Death Penalty Poll

[ThaSaltCracka]

This is one of the main reasons I oppose it. I remember about a year ago O'Reilly had Mark Furhman on his show plugging his new book, which was about Oklahoma's death row inmates. Basically through his research, and with the help of several lawyers, they reviewed all of the cases for each current death row inmate and found that an obscene number of people were wrongly convicted, or with faulty evidence. Because of his research, OK stopped doing capital punishment(not sure if thats changed).

To me, the mere thought that an innocent man might be put to death scares the crap out of me, and because of the death penalty, and the finality of it, this has more than likely happened.

[elwoodblues]

Below are some poll results from a 1993 study that I found on the net.

[jakethebake]

The innocent man thing is just the dumbest arguement ever for no death penalty. You're addressing the wrong problem. You have issues with our ability to determine guilt so you condemn the penalty. If convicted innocents is the issue, then we need to improve our ability to prove guilt or defend innocence, not change the punishments. It's not the punishment that's the problem.

[Victor]

so in the meantime we will just kill innocent people.


What you are saying would be like not treating the symptoms of someone suffering from say a sinus infection. The have a headache, sore throat and runny nose. Of course, there is no reason to relieve these problems as they are no the cause.

[jakethebake]

[ QUOTE ]
so in the meantime we will just kill innocent people.


[/ QUOTE ]
We don't know that's the case. In this case you're determining there's an illness w/o ANY symptoms, to use your medical analogy. I doubt we'd prescribe chemotherapy to someone w/o knowing they had cancer.

[tolbiny]

"We don't know that's the case. In this case you're determining there's an illness w/o ANY symptoms, to use your medical analogy"

The symptoms are there- look at Illinois where they put a moratorium on the death penalty as the process was corrupted so badly. There have been signifigant numbers of people on death row who have been released- it stands to reason that some of those who should have been released were not. (in fact if you do a search i am sure you will find a certain number of people who have been proven innocent after they were executed).

[Richard Tanner]

More then that, there was a study in 1999 (I'm sorry I can't remember the name) that found 13 innocent people had been killed. They had later been exhonorated (sp?) of their crime due to new DNA evidence.

Cody

[Hack]

They weren't released because they were innocent.

They were released because there wasn't enough evidence to give them the death penalty.

Some of them were given life in prison instead, btw, which obviously indicates that they were NOT innocent.

[KJS]

When the punishment cannot be reversed it is a problem.

KJS

[Nepa]

Doesn't it cost like 3 times more a year for a death penalty prisoner vs. a non-death penalty prisoner?

I consider myself a fiscal conservative and that is the reason that I'm against the death penalty.