LEGO
I didn’t claim that life imprisonment is more of a deterrent than execution, only that the evidence is mixed and inconclusive.

I have little to add to AJ Philips’ comprehensive refuting of you analogies with soldiers killing during war.

Modern forensics may reduce the risk of wrongful conviction, but they don’t eliminate it. Of the 150 death row prisoners found innocent in the USA since the 1970s, 80 were convicted after DNA testing was introduced in 1985.

Rehctub
There are many mentally ill people on the streets who probably shouldn’t be – Martin Bryant was probably one of them.

Sorry, LEGO. I was going to wait for your next post, but my response already got too big.

I'm not sure why you thanked me for my acknowledgment on deterrence. It didn't support your argument at all given everything I followed it up with. All it demonstrated was that logic, based on incomplete data, is prone to error.

That article I linked to didn't even mention the death penalty. It spoke about the complexities of deterrence theory and what it means for the development of sentencing measures from an economic perspective. The fact that you don’t expect me to read something like The Bell Curve is telling. Not everyone just wants to confirm their preconceptions, you know. I’m happy to read something that may contradict my views because I care about the truth of them. If I’m wrong about something, then I want to know. So we’re not even stevens there.

I read The Bell Curve and it’s not as bad as you make out. The authors glossed over the environmental influences that help to determine IQ, and the problems of measuring IQ with just one number, a bit too much. Some of their conclusions were a bit dubious too, and those that were have since been discredited. But other than that, it wasn’t too bad.

Unfortunately the the main author died shortly after the book was released and the surviving author wasn’t very good at defending it when racists leapt on to it as scientific evidence of their beliefs, then anti-racists responded with knee-jerk reactions. The authors acknowledge the likely (now effectively confirmed) influence of environmental factors on cognitive ability on page 270. The surviving author even noted in 2012 that the gap in IQ between blacks and whites in America has narrowed since the book was written. If they were arguing for a purely genetic link between race and IQ, as racists seem to imply, then he must think evolution can work mighty quick!

Neither books you mention contradict anything I’ve said or implied regarding race and over-representation of blacks in the justice system.

Continued…

...Continued

<<...your belief that the reason why black men are very disproportionately represented in very serious violent crime is because they are the poor oppressed victims of white oppression.>>

That is not my belief. I’ve addressed this well over ten times now. The last time being here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=17092#301897. What is wrong with you?

Regarding innocents being killed, you’ve also presented an argument for greater use of LWOP and better prison security and procedures. That way, even fewer would be killed with the risk of innocents being executed no longer being a problem. You did, after all, speak highly earlier of the virtues of typically only executing criminals "in cases where the sadistic nature and cruelty of the offender is almost beyond belief”, so there would still be plenty of other violent offenders to worry about.

As for the number of innocents killed in Australia versus those killed by people who were released, that’s difficult to gauge because of how long it’s been since the death penalty was used in Australia. On the one hand you talk of the improved investigative techniques used these day, then you forget about that when considering our ability to determine whether people executed in the distant past were innocent or not.

<<Is six dead innocent women and children "acceptable" to the anti death penalty squad?>>

Of course not, but the state didn’t plan, professionalise, carry out or condone those killings. You have no appreciation at all for the significance of symbolism, do you? I could equally argue that avoiding the symbolism that capital punishment carries with it (perhaps through the brutalising effect of capital punishment) would prevent more deaths. You simply don’t have the data to make the assumptions you’re making. Neither do I at the moment, but at least I’m willing to look for it.

As for crime bosses and incapacitation, could you link me to some data on that? I’ve had a good look and can’t find much. Incapacitation isn’t the only difference between enemy combatants and prisoners either. But we’ll get to the other differences in due course.

I accept your apology, AJ Phillips. I could not follow through with my "continued" post as I ran foul of the "four posts in 24 hour" rule. No matter, I will dissect your latest post.

I thanked you for at agreeing with the idea that the death penalty seems a greater deterrent than capitol punishment. it is logical, and therefore a common sense premise.

My reason for mentioning The Bell Curve, was because you dismissed my analogy about climate change research, which I had used to highlight the idea that scientific research is not always objective. It can be used to push an ideology that has no relation to self evident reality using the prestige of science to create credibility. Because of your objection, I tossed in another example, that of "The Bell Curve", which I presumed would be more acceptable to you, as an example of a scientific position which you probably disagreed with.

And we still are even stevens. After reading "A Mind to crime" and "The Bell Curve", I needed to read an opposing view. So I went to Dymocks and bought Peter R. Breggin's book "The War Against Children." It was laughable. But I digress. Oh, and by the way, I had previously completely missed the post that you directed at me with your link. I think it was because of Early Onset Alzheimer's.

Back on topic.

The point I made about innocents, was in reply to your post in which you asked me if executing a few innocents by mistake is "acceptable?" My response is, to point out that this logic works both ways, and that my case is the stronger. You do not know of any innocents in Australia who were executed by mistake in the final decades of capitol punishment. But we do know that five young women would have lived if four abductor/rapist/ murderers had been executed. My five actual dead killed in the last decades of capitol punishment trumps your theoretical dead for the same period.

continued

continued

And yes, I do have appreciation for symbolism. An enemy of the people is still an enemy regardless of whether he is an internal enemy, or an external enemy. If it is OK to kill enemy soldiers by the thousands, who may be a very decent people in civilian life, it is symbolically OK to kill a handful of internal enemies who are absolute monsters.

Symbolically, punishments must be proportionate to the crime. The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, confessed to strangling to death 48 young women, although the actual figure is believed to be twice that number. Life Without Parole is a manifestly and symbolically inadequate a sentence for a crime of such magnitude.

Your quip that "if we had the resources. we would simply capture and imprison every enemy combatant for life," got a wheeze out of me. We already do that in Guantanamo Bay. But "liberals" like yourself think that imprisoning terrorists is just as awful.

As for crime bosses and incapacitation, try reading "Killing Pablo" about the murderous reach of narcotrafficante Pablo Escobar. Escobar had a bomb put in a commercial airliner to give the Columbian government a message to stop trying to arrest him. Every man, woman and child on the airliner was killed. When that failed to prevent the Columbian government from inconveniencing him, he had a school bus full of kids machine gunned. When they eventually got him, they could not execute him, because there is no capitol punishment in Columbia. Only the innocents can be routinely killed in Columbia. Escobar then ran his criminal empire from his personnel prison complete with Olympic size swimming pool, harem, and zoo. When he got tired of it, he walked out. The yanks used radio intercepts to find him, and when his hideout was surrounded by the police, somebody was smart enough to put three shots in his ten ring.

Columbia sounds like the sort of capitol punishment free utopia that you dream about.

LEGO, generalisation from extremes is not just poor argumentation, it's stupid.