RE: How people are and the death penalty The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are. It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences. See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win…
The Case of Richard Glossip
201–210 of 233 posts
Re: The Case of Richard Glossip
#202RE: How people are and the death penalty The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are. It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences. See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win…
My uncle who's a pastor gave me an interesting perspective on this phrase. Before Solomon it was common practice to escalate a transgression. So a theft begets a retaliatory murder, begets a retaliatory massacre. This adage is not as much about seeking equality in punishment, as much as a brake to limit escalation. "An eye for an eye and no more."
Re: The Case of Richard Glossip
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
* in USA. The average jail time in France is less than 2 years. French people are often surprised of the length of the penalties in countries which seem similarly western, such as Luxembourg.
Oh boy... I would not use France as a counter-example. Jail time is low in France because our jails are full. Any sentence below two years is automatically deferred to probation, which means that a large number of crimes are de facto not punished. A quick google search will reveal a disturbing trend of violent crimes that don't result in jail time for this reason. France has the opposite problem, and it's no better.
Re: The Case of Richard Glossip
#204RE: How people are and the death penalty The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are. It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences. See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win…
Re: an eye for an eye. My uncle who's a pastor gave me an interesting perspective on this phrase. Before Solomon it was common practice to escalate a transgression. So a theft begets a retaliatory murder, begets a retaliatory massacre. This adage is not as much about seeking equality in punishment, as much as a brake to limit escalation. "An eye for an eye and no more ."
Re: The Case of Richard Glossip
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
About this: "Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform." How do you justify the statement that a jury is the best idea that we have? Germany has the concept of Schöffe, and some believe this offers results that stick closer to the law than the jury system: http://www.britannica.com/topic/Schoffe While any government of mortal human flesh must inevitably ha…
Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time. In all the common law countries you list, this is basically unheard of, at least in the last 400 years. Our common law system has evolved to be resilient against many different things, rather than being designed to maximize efficiency of a few things. It is certainly not perfect, there is no doubt of that. Combined with th…
Some civil law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years. Some common law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years (e.g.: English revolution, detainment of Americans with Japenese ancestry during World War 2).
> Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.
Except when it doesn’t serve the common interests very well by, for example, maintaining the legality of slavery well past the point it was abolished in many (civil and common law) countries and by taking another 100 years to reconsider the whole apartheid thing. In comparison, the civil law countries in Scandinavia seem to have faired quite well on the civil rights front and it was also civil, not common, law countries that drove the spearhead for women’s suffrage.
> Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder.
Ah, yes, the famous French common law system based not at all on the Code Napoleon and the equally famous Soviet common law system.
> The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries.
Again, the English revolution comes to mind. Or that whole debacle where slavery was only abolished after a bloody civil war in the 1860s! Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland weren’t exactly hotspots of instability either. And to be honest, I am not sure that Quebec has seen many more fascist dictators than the rest of Canada, something that would be implied by its civil law nature?
> That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.
Except, of course, when you can.
Re: The Case of Richard Glossip
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that is where you should direct your hate I beg your pardon? > the will of the American voters "A 2010 poll by Lake Research Partners found that a clear majority of voters (61%) would choose a punishment other than the death penalty for murder." (deathpenaltyinfo.org) And between 1967 and 1977 not a single person was executed in the whole US, independently of the possible will of some states. The Eighth Amendment f…
Fine edited to outrage. Your goal is to paint the US as similar to those countries but the fact is it is up to the states. Here are the states with no death penalty: Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin, District of Columbia
Re: The Case of Richard Glossip
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh boy... I would not use France as a counter-example. Jail time is low in France because our jails are full. Any sentence below two years is automatically deferred to probation, which means that a large number of crimes are de facto not punished. A quick google search will reveal a disturbing trend of violent crimes that don't result in jail time for this reason. France has the opposite problem, and it's no better.
> our jails are full I find it good. So magistrates are constrained by capacity. Of course I'd prefer they don't fill up French prisons at 125%. If we build more prisons, we'll fill them up. US is now famously known for having more people in jail than Stalin's gulags [1]. I quite appreciate France's leniency with penalties, because I'm not sure 3 months or 3 years is really different, apart from further distorting th…
My point is simply that not punishing people isn't a viable solution, either. France has the same problem as the US (too many people incarcerated) and an equally bad solution (stop incarcerating altogether).
Re: The Case of Richard Glossip
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh my, that is quite scary, but I'm sure you have no examples.
He was talking about Guantanamo, presumably ("extralegal holding facility")
And dont forget CIA blacksites!
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-poland-cia-blacksi...
Bush admits to secret prisons(wikipedia sources are your friend): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5321606.stm http://web.archive.org/web/20060906193917/http://www.cnn.com...
Re: The Case of Richard Glossip
#209RE: How people are and the death penalty The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are. It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences. See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win…
Re: The Case of Richard Glossip
#210The death penalty: Of the 49 European countries, only 1 (Belarus) still has the death penalty and executes people. Last time a civilian executed in Mexico: 1937, Canada: 1962, UK: 1977, Russia: 1999 In 2014, only these countries executed more people per million than the US: Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Palestine, China, Singapore, Belarus, Taiwan, Afghanistan and Egypt A…
I'm not particularly pro-death penalty, but using the UN as an appeal to authority doesn't really work.