I would appreciate you letting me know if you find any evidentiary data to support any of your
speculations.
I wasn't stating a fact but rather an alternative explanation of why a certain fact may be true rather then your apparently assumed one that the death penalty does nothing to discourage murderers. I don't know if there is any easily obtainable evidence to support either hypothesis.
For your information, the aggregate of the States curently without the death penalty (Alaska, Hawaii,
Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia
and Wisconsin) have approximately half the rate of murders as the aggregate of the DP States
Do they also have lower crime rates in general? If they have crime rates as high or higher then the rates in the states with a death penalty but have lower murder rates then it would decent evidence to support your conclusion, otherwise it seems to be a fairly meaningless stat.
I would be interested in finding out why the murder rate was 35% lower in the States which has
abolished the death penalty than those which were executing people.
If these states abolished the death penalty and then relatively quickly the murder rate went down 35% without a similar drop in states that did not abolish the death penalty then you would have a very strong argument.
"That's focusing on an unimportant issue"
You could hardly have meant that. Perhaps you mean that it was not important to you because you were reading the link of generalized statistics with a personal agenda of critiquing their relevance to a narrow consideration? ...My first thought on seeing the stats on the child death sentences was to wonder why they were so high as compared to countries I considered far less tolerant of human rights...
I consider the number of executions in a particular age group to be a far narrower and less important piece of information then the question of the justice of such executions. If the executions are a violation of human rights then you have a point that its odd that a country that cares so much more about human rights would have a large number of them (even if it isn't more per capita). Also the term "child executions" might mislead people to think we are executing 6 year old or 10 year olds. To my knowledge people are not getting executed for crimes they committed before they were 14, and rarely for crimes they committed before 16. In many cultures 16 year olds are considered adults. They obviously are not yet completely mature but I don't know that I would call a 16 or 17 year old a child. What is the cutoff point in your source for someone to be considered a child? 14? 16? 18? 21? older?
I don't know why you consider that important when you have just said that the fact that 160 children
had been sentenced to die was an unimportant issue? Now, for some reason, you wish me to go scouring
the internet for their ages.
I was asking you about that age in response to your point that there was no minimum age. If it was considered esp. unjust for someone very young to be executed, then it would become important when considering how just a system is to determine how young the people being executed are. If most states have a limit of 14, 15 or 16, and the states that have no limit had not actually executed someone for a crime that wa committed before the age of 14, then the actions of those states would not be worse then the actions of the states that have a limit of 14. I suppose its possible that I misunderstood your point, and you where pointing out the risk that say a 10 year old might be executed, rather then implying that they actually where. If that is what you meant then I concede that you have a point but a very small one IMO because the risk seems very minimal. Of course if people are regularly getting executed for crimes they committed before they where 14 then then my judgment of the risk would be off and your point would become much more important, however I have never seen anything to indicate that any significant number of such executions have happened in my life time. In fact it might not just be "any significant number", I suspect that no executions of criminals that where convicted of crimes they committed as small children have happened in my life time in the United States.
What I was saying was unimportant was not that executions of minors happen, but rather the number compared to some other country that has a different population then the US. I consider the comparison to be unimportant both because of the concerns about the different population levels, and more importantly because of the fact that the justice or morality of our actions to punish young criminals do not depend on what other countries are doing to punish young criminals. The justice of these executions in the US stands or falls on its own merits. If it is just then it does not become unjust if everyone else stops doing it. If it is unjust then it doesn't matter if every other country in the world has a per capita rate 10 times as high as ours.
In a sense all of this is just dancing around the relevant question - "Are executions of people for crimes they committed in their teens just?". I might say yes, if the crimes are bad enough and it could be determined with sufficient certainty that they did commit the crime. Of course that point (can we be sufficiently certain that they really are guilty?) also applies to executions for murders that where committed by adults.
I recognize that you consider it unjust because you are against the death penalty in general, but do you consider it specifically unjust if a 25 year old man is executed for a crime he committed while he was 17? Would it make a big difference if he was 16 or 18 or 19 or 21 at the time the crime was committed? I'm not so sure that it would, but I am quite willing to listen to arguments about that question.
Tim |
