[coffeecrazy1]

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except then we end up executing innocent people.

I have a friend who got a guy off death row, in part because he was able to take some time to get his story written. (He was an investigative journalist)

Your idea would have killed an innocent man before he got a new trial.

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1)I defy you to tell me where I prescribed executing innocent people.
2)I also never said I thought the appeals process should be less thorough...I was saying I thought it should either be more efficient, or keep it the same way, but have the politicians be upfront and honest about the fact that long years of thinking about your impending death is part of the punishment.

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I find that obscene and your ideas repungant.

[/ QUOTE ] That's fine. You and I tend to disagree about most things.

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The death penalty is ancient history - it belongs with child labor and slavery as the product of an age when sleeping with one's own sister was legal and a black man could be lynched for looking at a white woman.

[/ QUOTE ] Again, I disagree that the death penalty is in that same category.

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It lumps us in with Islamic States and 3rd world countries instead of putting us in with the rest of civilized society.

[/ QUOTE ] By and large, yes...but haven't we already showed that we're not exactly the ONLY civilized place with the death penalty? Isn't Japan civilized, for one? Regardless...you're essentially making the "everyone's doing it, so why can't we?" argument...which is probably not the best strategy for public policy.

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Stanley Willams did some bad [censored]....he's paid for his crime for 20 years. Now he can't keep repaying society, which is too bad - cause he really was repaying society back by taking his anti-gang message to the inmates in prison and members on the outside

[/ QUOTE ] Yes...but the time Stanley Williams did was not the punishment. As horrible as it is, the time he spent on death row was ancillary and irrelevant to the nature of his actual punishment. A jury decided that he was guilty of the most heinous type of murder(special circumstance), and that his punishment was the forfeiture of his life. If he was innocent, or the jury committed some error of law, that's one thing. But not even Tookie's supporters have provided any hard evidence that he did not deserve what he got(the death part, anyway).

And...let's be upfront about something else. We don't send people to jail because they need to "repay society." We send them to jail because they violated a law, and must be punished for that violation. Stanley Williams' actions on death row, while noble, are irrelevant to the completion of his sentence.

Stanley Williams brutally murdered four people. From the way it sounds, you think that each of them deserved five years of his time. Surely you don't mean that...