hdgh29 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 5:46 pm Officials and corrupt business leaders in Vietnam are regularly given the death penalty for accepting bribes and involvement in shady dealings, including some previously high ranked government people.
The best thing about the death penalty in Vietnam is that it is executed (ok, bad pun) almost immediately after sentencing. I can never understand why murderers and rapists are held on death row in the US for like 20 years before being finally killed off. I accept the state needs to make sure that they are definitely guilty, but it doesnt take decades to decide that.

xandreu wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 11:53 pm You often hear people calling for the death penalty for a variety of reasons, usually for the most evil, heinous of crimes. I'm surprised that there is a country which regularly gives out the death penalty for freud. I don't believe in the death penalty for any reason.

1. Most civilised countries laws are based on the sanctity of life. It is illegal to deliberately take someone's life except in extreme cases such as an act of war (even that is limited under the Geneva convention), self defence (where there was no other option) and in some countries, euthanasia. Other than that, the deliberate, planned taking of someone's life is illegal, and for a law to be respected, it must be seen to abide by itself.

2. I don't believe in 'an eye for an eye'. Killing someone because they themselves took someone else's life makes the law no better than the criminal. For a society to truly call itself civilised, the law must be morally superior.

3. For people who commit the most heinous crimes such as rape, murder, and crimes against children, there are fates worse than death. Most people who are sentenced to full-life sentences, who know they will never, ever be released, often commit suicide, or at least attempt to. I know I'd probably take my own life if I knew I'd never ever be free again.

4. Following on from 3, depending on how bad your crime was, especially if it involved children, you will spend every day of your life either in solitary confinement, or in fear of being attacked by other criminals. Again, this is why many take their own life, because it is seen as an easy way out. Why give them what they want? Why allow them the easy way out? If someone did something to my child, I'd rather know they were living every minute of every day of the rest of their life in abject fear, never knowing if there was crushed glass in their meal, never knowing when another criminal might take advantage of a guard looking the other way and deciding to up his credibility be being 'the one' that got to you, and aside from that, having to face themselves in the mirror every morning knowing exactly what they did, than simply being quickly put out of their misery and it's all over.

5. The law makes mistakes. Innocent people do get convicted. If they've been killed and it comes to light that they were innocent, well, tough luck. You might say that this only happens in rare cases, but that doesn't mean anything if it happens to a member of your family.

6. Once a criminal, famous because of the evilness of their crime, is dead, you never hear about them again. As an example, one of the most famous crimes in the UK was a couple - Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who kidnapped and murdered several children in the 1960s. They both - but Myra especially (because she was a woman) regularly cropped up in the media over the following decades. Before Myra died, she (and her partner Brady, but again, Myra got the most attention because it's rare for a woman to do what they did) served as a reminder to everyone that if you do crimes like that, this is what will happen to you. She died in 2002 (in prison) so now, most young people are not aware of the story. On the contrary, we had a doctor (Doctor Shipman) who killed over 200 people but killed himself soon after being sentenced to life in prison, and therefore his crimes have largely been forgotten about, and only people of my generation are aware of the story. But we also have another guy, Ian Huntley, who murdered two schoolgirls, but despite many attempts at taking his own life, is still alive and therefore still crops up in the media from time to time, again, reminding people what will happen to you if you commit these types of crimes.

7, As the original story of this thread shows, once the death penalty is seen as an accepted punishment, where does it end? I don't think most people would agree with the death penalty for freud, but in a country where the death penalty has been 'normalised', not only are people given capital punishment for fraudulent crimes, but you're then not far off from governments killing people for political crimes, as a way of dealing with political rivals.

There are many other reasons why I don't believe in the death penalty but I think I've bored you all enough.