Subj : Re: Death Penalty To : Jazzman From : Finnigann Date : Thu Sep 29 2005 12:04 pm -=> Jazzman wrote to Finnigann <=- > As I pointed out elsewhere, our system is based on NOT convicting an innocen > man. Even if ten guilty people go free as a result. Sorry if that doesn't gi > you much satisfaction. But the founding fathers foresaw possible miss-use. M > appeals are automatic. Ja> I understood our topic to be about maintaining the DP. Sorry but i Ja> don't follow what your trying to tell me about 10 guilty people Ja> going free as a result. A result of ?... From the previous stats yes the death penatly is the severest form of punishment we can mete out by aw. But Justice is there for all crimes (hopefully) Our system is designed to be careful about a persons rights. AS in everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a _reasonable_ doubt. No mah has to prove his innocents. That is the state of being from the start. It's the burden of the state to prove his guilt. All safe gards must be observed. Any evidense found to be exculpatory for the defense must be turned over to the defense at once. (as an example) The reverse is not true. No man can be tried for the same crime twice. All that is needed is one NOT guilty verdict and it's over. Do many guilty people go free? Yes. and it's sad when a technicallity causes such a turn of events. BUT our system is premised on innocences being preserved. That's where the ten guilty going free comes from. Our system must be so secure for the innocent that sometimes the guilty may also elude punishment. But it can be demonstrated that this is no longer the case for many folks. Our prisons have ratios higher than general populations would suggest they should be. Even the arrests do not support such high numbers in prison (and by extention the death penatly) People are not found guilty sometimes due to their skin color etc. They do not get sentenced to prison due to racial considerations. Serving time unjustly is bad enough, we can make amends if the error comes to light. But this is NOT the case in death penalty cases. Once it done... there is no opps! Ja> we both viewed, 11 on DR executed since 1977 and now 645 on DR in Ja> California. That points to something being drastically wrong with Ja> the system. You certainly couldn't argue that they are moving to Ja> fast would you ? Do you think they are moving too slow? If I were an innocent man, siting on death row. I would want every stone overturned to help proven my innocences. Our system demands that much. > Ja> AFAIK there are penalties for prosecuters and defense attorneys who > Ja> lie and wrongfully manipulate the system. They can be stripped of > Ja> practicing by the BAR Association and subject to jail/prison time. > Hardly a fair balance and rare too. I have not ever heard of a prosecutor Ja> Well that would be balance compared to somone who commits a horrendous Ja> act like murder. Stripping someone of their career seems fairly Ja> severe to me. If it's a mistake maybe that would be enough. But sometimes they get so locked into a set of facts that they will bend the rules or worse. Then I think they should trade places with the person they helped to wrongly convict and sit on death row, or in their jail cell. I am not saying this happens often, I have no data on that. But that it does happen I have no doubt either. If cought and convicted in such cases, they should be forced to finish out the sentence they evoked... It would, I should think, instill a great sense of care in prosecuting cases. ÕÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ ³ "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, ³ in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." ³ - Carl Sagan ³ .... 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2. --- MultiMail/Win32 v0.46 þ Synchronet þ Bits-N-Bytes BBS Onehellofa BBS bnb.dtdns.net .