Hmmm, here we go, and I am gonna be answering cross posts here; first off, criminals do have human rights, I agree but....some criminals give up the right to be treated humanely if their crime was inhuman ... I hope you understand where I am coming from here.
I readily acknowledge the consequential problem of who gets to draw the line and where but that is a problem that falls fairly and squarely into the lap of the lesser of evils as far as I am concerned.
I'll now come to the notion of there being no active deterrent to the cases I am referring to, the child killers.
The type of animal who systematically tortures and eventually murder children such as in the recent case of Baby P will not be deterred by a death sentence, leastwise I don't think their pathology allows them to be deterred anyway.
The problem with evaluating deterrence values is, you are trying to prove a negative and as you know Jay, it is allegedly impossible.
With that in mind, I find it difficult to lend any weight to any argument that categorically states the death penalty doesn't deter.
When analyzing this problem, it's a skewed demographic here because you presumably end up interviewing murderers, who self-evidently weren't deterred but how many deterred potential killers are out there?
It's not as if they would be queuing up to register the fact they were deterred from killing a kid with the local authorities.
At this point, it is quite natural of me to refer back to the post I made before this in the thread where I detailed the scenario whereby we have the death penalty and ponder the two options of whether it works or not.
The important aspect of that is, the only way you can undermine it is by assigning more rights to the murderer.
I wasn't gonna respond to Dskize because I thought his answer was too glib and he hadn't thought it through enough, especially when considering the veracity of the statement, 'the death penalty doesn't deter'.
Am I missing something here Jay coz for me, it's a no-brainer, I have tried to approach this problem as a logician would and maybe that's where I am going wrong?