Dear O Sung Wu,

Decisions about capital punishment are not really
about deterrence. They're about retribution - about
society's revenge on a person who takes another's
life.

Whether such retribution is justified is not a
matter of measurable facts; it is a moral judgement
for each individual to make.

Some people feel that those who kill another human
being should pay the supreme penalty and forfeit
their own lives; others feel that human life is so
sacred that society is demeaned when the state kills
its citizens, however grave their offense.

In any event, a large and increasing number of people -
seem to favour the death penalty.

The usefulness and morality of the death sentence
are controversial, particularly because the United
States is virtually the only Western democracy that allows
executions. A principled argument for the death
penalty is that it will deter murder. Although people
on both sides of the debate have wrenched the statistics
this way and that in support of their claims, there
does not appear to be any consistent difference in
homicide rates between states with the death penalty
and other wise similar states without it.

And if the death penalty alone deterred murder, there would
be hardly any homicide in the US, which has the death
penalty, and a great deal of homicide among other
industrialised nations, which do not. Yet the reverse is
true; the American homicide rate is by far the highest in
the industrialised world.

o sung wu, I do not agree with the death penalty, its not a deterrent, and its simply societies way of exacting revenge, and revenge is not justice. You recall the 'backpacker' murders some years back, could there be a more heinous criminal than Milat, hard to find one. Yes, I fully understand if it was my child murdered then I may well want revenge in the form of the death penalty, hard to say as I'm not in that situation.

Dear O Sung Wu,

We also need to remember that terrorism is
a complex phenomenon. There are certain conditions -
social, political, religious conditions that exist
and people choose terrorism because they believe that
violence or its threat will be effective and usher in
change. They believe that the violent means justify the
ends. Killing these people - will make them martyrs
and heroes - and possibly may attract others to their
cause. I doubt whether deterrence will be the result.

The answer is simple. If murder is wrong, judicial murder cannot be right.

Good afternoon to all you good people...

I've calmed down a little from yesterday where for the first time in awhile a cold fury came to the surface.

Some of you may recall, I broached this very subject a couple of years back and at that time I spoke against Capital Punishment for ALL crimes. Since then I've had a significant shift, crime is crime, murder is murder' but unmitigated terrorism involving a person gleefully holding up a decapitated head for the purpose of teasing 'whoever' - is no crime, it's an abomination, an obscenity and the perpetrator of which should be destroyed, not punished but completely destroyed.

Some of you may know I'm 75, a retired detective, and a veteran, so I'm not exactly a shrinking violet. But these views and opinions that I've summarised herein, have really concerned me, as I've thought by now, I was sufficiently settled enough to rise above these daily accounts of atrocities and horror, all of which were perpetrated in the name of Islam.

HASBEEN'S correct. We're far, far too soft. Give it back to these 'people' in spades. Twice as hard, without any degree of mercy, in fact the word mercy should not be in our vocabulary when dealing with this 'disease'. Render total destruction and forget all about being civilised, compassionate, mature, above it all etc - total and absolute destruction, perhaps then they'll have a greater degree of fear of us, and leave us alone.

Agronomist,

We should all use the same understanding of words,

Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being by any other human, judicial murder is the unlawful killing of a human being by the State, but the execution by the State of a criminal, who has been found guilty of a capital offence in accordance with the laws of that State is not murder.