GOP DebateFollow

Huntsman is the new Ron Paul.

I love the Bible Belt's "You can be anything you want to be, as long as you're white and Christian" mentality sometimes.

If you 'toweled off' a GOP politician, It would probably generate a scandal.

Without meaning to sidetrack the entire thread, you are an idiot, your observations are misguided at best, and your understanding of the distinction between capital punishment and "caring about life" is about as sharp as a beach ball.

Go play in a dumpster and leave the big kids to talk.

Really? You can't see where he's coming from since these same groups fight so hard to end abortion and keep marriage between a man and a woman, but they do nothing/very little to stop capital punishment in their states? Right or wrong, it's pretty easy to see where his view would be coming from. If your heads not buried in the sand that is.

I think the point is that they spent all their time and money trying to prevent teh gays from getting married, which does nothing to end life, instead of fighting to stop the death penalty, which does very little to protect life.

My mom was brutally murdered in 2004. The lawyer gave us the option of pressing for the death penalty or allowing him to settle for a plea bargain of 150 years in prison. We chose the latter, because we felt no need for blood vengeance, and while I am agnostic, my older sisters are devout Catholics and they believe the death penalty is never justified, no matter how heinous the crime.

Edited, Sep 9th 2011 9:02pm by catwho

No. They're being judged on their fights to end abortion because it's murder and then turning a blind eye to another state allowed murder. They are not completely separate. Not when the most verbal argument they use is that abortions are murder.

I'd rather leave some sick ******* to rot in prison for 50 years than give him early release through the death penalty.

Adding a little something. The main reason I like the Death penalty is what happen in catwho case. If all you stand to lose is your freedom rolling the dice is not that bad of a bet. When you use the death penalty it adds a a greater risk to that roll. Now when Death penalty cases come up you must always include a lesser charge the jury can convict on. As a deterrent it doesn't work getting pleas and ensuring at least justice is served in some way it works better.

Er, I really doubt the guy who killed my mom in a fit of schizophrenic rage was at all concerned about what punishment he was going to get at the time he did it.

Edited, Sep 10th 2011 12:23am by catwho

I hate that plea bargains exist. I really, really do. We have a system in which a crime is heard by a jury of the people for a reason--anything that allows us to be taken out of the equation is not okay with me.

Same reason why I don't like military tribunals (ignoring the horrifying inequalities of them).

Except that this isn't how they are used. This might be why they were first conceived of, but it definitely doesn't reflect our current system.

In reality, cases where the conviction is assured are those where they DON'T get a plea bargain offer, because the DA has no fear of losing and the wins are good for the prosecutor's record (which increases chances for promotion, and decreases chances they'll lose their position).

The people who are offered pleas are the ones where the DA is worried about a loss--the majority of cases in the US (easily) are the result of plea bargains. And the DA loves them, because it's so much less work on their end.

But, in reality, it comes at a massive price. Since the system is pushing prosecutors to make deals before ever going to court, they need to make their offer really attractive. They can't just make it increasingly lenient, so they trump up the charges they are threatening people with--literally adding every possible charge they can, as extreme as they can (even to the point where they would certainly never be able to actually prove the defendant deserved it in court).

And that creates another problem--innocent people get charged with crimes. And it happens more often than anyone is happy about. A system that revolves around plea bargains means that they are getting the absolute worst charges slapped onto them, beyond what they would deserve if they were guilty. That makes going to court increasingly terrifying, since their actual innocence means relatively little at the point where they are standing trial, since the prosecution has some kind of evidence against them.

Suppose your lawyer has told you that he thinks you have a 50/50 shot of winning. On the one hand, there's freedom. On the other hand, there's 10 years in prison. That plea bargain of 2 years is looking pretty damn attractive at this point...

And the worst part is when it comes to sexual indecency cases, where you find an absurd number of innocent people going to prison. It's so hard to fight these convictions, since our society is inclined to convict even in cases where the evidence is half circumstantial, half testimony. You get people going to prison (and being labeled sex offenders) even when they didn't do it, because accepting the plea is almost certainly getting them a reduced sentence.

But this is only part of the issue--the other part is that we are now creating punishments almost specifically to force people into pleas. The majority of armed robberies are actually punished as unarmed, for instance. The only substantial reason, then, that the armed robbery charge is so severe is to make the unarmed offer attractive. But how is it just that some people get unarmed charges, but others don't even get offered a deal and need to take the armed one, for the same crime in the same place.