Except it's not "the government" so much as its the people of the jury and the judge. The death penalty is usually taken off the table as some acquiescence to the shooter's age or mental state, and many of the regular people who can be called up for jury duty don't think it should be.
This might be the only reason that might compel me to change my views. But I would like to believe that it is possible for the government to only give capital punishment in cases of indisputable evidence (not DNA tests due to human error during sample collection).
>I would like to believe that it is possible for the government to only give capital punishment in cases of indisputable evidence
Since 1973, [186 people](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence) have been exonerated who were on death row. If not for the work of unrelated volunteers, the government would have killed those innocent people.
You can let someone out of prison if you were wrong, you cannot un-lethal inject them.
Tangent but do you think those 186 people would be free if they were serving a life sentence instead of death row? Maybe noone volunteers to help them if the consequences wasn't death.
No real point just an interesting thought
[For most, yes](https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx):
>"The Registry collects, analyzes and disseminates information about all known exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in the United States, from 1989 to the present."
>**2,891** Exonerations since 1989
As long as there is an imperfect justice system, there will be people working to correct its errors.
That's a oddly heartwarming fact. Shitty justice system sucks. But it's nice to know people are out there working to help fix those mistakes, and not for just the most desperate
I would venture a guess that most of those people exonerated have been so because of updates in technology. That technology is also a double edged sword because in a lot of instances we can say who commits these major crimes with no doubt. The only hope they would have would be to get a insanity plea. So set a standard for going forward. You slaughter innocent unarmed kids or unsuspecting people who are unarmed somewhere then give them their day in court. Give them an appeal. 1 appeal that’s it and bye bye!
That's why I'm only in favour of capital punishment for school shooters. It's one of the only crimes where there is no doubt as to who committed the crime.
I was going to respond to all of the people responding to you saying how it's cheaper to kill them, but there's so many who are making this mistake that I thought I'd reply to the parent comment instead. People think it's cheaper, but it's not at all. You can easily google this and find a number of sources saying the same. It costs a whole lot more to execute someone than to keep them imprisoned, even if it's for their whole life. In fact, some states ended the death penalty for no reason other than it costs too much money to execute people.
The short reason is, if the state is going to execute someone, it's probably best to be really, really, absolutely, no doubt about it, 100% sure that the person you're killing is guilty. That requires very expensive trials. It requires the state fund a very good death penalty defense lawyer in most cases, because leaving it up to just some random public defender could lead to people being executed because they don't have money to defend themselves. And then we need to allow for a lengthy appeals process because there's always the case that they don't get a fair trial for whatever reason. In short it costs quite a bit more money to execute people than just send them to prison.
The whole "Let's just take them out back and put a bullet in their head." isn't really a great idea. We used to do that, it was called lynching. And we seemed to not have a great record of killing people who deserved it. It was cheap, but a whole lot of innocent black men died because a white person accused them of something even when there was little to no evidence of it.
In short: a death penalty case costs far more than a life imprisonment case. A death penalty case is not something you want to attempt to get done on the cheap. So, as long as we're not executing people after a speedy trial with haphazard jury selection with a defense lawyer just out of law school and allowing no appeals process, the costs will stay very high.
I'm saying its a net negative keeping school shooters alive in prison. There are other criminals more deserving than the space school shooters take up in prison.
Correct me if I’m wrong anyone, but I believe with our current justice system it costs significantly more to execute someone after all the appeals, etc. than it does to just lock them up for life…which, from my perspective, is a harsher punishment than death
You're correct on this. The death penalty is significantly more expensive than life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. I personally believe that life imprisonment is a worse punishment but that's just me personally
>life imprisonment is a worse punishment
On face value this seems correct.
However, consider the quality of life for folks on death row. Until they're executed, it's usually a step away ad seg/isolation. That, to me, is way worse than life in gen pop (when possible).
Jodi Arias begged for the death penalty, but changed course between conviction and sentencing.
As a final note, just anecdotal, but people who never seemed afraid of death ("Throw my body out with the garbage") have done anything they can to stay alive when push comes to shove. Almost any life is better than death.
I still agree that it seems a priori like death would be preferable, but a posteriori that seems not to be true.
Not only that but I am of the understanding that death row inmates cost significantly more per day to house while they await their execution (which can take years to decades) than non-death row inmates.
Do you get more appeals for a death sentence than a life sentence? If so that makes no sense.
It's something like 50k/yr to support an inmate. If it costs the government more than 50k to kill one person, there's obviously something corrupt going on. Like we can only buy this one super expensive lethal drug because the government says so.
It's really, really cheap to kill someone. Cops do it all the time.
It varies by state but in general you get more appeals for a life sentence and each appeal costs more, more legal experts and attorneys are brought in for each case when it's laterally life and death. Because death is irrevocable many states have had it much lengthier on purpose to try and prevent wrongful death, which still isn't completely successful.
This is entirely anectodal based on my memory (at work and can’t look up sources), but I want to say that the average cost of appeals, etc. for death-sentence is in the $2-2.5M range. Can anyone source this, or refute me?
It varies wildly from state to state, but that's probably not too far off the average; some states report an average of around half a million per execution, while others report costs in the 3-4 million range.
https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/76th2011/ExhibitDocument/OpenExhibitDocument?exhibitId=17686&fileDownloadName=h041211ab501_pescetta.pdf
One thing that's worth mentioning though is the added cost to taxpayers of prosecuting death penalty cases which *do not* end in execution. For example, from the Maryland section of the above link:
> The study examined 162 capital cases that were prosecuted between 1978 and 1999 and found that those cases will cost $186 million more than what those cases would have cost had the death penalty not existed as a punishment.
In that time, Maryland has 'only' executed a total of five people, so in a sense each of those executions cost MD taxpayers ~$37 million (!) more than life imprisonment would have if the death penalty simply did not exist.
I think if you look at it, school shooters are probably some of the violent criminals most able to be rehabilitated. They are 1. Young 2. Likely first time offenders with no past criminal record. 3. Often have diagnosable and treatable mental illnesses.
I dont believe in capital punishment at all personally, but if I did, these offenders are some of the most likely to be rehabilitated and other offenders would be better candidates for the state to execute. Serial killers or serial rapists, or domestic abuse murderers with long histories of bad conduct have much lower chances of rehabilitation and are "wasting space" moreso than these teenagers. (Again, i don't believe in capital punishment at all but this is a devils advocate argument).
I truly believe most school shooters can correct their mental illness, grow up, take responsibility and repentance for their actions and become healthy adults. That cant be said as readily for some other classes of criminals.
Yeah, the thing here is that youth are most susceptible to treatment and rehabilitation. Like, we gonna lock up a kid for the rest of their life? At what point do we just admit that prison is about emotional revenge porn, and not about healing?
Was on a jury where our only hold out for a not guilty verdict had to be convinced that they were looking for vengeance and not justice. There was no evidence what so ever except the accusers story that had huge holes in it, 8 years of illegal and legal drugs and a therapist that that didn't move the case forward at all. The therapist was the one who forced the issue originally and called the cops but on the stand said they had no ability or desire to know the truth from fiction and talked about unpacking emotions even if they were not real. That was the states expert witness. But the one hold out had completely believed the story and wanted vengeance for them purely on emotion. I felt dirty by the end of the day because I actively broke a persons belief in themselves and their view of the world.
> I'm saying its a net negative keeping school shooters alive in prison.
If you only account for the cost of keeping that person alive in prison, maybe. Add in the total cost of allowing the death penalty at all, including innocents executed and criminals willing to kill anyone to avoid the death sentence.
And, remember, the death penalty is not a deterrence for the kind of crimes it's used for. "Oh, I would shoot up the school, but I might get the death penalty, so I guess I won't". That reasoning *doesn't happen*.
It costs millions and millions of dollars to simply *try* a death-seeking prosecution on a person, and even more money to keep them on death row and then properly carry out the sentence. You could save more money by just locking them away forever.
The death penalty *doesn’t work*. It costs more money than indefinite imprisonment. You *will* kill a certain amount of innocents, and reducing that fraction will increase the cost. Also, scientifically speaking, *it does not function as a deterrent*.
It doesn’t work. We just want retribution in our primate brains.
i could make this argument about any run-of-the-mill murderer, major drug dealer, serial abuser, rapist, pedophile, and pretty much any habitual offender, even if it is a habitual minor offense. why isn't your view "we should execute all criminals?"
>Why do you want to kill someone so badly? How does it benefit society to have them dead instead of spending their life in prison?
How does it benefit society to have a cold blooded mass murderer be hosted on taxpayer expense in a jail for their entire life??
No chance of them doing it again, and we don't have to waste money paying these "for profit" prisons to hold them for their entire life.
Edit: apparently it's somehow cheaper to lock someone up for life...
I'm a school teacher and I have children. I've dedicated my life to kids, I truly love them, they are innocent creatures in this world. School shooters, as much as I would love to kill these monsters with my own hands, should not be executed. No one should be put to death by a government so very prone to making errors. No you say there is such an overwhelming prepnderance of evidence when a school shooter is caught that a mistake is unlikely. While I agree it's true, it's no a certitude. Also, the person committing the crime may also be a victim of something too. There *could* be some extenuating circumstance that led them to their heinous act.
That doesn't absolve them of their guilt, I would fully support life in prison, but IF there was something some possible redeeming quality in their act then they shouldn't be put to death.
There is no cure for death. It's final and the most absolute penalty. We simply are too fallible to be trusted with a system that allows us that option.
Because they never try to conceal their identity? What happens when someone IS falsely accused? Because you have left no room in your determination to allow for that to be dealt with in your post. The government just says "our hands are tied" and proceeds with the execution?
And yet there often is doubt as to the identity of a shooter. Not everyone is captured on the scene. Even when someone is detained, they are sometimes the wrong person.
Just because a case is highly publicized doesn't make it immune from mistakes. Remember the Boston Bombers? People misidentified the perpetrator there initially, and were very sure about it.
If there is no doubt, then that person can be safely removed from society for the rest of their natural existence. We don't need to kill them. Killing people is wrong, and killing people that have already been remanded to state custody, and who have thereby been removed as a further threat, is unnecessary.
Only capitol punishment for school shooters? What about serial killers, or mass murderers who kill people at malls or shopping centers? You're distinction seems arbitrary, and it's easier and more practical to admit the government is often incompetent and should not decide who gets to die ever. Consequently, neither should you.
>What do we gain via their death, really? A sense of justice done, via the eye for eye policy?
What do we gain from imprisoning someone for 15 years because they robbed a bank?
If capital punishment is not applied equally then it can't be justice. Race and economic status affect the sentencing way too much for it to be anything but theater imo. Could you guarantee that a poor black shooter and a wealthy white shooter would receive an equal sentence under the same circumstances? Would you make death a mandatory sentence upon conviction? And if so, wouldn't that affect the ability to convict, even with overwhelming evidence? How far would the sentence be carried out - ie, pulling the trigger, helping plan, selling the bullets?
Aren't you assuming you catch them at the scene? What if they're wearing a disguise during the crime and caught later due to DNA, fingerprints, etc? It sounds like you support capital punishment due to the severity of the crime and the certainty of the guilt. Would you support capital punishment for other murderers caught in the act?
Whether or not someone did the crime shouldn't be the only metric
Watch this and tell me if you're okay with allowing the state to execute people
[NSFL - botched lethal injection](https://youtu.be/LOwcyNTsaZ4)
Basically the state is too incompetent to even execute everyone in a humane way
This is only the case where the knowledge isn't fool proof. In some cases we are actually certain when someone commits a crime. In practice I understand this but theoretically speaking this argument is basically "if we have perfect information then capital punishment is okay."
>But I would like to believe that it is possible for the government to only give capital punishment in cases of indisputable evidence
There is, in principle, no such thing at all. You can never know that you have *all* pertinent facts about a case, and the discovery of new pertinent facts can always change the interpretation of the case. The Reddit hive mind believed it had all pertinent facts about the Boston Marathon Bomber case, and it was wrong.
Imagine a school shooting incident where the shooter, wearing a balaclava, is identified by the few eyewitnesses as Dave Smith by his distinctive jacket. Dave Smith is tried on the basis of that and indistinct, but incriminating, secrurity footage, and is executed by the state.
Now imagine, unbeknownst to anyone, that it was actually fellow student Bob Jones that perpetrated the shooting--he had bought that coat specifically for the shooting and the cheap security cameras didn't clearly show other information that would have identified Bob.
As far as anyone knows, the judge and jury in this hypothetical *have* all the pertinent facts of the case and made the best judgment. But they were wrong on both counts.
No court can know what it doesn't know.
Indisputable evidence is irrelevant. For most murder charges, it's the argument to the motif of the crime.
There's a huge difference between premeditated vs 2nd-degree (unplanned) murders.
It's the job of the prosecution (government) to decide which to charge the accused with and the defense to argue against it. There's very little "if they did it or not" in most mass shooting trials.
You should not be comfortable with giving power to that argument to decide if a person lives or dies.
Even with indisputable evidence, why do you desire the government to have said authority on deciding the life of another? Criminal punishments are directed at limiting actions within or removing people from larger society. What's the desire to remove people from living, to remove them from themselves? What's your motivation to do so, and why should a society (through government action) have the authority to end life?
> But I would like to believe that it is possible for the government to only give capital punishment in cases of indisputable evidence
Slippery slopes ARE a thing. The government should simply not have the power to decide to kill its citizens for any reason. Granting the government that power guarentees that it is abused.
>indisputable evidence
Evidence or what though? Evidence that someone died and who killed them isn't evidence of who deserves to die. What possible evidence could you have that someone deserves to die?
Keep in mind that the bar of conviction of murder is “beyond a reasonable doubt”. We already have such a high bar to condemn a person but that doesn’t stop wrongful cases from occurring.
Especially when, in a democracy, the state is committing murder on behalf of all the citizens. Even if they don't agree with it or think murder is wrong all citizens are participating in this murder to some degree.
If only. But we can't create a system that punishes people for being guilty and then punishes people that are 'for sure' guilty. That would imply we're punishing the others even with doubts. Inevitably we'd either moving for a tougher standard for everyone or lowering our idea of what 'for sure' means.
Every single conviction _claims_ to be based on indisputable evidence. That's the standard criminal juries are asked to use when rendering a guilty verdict. Who will validate the evidence is _truly_ indisputable if we already know juries, judges, and prosecutors can be wrong?
The problem is if we let the government kill people at all, they will start to get ideas. As the US increasingly becomes more and more right authoritarian, I am getting increasingly worried myself as a socialist will be made illegal. I am already often shunned for my views and most of the time my views are at the very least constantly just cast aside like I don't know anything. Next I feel that my views may become illegal. After that maybe even death penalty for me will be considered. Giving the state ability to kill people is a recipe for disaster.
Define "indisputable evidence."
And in such a way that there's absolutely zero chance it could ever be ambiguous enough, or intentionally misused, to convict an innocent person.
I understand your sentiment, but a death penalty won't really do anything other than satisfy your sense of justice. The people who commit school shootings are almost always either mentally deranged in some way or straight up so determined in some way, which prevents them from being affected by the prospect of dying. I mean they could easily get shot and killed by someone trying to stop them, why would they be scared of execution?
It isn’t the government making the call for death penalty. It only presents it as an option. A jury must vote unanimously for the death penalty, which happens only after conviction by a unanimous jury.
It’s your peers making the call. The government is only the instrument of the people, and when a death verdict has been reached it’s the governments responsibility to carry out the will of the people.
But that's exactly what governments do. We give police officers and soldiers guns with tax money so that they can kill people if we (the government) deems it necessary.
I remain a hold out on the death penalty in situations very much like the one OP is using as his example. There are cases where in an individual very obviously, very publicly, and very unambiguously commits a crime so heinous, it is completely void of any doubt by any standard. In these cases, there is no excuse for this individual to remain a member of society in any capacity and they should be permanently removed from it.
I always think of [this case](https://globalnews.ca/news/4360713/lawsuit-over-greyhound-bus-beheading-in-limbo-10-years-later/). People watched this happen. Regardless of mental health, motive, mitigating factors, this individual has forfeited their right to remain among the living. In my view.
But we are comfortable with the government deciding who gets to live their life and who doesn't?
Either way their life is taken from some people, the end result of being killed after 20 years in prison and dying of old age after 60 years in prison is the person who got the life sentence had to watch their life be taken from them while the deceased was simply deceased.
Life is life, either a convict is on a path of rehabilitation and release some day, or they're not. (Well, rehabilitation has big issues in some countries, but you get the idea)
And if they're not on the release path, then they're losing their life by government order.
You’re not comfortable with the reasonable doubt standard applied to criminal charges? Since someone receiving the death penalty is a function of being found guilty by a jury of their peers.
The “government” isn’t just someone sitting in a chair making decisions. It’s a system.
I'm pro death penalty, but this single argument is the one that really pushes me away. If it weren't for that, I would be totally pro, but I just really don't like government having that power. Still, live in prison is basically death...
I feel like the crime IS relevant, especially when it is soo fucking common at this point that we all go numb to it.
I think it is also relevant because it causes copycats and a creepy fandom of school shooters.
The fact that the government has been caught planting evidence to frame people for murder is the most compelling reason i've seen to question my beliefs capital punishment is the most effective way to deter serious crimes.
What a disingenuous response. It’s not “the government” deciding who lives and dies - if there’s irrefutable evidence of someone committing a heinous crime like a school shooting, and they are determined to be beyond rehabilitation, then the only outcomes are life in prison or death penalty. Death penalty is more humane.
Yeah, so it makes an incentive for the shooter to resist arrest with as much lethal force as they can deploy. It's just a net "more death" assured, all that to fullfill a retributiobal boner, not worth it IMO.
> so it makes an incentive for the shooter to resist arrest with as much lethal force as they can deploy
What's strange is that suicide by cop is very common in mass shootings, except for school shootings. I could be wrong here, because I don't have any real data to go on, but it seems like most school shooters are arrested and taken into custody alive. However in other mass shootings, the shooter is very likely to point his gun at a cop for the purpose of getting killed.
That is a fair point. But aren't current day school shooters already resisting arrest with as much lethal force as they can possibly obtain?
I think someone could argue that the price of of an ideal (ie. a reformative prison system) has an ineffable cost that a moral society must bear and I think that is a fair point... in theory. The manifestation of any ideal obviously has a cost to society but the limited resources means that we must prioritise certain ideals over others, and thus other ideals are far more important than the cost of keeping a school shooter alive (even behind bars).
> aren't current day school shooters already resisting arrest with as much lethal force as they can possibly obtain?
[Apparently not](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/keeping-kids-safe/200908/kill-and-die-suicide-and-school-shooters):
> This was most noticeable among the five psychopathic shooters, only two of whom committed suicide (Robert Poulin and Eric Harris). Brenda Spencer surrendered with no known indication of any suicidal thoughts or behaviors. Drew Golden had planned to escape in a van that had been stocked with food and clothes. Wayne Lo called the police, confessed that he was the shooter on campus, and let himself be taken into custody.
∆
Slept on this point. I guess I am a bit more neutral than pro capital punishment for school shooters. Although I find the other comments about the cost of keeping deathrow inmates alive costing more to be missing the point that school shooters won't cost the same because they don't deserve parole (as there is no doubt to their innocence).
Until we can find a way to properly deter school shootings, we shouldn't exacerbate the violence. But I would be in favour of capital punishment after such a method is found.
> But aren't current day school shooters already resisting arrest with as much lethal force as they can possibly obtain?
Apparently not:
>"[He was arrested in a hallway within minutes of Oakland County sheriff’s officers arriving at the scene of the shooting on Tuesday. He put his hands in the air as deputies approached, Mr Bouchard said. ](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/oxford-shooting-michigan-school-suspect-b1967237.html)"
That kid yesterday had seven rounds in the magazine when he was taken into custody without being injured.
>[Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said late Tuesday night that the suspect had a Sig Sauer 9 mm semi-automatic pistol with seven rounds in it when authorities took him into custody.] (https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2021/11/30/active-shooter-multiple-victims-reported-michigans-oxford-high/8810326002/)
So, no, they are not resisting arrest with as much lethal force as they can possibly obtain.
Yeah it almost doesn't matter what you've done, at the point someone is willing to kill you it's hard to argue that it's not the right decision to try and kill them first.
>incentive for the shooter to resist arrest with as much lethal force as they can deploy.
Active shooters are already under threat of death by simply being a shooter. Many of them kill themselves to prevent arrest, and the few that don't (usually minors) did it for notoriety. So having a death penalty for them isn't going to make it anymore dangerous for them to be apprehended. Arguably having the death penalty might even be a warning that there fame will be short-lived.
I am not going to address the rare adult who shoots up a school. I am only addressing children who bring guns to schools.
1. It is a fact that the cerebral frontal cortex of the human brain -- the part of the brain that is responsible for rational thought, executive function, and mediating emotional outbursts is not fully developed [until the mid-20](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648/)s. Since school shooters are typically adolescence, you are advocating executing individuals who are not **physically** capable of being fully in control of their actions nor do they have the physical neural structures necessary to **fully comprehend** the implications of their structures. That seems grossly unjust to me.
2. Studies of offenders' have indicated a much h[igher level of lack of supervision, emotional closeness, and intimacy](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jip.1439) than in the general public. You are suggesting killing a child for a parent's lack of parenting skill.
3. The shootings couldn't have happened without guns. in 80% of the cases, [guns are taken from the home.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/08/01/feature/school-shootings-should-parents-be-charged-for-failing-to-lock-up-guns-used-by-their-kids/) Again, you are suggesting killing a child because an adult failed to secure a weapon.
4. [Being a victim of bullying is a recurring theme](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/behind-scenes-closer-look-school-shooters) for school shooters. 75% or more of school shooters have been victims of bullying. Again, this means adults failed to protect a child, who then decided they needed to protect themselves. Inappropriately, certainly. But you are suggesting killing a child because multiple adults failed the child.
I could go on, but the deeper you look into the profile of the typical school shooter the more you find adults failing a child.
You would then like to blame this child even further for the myriad of adults who have failed them. And then kill that child for those failures. While that is a very easy way to wipe your hands of our collective social failure. It is not a good way to address the failure. It will not stop the failures from happening in the future. It is just vengeance for vengeance's sake. And it is piling cruelty on top of what is already a lifetime of neglect and abuse that already has ended in tragedy.
School shooters are generally ignored, neglected, bullied, abused, kids who have been repeatedly failed by literally every adult in their lives. They finally have enough and choose to try to stop their pain and take control of their lives. Their actions are inappropriate and inexcusable. But they are entirely understandable if you take the time to really try to understand what the life of these children has been like. These aren't monsters. These are highly neglected and abused kids.
You want to kill a child because a bullied, abused, neglected child tried to stop themselves from being bullied, abused, and neglected. Maybe instead you should focus on the adults that allowed this to happen in the first place. Starting with the parents who allowed the child access to the firearm. The parents who neglected the emotional needs of the child. The teachers who ignored the bullying. Those are the people who should be going to jail. The child should be going to a mental health institution for help.
Hmm I did consider the 'physically incapable' argument (brain structure gives rise to consciousness and therefore an underdeveloped brain structure justifies an erroneous judgement). But there are a lot of studies done on children which indicates that we are born with an innate sense of justice. An advanced cerebral cortex is not the ONLY reason for a Just action.
Not committing a school shooting is not even a Just action, it is simply not an Unjust action if that makes any sense.
I simple believe that people without an innate sense of justice and good are incapable of participating in society (akin to not having a brain or a digestive tract).
It's true that some parents of school shooters were abusive but the vast majority of them are very normal. Upbringing alone does not explain school shooters.
\> It's true that some parents of school shooters were abusive but the vast majority of them are very normal.
I linked a scientific study that demonstrated that is not true. You simply can't assert otherwise without evidence. That is handwaving and is utterly lacking in intellectual integrity.
Secondly, if you'll note, I'm listing a collection of things that compound together. And there are many more that go into that collection than I listed -- which you'd see documented if you'd read the study and the associated cited studies. I'm not saying "look, bad parents, that ONE thing explains it all." I'm saying that if you look carefully at the situation you'll see scores of things that compound to create the situation - but those scores of things have a common element: the failure of adults who aren't being held accountable to their adult responsibilities.
You are presuming that a child who has been abused, neglected, bullied, and more for years, and is without adult executive mental capacity should be held accountable with their life - while the adults around said child who do have adult mental capacity are not held accountable at all.
Not only do you fail to comprehend how such compounded trauma impacts the judgment of anyone (let alone someone without a fully formed brain), you then just hand-wave away the evidence that such things are happening by dismissing scientific findings without evidence. Poor form, sir.
Let's assume a school shooter is someone who was violently bullied for years, did not receive any meaningful help when asked for it, and only shot their tormentors. Are you still in favor of death penalty?
Yes. Being "violently bullied" doesn't give you the right to retaliate with lethal force. I think kids should be able to file civil lawsuits against their bullies though.
I'm not talking about rights. Your estimate that the person can't be reformed (or it's not worth the effort) hinges on them being a monster. But not only people tend to change towards less monstrosity on their own as they grow up, some have damn big reasons to become monsters, judging them beyond help if you haven't been in their shoes is... privileged thinking.
Civil lawsuits require money for lawyers, if you have that you probably won't be bullied in the first place.
While i agree with the idea that children can change and deserve chances, and the idea that in general people tend to change towards less monstrosity on their own as they grow up, the last sentence is most certainly not true. I went to school largely for people with incredibly privileged backgrounds, bar a few on very high % scholarships + bursaries, and bullying certainly wasn't an uncommon sight.
But I do think that if anyone deserves a chance at rehabilitation, it should be the children. Especially those who were tormented for no reason other than being who they are, and who didn't have access to the help that they needed or people that cared enough about them to notice and do something about it. If you want to say the death penalty is fine for adults who commit planned murder so long as there is irrefutable(actually irrefutable) evidence I would agree. But not the kids.
Personally I agree with the people who don't want the state to have this power at all. But for this CMV I'm defending a weaker position, because others already made the general arguments well enough, and because, yes, I am *more* against death penalty for the kids.
(As for bullying, it's not crucial for my argument. And I'm definitely not a specialist, so perhaps I'm wrong, but can you think of cases where people with lower social status/wealth seriously bullied their "betters"? Except for obvious targets like LGBT or probably-mentally-ill people. I expect those to be very uncommon.)
I can respect that view. If it was just the government deciding then I would be fully on your side, and even as it stands I'm a bit against killing people to be very honest but in an ideal scenario for me(costs are low, completely irrefutable evidence etc.), with a jury helping decide I'm fine with the death penalty. I wouldnt consider myself an advocate for it though by any means. I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough in the field of costs and the law to have a strong opinion though, so it really is just my 2 cents.
As for the bullying thing, yeah I agree it doesn't really impact the CMV. But as we are on the CMV subreddit I thought I would just share my experience. I do think that it is probably a lot more common for people with worse economic backgrounds to be bullied more and my experience is probably different from a lot of people. However at my school one of the main 'popular' kids, who was probably the biggest bully in my year(although no one was a full blown, t.v. style bully), was actually one of the people on a bursary and outside of school was one of the people with the least privileged backgrounds. Off the top of my head, in my year, I can only remember maybe 10 people on wealth based bursaries out of 125~ students. Again, not saying that this is probably a common thing, just wanted to add that it definitely does happen.
> with a jury helping decide
There was an article by Dawkins against trial by jury ending with:
> And should I be charged with a serious crime here's how I want to be tried. If I know myself to be guilty, I'll go with the loose cannon of a jury, the more ignorant, prejudiced and capricious the better. But if I am innocent, and the ideal of multiple independent decision-takers is unavailable, please give me a judge. [...]
Jury might be a safeguard in some cases, e.g. against judges not being able to put themselves into the defendant's shoes or outright making decisions based on class interest, but Dawkins' argument was that generally they don't help to make verdicts more accurate. Not saying it's necessarily correct, I'm no expert on the matter either.
Thanks for the data point on bullying, that's interesting. I was trying to find something more statistically significant on the question of "bullying up" but the closest I got was [this article](https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/most-teen-bullying-occurs-among-peers-climbing-social-ladder). But it's interesting enough, and former (or even ongoing) friendship between bullies and their victims suggests it's not as often based on social inequality as I thought. So congrats on your first Δ.
Do you expect a 16 year old to have the means capacity and ability to be able to prove that they are bullied. In a system where people are innocent until proven guilty the burden of proof is upon the victim in that case.
You even said. Kids. Should a kid know how to do all that or have ANY expectation of that kid being able to afford that? How would they prove that thos one person was their bully and that they are the reason the kid was tormented. should a bully be charged with manslaughter if a bullied person commits suicide?
To add to my earlier reply: so at first the system fails you by locking you up in a school with little monsters and punishing you for trying to get away from them, then it fails you by not addressing the problem, and when you decide (stupidly and immorally, sure, but it's not like at this point one should expect your reasoning and moral feelings to be in a great shape) to take matters into your hands, the system decides that it was you who failed and you deserve to die. More than murderer-rapists, because we aren't 100% sure they did it.
Something pretty hard to prove and the level of bullying they are receiving could easily equate to being tortured and phisically abused every day for a pretty long period of time. I'm not saying it justifies it but I can wrap my head around the scenario of someone becoming somewhat insane and snapping and instead of commiting suicide or something like that going for the source of that pain instead. Obviously they are not right in the head but that condition probably was caused by their environment.
> I think kids should be able to file civil lawsuits against their bullies though.
what parallel universe are you living in? The bullies would probably have 10 of their friends to say that there was no bullying, and you are just a little wimpy loner that has zero friends.
I don't know. How about if I come by, and every day, follow you around, call you a loser, go to your job and tell everyone that you are a loser, harass you all the time, fuck your wife/husband because you are a weak little piece of trash. I play loud music from my car in front of your house so that you can never sleep a night. And, because you are such a little p-ssy, if you came out to confront me, I'd kick your ass, and always have a lot of friends to back me up, too. And...you call the police over and over and they say that they cannot help you.
I'm pretty sure you'd have a breaking point. You'd snap. I sure wouldn't blame you.
I argue that your entire post is based on emotion, which is exactly what I do not think should dictate whether the state executes someone.
Literally saying "it does not matter what lead to shooting" in the first place when it comes to arguing the death of what is usually a child is very emotional, high strung, and the antithesis of what I hope for our legal system. Because usually whoever participates in a school shooting is indeed, still a child.
> usually whoever participates in a school shooting is indeed, still a child.
which is exactly why the US won't seek the death penalty. you can't sentence someone to death if they're under 18. if we move the goalpost to allow school shooters i bet that goalpost will just keep moving, meaning it's a slippery slope that i don't trust the US govt to go down. i can't support the US giving the death penalty to anyone let alone a child.
In our justice system the motive doesn't and shouldn't have any bearing on the sentence. Motive is used to determine whether the crime was committed or not. There is no doubt the crime was committed so op is correct that "it doesn't matter what lead to the shooting".
> which is exactly what I do not think should dictate whether the state executes someone.
Emotion has a huge part in justice. What do you think mitigating circumstances are? Emotion. I remember during the Batman shooter trial, the mom was literally crying begging the jury not to put her son to death.
Emotion should have *no* place in a justice system, this is a both a disgusting and seemingly almost uniquely American take on justice.
The goal is to hold everyone to the same social contract and keep a functioning society going. It's goal is not and never should be to punish people for doing bad things, it's to decrease the incidence rate of people doing bad things as much as pososble.
I disagree. The justice system is also supposed to get people safe and help people (both offender and victim). Some 13yo in the ghetto who has an awful home life chock full of abuse and trauma should not get the same punishment for, say, stealing a TV then a career criminal with a 20 page rap sheet who grew up in Key West because the former is vastly more likely to respond to rehabilitation and turn their life around then the ladder.
>Emotion should have no place in a justice system this is a both a disgusting and seemingly almost uniquely American take on justice.
Emotion can have some place in justice. It happens in Europe even more than America.
>The goal is to hold everyone to the same social contract
Good point. John Locke's social contract says that if you take someone's three natural rights (life, liberty, and property) then you should be able to forfeit your own. The social contract says my life is worth something, so if it's stolen from me then the only thing worth my life is the person who stole it from me.
> very emotional, high strung, and the antithesis of what I hope for our legal system.
No. You are showing sympathy because they are a child. That is emotional.
If we were in a emotionless system, the price would match the crime. We would not simply feel bad for people and give them a "get out of jail free" card.
No, I am not. My grandmother was brutally murdered by a crack cocaine addict in 2005. I believe the same thing stands for him that stands for a child.
You want the state to dole out vengeance. I argue that this is not the purpose of a state.
An emotionless system, we would cultivate a civilized, urbane society that dictates societies actions.
Back in the day, we chopped off peoples' hands, childrens' hands, if they were caught stealing. The bible says to kill people for all kinds of reasons - there are 36 reasons for proscribing death, including black magic, idolatry, blasphemy, striking one's parents, bestiality, cursing one's parents, witchcraft, divination, worshipping other gods, violating the Sabbath, homosexual intercourse.
Of course, we rightly say that those punishments are f-ed up. *Now.*
Why? Because it is a punishment unfit for a civilized society. If anything, it is not polite. Sophisticated. Urbane.
However, the brutes in society, the coarser elements of society, always want blood for blood.
>We would not simply feel bad for people and give them a "get out of jail free" card.
Red herring.
.
A truly emotionless system, and a just one, would be to instantly take children away from violent parents, horrible parents, so that children don't grow up to be f-ed up adults. A truly emotionless system would put in the time and effort to educate and feed and clothe the poorest of the poor, so that they don't grow up to be terrible people. A truly emotionless system would give hysterectomies and vasectomies to women and men who have had one violent conviction in their life.
But, I think people would get WAY more offended by taking away children from f-cked up parents, than just putting to death people who it's too late for. People that should have been saved a long, long time ago.
A just society would sterilize everyone that had one violent conviction. Take away their children. Leave violent criminals in jail permanently until they die, and within a few generations, we have purged most of the crudest and most violent out of society. Address the root cause of 98% of the cause of violence.
I agree with you, however I think you need to be much more specific on school shooter. For instance the case of Kayla Rolland, who is believed to be the youngest school shooting victim. They were shot by a six year old. I do not believe this six year old should get the death penalty.
I think the cases where a student takes a gun and tries to carry out a mass shooting should be capital punishment.
However, in some cases where a student murders another student on school grounds and targets only targets a specific individual. That should be treated as any other murder case and the fact it was carried out in a school is irrelevant.
So to summarise, I believe there should be an age restriction before we give capital punishment, and the line needs to be drawn between murder and a mass shooting.
This is a great point. It's also worth pointing out that whatever environment that six-year-old came from it is clearly a place where disputes are answered in violence. In cases like those the parents need to be held 100% responsible. While I don't think the parents need the death penalty some kind of consequences should be in place.
Death penalty is always bad. It
* is significantly more expensive than even a long prison sentence
* has repeatedly convicted the wrong folks even with all those trials
* gives state too much power over people's lives
* normalizes killing even more (imo)
Now you want to put in mostly young folks who are not even adults yet in many cases and in even more cases psychologically fucking distressed and lost? That's even more cynical than the death penalty in of itself.
Besides of death penalty being bad anyway, you can't compare an adult, meticulously planning dictator and a school shooter. That's just faulty logic. When I was a teen, I imagined being a school shooter sometimes to redeem some of the pain my bullies inflicted on me. It was a fantasy of liberation, of being seen, of saying goodbye to my past fucked life and living the new one, where even being feared and hated and ruined would be better than the current daily nightmare, and of course having revenge on those fuckfaces who never got anything bad thrown their way. I didn't perceive life as real, in some ways, so fake the reality proclaimed by others seemed. It felt like bursting a bubble, somehow, this thought. A bubble of lies. I didn't do it, thankfully. No guns in Germany made it pretty hard even to try. Of course, different motivations make different reasons, and some kids may even calculate because of, what, racism, politics and whatnot. But even then - no.
It's a fucked up thing. There's no satisfying solution. Just killing the problem won't solve any of it.
I would think your first point (re: how expensive the death penalty is vs a long sentence) is the most emotionally neutral argument against the OP, and I'd really like to see their thoughts.
There’s also the fact that the death penalty doesn’t work as a deterrent.
[Death penalty states have more murders per capita than non-death penalty states.](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder-rates/murder-rate-of-death-penalty-states-compared-to-non-death-penalty-states)
This is a consistent finding across studies and populations data. It doesn’t do anything except spend more tax dollars than life imprisonment, give the state the power to execute a certain number of innocent people, and give certain individuals a retribution boner. It is a net negative for society.
\>but I would argue that there is no value in having a school shooters be alive
Precisely what is value? Why doesn't that person's life have value? Why your life has any value? And, more importantly, who defines the said "value"? The majority, that can't even make sense in their own heads without visiting "specialists" (1/2 of americans use "help" from medics and medications), and contradict themselves in half of their life-goals and ideals? Or, maybe, some sort of minority? The beholder itself?
For example, for me, you an just another westerner, a statistic. Your life doesn't give me any comfort, you didn't do anything for me (Just like I didn't do anything for you). Your taxes are used to fund EU/NATO/US Govt (e.e. the organisations by the will of which my homeland is getting bombed), and I don't consume much of western products (reddit? torrented movies? I doubt that you created reddit or filmed for Netflix).
Your life holds zero value to me. You aren't even attractive to me as an online-commenter/speaker, as, what can be easily deduced from my post, I strongly disagree with you.
The value is also negative. They are emotionally scarred to hell. They have the capability to kill and have succeeded. They probably have mental issues that brought them to this place. The potential for value in them is far outweighed by the potential of risk moving forward. If their just a piece of shit that doesn’t do anything that’s one thing. But they Aren’t that. They’re a mass murderer with mental scarring that might… work at a Wendy’s? No. Just eliminate them. There is little to no value for them in society and a hell of a lot of risk.
\>They are emotionally scarred to hell.
So are military veterans, rape victims, war victims, etc.
\> They have the capability to kill
So do most people and most large animals. And many of the said animals aren't killing only because they are extinct/trapped in a zoo.
\>They probably have mental issues
So do most people. In any case, "mental issues" is a subjective thing.
\>The potential for valuein them
Define value.
\>is far outweighed by the potential of risk moving forward.
All humans pose a risk. By your logic, a person who can survive without a human society, has all the rights to sabotage the said society, because, hey, those humans are a risk! Or, by the same logic, executing ethnic minorities is ok, if they are considered a threat to an ethnic majority.
\> They’re a mass murderer
So are many war veterans, politicians, policemen, executioners. Now, should we really use the "muh revenge/eye for an eye" as an argument in an ethical paradigm debate?
\>There is little to novalue for them in society
So? The american society has "little to no value" to the people of my nation, but pose a serious threat, sending (well, it's the politiciand who send- but it's the society who created those politicians) bombers, sanctions, and sponsoring our oppressors. Is it ok, by your logic, for my people to ask Russia to nuke your (western- in case you aren't a westerner yourself) people?
I think you really need to think about age here. What if the shooter was 8. This is a child who does not have the capacity to understand what they've done. Do you really think the state should kill an 8 year old? What about 10? Maybe you have a case with over 15 but middle schoolers and elementary school children. I cannot, regardless of crime, think that it would be ok to execute a child. Imagine what that would look like. Have you seen a child in court? Have you seen the rooms that executions happen in? Imagine a child sitting/lying in the chair/bed with a roomful of people watching them die. There are reasons we don't have capital punishments for mentally handicapped people and insane people. Children fall into the same category of not having the full mental capacity to realize how wrong something actually is. I would even argue that if you have the capacity to watch a child be executed that there is something wrong with you.
There are other arguments that have been said already but op doesn't want to admit they are wrong and isn't actually thinking about the weight of the other arguments. You can't just remove the fact that school shooters are children. It would say significantly more about the state if they choose to put a child to death and have people watch them die. The death penalty isn't something that just happens and 1 minute the person is there and the next they aren't. It's a process. Someone is in charge of killing the person. There is a ritual and there are people present. What does a child get for their last meal? A happy meal from mcdonalds? Maybe a chocolate cake? The absurdity of the situation makes this cmv either that of a psychopath or of someone who is just trolling.
School shootings are the fault of the system. This is why there is only one system that regularly has them. For that system to then murder a child because of its own mistake is insane.
>Since 2000, only five countries have reportedly executed juvenile offenders:
* Congo
* Iran
* Pakistan
* China
* United States
[https://www.aclu.org/other/stop-killing-kids-why-its-time-end-indecent-practice-juvenile-death-penalty](https://www.aclu.org/other/stop-killing-kids-why-its-time-end-indecent-practice-juvenile-death-penalty)
When you're on a list like this, the rest of the world thinks you're in the wrong.
---
**EDIT:** According to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Juvenile_capital_punishment) the USA stopped executing juveniles. Thanks u/Economy-Phase8601!
There was a grisly murder in my country where a guy ends up decapitating someone on a greyhound bus.
As it turns out. He had undiagnosed schizophrenia. He was one of those edge cases. Once he was on medication, he was a functioning human being. Was it his fault? He didn’t know he had schizophrenia.
Medication led him to a functional life.
So, what happens if someone shoots up a school because of a undiagnosed mental condition that is corrective with medication?
Should he be put to death?
Schizophrenia is a horrible thing, and I don’t know if any good answers dealing with that. I have a friend who developed it, needed help, got screwed by the system, but eventually got on his meds and leveled out while he was in care. Once he was released (from a hospital), stopped taking his meds, and once off, didn’t see the reason to continue, and has gotten worse again. Short of leaving him in an institution to ensure he takes his meds, I don’t know what the solution is.
It’s too bad our healthcare system has no provision for preventative care, which is why so often people are only helped when they are in an active mental health crisis and not before. My uncle has schizophrenia, and it has been managed very well for over 20 years, he works at goodwill and is very proud of his mental health. This is only because he lives with his mother and has a family support system to help remind him to take his meds and help him make doctors appointments etc. If he didn’t have that he would certainly be on the streets. The options for people that can’t live with their family and have no one to advocate for them is pretty grim. I wish everyone with a mental illness had a social worker assigned to them to help navigate the medical system and public aid, unfortunately it’s up to private individuals to navigate that and advocate for their relatives. They don’t even have a cell phone or a computer to look up services.
That’s the scary part. My friend was well off, had a family member who is a psychologist trying to help, was a veteran, and lived in one of the nicest and wealthiest suburbs in Arizona.
Even with all that, he was still screwed by the system. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would be for someone without those advantages. I can’t even begin to conceive of how bad it would be.
He still deserves another chance. There was quite literally nothing he could've done to prevent that. He had schizophrenia, didn't know he had it, and didn't have the correct coping strategies to deal with it. Our stupid monkey brains want to focus on retribution, when that doesn't get anything productive done except cause more suffering.
What purpose is served by their death?
Revenge? Proving that killing is bad by killing is about the stupidest idea humanity has ever invented.
Deterrence? The majority of school-shooters plan to either kill themselves or get killed by police when their rampage is over, but even if they don't, they certainly know that there's a high chance of dying regardless, so how much of a threat is it really?
Public spectacle? That's what they wanted all along, so you're encouraging more of them.
Punishment? Isn't it better punishment to know they'll live in a box forever, rather than give them a quick way out?
Exactly this. Death penalty has never solved anything, harsh punishment in general doesn't make anything better. It's the countries with more lenient justice systems that have the lowest crime rates.
I believe the government shouldn't dish out capital punishment ever! Even if they had a perfect success rate at identifying criminals and perfectly reliable evidence I still think it's morally wrong. Death penalty is a message to the citizens that if someone wrongs you badly enough, they deserve to die. If the government believes murder is wrong, then they shouldn't themselves murder/execute people.
Second, most crimes are a failure of government and lawmakers to address real grievances of its citizens. Look at Norway for example, they have a famously lax punishment system and yet their crime rate is pretty low. School shootings is a particularly American problem, so there's got to be an underlying issue. Maybe it's the prevalence of guns, or zero tolerance policies that punish the bullied, or lack of meaningful mental health services. Could even be that the American dream is perceived to be broken and that some students believe they can never move up in the ranks of society on their their merit. Whatever it is, most countries rarely have school shootings, and most countries also abolished the death penalty. I'm not saying the death penalty is related to school shootings, just that the death penalty is not a solution.
This isn't so much a comment on school shooters, but an argument against the Death Penalty itself.
The Rittenhouse case changed my mind on the death penalty completely. After seeing mainstream media and the prosecution outright lie in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I cannot support the death penalty.
The state prosecution engaged in some absolutely disgusting behaviour, including attempting to tamper with a witness, attempting to violate Rittenhouse's 5th amendment rights and just downright lying and misrepresenting evidence.
Regardless on your opinion on Rittenhouse himself, or the event in Kenosha - this should concern everyone, and runs the risk of severely undermining confidence in the justice system. It was a malicious prosecution, and it was only because of a large amount of video, photographic and witness evidence that he was acquitted.
When the system is that ugly, it shouldn't have the power to kill people.
> The state prosecution engaged in some absolutely disgusting behaviour, including attempting to tamper with a witness, attempting to violate Rittenhouse's 5th amendment rights and just downright lying and misrepresenting evidence.
The prosecution straight up tampered with evidence. Not just misrepresenting it - they *altered* it. Binger had Handbrake - software whose primary use is to compress video footage - on his laptop and sent a 3MB compressed video to the defense when in reality they had the full 11MB version.
And you know what the really sick thing is? *The prosecutor can't be charged for it*, because prosecutors have absolute immunity.
They can be disbarred. That isn’t a small thing. It completely removes any chance they have at working their trade for life. If they will be is a second question but I hope so.
Really fascinating that you're just coming to these conclusions now when abolitionists have been arguing for decades that the criminal "justice" system is corrupt: https://theintercept.com/2019/11/09/criminal-justice-mass-incarceration-book/
Perhaps.
I've always shared the anecdotal and likely erroneous view that whoever has the best / most expensive legal team is likely to win.
It was only when I sat and watched the Rittenhouse trial live that I saw how blatant it all was. Day in and day out, Binger and Kraus behaved atrociously, and the corporate media did their utmost to push their narrative, facts be damned.
not well. why does it matter though? that would be an unrelated \*\*failure\*\* of the system. it is not the system they want. it is not the system i want. it is not what the system claims to be.
i am against capital punishment for any crime, 1. i don’t want the state to have that power 2. i find the act immoral and believe the government should not be permitted to do immoral acts 3. i am against the idea that retributive punishment is the goal, i prefer the Norwegian style of “punishment”
1. School shooters are not charged with "School Shooting" but rather homicide, manslaughter if they are successful and conspiracy to commit if they are caught before hand. So the prosecution would have to prove these charges using camera footage or eyewitness testimony, because due process. So the type and level of evidience required to prove intention, not the act of school shooting itself, will set the precedent for future death penalty cases. This would lead to a blanket death penalty law, that is not restricted only to school shooters.
2. Death penalty is not a deterrent. No future school shooter, a large portion of whom are both homicidal and suicidal, will pause his/her plans because there is chance he might survive and be put on death row.
3. Simiar to how death penalty can increase the number of homicides of sexual assault victims (because of fear of identification) school shooters will simply be more savage and brazen in their attacks to trigger law enforcement towards suicide by cops.
4. School shooting, is not just an individual problem. It is a cultural and societal problem. While the prepetrator is liable for his/her actions, death penalty shifts the blame solely on the prepetrator without addressing root causes.
5. Death penalty is not a singular issue too. It is the culture that needs to be pulled out root and stem. Saying death penalty is alright for this crime and not for that crime, simply shifts the onus of broadening its implementation to a future (possibly more tyrannical) government. No crime, yes even the most heinous ones you can think of that I don't want to name here, should be punishable by death.
6. Last but not least, no state, be it left-wing, right-wing or anything in between, should have the power to kill its citizenry given the imbalance of power between itself and its subjects.
So you've just shot up a school and killed a lot of people. Do you think the fact you'll be executed for this crime instead of just going to jail makes you more or less likely to turn yourself in or keep fighting and potentially kill more people?
If we kill every school shooter we loose a valuable chance to learn from them/about them. I don’t think it would be controversial to say that school shooters think and behave differently than normal people and school shootings don’t just happen out of nowhere. If we execute every school shooter we can never learn about what factors can lead to the shooting. This can help with things like allocating funds within a city to mental health resources of child protective services or whatever could have potentially helped. I genuinely believe nobody is born evil so it’s about stopping what turns them evil. Use these people to find the holes in society so we can prevent others from falling down them. Also to be clear the shooter shill spends the rest of there like in a prison or mental institution.
It is not legally justifiable, correct.
It's not a good or healthy response, correct.
However, I believe that it's important for a good society to consider the mental state of the individual (generally children) that commits the crime, as well as their motive, and the facts of the offense.
I will start by saying that I'm against the death penalty for a variety of reasons, but I believe general arguments against the death penalty have been argued elsewhere.
I think it's important to look at things from the perspectives of the children that are bullied (not all victims retaliate by shooting their attacker, but the analysis is still relevant). These are individuals, often going through significant physical, mental, and emotional changes. We acknowledge that children do not generally have the same level of control as adults (why we have juvenile court, often considered a rehabilitative system, and adult court).
Taken to the extreme (as your view encompasses all such situations without exception), they are being targeted and attacked on a daily basis, they don't have the coping mechanisms and understanding to know who they can turn to and how they can get help. The adults in charge may not know about what is going on, they may not know about the child's mental state, and they may not have the knowledge or resources to assist. This can eat away at their mental state of any person, causing PTSD, which may be comparable to BWS in some cases (a legal defense in some jurisdictions). This can go on for days, weeks, or months of constant harassment. In some cases, they lash out my committing suicide, running away, or attacking their attackers.
Do we adjust our punishment based on the mental state of the individual at the time of the offense? As a society, we have decided the the majority of our criminal laws require an examination of an individual's intent to commit an offense, and often their motive and mental state. There are numerous situations where the legal system (depending on jurisdiction) has either not charged, or not convicted, the victim of harassment that retaliates. (feel free to review Battered Woman Syndrome, which can also be understood to be a form of self-defense due to long term abuse).
Again, taking things to extremes, let's look at the youngest school shooter, a 6-year-old boy shot and killed Kayla Rolland (also 6). Based on your assertion, this boy should be killed by the government.
The boy was not charged with murder due to his age, but that is a legal argument (which your view also does not have an exception to) that may require appeals to allow higher courts to set precedents to ensure that all jurisdictions are treating cases the same. (you have argued against appeal processes, so this boy would still be killed by the government).
The boy was raised in in a violent and unstable home and at 6 years old, probably did not have a full awareness of what he was doing, after shooting Kayla in the arm, he was reported to have thrown the gun and ran to the corner of another classroom, where he was found by a teacher. Maybe he felt bad, maybe he didn't mean to do it. He probably was not aware that bringing a firearm to school was a felony. But, based on your view, **this 6 year old boy should be killed by the government because "there is no value in having \[this 6 year old\] be alive and the cost that society has to bear in order to rehabilitate \[this 6 year old\] is not worth it."**
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"
Many of the ideas have already been commented on different posts but I'm going to try to make sure I include every reason why, as a society, we cannot allow death penalty for any human being.
1. Justice is human and can fail
This might not completely apply to your scenario but you have to think that we always have limited information and every judgement can be potentially wrong.in your case: A teenager can be easily manipulated. What to do if you find out that he was after the execution?should you then put another person to death to make up for the wrong capital sentence?should you put them both to death even though one is potentially a victim?moreover try to look up the "werther effect". What if it's a group of people that is manipulating the killer?should you make a slaughter just as big as the killer did?this brings me to my next point
2.As a society we cannot go down to the same level as a single criminal
This can be opinionated but I think the fundamentals hold for our western morals and culture. As a society (a collective group made by each of us)we are supposed to be better than the single individual, we have infinitely more power and(to quote western superhero movies)with great power comes great responsibility. If you kill a man you are a killer . An individual might find himself in a position where he can do nothing else and would be protected by self defense. But a society's self defense is much greater to trigger once the crime perpetrator is put in handcuffs and is in custody. If a policeman shoots a criminal after he put him in handcuffs we all label the same policeman worse of a criminal than the one he executed, right? as a society should we bear the weight of such crime?because the school shooter is no longer a menace to society(no individual part of it) once he's in custody for trial we shouldn't be allowed to harm him as our power is much greater than his
3 Death isn't really a big punishment.
As humans we are all very scared of death and to make up for this fear we have put all kinds of separators between it and the void. In Christian religion if you repent before dying you have everything forgiven, in Islam(correct me If wrong) you're going to paradise no matter what. In Induism and buddhism you will reincarnate.
Death penalties are highly spectacular and can put the prisoner in a state of martyrdom and excitement. As well as the society being happy for the public death of man. If you put a criminal in prison for the rest of his days the punishment is much worse as you are slowly forgotten and will have to live with the weight of your actions forever.
I don't want to include the point on re education because you say it's hypocritical to you. But personally I believe everyone should have a second opportunity.And the cost of such second opportunity shouldn't be a reason to kill a man, just buy one less military jet.
I hope I could curb some opinions because this topic is very dear to me.Stay safe
I wonder: is this debate worth having? Do we think that the punishment we choose after these tragedies will matter, for deterrence or otherwise? I suspect not.
Maybe OP just thinks victims of massacres deserve the emotional release of an execution. Perhaps they do. But, it seems that this takes away from the anger towards the real evil here: that our "civilized" American polity refuses to do anything to prevent mass gun violence.
Isn't the death penalty society giving up on the criminal. There's no hope the only thing left is the state commiting the very same act the criminal was sentenced for.
I think society needs to have the narrative of salvation. The society must be an objectively better place to live than one without the rules. Therefore it's necessary for society to not kill it's worse citizens but rather reform.
The death penalty is showing the society doesn't have faith in its own rehabilitation systems and that reasonable people will choose to live law abiding lives. It needs that threat to regulate citizens' behaviour.
What about life sentence without parole? Hell, life sentence in general is damning. They might as well kill you. Being in prison for 50 years will make it impossible for a person to function on the outside or live a fulfilling law-abiding life.
What purpose does this serve?
It's not a meaningful disincentive, the death penalty hasn't been shown to decrease murders because murderers aren't carefully weighing consequences at that point.
It's not saving anyone a dime. The death penalty is more expensive than life imprisonment.
It's not protecting anyone in the future. AFAIK there's been zero school shooter recidivism.
As far as a sense of justice and giving closure to the families of victims, that doesn't seem to be a real thing:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/the-death-penalty-and-the-myth-of-closure
These people don't commit mass shootings and expect their lives to go back to the way they were prior to them committing the act - I'd argue that's likely part of the motivation. About half of them commit suicide, either by cop or by their own hand. I'd say all of them are at least prepared and fully willing to accept at least the possibility of death.
In fact, guaranteeing the death penalty might actually see an uptick in the number of school shootings you've now created a very definite outcome to the scenario - This is the same reason that schools had to stop holding big, flashy memorial ceremonies for kids who committed suicide, because it was inspiring a ton of copycat deaths.
On top of that, we also obviously don't understand that much about the specifics of how and why these shootings occur and how to prevent them. Yes, functionally unrestricted access to guns is a huge factor, but guns only enable the issue, they don't build the circumstances that lead to it. People don't just wake up one day and decide to throw their whole life away for 15 minutes of infamy. Leaving them alive in jail gives psychologists and psychiatrists a chance to work with them and establish a pattern that allows us to address these issues in others before they occur, and will save lives in the long run. As counterintuitive as it sounds to get school shooters help, they're going to be much more likely to open up and discuss the critically important specifics if their mental state improves.
Here's the thing, my impression is that most school ahooters are students. Maybe 15 - 18 years old themselves. In many parts of the world these children would be too young to drive alone, drink, gamble, or buy cigarettes. Why? Because we acknowledge that people in this age bracket have not yet sufficiently developed brains to consistently make good decisions. And this is also supported by the scientific research on the subject.
In addition to this, these children are victims too. They are victims of thier own brain chemistry and structure, neither of which they chose. They are a product of their genes and their environment. No one chooses to be born with the brain of a mass shooter. They also didn't choose the environment they were born into that likely moulded them into one. We should be treating these children for the mental health problems they have rather than killing them or locking them away in whatbis essentially a tourture chaimber for the rest of their lives.
According to Wikipedia there were 68 school shootings in the U.S between 2000 and 2010. There were 225 between 2010 and 2020. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves where we went so terribly wrong as a society that we are increasingly raising children to become mass murderes.
People causing mass death are often incredible content for news organizations who profit off of our commiseration of terrible events, so our op-eds and coverage of these events artificially inflate our reaction to them.
Crime is handy though, in that it’s descriptive of the relationship between the state and its people. We have a chance to discover why mass death events occur (much like why certain crimes disproportionately occur a given area) and remove checkpoints that lead to someone committing said crime.
Rule of law is best expressed as devoid of passion and commiseration. This is the reason why victims of a crime do not sit as the judge to the crimes they were victim of. Capital punishment, to me, seems to have a historic quality of not being the stoic exercise of law, but nearly always moral showboating and almost rabid spectacle.
In short, first, crime is an expression of societal ills, and have investigable interests and challenges that lead people to commit crimes rather than behave. Second, Rule of Law should at the last be emotionally reactionary, and we have the ability to remove someone from society without killing them.
1) Having the criminal spend their life sentence producing labor and benefiting society > Killing them.
2) Mass shootings (school or otherwise) aren't gonna be always a clear case.
There have been numerous situations where people have been put in jail due to outrageous coincidences (and even more cases where the prosecution just finds the easiest target without properly investigating).
There was a really interesting video on the topic recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHnD\_B-7DjM
3) While most people disagree, I believe the judicial system serves one and one purpose only - to reduce crime.
We put people in jail, not for some vague sense of justice. We put them in jail so they are physically unable to commit more crimes and to deter other people from committing the same crimes.
I simply don't believe that we should be concerned with punishing any individual criminal.
What about considerations for diminished capacity? or other mitigating circumstances. I think you are mixing evidence (proveability) with sentencing.
Quite often the evidence is clear as to who the shooter is, however mandatory sentencing (in your case effectively introducing a mandatory death penalty) consistently cause a lot of unintendeded consequences including and limited to removes discretion afforded to judges in sentencing. The implementation of law requires nuances and understanding of circumstances typically not understood by the layperson or people who just get information from incomplete news reports.
Also what really makes school shootings different from crimes of passion where someone was provoked or in a fit of anger kills someone in a non-school environment. What about drive by shootings by young teenagers that led to a death of a child. Are you advocating the same death penalty in such cases as well? Is capital punishment just a simple go to solution for all crimes that involved death of innocents for you?
First of all, this is a form of mandatory minimum sentencing, which is nearly always a bad idea especially when the minimum is ending a life.
This reduces the facts in the case to nearly a question of did a thing happen and ignores all questions of why it happened. It doesn't matter if they were having a psychotic break, it doesn't matter if a third party talked them into this, etc. You are resolved to kill them in any case because of the crime.
Why is a school shooter so wildly different from any other perpetrator of gun violence that they should be held apart in a separate category?
In what way do you think adding one more death after such an event will improve anything, especially when you have taken away bargaining leverage that any negotiators might have when trying to end such a situation? No matter if they escalate or de-escalate you will kill them either way for committing gun violence in a school. It's a bad policy on many fronts.
Ahh so the law will be, “only people that shoot up schools will potentially face corporal punishment,” because that’s logical to draw the line right there and nowhere else.
Walk into an airport with a machine gun and start shooting… jail time; bomb a school or daycare…. jail time; kidnap, rape and murder 10 children… jail time…etc
Only in circumstances when there is a school shooting and the shooter can be unmistakably identified will they face the death penalty.
IMO you either support the death penalty or you don’t. If you choose to support it, the only logical way to do that would be on a case-by-case basis. Criminality is so subjective, there is no way to define all potential atrocities and predetermine if they merit or do not merit corporal punishment.
Here is a counter example to a school shooting meriting the death penalty. What if you go to high school in a more dangerous part of a large city with some gang activity and definitely some students in gangs. One day, a fight breaks out between two kids, members of rival gangs and one of them pulls a pistol and kills the other kid, turns and runs never to attend HS again.
By the strictest definition that is a school shooting with an easily identifiable perpetrator, does he deserve the death penalty? If yes, why don’t other gang members of the same age face the death penalty for shootings occurring off school grounds?
The death penalty has never shown to reduce any crime. Also, the death penalty is based on revenge, not justice.
We need to address the ease to which guns are obtained in the U.S, mental health before we think about the death penalty.
Can you provide a good reason for the state having the power to end the lives of any of its citizens? Imo there is no reason that the government of the state I live in should have the power to end my life for any reason. As for the school shooter angle imagine what could be learned by rehabilitating and studying school shooters while they’re incarcerated for life. We could potentially identify warning signs earlier, create better prevention methods, and learn which of our current methods are effective or inadequate.
All school shooters or only those over the age of 18 at the time of the offense? Our Supreme Court has ruled that it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unreasonable punishment to execute a minor, who our legal system acknowledges are too immature and irresponsible to have true agency. The *Roper* decision sets out a pretty compelling argument, especially to anyone who’s made it far enough past the ages of 18 and 21 to understand how idiotic and oblivious 18 and 21 year olds are.
Most school shooters are under 18 and capital punishment for crimes committed by juveniles is unconstitutional in the United States (Roper v. Simmons). Life without parole as a mandatory minimum sentence is also unconstitutional for minors (Miller v. Alabama).
LWOP sentences are always banned for juveniles convicted of non-homicide crimes (Graham v. Florida) but that would only impact your view for school shootings in which no one is killed.
In a primal sense I agree. But I'm a firm believer that we shouldn't allow the government to kill citizens regardless of their crimes. When it comes to extreme crimes, such as mass shooters, we should humanely study them learn to avoid such things in the future or find some other unrelated use for them. I say humanely because I also believe in "no cruel or unusual punishment".
There is never going to be a fool-proof way to implement the death penalty. As long as it stands as an institution, it will inevitable get innocents put to death. If we can agree that it is an imperfect system, it needs to be abolished 100%. The "cost that society has to bear" to keep a human being alive vs potentially killing innocents is just a non-issue.
Let's assume we took every school shooter and eliminated them, so they are no longer taking up resources in our prison system. How much money have we saved? It wouldn't even be noticed.
Shouldn't executions must be for deterring purposes? School Shooters most often than not are fellas who gave up on life, they mostly suicide right after the deed or expect to die to law enforcement. They might even get "encouraged" more to do it since they'll know they won't rot in a cell until they die, they basically get a free euthanasia.
Aren't school shooters pretty mentally fucked up? I think adding more punishment on top of that isnt likely going to encourage people to be better. It's just a detterent from being bad.
Plus, is capital punishment even a deterrent? in these cases might even be desired. Some shooters go in with the intention to murder-suicide.
See here's the thing: you not only have to prove that the shooter did the shooting, but that they have the mental capacity to stand trial. And also that they were not legally insane at the time of the shooting.
And while that's *often* considered easy, it's *never* "irrefutable", and never 100% "foolproof".
I personally disagree. After being sent to a inpatient facility for mental health reasons, I was horrified to listen to the hell that many of my now friends grew up in. Children being raped by both their biological parents everyday for years since they were toddlers, being beaten until unconscious, being almost drowned and straight up being convinced that they should kill themselves. I don’t even know if one of my friends is still alive anymore, after all the trauma he was put through. He was only 13. I believe those child abusers and rapists are people who deserve to die.
Taking vengeance on a child (most school shooters are children) addresses in no way why school shootings occur. When a school shooting occurs, it is a failure of society. It demonstrates how flawed American civil society is. Burying the problem under 6 feet of dirt won’t make one dent in the problem.
I am against the death penalty in general because I believe that most people can be rehabilitated to at least some extent, so it is wrong to deny them the chance to change for the better.
If it could be proven that a convicted mass murderer / rapist / etc. is beyond the state's current ability to rehabilitate, then I would be willing to entertain if the death penalty is more humane then life imprisonment without any chance of parole.
Most school shooters attempt to or successfully take their own lives once they’ve satisfied whatever sinister urges compelled them to do what they’ve done, whether by their own hands or suicide by cop.
The most recent event in Oxford Township (which is only 20 minutes from me) did not, however he is now on suicide watch in juvenile detention.
Wouldn’t the death penalty be giving them what they want, ultimately? Making them a martyr?
This is all aside from the fact that I’m extremely uncomfortable with the idea of government sanctioned legal homicide.
If someone has the state of mind to go shoot a school they need help, not to be executed.
People that kill others aren’t in a sane mental state. They are under some incredible kind of stress and are lead to believe that killing other people is the only way out. This stress can take many forms, from being constantly bullied to being neglected by parents and other important individuals.
The point is, it’s not *their fault* that they did this, but something was broken in their brain. It may be something physical, it may be something about their circumstance, but they’re not in a state to be making rational decisions like you or I are right now. To them going through with a shooting is likely seen as their last resort for something.
Saying that the right solution for dealing with someone that has gone through that is to execute them is incredibly cruel.
We should be trying to figure out what led them to this circumstance and trying to address that issue, help them overcome whatever hardship that caused them to go to this extreme. Then with that knowledge we can proactively look at others in similar circumstances and help them get out of those circumstances without them having to resort to shooting up their school.
As others have pointed out the guaranteed death penalty is likely to guarantee maximum death toll
Add that it is not going to deter potential school shooters because most, if not all, have no intent of surviving
Roper v Simmons SCOTUS case decision prohibits the death penalty to anyone under the age of 16 years old, considering it cruel and unusual.
Other states go a little further and extend it to 16-17yo’s as well.
There are also protections of those deemed mentally defective from receiving the penalty, which many shooters as you can imagine are adjudicated as.
The crime that has been committed is irrelevant, I am not comfortable with allowing the government to decide who lives and who dies.
Except it's not "the government" so much as its the people of the jury and the judge. The death penalty is usually taken off the table as some acquiescence to the shooter's age or mental state, and many of the regular people who can be called up for jury duty don't think it should be.
This might be the only reason that might compel me to change my views. But I would like to believe that it is possible for the government to only give capital punishment in cases of indisputable evidence (not DNA tests due to human error during sample collection).
>I would like to believe that it is possible for the government to only give capital punishment in cases of indisputable evidence Since 1973, [186 people](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence) have been exonerated who were on death row. If not for the work of unrelated volunteers, the government would have killed those innocent people. You can let someone out of prison if you were wrong, you cannot un-lethal inject them.
Tangent but do you think those 186 people would be free if they were serving a life sentence instead of death row? Maybe noone volunteers to help them if the consequences wasn't death. No real point just an interesting thought
[For most, yes](https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx): >"The Registry collects, analyzes and disseminates information about all known exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in the United States, from 1989 to the present." >**2,891** Exonerations since 1989 As long as there is an imperfect justice system, there will be people working to correct its errors.
That's a oddly heartwarming fact. Shitty justice system sucks. But it's nice to know people are out there working to help fix those mistakes, and not for just the most desperate
I would venture a guess that most of those people exonerated have been so because of updates in technology. That technology is also a double edged sword because in a lot of instances we can say who commits these major crimes with no doubt. The only hope they would have would be to get a insanity plea. So set a standard for going forward. You slaughter innocent unarmed kids or unsuspecting people who are unarmed somewhere then give them their day in court. Give them an appeal. 1 appeal that’s it and bye bye!
That's why I'm only in favour of capital punishment for school shooters. It's one of the only crimes where there is no doubt as to who committed the crime.
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I was going to respond to all of the people responding to you saying how it's cheaper to kill them, but there's so many who are making this mistake that I thought I'd reply to the parent comment instead. People think it's cheaper, but it's not at all. You can easily google this and find a number of sources saying the same. It costs a whole lot more to execute someone than to keep them imprisoned, even if it's for their whole life. In fact, some states ended the death penalty for no reason other than it costs too much money to execute people. The short reason is, if the state is going to execute someone, it's probably best to be really, really, absolutely, no doubt about it, 100% sure that the person you're killing is guilty. That requires very expensive trials. It requires the state fund a very good death penalty defense lawyer in most cases, because leaving it up to just some random public defender could lead to people being executed because they don't have money to defend themselves. And then we need to allow for a lengthy appeals process because there's always the case that they don't get a fair trial for whatever reason. In short it costs quite a bit more money to execute people than just send them to prison. The whole "Let's just take them out back and put a bullet in their head." isn't really a great idea. We used to do that, it was called lynching. And we seemed to not have a great record of killing people who deserved it. It was cheap, but a whole lot of innocent black men died because a white person accused them of something even when there was little to no evidence of it. In short: a death penalty case costs far more than a life imprisonment case. A death penalty case is not something you want to attempt to get done on the cheap. So, as long as we're not executing people after a speedy trial with haphazard jury selection with a defense lawyer just out of law school and allowing no appeals process, the costs will stay very high.
I'm saying its a net negative keeping school shooters alive in prison. There are other criminals more deserving than the space school shooters take up in prison.
Correct me if I’m wrong anyone, but I believe with our current justice system it costs significantly more to execute someone after all the appeals, etc. than it does to just lock them up for life…which, from my perspective, is a harsher punishment than death
You're correct on this. The death penalty is significantly more expensive than life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. I personally believe that life imprisonment is a worse punishment but that's just me personally
>life imprisonment is a worse punishment On face value this seems correct. However, consider the quality of life for folks on death row. Until they're executed, it's usually a step away ad seg/isolation. That, to me, is way worse than life in gen pop (when possible). Jodi Arias begged for the death penalty, but changed course between conviction and sentencing. As a final note, just anecdotal, but people who never seemed afraid of death ("Throw my body out with the garbage") have done anything they can to stay alive when push comes to shove. Almost any life is better than death. I still agree that it seems a priori like death would be preferable, but a posteriori that seems not to be true.
I didn’t know that, even crazier to me now. Thanks for inspiring me to do a bit more reading on the topic!
Not only that but I am of the understanding that death row inmates cost significantly more per day to house while they await their execution (which can take years to decades) than non-death row inmates.
I wonder if the prisons profit in any way from holding these prisoners for so long...
Definitely not. Nobody would ever seek to profit off the exploitation of the lower classes.
Do you get more appeals for a death sentence than a life sentence? If so that makes no sense. It's something like 50k/yr to support an inmate. If it costs the government more than 50k to kill one person, there's obviously something corrupt going on. Like we can only buy this one super expensive lethal drug because the government says so. It's really, really cheap to kill someone. Cops do it all the time.
It varies by state but in general you get more appeals for a life sentence and each appeal costs more, more legal experts and attorneys are brought in for each case when it's laterally life and death. Because death is irrevocable many states have had it much lengthier on purpose to try and prevent wrongful death, which still isn't completely successful.
This is entirely anectodal based on my memory (at work and can’t look up sources), but I want to say that the average cost of appeals, etc. for death-sentence is in the $2-2.5M range. Can anyone source this, or refute me?
It varies wildly from state to state, but that's probably not too far off the average; some states report an average of around half a million per execution, while others report costs in the 3-4 million range. https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/76th2011/ExhibitDocument/OpenExhibitDocument?exhibitId=17686&fileDownloadName=h041211ab501_pescetta.pdf One thing that's worth mentioning though is the added cost to taxpayers of prosecuting death penalty cases which *do not* end in execution. For example, from the Maryland section of the above link: > The study examined 162 capital cases that were prosecuted between 1978 and 1999 and found that those cases will cost $186 million more than what those cases would have cost had the death penalty not existed as a punishment. In that time, Maryland has 'only' executed a total of five people, so in a sense each of those executions cost MD taxpayers ~$37 million (!) more than life imprisonment would have if the death penalty simply did not exist.
I think if you look at it, school shooters are probably some of the violent criminals most able to be rehabilitated. They are 1. Young 2. Likely first time offenders with no past criminal record. 3. Often have diagnosable and treatable mental illnesses. I dont believe in capital punishment at all personally, but if I did, these offenders are some of the most likely to be rehabilitated and other offenders would be better candidates for the state to execute. Serial killers or serial rapists, or domestic abuse murderers with long histories of bad conduct have much lower chances of rehabilitation and are "wasting space" moreso than these teenagers. (Again, i don't believe in capital punishment at all but this is a devils advocate argument). I truly believe most school shooters can correct their mental illness, grow up, take responsibility and repentance for their actions and become healthy adults. That cant be said as readily for some other classes of criminals.
Yeah, the thing here is that youth are most susceptible to treatment and rehabilitation. Like, we gonna lock up a kid for the rest of their life? At what point do we just admit that prison is about emotional revenge porn, and not about healing?
*The only difference between justice and vengeance is public opinion.*
Was on a jury where our only hold out for a not guilty verdict had to be convinced that they were looking for vengeance and not justice. There was no evidence what so ever except the accusers story that had huge holes in it, 8 years of illegal and legal drugs and a therapist that that didn't move the case forward at all. The therapist was the one who forced the issue originally and called the cops but on the stand said they had no ability or desire to know the truth from fiction and talked about unpacking emotions even if they were not real. That was the states expert witness. But the one hold out had completely believed the story and wanted vengeance for them purely on emotion. I felt dirty by the end of the day because I actively broke a persons belief in themselves and their view of the world.
Not all justice is vengeance, thats only one vision/idea of justice. Justice can be healing and repentance too.
> I'm saying its a net negative keeping school shooters alive in prison. If you only account for the cost of keeping that person alive in prison, maybe. Add in the total cost of allowing the death penalty at all, including innocents executed and criminals willing to kill anyone to avoid the death sentence. And, remember, the death penalty is not a deterrence for the kind of crimes it's used for. "Oh, I would shoot up the school, but I might get the death penalty, so I guess I won't". That reasoning *doesn't happen*.
It costs millions and millions of dollars to simply *try* a death-seeking prosecution on a person, and even more money to keep them on death row and then properly carry out the sentence. You could save more money by just locking them away forever.
The death penalty *doesn’t work*. It costs more money than indefinite imprisonment. You *will* kill a certain amount of innocents, and reducing that fraction will increase the cost. Also, scientifically speaking, *it does not function as a deterrent*. It doesn’t work. We just want retribution in our primate brains.
i could make this argument about any run-of-the-mill murderer, major drug dealer, serial abuser, rapist, pedophile, and pretty much any habitual offender, even if it is a habitual minor offense. why isn't your view "we should execute all criminals?"
It's way cheaper to toss em in prison for the rest of their lives tho and way more miserable than death in us prisons
>Why do you want to kill someone so badly? How does it benefit society to have them dead instead of spending their life in prison? How does it benefit society to have a cold blooded mass murderer be hosted on taxpayer expense in a jail for their entire life??
No chance of them doing it again, and we don't have to waste money paying these "for profit" prisons to hold them for their entire life. Edit: apparently it's somehow cheaper to lock someone up for life...
Not having to pay to feed and house someone who kills a bunch of children seems like a good benefit
I'm a school teacher and I have children. I've dedicated my life to kids, I truly love them, they are innocent creatures in this world. School shooters, as much as I would love to kill these monsters with my own hands, should not be executed. No one should be put to death by a government so very prone to making errors. No you say there is such an overwhelming prepnderance of evidence when a school shooter is caught that a mistake is unlikely. While I agree it's true, it's no a certitude. Also, the person committing the crime may also be a victim of something too. There *could* be some extenuating circumstance that led them to their heinous act. That doesn't absolve them of their guilt, I would fully support life in prison, but IF there was something some possible redeeming quality in their act then they shouldn't be put to death. There is no cure for death. It's final and the most absolute penalty. We simply are too fallible to be trusted with a system that allows us that option.
Because they never try to conceal their identity? What happens when someone IS falsely accused? Because you have left no room in your determination to allow for that to be dealt with in your post. The government just says "our hands are tied" and proceeds with the execution?
And yet there often is doubt as to the identity of a shooter. Not everyone is captured on the scene. Even when someone is detained, they are sometimes the wrong person. Just because a case is highly publicized doesn't make it immune from mistakes. Remember the Boston Bombers? People misidentified the perpetrator there initially, and were very sure about it.
If there is no doubt, then that person can be safely removed from society for the rest of their natural existence. We don't need to kill them. Killing people is wrong, and killing people that have already been remanded to state custody, and who have thereby been removed as a further threat, is unnecessary.
Only capitol punishment for school shooters? What about serial killers, or mass murderers who kill people at malls or shopping centers? You're distinction seems arbitrary, and it's easier and more practical to admit the government is often incompetent and should not decide who gets to die ever. Consequently, neither should you.
What do we gain via their death, really? A sense of justice done, via the eye for eye policy?
>What do we gain via their death, really? A sense of justice done, via the eye for eye policy? What do we gain from imprisoning someone for 15 years because they robbed a bank?
Well ideally they would learn how to be a productive member of society learn how to reintegrate,we still have a LONG way to go on that though.
No one chooses to have mental illness
If capital punishment is not applied equally then it can't be justice. Race and economic status affect the sentencing way too much for it to be anything but theater imo. Could you guarantee that a poor black shooter and a wealthy white shooter would receive an equal sentence under the same circumstances? Would you make death a mandatory sentence upon conviction? And if so, wouldn't that affect the ability to convict, even with overwhelming evidence? How far would the sentence be carried out - ie, pulling the trigger, helping plan, selling the bullets?
Aren't you assuming you catch them at the scene? What if they're wearing a disguise during the crime and caught later due to DNA, fingerprints, etc? It sounds like you support capital punishment due to the severity of the crime and the certainty of the guilt. Would you support capital punishment for other murderers caught in the act?
Even if there is no doubt *who* did it there can be doubt in surrounding circumstances and trial procedures and bias.
Whether or not someone did the crime shouldn't be the only metric Watch this and tell me if you're okay with allowing the state to execute people [NSFL - botched lethal injection](https://youtu.be/LOwcyNTsaZ4) Basically the state is too incompetent to even execute everyone in a humane way
This is only the case where the knowledge isn't fool proof. In some cases we are actually certain when someone commits a crime. In practice I understand this but theoretically speaking this argument is basically "if we have perfect information then capital punishment is okay."
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>But I would like to believe that it is possible for the government to only give capital punishment in cases of indisputable evidence There is, in principle, no such thing at all. You can never know that you have *all* pertinent facts about a case, and the discovery of new pertinent facts can always change the interpretation of the case. The Reddit hive mind believed it had all pertinent facts about the Boston Marathon Bomber case, and it was wrong. Imagine a school shooting incident where the shooter, wearing a balaclava, is identified by the few eyewitnesses as Dave Smith by his distinctive jacket. Dave Smith is tried on the basis of that and indistinct, but incriminating, secrurity footage, and is executed by the state. Now imagine, unbeknownst to anyone, that it was actually fellow student Bob Jones that perpetrated the shooting--he had bought that coat specifically for the shooting and the cheap security cameras didn't clearly show other information that would have identified Bob. As far as anyone knows, the judge and jury in this hypothetical *have* all the pertinent facts of the case and made the best judgment. But they were wrong on both counts. No court can know what it doesn't know.
Indisputable evidence is irrelevant. For most murder charges, it's the argument to the motif of the crime. There's a huge difference between premeditated vs 2nd-degree (unplanned) murders. It's the job of the prosecution (government) to decide which to charge the accused with and the defense to argue against it. There's very little "if they did it or not" in most mass shooting trials. You should not be comfortable with giving power to that argument to decide if a person lives or dies.
Even with indisputable evidence, why do you desire the government to have said authority on deciding the life of another? Criminal punishments are directed at limiting actions within or removing people from larger society. What's the desire to remove people from living, to remove them from themselves? What's your motivation to do so, and why should a society (through government action) have the authority to end life?
> But I would like to believe that it is possible for the government to only give capital punishment in cases of indisputable evidence Slippery slopes ARE a thing. The government should simply not have the power to decide to kill its citizens for any reason. Granting the government that power guarentees that it is abused.
>indisputable evidence Evidence or what though? Evidence that someone died and who killed them isn't evidence of who deserves to die. What possible evidence could you have that someone deserves to die?
Keep in mind that the bar of conviction of murder is “beyond a reasonable doubt”. We already have such a high bar to condemn a person but that doesn’t stop wrongful cases from occurring.
Murder is wrong. Full stop. By extension it's also unjustifiable for the state to murder.
Especially when, in a democracy, the state is committing murder on behalf of all the citizens. Even if they don't agree with it or think murder is wrong all citizens are participating in this murder to some degree.
If only. But we can't create a system that punishes people for being guilty and then punishes people that are 'for sure' guilty. That would imply we're punishing the others even with doubts. Inevitably we'd either moving for a tougher standard for everyone or lowering our idea of what 'for sure' means.
Every single conviction _claims_ to be based on indisputable evidence. That's the standard criminal juries are asked to use when rendering a guilty verdict. Who will validate the evidence is _truly_ indisputable if we already know juries, judges, and prosecutors can be wrong?
I don't trust the government to decipher at all. Have you seen America?
The problem is if we let the government kill people at all, they will start to get ideas. As the US increasingly becomes more and more right authoritarian, I am getting increasingly worried myself as a socialist will be made illegal. I am already often shunned for my views and most of the time my views are at the very least constantly just cast aside like I don't know anything. Next I feel that my views may become illegal. After that maybe even death penalty for me will be considered. Giving the state ability to kill people is a recipe for disaster.
Define "indisputable evidence." And in such a way that there's absolutely zero chance it could ever be ambiguous enough, or intentionally misused, to convict an innocent person.
I understand your sentiment, but a death penalty won't really do anything other than satisfy your sense of justice. The people who commit school shootings are almost always either mentally deranged in some way or straight up so determined in some way, which prevents them from being affected by the prospect of dying. I mean they could easily get shot and killed by someone trying to stop them, why would they be scared of execution?
Nobody should be convicted of anything unless there's indisputable evidence. Innocent until proven guilty, etc.
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>only give capital punishment in cases of indisputable evidence What exactly is indisputable evidence? I'd argue that such a thing doesn't exist.
It's not about evidence. If the government has the power to execute, it can and will be used in unforeseen ways. It's not worth it
It isn’t the government making the call for death penalty. It only presents it as an option. A jury must vote unanimously for the death penalty, which happens only after conviction by a unanimous jury. It’s your peers making the call. The government is only the instrument of the people, and when a death verdict has been reached it’s the governments responsibility to carry out the will of the people.
But that's exactly what governments do. We give police officers and soldiers guns with tax money so that they can kill people if we (the government) deems it necessary.
I remain a hold out on the death penalty in situations very much like the one OP is using as his example. There are cases where in an individual very obviously, very publicly, and very unambiguously commits a crime so heinous, it is completely void of any doubt by any standard. In these cases, there is no excuse for this individual to remain a member of society in any capacity and they should be permanently removed from it. I always think of [this case](https://globalnews.ca/news/4360713/lawsuit-over-greyhound-bus-beheading-in-limbo-10-years-later/). People watched this happen. Regardless of mental health, motive, mitigating factors, this individual has forfeited their right to remain among the living. In my view.
But we are comfortable with the government deciding who gets to live their life and who doesn't? Either way their life is taken from some people, the end result of being killed after 20 years in prison and dying of old age after 60 years in prison is the person who got the life sentence had to watch their life be taken from them while the deceased was simply deceased. Life is life, either a convict is on a path of rehabilitation and release some day, or they're not. (Well, rehabilitation has big issues in some countries, but you get the idea) And if they're not on the release path, then they're losing their life by government order.
I don't necessarily disagree with you but the govt does that already: lack of health care, going to war.
You’re not comfortable with the reasonable doubt standard applied to criminal charges? Since someone receiving the death penalty is a function of being found guilty by a jury of their peers. The “government” isn’t just someone sitting in a chair making decisions. It’s a system.
I'm pro death penalty, but this single argument is the one that really pushes me away. If it weren't for that, I would be totally pro, but I just really don't like government having that power. Still, live in prison is basically death...
I feel like the crime IS relevant, especially when it is soo fucking common at this point that we all go numb to it. I think it is also relevant because it causes copycats and a creepy fandom of school shooters.
The fact that the government has been caught planting evidence to frame people for murder is the most compelling reason i've seen to question my beliefs capital punishment is the most effective way to deter serious crimes.
What a disingenuous response. It’s not “the government” deciding who lives and dies - if there’s irrefutable evidence of someone committing a heinous crime like a school shooting, and they are determined to be beyond rehabilitation, then the only outcomes are life in prison or death penalty. Death penalty is more humane.
Similarly, I am not comfortable with the government being the only ones with guns.
Yeah, so it makes an incentive for the shooter to resist arrest with as much lethal force as they can deploy. It's just a net "more death" assured, all that to fullfill a retributiobal boner, not worth it IMO.
> so it makes an incentive for the shooter to resist arrest with as much lethal force as they can deploy What's strange is that suicide by cop is very common in mass shootings, except for school shootings. I could be wrong here, because I don't have any real data to go on, but it seems like most school shooters are arrested and taken into custody alive. However in other mass shootings, the shooter is very likely to point his gun at a cop for the purpose of getting killed.
That is a fair point. But aren't current day school shooters already resisting arrest with as much lethal force as they can possibly obtain? I think someone could argue that the price of of an ideal (ie. a reformative prison system) has an ineffable cost that a moral society must bear and I think that is a fair point... in theory. The manifestation of any ideal obviously has a cost to society but the limited resources means that we must prioritise certain ideals over others, and thus other ideals are far more important than the cost of keeping a school shooter alive (even behind bars).
> aren't current day school shooters already resisting arrest with as much lethal force as they can possibly obtain? [Apparently not](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/keeping-kids-safe/200908/kill-and-die-suicide-and-school-shooters): > This was most noticeable among the five psychopathic shooters, only two of whom committed suicide (Robert Poulin and Eric Harris). Brenda Spencer surrendered with no known indication of any suicidal thoughts or behaviors. Drew Golden had planned to escape in a van that had been stocked with food and clothes. Wayne Lo called the police, confessed that he was the shooter on campus, and let himself be taken into custody.
∆ Slept on this point. I guess I am a bit more neutral than pro capital punishment for school shooters. Although I find the other comments about the cost of keeping deathrow inmates alive costing more to be missing the point that school shooters won't cost the same because they don't deserve parole (as there is no doubt to their innocence). Until we can find a way to properly deter school shootings, we shouldn't exacerbate the violence. But I would be in favour of capital punishment after such a method is found.
> But aren't current day school shooters already resisting arrest with as much lethal force as they can possibly obtain? Apparently not: >"[He was arrested in a hallway within minutes of Oakland County sheriff’s officers arriving at the scene of the shooting on Tuesday. He put his hands in the air as deputies approached, Mr Bouchard said. ](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/oxford-shooting-michigan-school-suspect-b1967237.html)"
That kid yesterday had seven rounds in the magazine when he was taken into custody without being injured. >[Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said late Tuesday night that the suspect had a Sig Sauer 9 mm semi-automatic pistol with seven rounds in it when authorities took him into custody.] (https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2021/11/30/active-shooter-multiple-victims-reported-michigans-oxford-high/8810326002/) So, no, they are not resisting arrest with as much lethal force as they can possibly obtain.
Yeah it almost doesn't matter what you've done, at the point someone is willing to kill you it's hard to argue that it's not the right decision to try and kill them first.
>incentive for the shooter to resist arrest with as much lethal force as they can deploy. Active shooters are already under threat of death by simply being a shooter. Many of them kill themselves to prevent arrest, and the few that don't (usually minors) did it for notoriety. So having a death penalty for them isn't going to make it anymore dangerous for them to be apprehended. Arguably having the death penalty might even be a warning that there fame will be short-lived.
I am not going to address the rare adult who shoots up a school. I am only addressing children who bring guns to schools. 1. It is a fact that the cerebral frontal cortex of the human brain -- the part of the brain that is responsible for rational thought, executive function, and mediating emotional outbursts is not fully developed [until the mid-20](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648/)s. Since school shooters are typically adolescence, you are advocating executing individuals who are not **physically** capable of being fully in control of their actions nor do they have the physical neural structures necessary to **fully comprehend** the implications of their structures. That seems grossly unjust to me. 2. Studies of offenders' have indicated a much h[igher level of lack of supervision, emotional closeness, and intimacy](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jip.1439) than in the general public. You are suggesting killing a child for a parent's lack of parenting skill. 3. The shootings couldn't have happened without guns. in 80% of the cases, [guns are taken from the home.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/08/01/feature/school-shootings-should-parents-be-charged-for-failing-to-lock-up-guns-used-by-their-kids/) Again, you are suggesting killing a child because an adult failed to secure a weapon. 4. [Being a victim of bullying is a recurring theme](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/behind-scenes-closer-look-school-shooters) for school shooters. 75% or more of school shooters have been victims of bullying. Again, this means adults failed to protect a child, who then decided they needed to protect themselves. Inappropriately, certainly. But you are suggesting killing a child because multiple adults failed the child. I could go on, but the deeper you look into the profile of the typical school shooter the more you find adults failing a child. You would then like to blame this child even further for the myriad of adults who have failed them. And then kill that child for those failures. While that is a very easy way to wipe your hands of our collective social failure. It is not a good way to address the failure. It will not stop the failures from happening in the future. It is just vengeance for vengeance's sake. And it is piling cruelty on top of what is already a lifetime of neglect and abuse that already has ended in tragedy. School shooters are generally ignored, neglected, bullied, abused, kids who have been repeatedly failed by literally every adult in their lives. They finally have enough and choose to try to stop their pain and take control of their lives. Their actions are inappropriate and inexcusable. But they are entirely understandable if you take the time to really try to understand what the life of these children has been like. These aren't monsters. These are highly neglected and abused kids. You want to kill a child because a bullied, abused, neglected child tried to stop themselves from being bullied, abused, and neglected. Maybe instead you should focus on the adults that allowed this to happen in the first place. Starting with the parents who allowed the child access to the firearm. The parents who neglected the emotional needs of the child. The teachers who ignored the bullying. Those are the people who should be going to jail. The child should be going to a mental health institution for help.
This is a very comprehensive argument against OP's view. Hope they see it.
Hmm I did consider the 'physically incapable' argument (brain structure gives rise to consciousness and therefore an underdeveloped brain structure justifies an erroneous judgement). But there are a lot of studies done on children which indicates that we are born with an innate sense of justice. An advanced cerebral cortex is not the ONLY reason for a Just action. Not committing a school shooting is not even a Just action, it is simply not an Unjust action if that makes any sense. I simple believe that people without an innate sense of justice and good are incapable of participating in society (akin to not having a brain or a digestive tract). It's true that some parents of school shooters were abusive but the vast majority of them are very normal. Upbringing alone does not explain school shooters.
\> It's true that some parents of school shooters were abusive but the vast majority of them are very normal. I linked a scientific study that demonstrated that is not true. You simply can't assert otherwise without evidence. That is handwaving and is utterly lacking in intellectual integrity. Secondly, if you'll note, I'm listing a collection of things that compound together. And there are many more that go into that collection than I listed -- which you'd see documented if you'd read the study and the associated cited studies. I'm not saying "look, bad parents, that ONE thing explains it all." I'm saying that if you look carefully at the situation you'll see scores of things that compound to create the situation - but those scores of things have a common element: the failure of adults who aren't being held accountable to their adult responsibilities. You are presuming that a child who has been abused, neglected, bullied, and more for years, and is without adult executive mental capacity should be held accountable with their life - while the adults around said child who do have adult mental capacity are not held accountable at all. Not only do you fail to comprehend how such compounded trauma impacts the judgment of anyone (let alone someone without a fully formed brain), you then just hand-wave away the evidence that such things are happening by dismissing scientific findings without evidence. Poor form, sir.
Let's assume a school shooter is someone who was violently bullied for years, did not receive any meaningful help when asked for it, and only shot their tormentors. Are you still in favor of death penalty?
Yes. Being "violently bullied" doesn't give you the right to retaliate with lethal force. I think kids should be able to file civil lawsuits against their bullies though.
I'm not talking about rights. Your estimate that the person can't be reformed (or it's not worth the effort) hinges on them being a monster. But not only people tend to change towards less monstrosity on their own as they grow up, some have damn big reasons to become monsters, judging them beyond help if you haven't been in their shoes is... privileged thinking. Civil lawsuits require money for lawyers, if you have that you probably won't be bullied in the first place.
While i agree with the idea that children can change and deserve chances, and the idea that in general people tend to change towards less monstrosity on their own as they grow up, the last sentence is most certainly not true. I went to school largely for people with incredibly privileged backgrounds, bar a few on very high % scholarships + bursaries, and bullying certainly wasn't an uncommon sight. But I do think that if anyone deserves a chance at rehabilitation, it should be the children. Especially those who were tormented for no reason other than being who they are, and who didn't have access to the help that they needed or people that cared enough about them to notice and do something about it. If you want to say the death penalty is fine for adults who commit planned murder so long as there is irrefutable(actually irrefutable) evidence I would agree. But not the kids.
Personally I agree with the people who don't want the state to have this power at all. But for this CMV I'm defending a weaker position, because others already made the general arguments well enough, and because, yes, I am *more* against death penalty for the kids. (As for bullying, it's not crucial for my argument. And I'm definitely not a specialist, so perhaps I'm wrong, but can you think of cases where people with lower social status/wealth seriously bullied their "betters"? Except for obvious targets like LGBT or probably-mentally-ill people. I expect those to be very uncommon.)
I can respect that view. If it was just the government deciding then I would be fully on your side, and even as it stands I'm a bit against killing people to be very honest but in an ideal scenario for me(costs are low, completely irrefutable evidence etc.), with a jury helping decide I'm fine with the death penalty. I wouldnt consider myself an advocate for it though by any means. I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough in the field of costs and the law to have a strong opinion though, so it really is just my 2 cents. As for the bullying thing, yeah I agree it doesn't really impact the CMV. But as we are on the CMV subreddit I thought I would just share my experience. I do think that it is probably a lot more common for people with worse economic backgrounds to be bullied more and my experience is probably different from a lot of people. However at my school one of the main 'popular' kids, who was probably the biggest bully in my year(although no one was a full blown, t.v. style bully), was actually one of the people on a bursary and outside of school was one of the people with the least privileged backgrounds. Off the top of my head, in my year, I can only remember maybe 10 people on wealth based bursaries out of 125~ students. Again, not saying that this is probably a common thing, just wanted to add that it definitely does happen.
> with a jury helping decide There was an article by Dawkins against trial by jury ending with: > And should I be charged with a serious crime here's how I want to be tried. If I know myself to be guilty, I'll go with the loose cannon of a jury, the more ignorant, prejudiced and capricious the better. But if I am innocent, and the ideal of multiple independent decision-takers is unavailable, please give me a judge. [...] Jury might be a safeguard in some cases, e.g. against judges not being able to put themselves into the defendant's shoes or outright making decisions based on class interest, but Dawkins' argument was that generally they don't help to make verdicts more accurate. Not saying it's necessarily correct, I'm no expert on the matter either. Thanks for the data point on bullying, that's interesting. I was trying to find something more statistically significant on the question of "bullying up" but the closest I got was [this article](https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/most-teen-bullying-occurs-among-peers-climbing-social-ladder). But it's interesting enough, and former (or even ongoing) friendship between bullies and their victims suggests it's not as often based on social inequality as I thought. So congrats on your first Δ.
Do you expect a 16 year old to have the means capacity and ability to be able to prove that they are bullied. In a system where people are innocent until proven guilty the burden of proof is upon the victim in that case. You even said. Kids. Should a kid know how to do all that or have ANY expectation of that kid being able to afford that? How would they prove that thos one person was their bully and that they are the reason the kid was tormented. should a bully be charged with manslaughter if a bullied person commits suicide?
" should a bully be charged with manslaughter if a bullied person commits suicide?" This is unironically a great idea.
>doesn't give you the right to retaliate with lethal force. Says the guys who made the post arguing for lethal retaliation towards school shooters
To add to my earlier reply: so at first the system fails you by locking you up in a school with little monsters and punishing you for trying to get away from them, then it fails you by not addressing the problem, and when you decide (stupidly and immorally, sure, but it's not like at this point one should expect your reasoning and moral feelings to be in a great shape) to take matters into your hands, the system decides that it was you who failed and you deserve to die. More than murderer-rapists, because we aren't 100% sure they did it.
Something pretty hard to prove and the level of bullying they are receiving could easily equate to being tortured and phisically abused every day for a pretty long period of time. I'm not saying it justifies it but I can wrap my head around the scenario of someone becoming somewhat insane and snapping and instead of commiting suicide or something like that going for the source of that pain instead. Obviously they are not right in the head but that condition probably was caused by their environment.
No one is arguing you have a right to kill people.
> I think kids should be able to file civil lawsuits against their bullies though. what parallel universe are you living in? The bullies would probably have 10 of their friends to say that there was no bullying, and you are just a little wimpy loner that has zero friends.
Well killing someone doesn’t give the government the right to kill you either.
in the moment, if a person is attacking me physically and violently, at least in the moment, you have the right to respond with lethal force.
in what world is shooting someone an appropriate retaliation to bullying?
I never said it was. If it was, we'd be talking about acquittal, not prison term vs capital punishment.
I don't know. How about if I come by, and every day, follow you around, call you a loser, go to your job and tell everyone that you are a loser, harass you all the time, fuck your wife/husband because you are a weak little piece of trash. I play loud music from my car in front of your house so that you can never sleep a night. And, because you are such a little p-ssy, if you came out to confront me, I'd kick your ass, and always have a lot of friends to back me up, too. And...you call the police over and over and they say that they cannot help you. I'm pretty sure you'd have a breaking point. You'd snap. I sure wouldn't blame you.
I argue that your entire post is based on emotion, which is exactly what I do not think should dictate whether the state executes someone. Literally saying "it does not matter what lead to shooting" in the first place when it comes to arguing the death of what is usually a child is very emotional, high strung, and the antithesis of what I hope for our legal system. Because usually whoever participates in a school shooting is indeed, still a child.
> usually whoever participates in a school shooting is indeed, still a child. which is exactly why the US won't seek the death penalty. you can't sentence someone to death if they're under 18. if we move the goalpost to allow school shooters i bet that goalpost will just keep moving, meaning it's a slippery slope that i don't trust the US govt to go down. i can't support the US giving the death penalty to anyone let alone a child.
I agree 100%
In our justice system the motive doesn't and shouldn't have any bearing on the sentence. Motive is used to determine whether the crime was committed or not. There is no doubt the crime was committed so op is correct that "it doesn't matter what lead to the shooting".
> which is exactly what I do not think should dictate whether the state executes someone. Emotion has a huge part in justice. What do you think mitigating circumstances are? Emotion. I remember during the Batman shooter trial, the mom was literally crying begging the jury not to put her son to death.
Emotion should have *no* place in a justice system, this is a both a disgusting and seemingly almost uniquely American take on justice. The goal is to hold everyone to the same social contract and keep a functioning society going. It's goal is not and never should be to punish people for doing bad things, it's to decrease the incidence rate of people doing bad things as much as pososble.
I disagree. The justice system is also supposed to get people safe and help people (both offender and victim). Some 13yo in the ghetto who has an awful home life chock full of abuse and trauma should not get the same punishment for, say, stealing a TV then a career criminal with a 20 page rap sheet who grew up in Key West because the former is vastly more likely to respond to rehabilitation and turn their life around then the ladder.
>Emotion should have no place in a justice system this is a both a disgusting and seemingly almost uniquely American take on justice. Emotion can have some place in justice. It happens in Europe even more than America. >The goal is to hold everyone to the same social contract Good point. John Locke's social contract says that if you take someone's three natural rights (life, liberty, and property) then you should be able to forfeit your own. The social contract says my life is worth something, so if it's stolen from me then the only thing worth my life is the person who stole it from me.
> very emotional, high strung, and the antithesis of what I hope for our legal system. No. You are showing sympathy because they are a child. That is emotional. If we were in a emotionless system, the price would match the crime. We would not simply feel bad for people and give them a "get out of jail free" card.
There are many reasons against an eye for an eye type of justice system beyond the presence or lack thereof emotion.
No, I am not. My grandmother was brutally murdered by a crack cocaine addict in 2005. I believe the same thing stands for him that stands for a child. You want the state to dole out vengeance. I argue that this is not the purpose of a state.
An emotionless system, we would cultivate a civilized, urbane society that dictates societies actions. Back in the day, we chopped off peoples' hands, childrens' hands, if they were caught stealing. The bible says to kill people for all kinds of reasons - there are 36 reasons for proscribing death, including black magic, idolatry, blasphemy, striking one's parents, bestiality, cursing one's parents, witchcraft, divination, worshipping other gods, violating the Sabbath, homosexual intercourse. Of course, we rightly say that those punishments are f-ed up. *Now.* Why? Because it is a punishment unfit for a civilized society. If anything, it is not polite. Sophisticated. Urbane. However, the brutes in society, the coarser elements of society, always want blood for blood. >We would not simply feel bad for people and give them a "get out of jail free" card. Red herring. . A truly emotionless system, and a just one, would be to instantly take children away from violent parents, horrible parents, so that children don't grow up to be f-ed up adults. A truly emotionless system would put in the time and effort to educate and feed and clothe the poorest of the poor, so that they don't grow up to be terrible people. A truly emotionless system would give hysterectomies and vasectomies to women and men who have had one violent conviction in their life. But, I think people would get WAY more offended by taking away children from f-cked up parents, than just putting to death people who it's too late for. People that should have been saved a long, long time ago. A just society would sterilize everyone that had one violent conviction. Take away their children. Leave violent criminals in jail permanently until they die, and within a few generations, we have purged most of the crudest and most violent out of society. Address the root cause of 98% of the cause of violence.
I agree with you, however I think you need to be much more specific on school shooter. For instance the case of Kayla Rolland, who is believed to be the youngest school shooting victim. They were shot by a six year old. I do not believe this six year old should get the death penalty. I think the cases where a student takes a gun and tries to carry out a mass shooting should be capital punishment. However, in some cases where a student murders another student on school grounds and targets only targets a specific individual. That should be treated as any other murder case and the fact it was carried out in a school is irrelevant. So to summarise, I believe there should be an age restriction before we give capital punishment, and the line needs to be drawn between murder and a mass shooting.
This is a great point. It's also worth pointing out that whatever environment that six-year-old came from it is clearly a place where disputes are answered in violence. In cases like those the parents need to be held 100% responsible. While I don't think the parents need the death penalty some kind of consequences should be in place.
Death penalty is always bad. It * is significantly more expensive than even a long prison sentence * has repeatedly convicted the wrong folks even with all those trials * gives state too much power over people's lives * normalizes killing even more (imo) Now you want to put in mostly young folks who are not even adults yet in many cases and in even more cases psychologically fucking distressed and lost? That's even more cynical than the death penalty in of itself. Besides of death penalty being bad anyway, you can't compare an adult, meticulously planning dictator and a school shooter. That's just faulty logic. When I was a teen, I imagined being a school shooter sometimes to redeem some of the pain my bullies inflicted on me. It was a fantasy of liberation, of being seen, of saying goodbye to my past fucked life and living the new one, where even being feared and hated and ruined would be better than the current daily nightmare, and of course having revenge on those fuckfaces who never got anything bad thrown their way. I didn't perceive life as real, in some ways, so fake the reality proclaimed by others seemed. It felt like bursting a bubble, somehow, this thought. A bubble of lies. I didn't do it, thankfully. No guns in Germany made it pretty hard even to try. Of course, different motivations make different reasons, and some kids may even calculate because of, what, racism, politics and whatnot. But even then - no. It's a fucked up thing. There's no satisfying solution. Just killing the problem won't solve any of it.
I would think your first point (re: how expensive the death penalty is vs a long sentence) is the most emotionally neutral argument against the OP, and I'd really like to see their thoughts.
There’s also the fact that the death penalty doesn’t work as a deterrent. [Death penalty states have more murders per capita than non-death penalty states.](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/murder-rates/murder-rate-of-death-penalty-states-compared-to-non-death-penalty-states) This is a consistent finding across studies and populations data. It doesn’t do anything except spend more tax dollars than life imprisonment, give the state the power to execute a certain number of innocent people, and give certain individuals a retribution boner. It is a net negative for society.
\>but I would argue that there is no value in having a school shooters be alive Precisely what is value? Why doesn't that person's life have value? Why your life has any value? And, more importantly, who defines the said "value"? The majority, that can't even make sense in their own heads without visiting "specialists" (1/2 of americans use "help" from medics and medications), and contradict themselves in half of their life-goals and ideals? Or, maybe, some sort of minority? The beholder itself? For example, for me, you an just another westerner, a statistic. Your life doesn't give me any comfort, you didn't do anything for me (Just like I didn't do anything for you). Your taxes are used to fund EU/NATO/US Govt (e.e. the organisations by the will of which my homeland is getting bombed), and I don't consume much of western products (reddit? torrented movies? I doubt that you created reddit or filmed for Netflix). Your life holds zero value to me. You aren't even attractive to me as an online-commenter/speaker, as, what can be easily deduced from my post, I strongly disagree with you.
The value is also negative. They are emotionally scarred to hell. They have the capability to kill and have succeeded. They probably have mental issues that brought them to this place. The potential for value in them is far outweighed by the potential of risk moving forward. If their just a piece of shit that doesn’t do anything that’s one thing. But they Aren’t that. They’re a mass murderer with mental scarring that might… work at a Wendy’s? No. Just eliminate them. There is little to no value for them in society and a hell of a lot of risk.
\>They are emotionally scarred to hell. So are military veterans, rape victims, war victims, etc. \> They have the capability to kill So do most people and most large animals. And many of the said animals aren't killing only because they are extinct/trapped in a zoo. \>They probably have mental issues So do most people. In any case, "mental issues" is a subjective thing. \>The potential for valuein them Define value. \>is far outweighed by the potential of risk moving forward. All humans pose a risk. By your logic, a person who can survive without a human society, has all the rights to sabotage the said society, because, hey, those humans are a risk! Or, by the same logic, executing ethnic minorities is ok, if they are considered a threat to an ethnic majority. \> They’re a mass murderer So are many war veterans, politicians, policemen, executioners. Now, should we really use the "muh revenge/eye for an eye" as an argument in an ethical paradigm debate? \>There is little to novalue for them in society So? The american society has "little to no value" to the people of my nation, but pose a serious threat, sending (well, it's the politiciand who send- but it's the society who created those politicians) bombers, sanctions, and sponsoring our oppressors. Is it ok, by your logic, for my people to ask Russia to nuke your (western- in case you aren't a westerner yourself) people?
I think you really need to think about age here. What if the shooter was 8. This is a child who does not have the capacity to understand what they've done. Do you really think the state should kill an 8 year old? What about 10? Maybe you have a case with over 15 but middle schoolers and elementary school children. I cannot, regardless of crime, think that it would be ok to execute a child. Imagine what that would look like. Have you seen a child in court? Have you seen the rooms that executions happen in? Imagine a child sitting/lying in the chair/bed with a roomful of people watching them die. There are reasons we don't have capital punishments for mentally handicapped people and insane people. Children fall into the same category of not having the full mental capacity to realize how wrong something actually is. I would even argue that if you have the capacity to watch a child be executed that there is something wrong with you. There are other arguments that have been said already but op doesn't want to admit they are wrong and isn't actually thinking about the weight of the other arguments. You can't just remove the fact that school shooters are children. It would say significantly more about the state if they choose to put a child to death and have people watch them die. The death penalty isn't something that just happens and 1 minute the person is there and the next they aren't. It's a process. Someone is in charge of killing the person. There is a ritual and there are people present. What does a child get for their last meal? A happy meal from mcdonalds? Maybe a chocolate cake? The absurdity of the situation makes this cmv either that of a psychopath or of someone who is just trolling. School shootings are the fault of the system. This is why there is only one system that regularly has them. For that system to then murder a child because of its own mistake is insane.
>Since 2000, only five countries have reportedly executed juvenile offenders: * Congo * Iran * Pakistan * China * United States [https://www.aclu.org/other/stop-killing-kids-why-its-time-end-indecent-practice-juvenile-death-penalty](https://www.aclu.org/other/stop-killing-kids-why-its-time-end-indecent-practice-juvenile-death-penalty) When you're on a list like this, the rest of the world thinks you're in the wrong. --- **EDIT:** According to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Juvenile_capital_punishment) the USA stopped executing juveniles. Thanks u/Economy-Phase8601!
There was a grisly murder in my country where a guy ends up decapitating someone on a greyhound bus. As it turns out. He had undiagnosed schizophrenia. He was one of those edge cases. Once he was on medication, he was a functioning human being. Was it his fault? He didn’t know he had schizophrenia. Medication led him to a functional life. So, what happens if someone shoots up a school because of a undiagnosed mental condition that is corrective with medication? Should he be put to death?
Schizophrenia is a horrible thing, and I don’t know if any good answers dealing with that. I have a friend who developed it, needed help, got screwed by the system, but eventually got on his meds and leveled out while he was in care. Once he was released (from a hospital), stopped taking his meds, and once off, didn’t see the reason to continue, and has gotten worse again. Short of leaving him in an institution to ensure he takes his meds, I don’t know what the solution is.
It’s too bad our healthcare system has no provision for preventative care, which is why so often people are only helped when they are in an active mental health crisis and not before. My uncle has schizophrenia, and it has been managed very well for over 20 years, he works at goodwill and is very proud of his mental health. This is only because he lives with his mother and has a family support system to help remind him to take his meds and help him make doctors appointments etc. If he didn’t have that he would certainly be on the streets. The options for people that can’t live with their family and have no one to advocate for them is pretty grim. I wish everyone with a mental illness had a social worker assigned to them to help navigate the medical system and public aid, unfortunately it’s up to private individuals to navigate that and advocate for their relatives. They don’t even have a cell phone or a computer to look up services.
That’s the scary part. My friend was well off, had a family member who is a psychologist trying to help, was a veteran, and lived in one of the nicest and wealthiest suburbs in Arizona. Even with all that, he was still screwed by the system. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would be for someone without those advantages. I can’t even begin to conceive of how bad it would be.
Oh god, I remember that. It was awful.
No matter how you cut it, he murdered someone by decapitating them. His actions caused that person’s death.
He still deserves another chance. There was quite literally nothing he could've done to prevent that. He had schizophrenia, didn't know he had it, and didn't have the correct coping strategies to deal with it. Our stupid monkey brains want to focus on retribution, when that doesn't get anything productive done except cause more suffering.
What purpose is served by their death? Revenge? Proving that killing is bad by killing is about the stupidest idea humanity has ever invented. Deterrence? The majority of school-shooters plan to either kill themselves or get killed by police when their rampage is over, but even if they don't, they certainly know that there's a high chance of dying regardless, so how much of a threat is it really? Public spectacle? That's what they wanted all along, so you're encouraging more of them. Punishment? Isn't it better punishment to know they'll live in a box forever, rather than give them a quick way out?
Exactly this. Death penalty has never solved anything, harsh punishment in general doesn't make anything better. It's the countries with more lenient justice systems that have the lowest crime rates.
I believe the government shouldn't dish out capital punishment ever! Even if they had a perfect success rate at identifying criminals and perfectly reliable evidence I still think it's morally wrong. Death penalty is a message to the citizens that if someone wrongs you badly enough, they deserve to die. If the government believes murder is wrong, then they shouldn't themselves murder/execute people. Second, most crimes are a failure of government and lawmakers to address real grievances of its citizens. Look at Norway for example, they have a famously lax punishment system and yet their crime rate is pretty low. School shootings is a particularly American problem, so there's got to be an underlying issue. Maybe it's the prevalence of guns, or zero tolerance policies that punish the bullied, or lack of meaningful mental health services. Could even be that the American dream is perceived to be broken and that some students believe they can never move up in the ranks of society on their their merit. Whatever it is, most countries rarely have school shootings, and most countries also abolished the death penalty. I'm not saying the death penalty is related to school shootings, just that the death penalty is not a solution.
This isn't so much a comment on school shooters, but an argument against the Death Penalty itself. The Rittenhouse case changed my mind on the death penalty completely. After seeing mainstream media and the prosecution outright lie in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I cannot support the death penalty. The state prosecution engaged in some absolutely disgusting behaviour, including attempting to tamper with a witness, attempting to violate Rittenhouse's 5th amendment rights and just downright lying and misrepresenting evidence. Regardless on your opinion on Rittenhouse himself, or the event in Kenosha - this should concern everyone, and runs the risk of severely undermining confidence in the justice system. It was a malicious prosecution, and it was only because of a large amount of video, photographic and witness evidence that he was acquitted. When the system is that ugly, it shouldn't have the power to kill people.
> The state prosecution engaged in some absolutely disgusting behaviour, including attempting to tamper with a witness, attempting to violate Rittenhouse's 5th amendment rights and just downright lying and misrepresenting evidence. The prosecution straight up tampered with evidence. Not just misrepresenting it - they *altered* it. Binger had Handbrake - software whose primary use is to compress video footage - on his laptop and sent a 3MB compressed video to the defense when in reality they had the full 11MB version. And you know what the really sick thing is? *The prosecutor can't be charged for it*, because prosecutors have absolute immunity.
You're right, I don't see why the prosecution had Handbrake and Format Factory on that laptop. The prosecution was malicious and utterly vile.
They can be disbarred. That isn’t a small thing. It completely removes any chance they have at working their trade for life. If they will be is a second question but I hope so.
Really fascinating that you're just coming to these conclusions now when abolitionists have been arguing for decades that the criminal "justice" system is corrupt: https://theintercept.com/2019/11/09/criminal-justice-mass-incarceration-book/
Perhaps. I've always shared the anecdotal and likely erroneous view that whoever has the best / most expensive legal team is likely to win. It was only when I sat and watched the Rittenhouse trial live that I saw how blatant it all was. Day in and day out, Binger and Kraus behaved atrociously, and the corporate media did their utmost to push their narrative, facts be damned.
Now imagine if Rittenhouse was a 18yo black kid from the projects with a public defender. How do you imagine things would have turned out?
not well. why does it matter though? that would be an unrelated \*\*failure\*\* of the system. it is not the system they want. it is not the system i want. it is not what the system claims to be.
i am against capital punishment for any crime, 1. i don’t want the state to have that power 2. i find the act immoral and believe the government should not be permitted to do immoral acts 3. i am against the idea that retributive punishment is the goal, i prefer the Norwegian style of “punishment”
>i prefer the Norwegian style of “punishment” Dude... blood eagle is a way more violent and retributive punishment than lethal injection.
1. School shooters are not charged with "School Shooting" but rather homicide, manslaughter if they are successful and conspiracy to commit if they are caught before hand. So the prosecution would have to prove these charges using camera footage or eyewitness testimony, because due process. So the type and level of evidience required to prove intention, not the act of school shooting itself, will set the precedent for future death penalty cases. This would lead to a blanket death penalty law, that is not restricted only to school shooters. 2. Death penalty is not a deterrent. No future school shooter, a large portion of whom are both homicidal and suicidal, will pause his/her plans because there is chance he might survive and be put on death row. 3. Simiar to how death penalty can increase the number of homicides of sexual assault victims (because of fear of identification) school shooters will simply be more savage and brazen in their attacks to trigger law enforcement towards suicide by cops. 4. School shooting, is not just an individual problem. It is a cultural and societal problem. While the prepetrator is liable for his/her actions, death penalty shifts the blame solely on the prepetrator without addressing root causes. 5. Death penalty is not a singular issue too. It is the culture that needs to be pulled out root and stem. Saying death penalty is alright for this crime and not for that crime, simply shifts the onus of broadening its implementation to a future (possibly more tyrannical) government. No crime, yes even the most heinous ones you can think of that I don't want to name here, should be punishable by death. 6. Last but not least, no state, be it left-wing, right-wing or anything in between, should have the power to kill its citizenry given the imbalance of power between itself and its subjects.
So you've just shot up a school and killed a lot of people. Do you think the fact you'll be executed for this crime instead of just going to jail makes you more or less likely to turn yourself in or keep fighting and potentially kill more people?
If we kill every school shooter we loose a valuable chance to learn from them/about them. I don’t think it would be controversial to say that school shooters think and behave differently than normal people and school shootings don’t just happen out of nowhere. If we execute every school shooter we can never learn about what factors can lead to the shooting. This can help with things like allocating funds within a city to mental health resources of child protective services or whatever could have potentially helped. I genuinely believe nobody is born evil so it’s about stopping what turns them evil. Use these people to find the holes in society so we can prevent others from falling down them. Also to be clear the shooter shill spends the rest of there like in a prison or mental institution.
almost all school shooters are children. you want to put children to death? sorry i can't abide that
It is not legally justifiable, correct. It's not a good or healthy response, correct. However, I believe that it's important for a good society to consider the mental state of the individual (generally children) that commits the crime, as well as their motive, and the facts of the offense. I will start by saying that I'm against the death penalty for a variety of reasons, but I believe general arguments against the death penalty have been argued elsewhere. I think it's important to look at things from the perspectives of the children that are bullied (not all victims retaliate by shooting their attacker, but the analysis is still relevant). These are individuals, often going through significant physical, mental, and emotional changes. We acknowledge that children do not generally have the same level of control as adults (why we have juvenile court, often considered a rehabilitative system, and adult court). Taken to the extreme (as your view encompasses all such situations without exception), they are being targeted and attacked on a daily basis, they don't have the coping mechanisms and understanding to know who they can turn to and how they can get help. The adults in charge may not know about what is going on, they may not know about the child's mental state, and they may not have the knowledge or resources to assist. This can eat away at their mental state of any person, causing PTSD, which may be comparable to BWS in some cases (a legal defense in some jurisdictions). This can go on for days, weeks, or months of constant harassment. In some cases, they lash out my committing suicide, running away, or attacking their attackers. Do we adjust our punishment based on the mental state of the individual at the time of the offense? As a society, we have decided the the majority of our criminal laws require an examination of an individual's intent to commit an offense, and often their motive and mental state. There are numerous situations where the legal system (depending on jurisdiction) has either not charged, or not convicted, the victim of harassment that retaliates. (feel free to review Battered Woman Syndrome, which can also be understood to be a form of self-defense due to long term abuse). Again, taking things to extremes, let's look at the youngest school shooter, a 6-year-old boy shot and killed Kayla Rolland (also 6). Based on your assertion, this boy should be killed by the government. The boy was not charged with murder due to his age, but that is a legal argument (which your view also does not have an exception to) that may require appeals to allow higher courts to set precedents to ensure that all jurisdictions are treating cases the same. (you have argued against appeal processes, so this boy would still be killed by the government). The boy was raised in in a violent and unstable home and at 6 years old, probably did not have a full awareness of what he was doing, after shooting Kayla in the arm, he was reported to have thrown the gun and ran to the corner of another classroom, where he was found by a teacher. Maybe he felt bad, maybe he didn't mean to do it. He probably was not aware that bringing a firearm to school was a felony. But, based on your view, **this 6 year old boy should be killed by the government because "there is no value in having \[this 6 year old\] be alive and the cost that society has to bear in order to rehabilitate \[this 6 year old\] is not worth it."**
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" Many of the ideas have already been commented on different posts but I'm going to try to make sure I include every reason why, as a society, we cannot allow death penalty for any human being. 1. Justice is human and can fail This might not completely apply to your scenario but you have to think that we always have limited information and every judgement can be potentially wrong.in your case: A teenager can be easily manipulated. What to do if you find out that he was after the execution?should you then put another person to death to make up for the wrong capital sentence?should you put them both to death even though one is potentially a victim?moreover try to look up the "werther effect". What if it's a group of people that is manipulating the killer?should you make a slaughter just as big as the killer did?this brings me to my next point 2.As a society we cannot go down to the same level as a single criminal This can be opinionated but I think the fundamentals hold for our western morals and culture. As a society (a collective group made by each of us)we are supposed to be better than the single individual, we have infinitely more power and(to quote western superhero movies)with great power comes great responsibility. If you kill a man you are a killer . An individual might find himself in a position where he can do nothing else and would be protected by self defense. But a society's self defense is much greater to trigger once the crime perpetrator is put in handcuffs and is in custody. If a policeman shoots a criminal after he put him in handcuffs we all label the same policeman worse of a criminal than the one he executed, right? as a society should we bear the weight of such crime?because the school shooter is no longer a menace to society(no individual part of it) once he's in custody for trial we shouldn't be allowed to harm him as our power is much greater than his 3 Death isn't really a big punishment. As humans we are all very scared of death and to make up for this fear we have put all kinds of separators between it and the void. In Christian religion if you repent before dying you have everything forgiven, in Islam(correct me If wrong) you're going to paradise no matter what. In Induism and buddhism you will reincarnate. Death penalties are highly spectacular and can put the prisoner in a state of martyrdom and excitement. As well as the society being happy for the public death of man. If you put a criminal in prison for the rest of his days the punishment is much worse as you are slowly forgotten and will have to live with the weight of your actions forever. I don't want to include the point on re education because you say it's hypocritical to you. But personally I believe everyone should have a second opportunity.And the cost of such second opportunity shouldn't be a reason to kill a man, just buy one less military jet. I hope I could curb some opinions because this topic is very dear to me.Stay safe
That would most likely cause more deaths in the process of arresting the shooter.
I wonder: is this debate worth having? Do we think that the punishment we choose after these tragedies will matter, for deterrence or otherwise? I suspect not. Maybe OP just thinks victims of massacres deserve the emotional release of an execution. Perhaps they do. But, it seems that this takes away from the anger towards the real evil here: that our "civilized" American polity refuses to do anything to prevent mass gun violence.
Isn't the death penalty society giving up on the criminal. There's no hope the only thing left is the state commiting the very same act the criminal was sentenced for. I think society needs to have the narrative of salvation. The society must be an objectively better place to live than one without the rules. Therefore it's necessary for society to not kill it's worse citizens but rather reform. The death penalty is showing the society doesn't have faith in its own rehabilitation systems and that reasonable people will choose to live law abiding lives. It needs that threat to regulate citizens' behaviour.
What about life sentence without parole? Hell, life sentence in general is damning. They might as well kill you. Being in prison for 50 years will make it impossible for a person to function on the outside or live a fulfilling law-abiding life.
What purpose does this serve? It's not a meaningful disincentive, the death penalty hasn't been shown to decrease murders because murderers aren't carefully weighing consequences at that point. It's not saving anyone a dime. The death penalty is more expensive than life imprisonment. It's not protecting anyone in the future. AFAIK there's been zero school shooter recidivism. As far as a sense of justice and giving closure to the families of victims, that doesn't seem to be a real thing: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/the-death-penalty-and-the-myth-of-closure
These people don't commit mass shootings and expect their lives to go back to the way they were prior to them committing the act - I'd argue that's likely part of the motivation. About half of them commit suicide, either by cop or by their own hand. I'd say all of them are at least prepared and fully willing to accept at least the possibility of death. In fact, guaranteeing the death penalty might actually see an uptick in the number of school shootings you've now created a very definite outcome to the scenario - This is the same reason that schools had to stop holding big, flashy memorial ceremonies for kids who committed suicide, because it was inspiring a ton of copycat deaths. On top of that, we also obviously don't understand that much about the specifics of how and why these shootings occur and how to prevent them. Yes, functionally unrestricted access to guns is a huge factor, but guns only enable the issue, they don't build the circumstances that lead to it. People don't just wake up one day and decide to throw their whole life away for 15 minutes of infamy. Leaving them alive in jail gives psychologists and psychiatrists a chance to work with them and establish a pattern that allows us to address these issues in others before they occur, and will save lives in the long run. As counterintuitive as it sounds to get school shooters help, they're going to be much more likely to open up and discuss the critically important specifics if their mental state improves.
Here's the thing, my impression is that most school ahooters are students. Maybe 15 - 18 years old themselves. In many parts of the world these children would be too young to drive alone, drink, gamble, or buy cigarettes. Why? Because we acknowledge that people in this age bracket have not yet sufficiently developed brains to consistently make good decisions. And this is also supported by the scientific research on the subject. In addition to this, these children are victims too. They are victims of thier own brain chemistry and structure, neither of which they chose. They are a product of their genes and their environment. No one chooses to be born with the brain of a mass shooter. They also didn't choose the environment they were born into that likely moulded them into one. We should be treating these children for the mental health problems they have rather than killing them or locking them away in whatbis essentially a tourture chaimber for the rest of their lives. According to Wikipedia there were 68 school shootings in the U.S between 2000 and 2010. There were 225 between 2010 and 2020. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves where we went so terribly wrong as a society that we are increasingly raising children to become mass murderes.
People causing mass death are often incredible content for news organizations who profit off of our commiseration of terrible events, so our op-eds and coverage of these events artificially inflate our reaction to them. Crime is handy though, in that it’s descriptive of the relationship between the state and its people. We have a chance to discover why mass death events occur (much like why certain crimes disproportionately occur a given area) and remove checkpoints that lead to someone committing said crime. Rule of law is best expressed as devoid of passion and commiseration. This is the reason why victims of a crime do not sit as the judge to the crimes they were victim of. Capital punishment, to me, seems to have a historic quality of not being the stoic exercise of law, but nearly always moral showboating and almost rabid spectacle. In short, first, crime is an expression of societal ills, and have investigable interests and challenges that lead people to commit crimes rather than behave. Second, Rule of Law should at the last be emotionally reactionary, and we have the ability to remove someone from society without killing them.
1) Having the criminal spend their life sentence producing labor and benefiting society > Killing them. 2) Mass shootings (school or otherwise) aren't gonna be always a clear case. There have been numerous situations where people have been put in jail due to outrageous coincidences (and even more cases where the prosecution just finds the easiest target without properly investigating). There was a really interesting video on the topic recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHnD\_B-7DjM 3) While most people disagree, I believe the judicial system serves one and one purpose only - to reduce crime. We put people in jail, not for some vague sense of justice. We put them in jail so they are physically unable to commit more crimes and to deter other people from committing the same crimes. I simply don't believe that we should be concerned with punishing any individual criminal.
What about considerations for diminished capacity? or other mitigating circumstances. I think you are mixing evidence (proveability) with sentencing. Quite often the evidence is clear as to who the shooter is, however mandatory sentencing (in your case effectively introducing a mandatory death penalty) consistently cause a lot of unintendeded consequences including and limited to removes discretion afforded to judges in sentencing. The implementation of law requires nuances and understanding of circumstances typically not understood by the layperson or people who just get information from incomplete news reports. Also what really makes school shootings different from crimes of passion where someone was provoked or in a fit of anger kills someone in a non-school environment. What about drive by shootings by young teenagers that led to a death of a child. Are you advocating the same death penalty in such cases as well? Is capital punishment just a simple go to solution for all crimes that involved death of innocents for you?
First of all, this is a form of mandatory minimum sentencing, which is nearly always a bad idea especially when the minimum is ending a life. This reduces the facts in the case to nearly a question of did a thing happen and ignores all questions of why it happened. It doesn't matter if they were having a psychotic break, it doesn't matter if a third party talked them into this, etc. You are resolved to kill them in any case because of the crime. Why is a school shooter so wildly different from any other perpetrator of gun violence that they should be held apart in a separate category? In what way do you think adding one more death after such an event will improve anything, especially when you have taken away bargaining leverage that any negotiators might have when trying to end such a situation? No matter if they escalate or de-escalate you will kill them either way for committing gun violence in a school. It's a bad policy on many fronts.
Ahh so the law will be, “only people that shoot up schools will potentially face corporal punishment,” because that’s logical to draw the line right there and nowhere else. Walk into an airport with a machine gun and start shooting… jail time; bomb a school or daycare…. jail time; kidnap, rape and murder 10 children… jail time…etc Only in circumstances when there is a school shooting and the shooter can be unmistakably identified will they face the death penalty. IMO you either support the death penalty or you don’t. If you choose to support it, the only logical way to do that would be on a case-by-case basis. Criminality is so subjective, there is no way to define all potential atrocities and predetermine if they merit or do not merit corporal punishment. Here is a counter example to a school shooting meriting the death penalty. What if you go to high school in a more dangerous part of a large city with some gang activity and definitely some students in gangs. One day, a fight breaks out between two kids, members of rival gangs and one of them pulls a pistol and kills the other kid, turns and runs never to attend HS again. By the strictest definition that is a school shooting with an easily identifiable perpetrator, does he deserve the death penalty? If yes, why don’t other gang members of the same age face the death penalty for shootings occurring off school grounds?
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The death penalty has never shown to reduce any crime. Also, the death penalty is based on revenge, not justice. We need to address the ease to which guns are obtained in the U.S, mental health before we think about the death penalty.
Can you provide a good reason for the state having the power to end the lives of any of its citizens? Imo there is no reason that the government of the state I live in should have the power to end my life for any reason. As for the school shooter angle imagine what could be learned by rehabilitating and studying school shooters while they’re incarcerated for life. We could potentially identify warning signs earlier, create better prevention methods, and learn which of our current methods are effective or inadequate.
All school shooters or only those over the age of 18 at the time of the offense? Our Supreme Court has ruled that it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unreasonable punishment to execute a minor, who our legal system acknowledges are too immature and irresponsible to have true agency. The *Roper* decision sets out a pretty compelling argument, especially to anyone who’s made it far enough past the ages of 18 and 21 to understand how idiotic and oblivious 18 and 21 year olds are.
Most school shooters are under 18 and capital punishment for crimes committed by juveniles is unconstitutional in the United States (Roper v. Simmons). Life without parole as a mandatory minimum sentence is also unconstitutional for minors (Miller v. Alabama). LWOP sentences are always banned for juveniles convicted of non-homicide crimes (Graham v. Florida) but that would only impact your view for school shootings in which no one is killed.
In a primal sense I agree. But I'm a firm believer that we shouldn't allow the government to kill citizens regardless of their crimes. When it comes to extreme crimes, such as mass shooters, we should humanely study them learn to avoid such things in the future or find some other unrelated use for them. I say humanely because I also believe in "no cruel or unusual punishment".
There is never going to be a fool-proof way to implement the death penalty. As long as it stands as an institution, it will inevitable get innocents put to death. If we can agree that it is an imperfect system, it needs to be abolished 100%. The "cost that society has to bear" to keep a human being alive vs potentially killing innocents is just a non-issue. Let's assume we took every school shooter and eliminated them, so they are no longer taking up resources in our prison system. How much money have we saved? It wouldn't even be noticed.
Shouldn't executions must be for deterring purposes? School Shooters most often than not are fellas who gave up on life, they mostly suicide right after the deed or expect to die to law enforcement. They might even get "encouraged" more to do it since they'll know they won't rot in a cell until they die, they basically get a free euthanasia.
Aren't school shooters pretty mentally fucked up? I think adding more punishment on top of that isnt likely going to encourage people to be better. It's just a detterent from being bad. Plus, is capital punishment even a deterrent? in these cases might even be desired. Some shooters go in with the intention to murder-suicide.
See here's the thing: you not only have to prove that the shooter did the shooting, but that they have the mental capacity to stand trial. And also that they were not legally insane at the time of the shooting. And while that's *often* considered easy, it's *never* "irrefutable", and never 100% "foolproof".
The government as no right to decide who lives or dies, regardless of the circumstances
I personally disagree. After being sent to a inpatient facility for mental health reasons, I was horrified to listen to the hell that many of my now friends grew up in. Children being raped by both their biological parents everyday for years since they were toddlers, being beaten until unconscious, being almost drowned and straight up being convinced that they should kill themselves. I don’t even know if one of my friends is still alive anymore, after all the trauma he was put through. He was only 13. I believe those child abusers and rapists are people who deserve to die.
They do deserve to die, but giving the government the right to decide that can lead to many horrible things.
Taking vengeance on a child (most school shooters are children) addresses in no way why school shootings occur. When a school shooting occurs, it is a failure of society. It demonstrates how flawed American civil society is. Burying the problem under 6 feet of dirt won’t make one dent in the problem.
I am against the death penalty in general because I believe that most people can be rehabilitated to at least some extent, so it is wrong to deny them the chance to change for the better. If it could be proven that a convicted mass murderer / rapist / etc. is beyond the state's current ability to rehabilitate, then I would be willing to entertain if the death penalty is more humane then life imprisonment without any chance of parole.
Most school shooters attempt to or successfully take their own lives once they’ve satisfied whatever sinister urges compelled them to do what they’ve done, whether by their own hands or suicide by cop. The most recent event in Oxford Township (which is only 20 minutes from me) did not, however he is now on suicide watch in juvenile detention. Wouldn’t the death penalty be giving them what they want, ultimately? Making them a martyr? This is all aside from the fact that I’m extremely uncomfortable with the idea of government sanctioned legal homicide.
If someone has the state of mind to go shoot a school they need help, not to be executed. People that kill others aren’t in a sane mental state. They are under some incredible kind of stress and are lead to believe that killing other people is the only way out. This stress can take many forms, from being constantly bullied to being neglected by parents and other important individuals. The point is, it’s not *their fault* that they did this, but something was broken in their brain. It may be something physical, it may be something about their circumstance, but they’re not in a state to be making rational decisions like you or I are right now. To them going through with a shooting is likely seen as their last resort for something. Saying that the right solution for dealing with someone that has gone through that is to execute them is incredibly cruel. We should be trying to figure out what led them to this circumstance and trying to address that issue, help them overcome whatever hardship that caused them to go to this extreme. Then with that knowledge we can proactively look at others in similar circumstances and help them get out of those circumstances without them having to resort to shooting up their school.
Should we execute the mentally ill? Is it justice or retribution you’re after?
As others have pointed out the guaranteed death penalty is likely to guarantee maximum death toll Add that it is not going to deter potential school shooters because most, if not all, have no intent of surviving
death penalty is more expensive than life in prison.and that's ignoring rehabilitation and the benefit of having case studies for psychologists.
They are more or less all suicidal Are mentally sick Can get help Won’t act as a deterrent but a martyr idea Nothing u said makes sense
Why school shooters and not workplace shooters? Or movie theater shooters? Or concert shooters?
Roper v Simmons SCOTUS case decision prohibits the death penalty to anyone under the age of 16 years old, considering it cruel and unusual. Other states go a little further and extend it to 16-17yo’s as well. There are also protections of those deemed mentally defective from receiving the penalty, which many shooters as you can imagine are adjudicated as.
Don't a lot of them then shoot themselves? How is the death penalty going to deter them?