News-Record.com

When North Carolina, like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, uses violence as a solution, what is the message?

Well depending on your era, the messages range from: "An Occassional Public Beheading is GOOD!" - or - "Chemical WMD's on those nasty Insurgents to the North, BAD" - or - "Chemical WMD's on those nasty Insurgents to the East, GOOD" - or - "Totalitarian Regime BAD" - or - "Totalitarian Regime GOOD" -

... actually, it's all Jimmy Carter's fault - with the new fault guys about to brought into office - either Hussain Obama, or Billary, or RINO John. In 4 years, expect another Christian White Male from the CONservative Right to come to the rescue, with one of the three above surrendering the un-earned runs.

"In his April 27 column about capital punishment, Charles Davenport Jr. offers as a solution to violent crime more violent crime via execution."

If a society's intent is to save innocent lives, support for capital punishment, should be automatic. Davenport is on solid ground.

Quoting from a New York Times report, "Does the Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate," November 18, 2007:

"For the first time in a generation, the question of whether the death penalty deters murders has captured the attention of scholars in law and economics, setting off an intense new debate about one of the central justifications for capital punishment."

"According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented."

"The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly."

"The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties over two decades."

CONTINUED AT LINK:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/us/18deter.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Yep .. "An Occassional Public Beheading is GOOD!"

"If a society's intent is to save innocent lives, support for capital punishment, should be automatic. Davenport is on solid ground."

Yep. Beam me up. No sign of intelligent life here.

(Suppose Shuford is "pro life"?)

"When North Carolina, like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, uses violence as a solution, what is the message?"

Makes you wonder how Al-Qaeda's feels about abortion......

I'm well known as an anal-retentive fighter against criminals. Fighting crime, and assisting in sending thousands of convicted criminals to prison has been a life long passion of mine.

However, I've always been against capital punishment. I have several reasons for this. Here are just a few of them.

1. Death can not be recalled. Too many innocent people end up in prison. Trials are and will be flawed. Too many sleazy attorneys practice a philosophy of "win at all cost". They will surpress truth just for the personal victory of winning a case. Truth and innocence has no meaning for these legal bags of trash.

2. All life on Earth have a date to die as a natural progression of "as the world turns". Using death as a form of punishment make death to be fearful and bad. Death is a natural function of life. All of us face it. If I never commit a bad act, why should I have to die? Death in itself is not bad. Not any worst than being born.

3. Death is too easy on a mean-ass violent predator. Their victim died a horrible, violent, pain-filled, fear-filled death. The executed criminal's death is conducted to be pain-free and as gentle as it can be made. The punishment will never fit the crime.

I would like to see the death penalty changed to life with no parole. The criminal will be placed in a cell with no communication what-so-ever. No TV, radio, newspapers. Nothing for entertainment. No human contact, ever accept for medical when needed. No contact with family, ever. They would have no concept of dates ot time of day.

Their food would be enough to keep them basically fed. The food would be a sort of gruel that would supply their body's need for nurishment. Their cell would be monitored by video cameras and a light would be on for 24 hours a day. Most of them would wish for the death penalty. When they eventually die, their body would be cremated and a notice would be sent to a family member. The last insult to the criminal is they would know that even in death they would never be release.

The only activety they would have would be to think about what they did to end up where they are.

And, if evidence is discovered that they are innocent, then they are alive to be freed. If an executed person is discovered to be innocent, well then, whoops! A post-humerous pardon is not worth a damn to someone that's dead. Anyone agree or disagree?

The Dog's outa here.
Crime Dog

So rather than kill them you want to torture them 24/7 for 50 years? You stated that you didn't support execution because there could be innocents, yet you are willing to torture people for the 10-20 years it might take to show innocence? Your heart is so large it makes the Grinch's look like its the size of the sun...

Yeah, I could go for the 24/7 torture over the death penalty, but you know how the ACLU types would go on about the gruel not being tasty enough, the 24-hour lighting contributing to global warming, the lack of NPR programming, and so on. (You know how they are.)

Until we can overcome those obstacles, I say we just make due with the death penalty.

Crime Dog,
You have my utmost respect. Tom Shuford has shown his total lack of understanding of facts and people.

Tom, I would agree with you, if you could be 100% certain a person was guilty. You only need to look at the Duke case to see that, you can be tried and found guilty by the LIBERAL press to get a few votes in NC. Have you noticed how quick Nifong was out of print, when it was show he was full of crap as a Christmas turkey. He committed a crime and the LIBERAL press could have not give a damn less. Not one LIBERAL paper in NC called for any punishment against Nifong. The Duke men were ruined for life and not one LIBERAL reporter could care less.

This is not an issue where evidence plays much of a role --- in policy or personal predilection.

But if evidence DID matter..

HIghights from the New York Times article I referenced above:

NOBEL LAUREATE IN ECONOMICS GARY BECKER:

“...the evidence of a variety of types — not simply the quantitative evidence — has been enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.”

CASS R. SUNSTEIN, a law professor at the University of Chicago who has frequently taken liberal positions:

“The evidence on whether it has a significant deterrent effect seems sufficiently plausible that the moral issue becomes a difficult one . . . I did shift from being against the death penalty to thinking that if it has a significant deterrent effect it’s probably justified.”

Professor Sunstein and ADRIAN VERMEULE, a law professor at Harvard, wrote in their own Stanford Law Review article:

“...the recent evidence of a deterrent effect from capital punishment seems impressive, especially in light of its ‘apparent power and unanimity.’ [quoting a separate overview of the evidence by Robert Weisberg of Stanford]. “Capital punishment may well save lives. Those who object to capital punishment, and who do so in the name of protecting life, must come to terms with the possibility that the failure to inflict capital punishment will fail to protect life.”

DIFFERENTIAL QUALITY OF STUDIES OF STUDIES ON THE DEATH PENALTY:

“The recent studies are, some independent observers say, of good quality, given the limitations of the available data. ‘These are sophisticated econometricians who know how to do multiple regression analysis at a pretty high level,’ Professor Weisberg of Stanford said. The economics studies are, moreover, typically published in peer-reviewed journals, while critiques tend to appear in law reviews edited by students.”

NEGATIVE CORRELATION BETWEEN PRISON CONDITIONS AND CRIME RATE: THE WORSE THE PRISON CONDITIONS, THE LOWER THE CRIME RATE:

“A 2003 paper by Lawrence Katz, Steven D. Levitt and Ellen Shustorovich published in The American Law and Economics Review found a ‘a strong and robust negative relationship’ between prison conditions, as measured by the number of deaths in prison from any cause, and the crime rate. The effect is, the authors say, ‘quite large: 30-100 violent crimes and a similar number or property crimes’ were deterred per prison death.”

DEATH PENALTY DETERS ONLY IN STATES WHERE EXECUTIONS OCCUR AT A MINIMUM OF ONE EVERY TWO YEARS:

Professor Shepherd in the Michigan Law Review (2005): “Deterrence cannot be achieved with a half-hearted execution program . . . She found a deterrent effect in only those states that executed at least nine people between 1977 and 1996.”

Davenport "argues for a limited role by government, yet he grants it ultimate authority over life."

Davenport grants the government nothing. The authority for capital punishment comes from the Constitution.

lets add some other bits from that NY times article shall we?

“It seems unlikely,” Professor Donohue and Professor Wolfers concluded in their Stanford article, “that any study based only on recent U.S. data can find a reliable link between homicide and execution rates.”

The two professors offered one particularly compelling comparison. Canada has executed no one since 1962. Yet the murder rates in the United States and Canada have moved in close parallel since then, including before, during and after the four-year death penalty moratorium in the United States in the 1970s.

or perhaps this bit:

The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,” they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”

Selective quotation to support a point is dangerous indeed. As is the death penalty itself. In dallas, i believe, 17 out of 40 capital cases which were reexamined in light of DNA evidence were tossed. Complete exoneration in almost 40% of cases. How many people are you willing to sacrifice to attain some amorphous 'deterrence?'

Evilgreen,

Commendations. You read the piece!

Let'st take a paragraph you pull from the article with information that seems particularly compelling to you and to the two death-penalty opponents cited in the NYT piece (Donohue at Yale and Wolters at U. Penn):

"The two professors offered one particularly compelling comparison. Canada has executed no one since 1962. Yet the murder rates in the United States and Canada have moved in close parallel since then, including before, during and after the four-year death penalty moratorium in the United States in the 1970s."

Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of crime statistics knows these vary dramatically by ethnicity.

The Asian murder rate is about one fourth that of whites and whites about one eight of blacks and one-half to one-third that of Hispanics.

Guess which country has been receiving mostly Asian immigrants since 1962? Guess which mostly Hispanic immigrants?

* * *

Finally:

"The death penalty 'is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,'John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005 . . ."

Aren't these the same two fellows who couldn't figure out why Canada's murder rates "moved in close parallel" with the U. S?

In any case, look to the "quality of studies" issue addressed in the NYT article.

* * *
Finally, you comment (not from the piece):

"In dallas, i believe, 17 out of 40 capital cases which were reexamined in light of DNA evidence were tossed."

Kindly verify with link.

No humanly managed justice system is immune to terrible mistakes, but if the system were as given to error as you seem to suggest, it would be a VERY big story indeed.

How about supporting your charge?