Death Penalty: Is it Moral in Some Contexts, Should it be Allowed?

[DavidOdden]

Challenging the deterrence in the death penalty =/= Implying lack of deterrence means that death penalty should be removed.

Do you think that there is evidence that imprisonment deters theft, assault, fraud, or drug use & sale? If you want to cast doubt on the deterrence value of the death penalty, you need to establish that punishment does in general have a known and unquestionable deterrence value. That would give us a basis for saying that the death penalty in particular was actually counterproductive in terms of deterrence.

You don't have a credible challenge to the death penalty deterrent, since your study failed to explain the change across time in the difference between death penalty states and non-death-penalty states. The statistics are completely meaningless because they failed to control the most elementary of variables. Note that DC, which has no death penalty, consistently has the highest murder rate, higher than the competitors by almost an order of magnitude. I see no reason to think that there is any significance, especially correlation with having a death penalty, to those figures.

And I am generously ignoring the fact that you've misidentified the function of punishment, as freestyle points out.

[Grames]

That's not what I said. Challenging the deterrence in the death penalty =/= Implying lack of deterrence means that death penalty should be removed.

We agree then. Deterrence can be discarded as a factor. What remains? Penalty and punishment are related ideas yet to be defined in this thread.

[Sergeant343]

We agree then. Deterrence can be discarded as a factor. What remains? Penalty and punishment are related ideas yet to be defined in this thread.

I think it'll be fair to say that punishments are temporary and penalties are "permanent"