An Alliance Portal on the Death Penalty
Capital Punishment, death penalty, judicial homicide, assassination, bloodshed, bumping off, carnage, execution, extermination, manslaughter, massacre, slaughter, slaying, mob justice, stringing up, the gallows, vigilante justice, vengeance, murder by any other name.

The Death Penalty

Capital Punishment
Civilized nations have abandoned state murder.
Hopefully the United States will join the ranks
of the civilized nations of the world.
Death Penalty – Two little words that mean
the legal act of committing murder.

The only time
killing is “justified”
is as a last resort
in direct self-defense.

https://sites.google.com/site/judicialhomicide/
.

More on the Death Penalty, Judicial Homicide, and Killing both Innocent and Guilty Prisoners…

On Killing prisoners:
Killing prisoners is morally
unacceptable. Killing in
time of war is “justified”
according to the threat
presented by an enemy
combatant. Killing an
enemy in combat may
be “justified” on a similar
basis as for killing in
self-defense outside of war.
A prisoner no longer presents a
threat used to justify killing in war.
Killing prisoners is murder, pure and simple.
It is immoral. It was Hitler’s most heinous crime.

According to the Geneva Convention,
prisoners of war who have surrendered
cannot be tortured, plundered or killed.
The murder of defenseless prisoners
is rightly considered
to be a war crime.

What some have said about judicial homicide:

“Since I was a law student, I have
been against the death penalty.
It does not deter.

It is severely discriminatory
against minorities, especially
since they’re given no competent
legal counsel defense in many cases.
It’s a system that has to be perfect.
You cannot execute one innocent
person. No system is perfect.
And to top it off, for those of you
who are interested in economics,
it costs more to pursue a capital
case toward execution than it
does to have full life imprisonment
without parole.”
Ralph Nader Meet the Press interview, Jun. 25, 2000

We need to kill the death penalty, not people.

1) Democracy.
The death penalty is totalitarian.
I don’t want anyone killed

in my name, in our name.
When the government prosecutes, convicts, sentences,
and executes defendants, we the people are the
plaintiff. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously
said that in a democracy, not all are at fault, but
everyone is responsible. The current system enforces
that we citizens are co-responsible for our fellow
citizens’ state-sanctioned murder, which is more
akin to fascism than democracy. I dissent.
.

2) Barbarism.
The death penalty is barbaric
and an antiquated, regressive, “cruel and unusual” punishment. With all of our advances in the sciences, sociology, psychology, education,
technology, and so on, we should have more
socially-effective, non-lethal, civilized techniques
to punish (and rehabilitate) criminals, while
protecting the rest of society. Professor
Austin Sarat estimates that “executions
by lethal injection are botched at a higher
rate than any of the other methods employed
since the late 19th century, 7 percent.”
.

3) Cost.
The death penalty is quite expensive
and life imprisonment can be cheaper. Over
the lifetime of a case, executing prisoners can
be three times as expensive as life in prison,
primarily due to the higher costs of capital
punishment trials, automatic appeals, and
the heightened security on death row with
lower staff-to-prisoner ratios. Commuting
all death sentences to life in prison would
save hundreds of millions of dollars per year
in the U.S. and many billions over the coming decades.

.
4) Deterrence.
The death penalty doesn’t have
a deterrent factor and doesn’t decrease crime.
States with the death penalty do not have lower
homicide rates. Many criminals don’t get caught,
most criminals don’t receive the death penalty,
and those who do are typically on death row
for a long time, often at least a decade and
sometimes more, so would-be criminals don’t
typically make a connection between their crime
and capital punishment. We cannot conclude that
the death penalty has any deterrent effect on crime, including murder.
.

5) Brutalization Effect.
The death penalty is brutal
on society. The brutalization effect suggests that
when violence is condoned via the death penalty,
more violence occurs. Homicide rates tend to
increase around the time of executions, due to
legitimation, desensitization, and imitation.
The death penalty makes society more
dangerous by further increasing violence
through the brutalization effect.

.
6) Civilization.
The death penalty is uncivilized.
Civilized countries have banned the death penalty
as have 18 U.S. states, while the governments that
maintain the death penalty are typically more corrupt
and dictatorial ones (e.g., China, North Korea, Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen; in the U.S., Texas leads
in applying the death penalty by far, accounting
for over 1/3 of U.S. executions). The U.S., as the
only remaining Western country to regularly
administer the death penalty, is in very bad company
and the world knows it, even if many Americans don’t,
which decreases the legitimacy of the U.S. on human rights issues.

.
7) Innocence.
Innocent people are on death row
and innocent people have been put to death. These
are irreversible tragedies. A recent study concludes
that 4% of people on death row in America are not
guilty. Since 1973, 144 prisoners on death row have
been found to be innocent of the crimes for which
they were convicted. The Death Penalty Information
Centre strongly suspects that ten prisoners who were
put to death were wrongly accused and killed.
.

8) Racism.

The death penalty is racist
and has been applied in

racially-discriminatory ways. African
American men are disproportionately
sentenced to death. Prosecutors, juries,
and judges are much more likely to
apply the death penalty when the victim
is white and the defendant is black.

Race is a “potent influence” at every step in the criminal (in) justice system,
including search, arrest, indictment, trial, conviction, sentence, and execution.

.
9) Humanity.
The death penalty is inhumane.
Killing people makes us like the murderers
who most of us so despise. It is not only about
what capital punishment does to those killed,
but also what it does to those who do the
killing and those in whose name the killing
is done. It’s bad enough that we are victimized
by crime in our society; we don’t need to be
further victimized by by becoming perpetrators
and enacting the death penalty and then
living with the unfortunate consequences.

.
10) Social Change.
The tide is turning against
the death penalty. Increasingly, countries and states are banning the death penalty; drug companies are refusing to allow their products to be used for capital punishment; the U.S.
is executing fewer people; and public support for the death penalty is waning. Decreased crime rates, changes in sentencing guidelines, diminishing support, and demographics (the young and people of color are much less likely to support the death penalty) are all leading toward less capital punishment and its ultimate abolition.
There are also personal, political, religious,
and spiritual reasons to oppose capital punishment. The sooner we kill the death penalty, the better it’ll be.

Let’s not wait any longer.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/07/15/kill-death-penalty-10-arguments-against-capital-punishment

Dan Brook, Ph.D., is a freelance instructor of sociology and political science, maintains Eco-Eating at www.brook.com/veg, and can be contacted via brook@brook.com.

Capital Punishment Abolish the Death Penalty

How many western industrialized nations in the world today kill prisoners, murder citizens, put children to death, and exterminate the mentally-ill?

This Only Happens in America…
Let’s change this shameful state of affairs.

It’s an uphill battle… but the only way to stop killing, is to stop killing.

Too many innocents have died, click here for an update on recent events! Visit the Innocence Project http://www.innocenceproject.org/index.php Scroll Down for Links to related siites

Blogs Capital Punishment Discussion Group Capital Punishment – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Death Penalty Information Death Penalty Links Death Penalty News & Updates Capital Punishment Discussion Economics of Capital Punishment Groups and Organizations History of Capital Punishment National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty New!! Current News Articles on Capital Punishment Related Links The Death penalty: an overview Return to Home Page (IPRC)

The death penalty condemns the innocent to die.

- Since 1976, more than 100 people have been released from prison after being sentenced to death despite their innocence. In other words, 1 in 7 of those on death row have been freed after being fully exonerated.
  
  The book, In Spite of Innocence, notes that between 1900 and 1992 there have been 416 documented cases of innocent persons who have been convicted of murder or capital rape — a third of whom were given a death sentence. The authors discovered that in 23 of these cases, the person was executed.
Illinois has released as many from death row as it has executed since 1976. As a result, an Illinois Supreme Court Justice said, “Despite the courts’ efforts to fashion a death penalty scheme that is just…, the system is not working. Innocent people are being sentenced to death… If this is the best our state can do, we have no business sending people to their deaths.”

https://thepeaceresource.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/ban-capital-punishment-judcial-homicide-executions-and-the-murder-of-prisoners/

BREAKING NEWS AT THE ALLIANCE:

SYSTEM GRAVELY BROKEN:
RESPONSES TO CHASSE DISCIPLINE REVERSAL

     ~From Time on Our Hands, by Max Linden Levy

                                                Readings

The Death Penalty

Here are 10 reasons why, any one of which could be enough.

Capital Punishment Abolish the Death Penalty

It’s an uphill battle… but the only way to stop killing, is to stop killing.

The death penalty condemns the innocent to die.

Here are 10 reasons why, any one of which
could be enough.