Should murderers and other brutal criminals be executed?

@frostyflower: Justice isn't evil.

@Brando: Killing someone isn't justice. It only makes a rare few people feel better about the situation. True justice involves compassion, and thinking with your frontal cortex, not just your cerebellum. Killing them helps nobody, and it's actually more expensive to go through the trials that lead up to execution, and the execution itself, than it is to house an inmate for life.

@Brando: that's not justice, it's wrath. You can lock them up for good. Murdering a person for murdering a person makes us just as bad as they were.

Justice is an abstract, poorly defined ideal. If we speak in terms of lawfulness, slavery was lawful, the extermination of the Jews by the hands of the Nazis was lawful. Lawful is not always good. Lawful is not always just.

@frostyflower: you say it much better then I, but I totally agree.

@frostyflower: I think it's just but not practical. The taking of an innocent simply isn't the same as taking the life of the evil-doer. You can be against it on humanitarian grounds, I get that, but calling the two acts equivalent morally is a failure of critical thinking.

@Brando: I understand why we want to kill them. It's wrath, which is a common human emotion. I would feel that emotion too in cases and I might want to kill because of it too. But I think it's always wrong to kill, perhaps yes on humanitarian grounds. And also because indeed it doesn't solve anything. If you lock someone up for good you they at least have the chance to think about it and repent.

@Brando: At what point does it become morally reprehensible and corrupting to the society? Is it acceptable to kill a terrorist bomber, but not to kill a borderline mentally handicapped individual who has killed several people in cold blood? How about an abuse victim that murders their abuser, but not in direct self defense, simply because one day they snapped. Or a mother of 3 who kills an entire family in another car while drunk driving, or perhaps a parent that sincerely accidentally left their child in a hot car for an entire work day. A war general that signed off on an attack on a known hideout of a terrorist organization, but 10 children were slaughtered subsequently? Where do you draw the line? How much pride to we have in ourselves as being just and right and true that we should ever fein to have the moral capacity to decide who else should live or die? It is not our decision to make. And we, as a society, bear the burden of becoming that same evil by not opposing it vehemently.

@FeetAreFantastic: No, wrath would be torture. I'm against that. This is justice. It's not always wrong to kill, and I could give you 10 examples where you would agree with me.

I don't think you've been listening to the recent news regarding states trying to rush execution sentences because their execution drug is going to expire, and yet they KNOW the drugs have a history of not being successful in the standard dose because they were never even intended for execution to begin with. Cuz that looks an awful lot like torture to me. There is no such thing as a gentle way to kill someone.

@frostyflower: Generally, capital murder is where I draw the line. I don't take any pride in it. I don't think you think executing a man who murdered a child and the killing of that child are morally equivalent. I simply don't believe you.

@frostyflower: I'm not against due process.

@frostyflower: not to mention the mental torture of knowing you are going to die.

@FeetAreFantastic: That is the price of due process -- tell the lawyers about that.

@frostyflower SO true girl

@frostyflower My Dad was brutally murdered by my mother's older brother and made to look like suicide, to this day everyone still believes this. I have been hoping for the past 37 years to prove my uncle murdered my Dad and get justice.