Keep in mind, a significant portion of sexual offenders against children are…other children.
Also, some states (likely including Florida at some point soon if not already) are trying to classify trans people using the bathroom as a sex offense. What happens when these two get combined?
Some people on Twitter have also pointed out that this incentivises child sex abusers to kill their victims, since the penalties are the same and they’re less likely to get caught if the victim is dead and therefore can’t report the crime or testify in court.
Yeah, that’s one of the main reasons why I’m against the death penalty. Some people could get wrongly accused/convicted and once an innocent person is executed, it’s too late!
Most of the replies to that Tweet are supporting the death penatly to child sex abusers (unsurprisingly), but, like you mentioned, other replies suggested that this is a terrible idea. Here’s a gallery:
Sigh… Here we go again. The death penalty is a barbaric and senseless practice, and should never be applied, especially for cases which do not involve the death of a party.
A man’s life is not worth sexual trauma, which can be recovered from. This is beyond senseless, and serves no other purpose than to validate the prejudices and mores of a community.
At least the U.S. has safeguards against this (The Supreme Court).
Here in the UK, people (politicians and ordinary citizens) literally salavate at the idea of bringing back the death penalty and including any sex crimes as part of it.
Meanwhile, a recent survey revealed that 54% of Canadians want to reinstate the death penalty for murder:
Okay, so that survey was for “murder”, but I’m willing to bet that many of those same people would also want to apply the death penalty to child sex abusers as well.
Up until the late-20th century, the overwhelming majority of eligible voters from the ‘Bible Belt’ believed that segregation was ‘moral’ and ‘the natural order of things’ and believed that Brown v. Board of Education was either wrong or limited exclusively to the question of schools, and believed that ‘separate but equal’ was not incompatible with the 14th Amendment.
Does that mean we should overlook the gratuitious and despicable civil liberties and human rights violations that such a legal doctrine brought about? With black men being put to death for unproven rape allegations against white women, many of whom would later come to regret the loss of life caused by their abuse (with many making false accusations, or the statutes presuming that it was rape because these legal environments also banned interracial marriage because no ‘god-fearing white woman would dare consent to sex with a lesser race’).
I’m sick and tired of people misattributing populism and moralism for ‘democracy’. That’s not democracy, that’s mob rule, and conservatives would prefer to erode the distinction in areas that their cultural upbringing decides preemptively to be allowable, rather than being consistent with the principles.
Legal prohibitions on abortion, same-sex marriage, consensual homosexual conduct, and the right to free expression with regard to sexually-charged materials that do not involve the use of real children are all linked under the same moral-majoritarian umbrella, and it’s very clear that the death penalty is also involved here.
There is no greater crime a state can commit than the miscarriage of justice. Convictions for crimes that objectively violate civil liberties inherently cause injury, and putting people to death when they did not commit the crime, let alone ‘deserve it’ is an indictment against the death penalty I still find confounding with how it is still around.
Wouldn’t it be a hilarious reverse uno card, if this bill was suggested by a mortician who just wanted some more child corpses to… work on? In terms of that first bullet point, I mean.
Nobody deserves the death penalty. Even people like Kim Jong-Un as dumb as it sounds. Nothing good has come out of such punishments and the negatives always outweigh (try reviving an innocent). How are people still not learning from places like Finland. Their prisons look like hotels and they can go “outside” through VR, visit courses to educate themselves. Yes, even murderers.
Death Penalty to me always seems like a missed opportunity to try inducting extreme inmates into experiments and research into various unregulated medicines, like psychedelics, instead to forward science while also sampling to find anything that can be done about people who are that far gone. But I can also see how that would be more inhumane and unethical than outright ending them. In such case, serving death would be a privilege.
Perhaps I am just indifferent. The damage is already done regardless if they are killed or they live to serve time.
While I generally agree that this true, especially given the number of people absolved of a crime by DNA, there are a few rare cases. I don’t support the death penalty as it is clear that too many mistakes happen despite the US’s robust protections of the accused.
However, given the opportunity, I would happily gun down, fry, hang, etc. Hitler and a few other authors of such atrocities. Some people don’t deserve mercy. Wouldn’t lose sleep either.
Finland’s open prisons seems like a worthwhile endeavor to try in the US. It is clear our present system isn’t working well. But I don’t think it would work. Finland has a very homogenous population with a strong work and moral ethic. The US does not.
The death penalty itself is a human rights violation and serves no purpose, but sentencing those convicted of CSA crimes - even those without the death of a victim - is a gross and repugnant overstep of an already limited principle.
As a victim of CSA myself, it disgusts me that these radical conservatives think they can speak on my behalf. This will only lead to further, more severe abuse, as victims will be less likely to report it.
I read a Wikipedia article a while back about a black American woman - I forgot her name, sadly - who was raped when she was five years old (this was like, decades ago), named her accuser, and then her accuser was murdered by her brothers or something.
Because of this, she became mute for years because she was so afraid that “her words had killed somebody.”
edit:
Maya Angelou.
Angelou became mute for almost five years,[14] believing, as she stated, “I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone.”
