Should murder be punished with the death penalty?

Answer 1

Depends, If you want to be sure they never hurt anyone again or want revenge and you are 100% certain they did it, then yes. If your goal is not for revenge, but to rehabilitated, you have a good system for this and you can be sure that he won't hurt people upon his release, then no. Also, if you can't be 100% certain (not just 99%) then no

Answer 2

If it is mass murder like the Victorian bushfires than yes.

yes i do think that that cold blood muderers should get the death penalty but what if that person killed in self defence and what if you killed someone for your family so their is a lot of different murders

Answer 3

There are arguments either side. Some argue that this goes against human rights, or for some other reason is barbaric.

Some argue that it is just to extend to people who break the law in the worst possible way to suffer the worst possible legal fate.

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Indeed there are many arguments to this subject. However Most of these arguments are strictly based on emotion, opinion, religion or politics. Not only are arguments based on these factors inherently unreliable they are potentially dangerous. Human beings have historically invented explanations for things we do not understand. Weather it's life, death, or what have you. The question of why one human being would kill another when it is so adverse to perpetuating or species? Science and more specifically psychology has been used in the pursuit to answer this question. Many theories have been attached to this behavior such as human nature, nature vs nurture, genetics, etc. However many of these theories completely ignore their respective fields or for that matter human behavior.

The human being and intrinsically the human brain are complete slaves the their environment. Meaning that a person or therefore life is completely fabricated based on the environment around it. The Buddha once put it:

"The many contains the one and the one contains the many"

In other words to understand a human being one must understand the environment from which said human has been developed. Many of the most insidious murderers have been brutally abused and in many cases survivors of their own attempted murder by the hands of a loved one. Therefor if we are to put to death those who do become murderers should we not also put to death those who have been directly responsible in the development of that individual and so on? It was once said that "an eye for an eye would leave everyone blind" . Laws and punishment are only created for problems in which no effective solution can be found. Murder falls under this dilemma. To fix the problem would raise a need to fix the environment and therefor civilization itself.

Answer 4

That's a tricky one, and either answer has its own merits. Basically, you have to decide on your own.

The biggest trouble is that sometimes the law sentences the wrong person for the crime. With a life sentence, there's a still a chance to discover the error and give the person some life back. But if the person has already been executed then there's nothing more to be done.

If I was part of the legal system and had been directly involved with executing an innocent, I'd feel quite bad about it. If I had a friend or relative that got killed for something (s)he hadn't done, I'd be sad, and very angry with society for letting that happen.

Keep in mind that the law only admits two states, either innocent or guilty.

That's it. End of story.

You can never be almost innocent, or mostly guilty.

If the legal system was to say: "this guy, we've got good evidence on, we'll go for execution here. But that guy, evidence isn't that good, we go for a life sentence instead", then the law suddenly isn't sure anymore.

And as soon as you get degrees of guilt, then you're in trouble. Punishment has to be tied to the severity of the crime, not the quality of the evidence.

Then there are all the practical issues.

With all the appeals, death by execution can well be more expensive than life inprisonment. It's also not that easy to kill a human in a controlled and somehow "humane" way as you might think.

Hangings are difficult. Too long drop and the head will be pulled free of the body. Messy. Too short and the convict will choke, slowly, under considerable pain.

The electric chair wasn't a surefire thing either.

Basically the methods that looks reasonably clean and humane, weren't/aren't always (immediately) lethal. And the methods that were immediately lethal (execution squad, guillotine) were/are seen as messy, barbaric and hard on the staff.