Dunban67 said:
I question your data- i do not think it is close to acuarate (re the types of crimes that are sentanced to death
Re public hanging - it would very much be a deterent- someone who wants notatriety shoots up a public place or something that takes innocent lives or some other high profile, top of the news act- - hanging in the wind, dead is something that would show a high majority of violent criminals that they should think twice before pulling the trigger- most or at least a high % of the murders in the US are seneless and avoidable even in the context of crime, passion etc- In other wordss, even in the act of a crime, the mrder that transpired served no actual pupose- or they are gang/drug related or for "dissing" someone - It is amazing how little some people will kill another for-
|
If not crimes of desperation or passion, what kinds of things do you think tend to encourage the prosecutors to seek the death penalty? Jaywalking? Overfishing? *confused*
Psychologists and criminologists don't agree with you about deterrence:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/files/DeterrenceStudy2009.pdf
"A recent survey of the most leading criminologists in the country from found that the overwhelming majority did not believe that the death penalty is a proven deterrent to homicide. Eighty-eight percent of the country’s top criminologists do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to homicide, according to a new study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology and authored by Professor Michael Radelet, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Traci Lacock, also at Boulder.
Similarly, 87% of the expert criminologists believe that abolition of the death penalty would not have any significant effect on murder rates. In addition, 75% of the respondents agree that “debates about the death penalty distract Congress and state legislatures from focusing on real solutions to crime problems.”
The survey relied on questionnaires completed by the most pre-eminent criminologists in the country, including Fellows in the American Society of Criminology; winners of the American Society of Criminology’s prestigious Southerland Award; and recent presidents of the American Society of Criminology. Respondents were not asked for their personal opinion about the death penalty, but instead to answer on the basis of their understandings of the empirical research."