Baby P

Totally agree. I would definately suggest that capital punishment leads to a culture of violence and legitimises it as a solution
 
One has to understand that judicial execution, whether it's done by an American state, Russia, or in a Muslim country, is merely retribution. It doesn't pretend to the notion that all souls can be saved or that every life is still worth something; neither does it pretend that prison can rehabilitate people. I don't think it contributes to more violence, simply because whether you execute or you don't execute doesn't stop murders from being committed. People are hanged regularly in Iran for trafficking drugs, child rapists are beheaded in Saudi Arabia (from the sound of it, some people on here might like that fate for Baby P's parents), and so on - but the possibility of execution doesn't prevent people from continuing to deal in drugs or be driven to molest little ones.

If you like retribution, then you'll be for the death penalty. You can even get a bit of the Bible to support you with 'an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth', and Shari'ah Law definitely doesn't favour saving the murderous - sane or insane - among society. If you don't feel that retribution serves any purpose other than to exact extreme revenge, then you'll opt to see people locked away, possibly re-trained and rehabilitated, and released when they've learned to be better people, wherever possible. Christians are, rather contrarily, called upon to forgive. I could forgive a trespass against myself (probably, eventually, depending how gross it was), but it's not up to me to forgive any trespass against another. If they can't forgive, then should they not call for an eye for an eye?
 
The problem would be when, an eye for an eye potentially becomes another eye and another and another offering no break to the perpetual circle, creating the habit to kill.
 
i'm not interested in revenge..or deterring people though

firstly..I'm thinking how much money we can save...and boy doesn't money saved normally be really favoured in this country?

secondly..i'm thinking..when these people get let out..they can hurt someone else...and people that commit this type of horrendous crime do get out...so i'm thinking of future crime prevention.

two strong arguments for removing people that are barely human

all this soft arsed...taking life is wrong..doesn't wash with me

some of these crimes are not being carried out by human beings as we know the term..the people are monsters

what do they do when a dog bites someone?

to me..these people are far worse than biting dogs

I'm not religious..I find all that stuff complete and utter arrogant nonsense
...so the "eye for an eye" not being right isn't even an issue for me.

if none of this is possible..then

we cast hundreds of prisons ships out into an area of the north sea..fill them up with wrongoers and then helicopter drop a bit of food in every now and then...and leave them to it...we would just need a few people in monitoring stations along the coastline just to make sure none of them made it back to land

we waste far too much money on people in this country that deserve nothing...but then let others who need help go without

we need changes
 
There is no doubt some punishments do not appear to fit the crime, and a deserted place with bear assistance even on occasions seems like a soft option, but I cannot condone lawful or unlawful killing as the two cannot be differentiated, they are both killing. After all a rose is still a rose by any other name.
 
So you would have hanged the Birmingham six and Guildford four then

Krizon...toobe is right. look at the vile state of iran. doesnt stop at murdderers does it? homosexuals are fair game for state execution there. That is a violent disgusting society. because the state legitmises killing on the basis of sexuality you have a society of fear for thousands of homosexuals (and adulterers and now protestors) who know full well that what the state does the people will also feel empowered to do as well...and do. then you encourage where killing under the guise of suspicion (as we recently saw in pakistan)
 
So you would have hanged the Birmingham six and Guildford four then




your point is not supporting your argument though..its a bit of a lazy response imo...because..you of course have to have a justice system with people that can do the job properly..not fit people up because you are crap at police work

your argument if taken to its full course..would be..well we have found X guilty..but because our police force is corrupt/incompetent/shite we had better let him go

locking innocent people up can't be tolerated no matter what the punishment..thats the issue you should be concerned about

do you think Peter Sutcliffe..Moors murderers..were innocent..or fitted up?

if you add up the money just those 3 cost/costing us..you might see the point I'm making here

we cannot shape a punishment system around how crap we are at catching criminals...it should be based on getting the right person for the crime and giving a sentence that fits the crime

this idea that because we are poor at employing policemen means we should be easy on criminals..just in case we get it wrong....sums up the soft arsed..incompetent mess.. that our justice system is
 
Last edited:
In fairness, no matter your view, EC1 makes some good points, especially with his comment "we cannot shape a punishment system around how crap we are at catching criminals...it should be based on getting the right person for the crime and giving a sentence that fits the crime".
 
I dont think anyone will change anothers mind on the death penalty.
I am 100% in favour of it and no one will change my opinion-ever!!
Having 2 small children myself I wish these 3 "people" would be burned at the stake to be honest
 
Clivex - Iranian people are not a disgusting society, as you aver. Take your sentiments to their absurd extreme, and any society is disgusting - the Americans for being warlike and putting people to death in horrid ways, plus allowing extremist race-hate groups to exist; Indian society for still enforcing caste exclusions, bride burnings, etc.; too many African societies to mention which brutally murder on the basis of tribal differences or religious conviction; Germany for not banning neo-Nazi organisations - you can pick the bones out of any society and find most of them do something to disgust you. I am revolted by whaling, but I expect there are a lot of Japanese and Norwegian people and Faroe Islanders who are actually quite decent! The governments employ what are to you disgusting manifestations. These are imposed upon the societies under them - their rules don't make societies disgusting. There are, in fact, a number of ways in which homosexuality is permitted in Iran - one is for one of the male partners to have himself castrated, so that he can live as a version of a woman with his partner, without fear of further persecution. It's a hypocritical stance by the mullahs, as they're aware that Iranian doctors regularly perform the surgical removal of testes to enable men to live with their male partners, but it is one way around draconian religious edicts. Let's not get to hoity-toity about the issue - British men were regularly slammed into jail and trapped by policemen posing as homosexuals, right up until the day it was decriminalized in the UK. They had their lives wrecked by being named in newspapers for 'lewd conduct', lost their jobs and often their families - and such awful treatment led many to commit suicide. We have only a very recent record on 'allowing' men to cohabit as partners, and judging by the continuing homophobic attacks in this country, still a very long way to go in society as a whole accepting the state.

I don't believe there are any statistics to show that any murders are committed because a government imposes capital punishment, but if Toobe and yourself, can come up with some data to further your protestations, then let's see it. If your argument held water that by imposing such a punishment on murderers, governments incited more violence, then how come we now have daily killings throughout the UK, yet don't even put any but the insanest killers away for life? We not only don't execute anyone, we don't even impose 'real' life sentences! There's no evidence to support your or Toobe's statements that judicial killing begets more societal savagery - quite the opposite in this country, it appears.

For the record, I don't approve of judicial execution for any reason whatsoever. But that's on ethical grounds - not because of any belief system, certainly not because I think it represents a deterrent (it doesn't) or, conversely, that to employ it would create more civilian violence. Killing one's fellow human beings is wrong, full stop. I personally don't see how you can abhor a brutal murder on the one hand, and then calculatingly kill the perpetrator after dressing up what is merely retribution in legal terms. Violence against a person is violence, whether it's in government-instigated war, in rebellion, on the street, or through the courts. We are a violent animal, we humans, killing for the most feeble of reasons or to satisfy the most grandiose fancies of despots - and I fear we'll remain that way until the Sun burns our little blue marble to a blackened dot.
 
So we all have to face it then, whatever our belief system it could well be the case that Karma rules the day. Just for the record by the way, the man was a neo nazi I believe or, had interests in this area and the child was a blue eyed blonde boy, which kind of says it all really.
 
I'm totally in favour of bringing it back. The point about it being a deterrent or not I feel is not the argument for having it in place. Why should we, as a scoiety, pay for certain individuals to be fed, homed, educated(?) and have free medical treatment for the rest of their lifes in prison? Life should mean life imprisonment with no opportunity for parole, but it doesn't except in a very small handful of exceptions at least over the last fifty years but what is the point of keeping the likes of Brady alive? Or Hindley when she was? She didn't have to go on a waiting list for treatment for her cancer. ( I know remains were found after they were sentenced but Huntley is a more recent example) There is no purpose in keeping certain people like this alive. You can cite miscarriages of justice back to the beyond the medieval ages on the say so of a man who had more money than another and that was all the 'evidence' needed. As a society we have gone way beyond this kind of summary judgement. Just because an incident is in recent history doesn't make it any more of a reason why something should not be an option or not.
As an aside, the length of sentences for some crimes are also woefully inadequate to fit the crime and are no punishment at all.
 
EC1

The money argument is completely "lazy" as you say. Boring too. The sums involved are hardly going to cause a credit crunch

As for the Guildford 4 etc, you avoid the issue of wrongful killing which cannot be reversed. Obvious why you do of course
 
Krizon

Not good enough. The iranian people (supposedly) elected a goverment which hangs people on the basis of their sexuality. What happened here in the past uis neitehr here nor there. It doesnt happen now and it was never a state execution matter

Iran is a disgusting society
 
G-G, isn't there the tiniest amount of doubt in your mind about Huntley's guilt. All along I have felt that the woman, her names gone, was the 'brains' behind the crime.

I would have great difficulty clearing my mind of reasonable doubt if I was on the jury and the death penalty was in place.
 
Clivex - the Iranian people, you might have seen in the news, have been protesting against the results of the re-election of Ahmedinajad, which they say was fixed. They - along with all Muslim societies which have Shariah Law as the basis of their justice system (not all do, some are secular) - also don't have any sway over the mullahs, who determine the extent to which Shariah will be employed. They are lumbered with the system they have for now. There is no division in that country between mosque and State, unlike here, where thanks to the psychotic, destructive tantrums of one of our kings, there is the division of church and State, which informs what happens in courts and Parliament today.

I guess you don't put much store in the history of societal evolution, judging by your rather wild remarks. Of course hanging was a 'state execution matter'. What else do you think we did? Chuck the condemned men and women into the street, and let lynch mobs do the job? You really do say very weird things to try and suit your view. We had state-salaried executioners, mostly the Pierrepoint family, and we hung our last woman, Ruth Ellis, well within living memory. Sentenced to death by a state-salaried judge, in a state-owned court, executed in a state-owned prison in the presence of state-paid prison officers.

You're always so anxious to have a pop at anything Muslim, that you come up with complete tosh in order to try and imply that we're so saintly, since we stopped state-ordered killings. No, we're not. We've just evolved a little more ethically and become a little more in tune with the times, not still totally in step with religious dogma-based 'justice', whether it be Christian or Muslim.

If you think about it, the reason why religions (which represented the literate and articulate in every largely otherwise society) condoned execution was that what else were you going to do with the madmen in your little village or town's midst? Particularly if you lived in a nomadic society - you could hardly continue to feel safe at night, bedded down beneath the stars, knowing that one of your tribal members had hacked to death another in a dispute over an inheritance, could you? Hence, confession, trial, execution, everyone's feeling safer. It wasn't intended as a deterrent as much as a way to make the affected society know (as most executions were public) that the offender was never going to strike again.

But most societies have moved on over the decades, whereas old justice systems haven't, remaining locked in a muddle of invoking the fear of God (it's only a relatively recent innovation that you can simply attest, rather than swear on the Bible in court, for instance), blaming the Devil, and modern concepts of pleading insanity based on psychiatric assessment.

Anyway, that's me out on this - although I find it pretty weird that so many people on here who express a wish to visit all kinds of hideous retribution on the parents (the original subject of the topic), are so quick to condemn executions in other countries. They'd prefer to see a return to lynch mob rule, it appears, when it suits them. And you think that we've evolved?
 
Colin, you're really not saying that you think there is a chance Huntley isn't guilty? Whether Hindley was the brains or not, he still went along with it and is just as guilty of being scum as her in my eyes.
 
Colin Phillips said:
G-G, isn't there the tiniest amount of doubt in your mind about Huntley's guilt. All along I have felt that the woman, her names gone, was the 'brains' behind the crime.

I would have great difficulty clearing my mind of reasonable doubt if I was on the jury and the death penalty was in place.
Click to expand...

Her name was Maxine Carr, (not Myra Hindley as Dom seems to be suggesting) and I really don't know how you can link her to it beyond the fact she gave him an alibi. She was about 100 miles away all weekend
 
G-G said:
I'm totally in favour of bringing it back. The point about it being a deterrent or not I feel is not the argument for having it in place. Why should we, as a scoiety, pay for certain individuals to be fed, homed, educated(?) and have free medical treatment for the rest of their lifes in prison? Life should mean life imprisonment with no opportunity for parole, but it doesn't except in a very small handful of exceptions at least over the last fifty years but what is the point of keeping the likes of Brady alive? Or Hindley when she was? She didn't have to go on a waiting list for treatment for her cancer. ( I know remains were found after they were sentenced but Huntley is a more recent example) There is no purpose in keeping certain people like this alive. You can cite miscarriages of justice back to the beyond the medieval ages on the say so of a man who had more money than another and that was all the 'evidence' needed. As a society we have gone way beyond this kind of summary judgement. Just because an incident is in recent history doesn't make it any more of a reason why something should not be an option or not.
Click to expand...

Isn't there a whacking great contradiction in the logic here?. On the one hand you say that we've moved on and money isn't an issue in deciding justice, and shouldn't enter into the equation, and yet your whole premise for wanting to reinstate the death penalty (having dismissed the more credible argument of deterent) is based on what...... money :blink:

Money should never be a factor where justice is involved. In fact its a red herring, and as Clive suggests, its a lazy argument that is frequently put up by feeble tabloids designed to inflame some kind of shock reaction amongst the punting public who are being incited to rage against having their purse picked from the penatentiary, when they sit by either in blissful ignorance or passive acquiessence regarding infinately bigger assaults on the public finances daily.
 
From what I have read of the facts Huntley is completely guilty and the case was proved beyond any doubt that he committed it. Whether he had been influenced or coerced into committing it by anyone else, is frankly, irrelevant. He committed the actual act. The fact that she, Carr, helped to try and hide it and clean up or whatever else she did, for whatever reasons should not have a bearing on the sentence he received. In my opinion, she got off very lightly anyway.
 
My only concern for Maxine Carr was her continued use of the past tense whilst everyone was still searching for the 'missing' girls, I was never comfortable with this, and it is this, and this alone that was the only thing that led me to believe she might have suspected more than she was saying. As regards the murder she clearly wasn't involved, unless she's developed the ability to murder by telepathy. I think to describe her as the 'brains' behind the crime is a bit immotive bordering on the ridiclious. I can understand that you can have a mastermind behind a complicated 'bank job' or similar, but this was some warped product of an individual mind who seized an opportunity.

She returned from Grimsby after the murder and walked into a media maelstrom. She knew she'd been away all weekend and by proxy therefore, that Huntley had been alone. That in itself wouldn't convince you to automatcially suspect your partner, and if he were to explain how frightened he was that he did have an alibi and that he was worried people might start to think he could be involved, and that some terrirble miscarriage of justice could happen purely because she was in Grimsby. A combination of a manipulative and plausible plea on his part, issued against a less than critical mind that was probably in love with him, and one that wouldn't be the slightest bit disposed towards even contemplating his possible involvement, could easily lead her to fill in the gaps for him.

One suspects that it was only as the trial started to unfold and the evidence came forward that it really dawned on her for the first time that he was guilty, and indeed she turned evidence on him. She was duped, and i have to say, wouldn't be the only person who probably could be in similar circumstances. It's difficult to know what you could have charged her with though beyodn that which was brought against her? She didn't murder the children, and she wasn''t there and so couldn't be charged with being an accessory. There's no evidence that it was planned, and so conspiracy to murder wouldn't stand up, which left versions of perverting the course of justice as the prosecutable offence capable of withstanding the burden of proof of 'beyond reasonable doubt'. As offences in this country have sentancing guidelines by way of maximum, and can't be handed down on the whims of some gin sozzled judge, justice was probably done in her case, even if the public (as always seems to be the case when a womans involved) seized on her involvement with an equal degree of zeal even if her role in terms of the murder was peripheral at worst and non-existant at best
 
Last edited:
You are twisting my words Warbler. My whole premise is not how much money it costs to keep these people alive.No, I do not agree with paying for hideous individuals such as we have been discussing, to sit in warm, protected establishments with all their medical needs cared for for the rest of their lifes. With modern methods of collecting forensic evidence, their guilt is in no doubt. The passing of a sentence of death, if it were available, has nothing to do with how rich or poor the accused is NOW- which is what my point was about summary judgements being handed out in the past on hearsay or because of family feuds or because one person is of a higher social status than someone else and therefore must have been telling the truth. In plain truth, I do not believe such individuals have a right to life after committing the crimes they have. I cannot see what purpose it serves in keeping them alive.
 
It's not really twisting words at all, as you're still making money the ultimate arbiter. God forbid you ever have to work in the NHS as you can roll out the same logic there if you want to. It costs too much money to keep this person alive etc

Once you allow money and the cost of something to sit in judgement then you're on a very slippery slope. It's pretty well a 'Lord of the Flies' type of logic. You produce an artifical creation (money or a pigs head) and then absent responsibility of your own human judgement to some inanimate third party factor which you can then conveniently turn to absolve yourself from responsibility. It's medieval by its nature. In fact it's probably primeval. 'The Lord of the Dollar says' - you must die. You might as well go the whole hog and have a fire dance before asking the 'accountancy witch' to hand her judgement.

The other thing to note is that there isn't a generation in history that hasn't had the capacity to convict on the basis of "modern methods". What this superior snapshot in time that always places us on the apex of superiority fails to legislate for is wanton human misdeameanour, which has never been irradicated. The with holding and tampering of selective evidence etc. It doesn't really matter how good your forensics are, they'll never be fool proof, because of this element.

I think the important thing to do is not to be led by emotion, and far to often crimes of this nature are, as the modern day media can whip up a crowd baying for blood and convinced of someones guilt before they've even seen the first shred of evidence. People pyschological have a prediliction to convict just because someone's been accussed. Again this is no different to bleedin Salem in 1692.

How many people were ready to convict Robert Murat? Loads of them on here. There was only myself, Paul Jones and Clive who were saying hang on a minute..... there isn't a shred of credible evidence against this guy. As that case started to fall apart (not that it should ever have been brought) the attention turned to the McCanns and the same cyber vultures started cricling over them with the same blood lust.
 
I am not making money the ultimate arbiter - you are saying I am. I have not typed anywhere that is the only reason for having a death sentence at all. Do not presume to apply my points in this case to any other specific or hypothetical situations, or pass judgements on what I think about things I have not expressed an opinion about, and you have no way of knowing what I do or do not think. You cannot presume to know how I think or would act in different scenarios. We are talking here about capital punishment.
 
G-G said:
I'm totally in favour of bringing it back. The point about it being a deterrent or not I feel is not the argument for having it in place. Why should we, as a scoiety, pay for certain individuals to be fed, homed, educated(?) and have free medical treatment for the rest of their lifes in prison? Life should mean life imprisonment with no opportunity for parole, but it doesn't except in a very small handful of exceptions at least over the last fifty years but what is the point of keeping the likes of Brady alive? Or Hindley when she was? She didn't have to go on a waiting list for treatment for her cancer.
Click to expand...

You just give up with some people.

Deterent is a familiar theme often cited by the 'hang-um-high' brigade. You've dismissed this (post above). You've described as "not the argument for having it". You couldn't quite frankly, be more unequivicol if you tried. You haven't gone down the biblical 'eye for an eye' route (another oft cited justification). Instead you've clearly stated its about cost and paying for incarceration that is your primary concern, and that presuembly executing people reduces this. You've used Ian Brady as an example and said "what is the point keeping him alive" (in the context of a lengthy and hence expensive sentance). How on earth you can say that money isn't an issue when you clearly state;

"Why should we, as a scoiety, pay for certain individuals to be fed, homed, educated(?) and have free medical treatment for the rest of their lifes in prison" - is beyond me?

What other reasonable interpretation should people draw from these statements?

If we have "no way of knowing what I do or do not think" then I'm sorry. We'd only be drawing on posts put up in your own name. I can only deduce therefore that if these don't represent your opinions, then you are in some way being disingenious with what you're choosing to communicate
 
Back
Top