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To: LindyBill who wrote (2653)	11/8/2002 9:55:13 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 6901

< the anti-Death penalty folk have a good argument that it does not deter.> But that's not a good argument. There are doubtless plenty of instances where the death penalty is irrelevant. For example, a law defining crashing aircraft into high buildings and the punishment being a death sentence isn't going to be much use. It might even be an encouragement. "Cool, if they catch me, they'll execute me and it's 'Hello 70 Virgins'". It's important not to reward unwanted behaviour and encourage bad ideas. Too often, the law of unintended consequences creates more problems than a new, all singing and dancing, piece of bureaucracy solves. Another case would be where rape gets the death penalty, but so does murder. A smart rapist could figure out that he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and by murdering the victim, might even get away with it. That is not a sexist remark against me, because rapists often ARE men. Women have trouble raping men, using violence and threat of death, because that seems to affect the man's libido, which makes rape problematic. Of course, if that wasn't the case, women would be raping away [because we are non-discriminatory here, it would be inappropriate to suggest that women are actually simply disinclined to rape]. To resolve that, rape with murder could attract death by being dissolved in acid a drip at a time and simple rape without loss of life could be death by that gas they used in Moscow. There are many ways to skin a cat. I suppose the answer is to give the death penalty to those who don't want it and gaol to those who want the death penalty. They could get a form to fill in their preference. Or maybe toss a coin - heads = off with it, and tails = put them in gaol. If they grin at the result, do the opposite. Mqurice