The Death Penalty makes more sense than Solitary Confinement for Life.

"So would it be okay for the government to torture the convicted murderer before their death if they found out that that would sell and recoup the costs? By your statement, the government can basically do anything they want in order to make back the millions of dollars lost by the death penalty, so they can torture these people. This is a violation of human rights. " The Constitution goes even further than anything the government can do. Torture is against the Constitution; the death penalty is not. And the Constitution says nothing about the movie business buying out a person for a death scene. "- Rarely do victims of families cry out for solitary confinement. They cry out for death. They want the murderer killed. But we cannot simply be swayed by the emotions that people get wrapped up in when these things occur. Justice should be above emotion. We all may feel like the killer of one of our loved ones should die, but justice is above emotion. Justice does not bow to impassioned cries of vengeance. " The pain felt by the family members would be reflected in the pain felt in the family members of the death-penalized murderer. Emotions do not decide court cases. Evidence decides court cases. "- Even if DNA evidence, security tapes and testimony all lines up and points the finger at one person, their life should not be taken, because of my above (and below) reasons. " Well, you have not defended your point by saying that it might still be false, so that point has been conceded. "- Well, I'll have to disagree with people not being able to find spirituality without a priest or book. People do not need organized religion or texts to give them spirituality. There was none of that stuff when mankind began; it had to come out of somewhere. " Yes, but it would be much more difficult. It would be kind of hard to ask God for a sign if you're in solitary confinement. Also, people go mentally insane in prison. . http://justana-justana.blogspot.com... This makes it much harder to acknowledge religion. "- I just think you're making a very blanket value judgment on the meaning of someone's life. Who's to say that people who are completely alone and solitary have less meaning than you or me? I think you are making ill-placed assumptions that a person's life is devoid of meaning if they have nothing or are not surrounded by others. One can do many things internally and find out many things just with reflection, for example. " My assumptions are not ill-placed. If you sit in a cell for 30 years with nothing to do but reflect, your life means less than that of a person who actually contributes to the good of society. The government's main concern is the good of their jurisdiction and its society. "- Also, it would be MUCH safer for the murderers to be locked up in solitary confinement. All you need to do is put some food through a slot in the locked door. Not too hard to protect oneself. Meanwhile, a whole room full of prisoners is much more volatile. How many prison riots do you see on those cop shows? A good deal. It's because there are so many criminals in one area. Security is in fact, less tight in these situations. Solitary confinement would be safest for guards. " You're comparing solitary confinement to ordinary prisons. However, a dead criminal is much less likely to attack a guard than a freedom-deprived one. "- I feel as though that we are already keeping 'so many criminals in one place' by having prisons in the first place. But we cannot simply kill them all because a natural disaster may or may not occur. It is illogical. " No, it's a plausible reason as to why solitary confinement is worse than the death penalty. "- Well, I did not mean straight from the courtroom right to solitary. They would have an opportunity to write a will and any other religious rites they might need (last meal of sorts or something). They would be allowed such things before they would go into solitary for the remainder of their lives. " I said the same thing about the death penalty. But at least you can't forget your religion between your last meal and your death, rather than perhaps an unpredictable thirty years in between. "- I must :) How is it a good idea to kill in order to teach people not to kill? Should I smoke cocaine in front of my kids if I don't wish them to do it? Also, who has the right to take away that life, if the murderer loses the right to life? Do I? Do you? Why does the government? If we go with the idea that a murderer loses the right to life as soon as he/she takes the life of another purposefully, who gets to take that murderer's life? There is no logical answer given your stance. Either we all can or no one can. I'm sure you don't advocate people running around killing around anyone who they deem a murderer, so the only other option is that no one can. In your philosophical stance on the right to life, there is no one who may take the life of anyone, really, and that should include punishments/vengeance. " Killing is not necessarily murdering. If a person already lost his right to life, a death sentence is no longer depriving him of the right that he removed from himself. And I believe that punishments may, in some cases, include the loss of life. This isn't anarchy. This is a judicial system. "- And government is certainly not the answer to this criticism. It is an imperfect judge and has killed innocent people in the past, making the entity of government a murderer itself, really. So are we allowed to let a murderer judge a murderer? I would think not. " Well, you conceded that a person absolutely proven to be guilty of murder is guilty of murder, so the judge has no real power over this. Government is not perfect, but it is better at determining punishment that any other system. And so, let's live with it. And to counter your murder rate thing, we have a correlation between murder rate and death penalty. However, there are two possible explanations that do not involve a fault in the death penalty. 1. There are only fifty states for data, and only about twenty years. It could be purely coincidence; perhaps one of the death penalty states has always been naturally crime-run. 2. Maybe the death penalty does not lead to higher crime rates; maybe higher crime rates lead to the decision to adopt a death penalty, in an attempt to lower the crime rate. In conclusion, the death penalty has a way to undo its money problems, and it lacks a need of security. A person loses his right to life when he deprives this right from another. Thus, the Death Penalty makes more sense than Solitary Confinement for Life. Thank you for debating, and thank you, random bystander, for reading.