Here’s a Yahoo News story, and pay attention to the victims and their view of capital punishment.
Excerpt:
The leader of a former gang of Houston teenagers who raped and murdered two young girls walking home from a neighborhood party 17 years ago was executed Tuesday in Texas.
Peter Anthony Cantu, 35, was strapped to a gurney in the Huntsville Unit prison death chamber and administered a lethal injection at 6:09 p.m. CDT. He took a single deep breath before slipping into unconsciousness, then was pronounced dead eight minutes later as relatives of his victims, Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena, looked stoically through a window a few feet from him.
Asked by the warden if he had any last statement, Cantu replied: “No.” He never looked at the witnesses, including his victims’ parents.
“Nothing he would have said to me would have made any difference,” Adolfo Pena, who lost his daughter in the attack, said after watching Cantu die. “He did a horrendous crime to these two girls. He deserved to die and 17 years later, he died. Not soon enough.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Pena, who wore a T-shirt bearing pictures of both girls.
I’ll leave out the brutal details of the crime, and jump to this:
Jennifer’s father, Randy Ertman, who witnessed all three executions, said before Cantu was put to death Tuesday that the apologies meant nothing to him, that it was too late for apologies.
[…]Ertman said if the death penalty was intended as a deterrent, all five members who had been sentenced to die should have been hanged from trees outside Houston City Hall years ago.
“That would be a deterrent,” he said.
Ok, now look at this Fox News article which talks about whether it works to deter more violent crimes.
Excerpt:
What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.
[…]”Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it,” said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect.”A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. “The results are robust, they don’t really go away,” he said. “I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?”
Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory — if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people will change their behavior (forego apples or shy from murder).
That’s the only question we should be asking – does it work? Not “how does it makes us feel?”. I don’t care how it makes anyone feel except for the victims. I only care about the victims. If the conviction is good, and they accused admit their guilt, the death penalty should be on the table.
The Bible supports the idea of capital punishment, and if you want to explain to people why the Bible supports it, you need to give specific examples, talk from the point of the view of the victims, and reference the relevant research, keeping in mind that academics are vastly more likely to skew the results in favor of the liberal “murderers should not be punished because no one should be punished” view.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I’ve never really cared if CP has a deterrent effect or not. Deterrence isn’t the point. It’s a sentence, just like life in prison or any other sentence. The point is whether or not it’s a sentence appropriate for the crime. It is. Any sentence is a punishment first in order to satisfy justice. If it also deters, that’s a bonus. But whether or not a punishment has a deterent effect is irrelevant.
LikeLike
Of course it works. It’s not a secret that to be a gang member you have to ‘proof yourself’ by committing crimes. The law needs to punish justly.
LikeLike
I would say that the question we should be asking is not the utilitarian “does it work?” but the moral “is it right?”. One could argue that Hell is ineffective and “doesn’t work” since many (most actually according to Scripture) are heading there, and yet it exists not primarily as a deterrent but as a necessary part of a worked created by a just and holy Creator.
LikeLike
I think a concurrent question which is pertinent, is “does the justice system that reaches the verdict work?”
What level of incorrectly sentencing innocent people to the death penalty becomes unacceptable?
As a Christian who believes that the bible does allow for the government to carry out the death penalty, I do not, nor will I support the death penalty on any ballot where it is an option, or any discussion I participate in. Too many men have been executed for the crimes of another. I say let the death penalty be switched to life without possibility of parole. That allows for exonerating evidence to come forward and have effect. It also allows for the guilty to have a LONG time to ponder the mysteries of the universe, and to enter into a saving relationship with Jesus.
LikeLike
Concerns for the innocent are worthy, but they are not based on another reality, which is human failing, more often than not, the failings that led to the crime in the first place, the failings of those who could contribute to the criminal being brought to justice, the failings of those work in law enforcement and a host of other human failings.
It is also noteworthy that modern forensics and investigative techniques lower the chances of an innocent person being executed for the crimes of another. But it makes little sense to deprive justice due to the rare (and becoming more rare) incidence of mistaken identity. I would certainly hate to be another Hitchcock character, but I really don’t live my life in a manner that would lend to my being mistaken for someone worthy of execution.
For those who are indeed guilty and worthy of execution, they committed their crimes with the knowledge that capital punishment is likely upon their arrest and conviction. There are few crimes which carry execution as a just punishment, and those are connected with taking lives. To commit those crimes is to beg for death.
LikeLike
I’m not sure they’re so rare, nor that justice is deprived. Nor is bringing to bear a fictional and old scenario informed or appropriate.
There have been 15 death penalty executions overturned on DNA evidence while the ‘convicted’ was on death row. There are 39 occasions of people being executed whom probably shouldn’t have been by Northwestern University Law School. These are mostly based upon cases where usable DNA evidence was available for reexamination.
The idea that forensic science is so grand is a twisting of perception by a slew of forensic dramas on tv which have little to do with the reality of either forensics or the criminal justice system.
The above assumes that the facts of the case always come out and always win out, which is ideal but naive. Even if forensics were so great, it ignores politics…
The politicization of the district attorney’s office has only led to further problems, to wit the high profile UNC lacrosse team fiasco of a prosection and WSJ’s current highlight of Patrick Fitzgerald’s pattern of malicious and inappropriate prosecutions. This doesn’t begin to address the endemic corruption in the current Holder/Obama DOJ and their clear politicization of ‘justice’.
Someone rotting in a jail is neither happy nor a threat. But if they’re innocent, then advances in investigative and forensic techniques may be brought to bear before the end of life. Thre is no apologies to the dead, no do-overs.
LikeLike
By your own admission, DNA evidence has overturned convictions of innocent people. That such wasn’t available in the past (the 39 of whom you spoke) shows the advances that have been made. The likelihood of further mistakes is now reduced. (BTW, I don’t watch that much TV, nor do I confuse fictional TV series with actual, real life circumstances.)
(As an aside, as I recall, some of those spared by DNA evidence in that Northwestern study had criminal records of some kind. Some of these “innocents” were not so innocent. This certainly doesn’t justify being put to death if they committed no capital crime, but it goes to my point about living a good life.)
You bring up first the UNC lacrosse case which turned out properly (not a CP case), and then Fitzgerals’s activities (don’t recall any CP cases there) and end with Holder/Obama (any CP cases there?).
Very few CP cases have political implications to the extent that any politician looking to appear “tough on crime” would risk his career being wrong. Perhaps YOU are watching too much TV. As to rotting in jail, CP cases typically drag on for years and years with numerous appeals being processed for the slightest discrepancies and for least bit of doubt. This is troubling, but worth it for the sake of sparing the innocent, even though so many appeals are frivolous in nature.
It’s true one cannot apologize to the dead. But you make apologies to the victims that they must accept a lesser justice, and such apologies to the families and loved ones of those victims give little comfort. It’s as if one breaks someone’s window and the homeowner must content himself with an apology while he suffers the loss of the window at his own expense.
Capital punishment is society’s way of demonstrating its value of human life, that it is so precious that the only justice for the taking of a life is the forfeit of that life’s taker.
LikeLike