Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Pets / Animals Might have changed my mind re death penalty.

Then you'd be as wrong as was your naff spelling of 'please'.

People do things like this because they have gone completely off the rails for some reason, not because they have sat down and calculated they can get away with it. Possible retribution doesn't come into it.

Hanging and flogging may please you, but it's unlikely to stop this sort of thing. It is a lazy solution. You don't have to do any serious thinking to find ways of preventing it happening again.

It's not about vengeance Ex, its about justice, the public need to be protected from serial offender's, quite rightly you state we have all made mistakes, and with the majority of us we accept that and learn from them, however there are those that see the velvet glove as a green light to carry on doing wrong.

I do believe that there are good people and bad people, upbringing does obviously impact on how some behave, but we also have some well to do and rich criminals whom cant blame upbringing as a mitigation, I also believe that those people who are undoubtedly found guilty of murder or terrorism should be hanged.

How do you differentiate between someone who hacks a living being to death cos his own life isn't going the way he wants & someone who is pure evil. Is Excoriator suggesting that child murderers be allowed some molly coddling before being released back into society to probably kill again. I don't recall reading about any murderer who didn't have what they considered to be a good reason. "I was annoyed". " I had a message from God" "I had a brain storm" " I had a bad childhood" etc. Lock them up,throw away the key & let decent people go about their daily lives without fear. Anyone who tortures an animal is just a step away from torturing a human .

Excoriator are you trolling or do you truly believe the balderdash you're coming out with? Perhaps you or a member of your kith and kin have a deep dark secret you would like to share with us, I'm sure we could show you empathy.

No one is calling for the death penalty here. Venice was being sarcastic after another topic about the death penalty , which you must have missed.

Are we not entitled to have 'righteous indignation' against those who commit child abuse or various other atrocious crimes ?

If this person is released in 12 weeks, and goes out to commit a further offence of such magnitude, would you fee the same if it was perpetrated against your wife, daughter or yourself, when we know that he needs psychiatric help, which he obviously is not going to receive in this instance.

The whole idea of writing to one's MP is for the sentence to be extended by law for those who fully intend to commit such atrocious crimes. His crime was certainly not an accident, it was vicious and inhumane and probably pre-meditated.

Should the same theory of yours apply to rapists of innocent and defenceless children ?

Ex - Would you only give an ISIS man who sets fire to Christian humans captive in a cage ,just a few months in jail on the grounds that his environment ie pressure to follow what he believes is his gods will has prompted him to do this deed ?

Is he and others like him only sadly misguided and therefore should merely spend a short sentence with attempted rehabilitation as to what is acceptable in our society?
When someone has the ability to do such terrible things , dont you think it is going to take a lot longer than a few months to change something so deep an dark in a person?

Like granny said, the call is to ask for much much stiffer penalities ie longer.

Whether you can actually alter a persons psyche , when premeditated evil actions seem to come so easily to them, I dont know , but I want them away from the possibility of harming society for a long long time.

Wonder how long it will be before this lad commits murder on a human! And sick and tired of hearing on the tv and radio about people with mental issues, we must have more mental people living in the UK than anywhere else in the world, most just use it as an excuse to shy out of work!

"... its about deterrence and the safety of the society."

Since deterrence has been downgraded as an element of the treatment of offenders, due to its ineffectiveness, crime has dropped by about 50%.

I am criticising your proposals for 'deterrence', not because I want to be kind to crooks, but because they DON'T WORK!. And it is you who seem to be discontented with 'the rules' which have very sensibly been relaxed in favour of more effective ways of reducing crime, and not me. I suggest it is, therefore, you and your fellow hangers and floggers who need to move if anyone does.

"... Why should decent people have to excuse and pander to these lowlife."

Because it is a more effective way of reducing crime than deterrence. Perhaps you should research the matter a little more carefully before giving vent to your urge for vengeance?

Go look at old copies of the 'Liverpool Echo' for instance in the early 1900s when deterrence was the only method of 'preventing crime' The death penalty was in full swing (no pun intended) but the number of murders taking place in the city would make your hair stand on end compared with now.

No halos involved in my case. I don't really care much about the criminals. My aim is- like yours - to reduce crime but I want an effective approach rather than one that satisfies uninformed public opinion.

If it turned out that giving people like this a job or a car or a foreign holiday reduced the number of such events (pretty unlikely I know) then I would support this, merely on the grounds that it works. I suspect you would oppose it, but it might be as well to think through exactly why you would do so.

Research usually shows that the outcome is in favour of those that make money out of the result.

Hangmen would find hanging is the best deterrence.

Social workers find patting criminals on the head works best.

Punishment will always be the best deterrence for the majority, there will be a much smaller group that don't respond. That is why the majority of us don't go around robbing banks to make ourselves richer, but some do.

I think you have presented a rather weak teleological argument here. It is far more likely that those who take note of the result of research prosper.

However, I rest my case on police figures and the Crime survey for England and Wales. CSEW includes crimes not reported to the police and therefore shows a higher absolute number, but both show a reduction of between 40% and 50% in crime since a peak in 1995. This is reflected across Europe, so it's not just this country. One explanation is that this matches the departure of the law from deterrence to rehabilitation.

Another theory is that reduction correlates rather closely with the abolition of tetraethyl lead in petrol. The effect of lead poisoning is increased aggression, impulsive irrational behaviour and a reduction in intelligence. Some are more affected than others, and some who live near busy roads experience higher doses. We may well have locked up and criminalised many people for the heinous crime of being poisoned!

Whatever the reason, can you honestly say that hanging this dog torturer is justifiable if it is due to his being influenced by this substance? Can it be justified if the individual is insane? Advocates of extreme methods of deterrence rarely stop to consider these possibilities.

I think DD's statement :

"Punishment will always be the best deterrence for the majority, there will be a much smaller group that don't respond. That is why the majority of us don't go around robbing banks to make ourselves richer, but some do."

- reveals more about DD's thinking than he realises. It is simply another way of saying that most of us would commit whatever crime of our fancy if we could get away with it. One might conclude that he is assuming most people follow his thinking. I doubt he is right.

Most of us want to live in a crime-free society and are quite prepared to play the game in order to get it. Nobody wants to shop in a supermarket where you are frisked on leaving because shoplifting is thought to be prevalent for instance. It is easier and better if we are honest in sufficient numbers that such extreme measures are unnecessary. Personally, I will not use those off-licenses where you find yourself in a perspex box with a tiny window because the management doesn't trust you not to grab a bottle and run. We behave because life is easier and more pleasant with a level of trust.

No haloes were damaged in this (sorry) rather extended post! I hope I have made the case for rational analysis rather than howling for revenge as being a better approach. Nothing to do with patting social workers or crooks on the head. I, like you, want crime stopped. I just want it attacked with a little thought. I'm not a social worker either, by the way. I am an engineer and used to constructing things on the basis of rational argument rather than hunches or gut reactions.

Don't know about the stats but having a close connection with a person with mental illness and having spent time talking to patients in Clatterbridge psych unit I would say that most DONT use it as an excuse to shy out of work. You would have to be very crafty to get past the medical profession to just get on benefits associated with mental health.

Don't think anybody said seriously that this dog killer should be hanged or whatever. Most of us agree that the punishment given is too lenient. Maybe if he was given a more severe sentence ( the poor misguided and mixed up kid, huh!!) Would be given all these things you say Ex would make him a better fellow, may even want to join an animal sanctuary when he comes out cured. My argument for death penalty is for the more heinous crimes as I say child killers and the serial killers who want to snuff out someone's life just to give themselves the power or buzz or whatever the monsters crave. You have this debate with Sarah Paynes mum and many other mums and dads whose most precious child has been snuffed out like nothing just to satisfy these garbage beings. A quick injection and they are gone never able to do it again. Too good for them but at least off this earth! Like families have the life sentence of grief.

By the way I do say that tongue in cheek about coming out wanting to work in an animal sanctuary, didn't think I made that clear in previous post.

I think the vast majority of us come out on the side of the victim be it human or animal. End of. !!