Quote:
Originally posted by Timber Loftis:
...
As I said, however, address this problem and I'm okay with the death penalty. There are prices we pay. The price you pay for choosing to take life should be forfeiture of your life. There is no other thing you can pay that is worth what you took. Note, this applies to MURDER -- CHOSING to take life. Murder is absolutely wrong. When you murder someone else, you also murder yourself because you forfeit your life by breaking the paramount rule. The state doesn't kill a murderer, his choices and actions do.
IMO. 
|
What bothers me about your reasoning is that you seem eager to make your position appear as one supported by some kind of "objective logic". If it was that way though, I would have to be able to recognize it as such and agree. But the central premise of your argument, namely that it was possible for the murderer to repair any of the damage caused by his crime by paying (whom?) with his own life seems utterly illogical to me: he cannot pay the victim. Who else is a damged party? Society, whose strictest taboo has been broken, thus violating its members' sense of justice and security. Family and friends of the victim, whose loss is of course of a much more concrete nature. If the murderer could ever "pay" either of those parties by losing his own life depends exclusively on their belief systems: do they believe in the concept of retribution as much as you do, Timber? If they do, they might derive a certain degree of emotional satisfaction from the execution - I have always been skeptical about how much that really counts for fot those immediately affected - if they don't, it only adds insult to injury, thus the murderer's death would be at the best senseless.
Like I tried to explain earlier, it all comes down to personal beliefs and convictions or even much more concrete: do you believe in the principle of "an eye for an "eye" or do you, like I do, believe that that is as anachronistic as slavery or blood feuds?
Speaking of blood feuds, if retribution is to be the central principle, why not be consistent and return the right to execute the sentence to the party most directly affected, the family of the victim? To avoid the more unpleasant aspects of traditional self-administed justice, of course only after an independent jury has returned a guilty verdict after a trial due process.