_gooch Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 Originally posted by dumy@Dec 13 2005, 10:41 PM haha..but then we gotta shoot the niggas who shot them cuz they're "murderers"..wait they were playing by a rulebook when they shot/hung them..so that means it's "justice" gooch not a shot at you..just wanted to illustrate my point. Quoted post I hear you, it's a catch 22. I had a friend who was beaten to death in a drug deal gone bad. The guy who murdered him buried him on a piece of property he owned and laid a cement patio over where he was buried. I sat through the whole trial with my friend’s family and heard/saw all of the details about what had happened. This guy who murdered my friend was remorseful and kept saying he was sorry for maceing and the repeatedly bashing my friends head into the concrete floor of his basement. He is just sorry that he got caught, not that he beat my friend to death. He is now serving 25-Life, but personally I think he should be dead. To be honest, my friend was no saint and was involved with a whole shit load of fucked up shit. He was still my friend, and if it was him that was sitting on the stand, I can’t say I wouldn’t feel the same way about him. You reap what you sow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fermentor666 Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 That's a fucking terrible story gooch, particularly the part about burying him underneath a cement patio. There's a real issue here about how many other people get executed in this country with nowhere near the amount of evidence of guilt as there was in this case. And they get nowhere near the amount of exposure as this case has. Also, keep in mind that Tookie's case was brought through the appeals courts all the way up to the Supreme Court of Appeals and was still denied. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gasfacevictm Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 i don't believe in killing someone for killing another. it's just dumb logic. but my friends little sister was shot and killed a year ago at some party and it hit me personally and i felt different. that's why these things should be handled by outside authority and not on an eye for an eye basis. shit would never end that way. the whole world would be the hatfield's and mccoy's if revenge was the way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Milton Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 I do feel what all of your are saying. Don't get me wrong. I don't have all of the answers to this. I'm struggling to come to some semblence of a position on the issue. Gooch, if you're interested there is an article by a guy named Strawson, I can look it up for you if you want (I'm sure it's on Google Scholar) but it relates to why we punish. His theory is that we have "reactive attitudes" towards people that commit crimes and that these attitudes are the reason and justification for punishment (retributive punishment to boot). This really hits home when you have a tragedy happen to someone you are close to. Also another essay, I forget who by discusses ressentiment emotions or those emotions which we feel towards people who harm us. He argues first that our punishment system is in some way based on "bad" emotions such as greed, vengence, etc. But then he argues that actually the system is okay because it is not based wholly on those emotions. Anyhow interesting reading. A few misc. notes: 1) It isn't the cost of the injection or gas itself that gets you, it's the cost of the appeals. 2) A huge (unjustifiably huge) percentage of inmates get acquitted on appeal from death convictions. That is a scary prospect. MI Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the_gooch Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 yeah that sounds like it would be a good read. i'll look it up. thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shape1369 Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 Originally posted by 26SidedCube+Dec 13 2005, 08:11 PM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (26SidedCube - Dec 13 2005, 08:11 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteBegin-iliveinavagina@Dec 13 2005, 09:50 AM Did you expect more... We live in a moral dictatorship having color or no money is in itself a mechanism of being immoral. Quoted post I thought this was good. This topic suffers from a classic case of using too many words to say something that isn't all that complicated: You can't kill for the sake of civility. Quoted post [/b] There are a couple ways to answer the question of whether or not Williams should have died. First, one can look to the philosophers who are credited with laying down the foundations of our government. Locke, Rousseau and other contractarians would argue that there is no justification for killing someone that one is not in a state of war with. Locke, because he argues that no person can have right over their own life, let alone anyone elses. Rousseau in that no one can sell or barder their lives to anyone else for any reason. This, of course, would leave one to think that dumy's "Team Smart" is on the right path. But... What should be of real concern to us in this whole situation is how our founding philosophers would view Tookie himself. In all of their seminal texts on political bodies, political philosophers discuss the concept of who can create political bodies, or enter into social contracts with eachother. There is an underlying language of exclusion as to who can actually be a citizen. Not in the naturalized immigration sense of the word, but as to a person whom legal and national protection are inheritly ascribed to. Thus we find that there is a group who it then does not matter how they are treated. If one looks historically at the way we have positioned prisoners in our society, they find that specific rights are denied to them. This speaks to prisoners as non-citizens, and thus are not applicable to the civil and natural law Locke and Rousseau speak of. They are, however, still subject to the national and uniform judicature that is one of the main characteristics of citizenship for Locke. Now we have this entire population (2million as of 2003) who stand in this grey area that our society has created. The answer to Tookie's death lies in this question: "Are prisoner's citizens of our political body?" If the answer is yes, then we cannot kill them as it becomes antithetical to the ideological foundations of our societies. Not just america, but any contemporary polity influenced by western political thinkers. If the answer is no, then this entire argument is moot. They are a people who civil law no longer applies, and thus the treatment of those people no longer matters. While that is rather black and white view of the situation, it elucidates the underlying issues of this entire situation. There are contemporary philosophers that try to understand these concepts of social alienation and contractarian application though. Charles Mills discuss the concept that while the classic philosophical thinkers did have a nice story for the ideal polity, they did it with an underlying racial contract as well. More specifically, the social contract is a metaframework of contracts that deal with more specific issues. Thus, this answers the question of who can enter into a social contract at all. We find that there are not only the original requisites laid down by classic western philosophers, but also a racial requisite. Thus in any polity that is influenced by the original western thinkers, there is a construct of our existing political bodies that accounts for people such as Tookie. According to Mill's, Williams's death is merely an extension of the intrinsic racial and social alienation of our modern political bodies. Thus it is not Tookie's death as a good or bad person that is relevant, but his position as a social and political body in contention with the national body politic he lives in, that is of concern. Maybe I'm just too high and read way to into it, but yeah, my thoughts... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Sparoism Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 Wow, if that's how you write when you're high, then you must be hell on wheels when you're sober. I'm starting to think that the point we should be discussing is not so much whether capital punishment is right or wrong, but whether or not it has any relevance in today's society. I doubt that it has done a whole lot to lower the murder rate, and if you factor in the costs of housing a prisoner on death row and ultimately executing them, the dollar amount is truly staggering. It comes down to moral relativism. If someone I was close to was killed, God forbid, one of my reactions is sure to be vengeance. But, unless I saw the whole thing go down in front of me, I would allow due process to run its course and try to make peace with the results. Maybe it's a little different for the survivors of violent crime. I don't know, I've never really experienced it like that. Indirectly, but not in the way that some here might have. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Sparoism Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 Sorry, the wine I had for dinner is kicking my ass right now. My thoughts aren't coming across as clear as I'd like. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Birch Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 are we still talkin about tookie? that was so yesterday... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yellow Feets Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 They even made a YTMND about this. Not surprising. The REAL reason Tookie didn't get Clemency. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JUDONO? Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 WTF?^^^^ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shape1369 Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 ^^^^ha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BucketHead Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 well.. it seems you guys are gettin pretty deep... this has nothing to do with whether or not the death penalty is a good idea... Last night 4 dudes rolled around downtown oakland lighting trashcans on fire with molitov cocktails or something to that effect... they got quite a few of them. Yelling about how they shouldnt have killed tookie.. It was funny because it was as if they were trying to start a riot, but, if any of you have been in downtown oakland you know that there are about a total if 15 people in the whole area at any given time of night, so... Yeah, no riot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Sparoism Posted December 14, 2005 Share Posted December 14, 2005 Originally posted by BucketHead@Dec 14 2005, 04:13 AM well.. it seems you guys are gettin pretty deep... this has nothing to do with whether or not the death penalty is a good idea... Last night 4 dudes rolled around downtown oakland lighting trashcans on fire with molitov cocktails or something to that effect... they got quite a few of them. Yelling about how they shouldnt have killed tookie.. It was funny because it was as if they were trying to start a riot, but, if any of you have been in downtown oakland you know that there are about a total if 15 people in the whole area at any given time of night, so... Yeah, no riot. Quoted post I was expecting more to happen, too...downtown Oakland late at night is a little weird. There's always people on Broadway 24-7, but go a block off the main drag and it's totally deserted. Was this over by City Center or City Hall? I didn't see anything going on in the way of protests yesterday, but maybe it's a delayed reaction to the news or something. I'm not sure if anything is gonna happen at this point. It would have started by now. Part of me is disappointed, and the other part is relieved. Maybe violence in response to state-condoned violence is finally being recognized as a fait accompli. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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