Thread: Bali Executions

Originally Posted by Looper

Originally Posted by hazz

when crimes are premeditated the primary deterrent is not the punishment, its the expectation of being caught.

Total cobblers. the deterrence is in the total risk. The risk is a combination of probability (likelihood of getting caught) and impact (sentence severity).

Elementary risk analysis.

You are right that there is a balance between the expectation of being caught and the punishment. You genuinely argue that this creates the differential between say street property crime in thailand and the uk. in the UK the punishments are arguably so small that the people involved do not really care that they run a high risk of being caught multiple times each year and in some cases each day. But would thailand further reduce their street property crime rates if they increased the penalty from several years in jail to death? Did english society collapse into lawlessness as it abandoned the bloody code for the modern system we have now?

After all, When you get on a plane to travel somewhere, the reward is you get to go to your destination, the risk is you die in a plane crash.... a very harsh risk for relatively little gain.... do you even think about this risk when you walk through those plane doors... probably not, I don't, as the risk is so vanishingly small that the penalty does not even enter the equation? i recon it would n 1% of flights ended with a crash.

striving for effective policing and enforcement creating that expectation of being caught will always be more effective than punitive sentencing when discoragivge crime. Its no accident that the majority of states who kill drug mules are dysfunctional and corrupt.

All things being equal I think it is only common sense to accept that the death penalty constitutes a significant disincentive when compared with life imprisonment. The problem is that it is very difficult to hold all other factors equal in order to perform a statistically sound analysis.

However criminal disincentivisation is only one apect of the argument. the death penalty could be championed on other grounds.

e.g.

1. Society's and the victim's right to exact revenge upon a particularly severe outrage against the social contract. Society enjoys a sense of fairness so outrageous crime deserves no mercy.

2. A humane approach to the death penalty in the case of the worst cases of torture/rape/murder. i.e. we are putting a deranged and probably emotionally very unhappy and incurable creature out of its misery

3. A fiscal approach. It is far cheaper than life imprisonment.

have you bothered to even check to see if any of these 'common sense' arguments are correct? Quite a few states in the US have looked at the costs of death sentence are higher than those of life term.. starting with the cost of the trial and carrying on right thought to the end of the sentence.

The other issue is that in using the death sentence the state is denying its self the ability to make restitution in cases of wrongful conviction. And how many states in the US have stopped killing death row prisoners because they have become concerned about just how many prisoners are being exonerated by DNA evidence.

Just how many innocent people has the state killed? and what does that say about the people who think its was right to kill these people because it was cheaper than keeping them alive in jail? just how cheap is a life?

And the death sentence is a kindness because killing deranged people against their will is a kindness. well thats about as good as the 'if i didn't do it, some else would' excuse the people use to justify immoral acts.


Now you believe that revenge is ok, a natural human instinct we should embrace. Its not its up there with envy, malice and greed. It is consuming, destructive and quite possibly as addictive as cocain... given it lights up the same parts the the brain. The determination to put the perpetrator into the position of the victim, with interest. simply turns the victim into the perpetuator and the perpetuator into the victim... a victim who in turn wants revenge. its how blood feuds, wars and insurgencies start. Its too high a price to pay.

Now lets say Im wrong. what just do the innocent get. what if the court review Zainal's case and decide that his death sentence was wrong. Then by not saying the execution the indoneasian president has just murdered someone.... just as the policemen who fired their guns at him intended as they pulled the trigger. What right of revenge does his family have... what justice should they expect.

If one looks at the filipino there are very reasonable ground to believe that she had no idea she was carrying the drugs in her luggage. making her as guilty as the pilot who flew her and the drugs into indonesia. To kill her is murder in its self, what revenge do her family and country have the right to?

After all killing the innocent is murder. what justice do they and their families deserve, because I don not see them getting any. how many judges, jurors, lawyers and placement have ever been punished for their role? and in the absence of that justice does the family have the right to extract revenge?

If, more likely when, they kill that frenchman. should his family believing him with some justification innocent, or even the french state have the right to revenge. Perhaps kill the man who ordered the killing, the man who gave the death sentence, the man who requested it. perhaps take out a couple of their family members as 'interest on the priciple'?

This is where revenge takes you, its why it has no place in the justice system or society in general. The justice system is there to protect society by minimising crime, it is about punishment, protection and redemption. The punishment component should be proportionate with the crime and always provide society with the ability to provide meaningful restitution to the innocents who inevitably get wrongly convicted.

Fortunately for us we have created a system that not only protects us from criminals tearing our societies apart, but also from people like yourself who would want us too organise our societies on the basis of what you would like to work rather than on what actually, demostratbly works.