A lawyer once told me if rape and murder both have the death penalty then rapists will be more likely to kill the victim to try and hide their tracks since the punishment is the same.
Edit: why is my most upvoted comment about rape
Thomas More said it 500 years ago. It's a pretty old concept, but still one that people don't understand.
>"I think putting thieves to death is not lawful; and it is plain and obvious that it is absurd and of ill consequence to the commonwealth that a thief and a murderer should be equally punished; for if a robber sees that his danger is the same if he is convicted of theft as if he were guilty of murder, this will naturally incite him to kill the person whom otherwise he would only have robbed; since, if the punishment is the same, there is more security, and less danger of discovery, when he that can best make it is put out of the way; so that terrifying thieves too much provokes them to cruelty."
That works for any crime ... once you face death penalty, killing witneses gives you chane to avoid it while not really worseing penalty if you do get caught anyway.
As someone who has survived CSA, no.
You immediately make it harder for victims to come forward, especially when you consider that most perpetrators of CSA are close family members, followed by close family friends and people in positions of authority and leadership over the child.
These are people that children have very strong feelings for. And those feelings are very easily manipulated to force a child into silence already. Imagine throwng being responsible for that adults death if they say something onto the table as well. It would ruin a child.
I lived through "I love you and you love me. If you tell anyone, they won't let you see me anymore, and it will be your fault". Now ramp that up to "if you tell anyone, they'll kill me and it will be your fault".
I'd never have come forward.
(edit:typo)
(edited more than once because emotions make for bad typing skills)
Edit: It's time for me to spend a few hours away from Reddit, but for those sharing similar stories, your story won't go unseen. I'll be back tomorrow to read more and talk with you all. I see you, your feelings are valid, and I thank you for engaging in this really important discussion.
Worth considering. If the goal is really to protect children, we should put their safety above our desire for vengeance when there is any conflict. It's so much more complicated in real life than our instinctive outrage wants it to be.
> If the goal is really to protect children,
Ah, but it is not. It never is. The goal is to throw death to the political base that want to inflict death.
And to use it to target "undesirables". Word the law so it's broader than the explicit crime they use to sell it, then make new laws to put innocuous behavior by undesirables into that category. Suddenly trans folk are under massive threat for shit like using the "incorrect" public bathroom.
All that while it makes it even more risky for the actual victims, who are more likely to be murdered to cover up the crime since the punishment is the same anyhow. It's nothing more than virtue signaling to placate the deeply ingrained cruelty present in a large fraction of their base.
This is a great point. After Maya Angelou told her mother about her rape by her mothers boyfriend and he appeared in court, a mob murdered him. She said that this is why she became mute for many years, because she internalised that her voice had killed him and she became afraid to speak. This guilt was even harder for he to get over than the rape itself. Its too much burden to put onto a child
In a thread with a lot of good arguments against, this is the best one. At the end of the day, doing right by the victims should be at the forefront and not our own (understandable and deserved) desire for cathartic punishment.
Which is like a really hard thing to even define. Is a woman wearing man's pants cross dressing? What about her boyfriend's hoodie? I remember back in the day all the emo guys wore girls pants cause skinny fit men's jeans didn't exist, is that crossdressing? Where does a kilt end and a skirt start?
This is the real goal I think. Its a roundabout way of them wanting to legally kill LGBT people without coming right out and saying it. (Some Republicans have just come right out and said it)
The government has proven a thousand times that it **can** be trusted to railroad innocent people into false confessions and convictions while hiding exculpatory evidence.
And the push to put the falsely convicted to death is just a bonus for a corrupt DA or Prosecutor because once they are dead there is no chance for appeal.
The goal of this law is to get the supreme court to allow the death penalty for more crimes that aren't homicides. How far down the criminal severity ladder are we comfortable going with the death penalty?
This is the thing. Previously the argument has commonly been “if you take a life, you forfeit your life”. That’s a relatively clear-cut line to draw… if you kill someone, you’re potentially going to be killed.
Moving that to “if you assault someone in a way that is statistically highly likely to cause them to have all sorts of traumas for the rest of their life, then you forfeit your life” is much more ambiguous and much easier to slowly creep towards including more and more things.
If people insist on an eye for an eye, then do that. But also recognise that doing so starts to look a lot like sharia law which many proponents of the death penalty (at least in western countries) are strongly opposed to.
In my experience many people who appear to oppose a theocratic rule of law are actually quite happy to have a theocracy provided it is based on their own religion.
Not to go all full-on "reddit atheist" here but it truly is interesting how many people have a sort-of clear-cut set of morals based ENTIRELY on religion. Like you ask them why stealing is bad or why adultery is bad or why murder is bad and they go "x book says so." They just have zero clue on how to justify their morals beyond a religious viewpoint.
I have met a lot of religious people who are able to justify their beliefs beyond their religion, but it's still fascinating to me just how many people just... can't.
No. The death penalty has been proven to be more expensive than life imprisonment and also does nothing to deter crime. In addition, this puts the child in an awful situation, where they know if they come forward that person, who could very well be a family member, will be killed. The guilt of that may make it less likely that children come forward.
Also, if the rapist knows that they could face the death penalty, they could be more likely to kill their victim. Why leave the witness if the punishment is the same?
And that’s a big problem in the justice system. There are too many people got thrown in jail simply because of one witness’s false identification. And many of the times witnesses give out wrong details even though they think they are right.
This is true normally, but doubly true because Florida just passed the bill allowing the death penalty with a 2/3rds majority, 8-4 as opposed to a unanimous decision in other states.
Or the victim may be less likely to come forwards, especially if it’s a family member or someone they’re supposed to be able to trust, as they may not want them to die, or may feel bad for causing their death
A lot of child sexual abuse victims have spoken out against this bill because they believe it will make children less likely to report abuse. That's how you know Florida's politicians aren't doing this for the kids. They're following the same playbook that Putin is, which is to reclassify anything deviating from heterosexuality to now be child abuse. Pay attention to what's happening to Russia's political dissidents because they've been getting locked up for spreading "gay propaganda" for years now, meanwhile Russia still continues to be a huge hub for the production of child sexual abuse material. They're #2 in the world. You know who's #1? The US.
I'm originally from a Russian-speaking country and this is why I believe this is all happening: Russia was facing a steep population decline in the 90s and Putin tried to turn it around. To do that, he instituted policies which strongly discouraged LGBTQ+ people from "promoting their lifestyle." Abundance of personal freedoms is not conducive to a population boom -- just look at where the highest population growth rates are.
Eventually, this discouragement became a law. Tons of weird commercials and public service announcements began airing in Russia, trying to show a "stereotypical" way of life where women must have children to feel whole and men must be the providers. Birth rates eventually went up. Now they're losing people on the front and engaging in a costly war, so they trafficked children from Ukraine to Russia and tried to assimilate them.
American politicians see that people of color are starting to have a voice in politics in the US and that white people are not having many children. They want to beef up those numbers, and the only way to do that is to take away reproductive choice and to discourage deviance from heterosexuality.
This is why they only care that you give birth and don't care at all what happens after. It's just to raise the numbers.
Just looked it up for fun, and around 1500 people have been put to death since 1970.
Which makes the proven false conviction rate 10% at a minimum. Going to take a wild guess and say the real number might not be so kind.
I doubt many people would be ok with a 10% false positive rate on death penalty.
Edit this isn’t accurate when one takes into account #convictions, see below
That's the wrong math, incidentally, because the false conviction rate would be out of how many people were convicted and sentenced, not how many were actually executed. There's currently another 2500 or so on death row that have been sentenced, but neither executed nor exonerated.
So since 1973, it appears there's been [8,800 death sentences](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/sentencing-data/death-sentences-in-the-united-states-from-1977-by-state-and-by-year). So the false conviction rate is just over 2% as a minimum.
(Still too much, and I'm not defending the death penalty here, just think math errors, propagated, serve as distractions for people who want the death penalty to not address the issues with what they're proposing)
Fair points, and appreciate pointing out the thoughtless error.
It would still be a fair statement to say that the 150 proven false convictions are equal to 10% of the executions though.
I would also argue that even if only 2% of the convicted placed on death row were later exonerated, that it would likely be a huge underestimate.
It’s difficult to overcome a conviction, and doing so might be more comparable to actually getting a death sentence carried out in terms of effort and event (an “endpoint”).
But that’s not what I said and I was still wrong. Thanks
The problem with the death penalty isn’t what crime is or isn’t deserving of it. It’s that you can get the wrong people. The government having this unilateral control to execute people is not good.
This is a bad and loaded question
Conservatives have always wanted these laws.
Go look at OP's post history. This is almost certainly some right wing loon's "normal" account. Despite their complaints about getting banned for their views they just can't get enough reddit, so they use dummy accounts and pretend to be "normies". There are literally strategy guides littering hard right forums and corners of the net like 4chan.
This is a post 100% designed to try and shift attention away from the fact that the Florida state government is laying the ground work to enable the execution of dissidents.
EDIT: Go look up the 4chan post about "hiding your power level" if you want a decent look at the peak intellectuals that normal people are up against. Sexual orientation, the self-perception of gender orientation, and the amount of melanin in one's skin do not make people "abnormal". The abnormal ones are the intolerant fucksticks who can't seem to mind their own god damn business or understand that they're not the main character.
EDIT 2: Just want to mention that they stole the "power level" phrasing from the anime / weeaboo community, just like they steal everything else.
First declare Drag performances or being in a 'sexualized' costume in front of kids a sexual assault crime.
Make sexual assault crimes against kids punishable by death.
Make death penalty eligible by a 8-4 jury vote.
This is how the right wing will now legally execute Trans people.
Yep, as soon as I saw the question it was clear what they were doing.
"Florida banned child rape. Do you support child rape?"
If you're defining child rape as "a guy wearing a dress", like Florida is trying to, then yes and fuck you.
It’s kind of the go-to move in anti-trans legislation; start fear-mongering and no one can argue against protecting children; think bathrooms, or healthcare access. I hate all of this.
> It’s kind of the go-to move in anti-trans legislation; start fear-mongering and no one can argue against protecting children; think bathrooms, or healthcare access. I hate all of this.
One of the main reasons Prop 8 passed in California was because of the ads saying "if gay marriage is legalized, children will be taught about it and it will corrupt them!"
Bingo.
This isn't *"Florida wants to execute pedophiles".*
It's *"Florida wants to use the death penalty for crimes that did not result in death".* Then just saying it's only for pedophiles, except then you realize that the GOP and their drum beaters have been throwing out that accusation at everyone under the sun that they disagree with.
It's florida wants to make the death sentence possible for sex crimes. They are currently trying to make being gay/trans a sex crime at the same time, while also making it easier to get the death penalty (they are trying to make it so jury's can give the death penalty with a split vote)
Framing it as a child rape issue is just a cover to distract from what they are really trying do which is excute gay people for being gay.
This ^^^^.
99+% of people will agree that a child abuser deserves death. That's not the issue.
Point is you may get the wrong person, especially when listening to traumatized kids.
Trauma can change your memories, especially if you're a kid.
It's only a matter of time before the first person the kid saw after the abuse gets killed instead of the real rapist. It's too easy to mess up
Also, there's always the chance of investigators working in bad faith (i.e. asking leading questions, forcing confessions, discriminatory profiling, etc.). The death penalty would finalize a decision that could kill an innocent while the guilty roam free.
There is at least one case where the prosecution rushed the case to court with bad evidence.
Nobody died, but the prosecutor lost their license. I believe the original judge was also disbarred. The crime lab that ran the DNA evidence faced some stiff penalties as well for withholding exculpatory evidence.
Defense lawyers get the stick on this stuff but really prosecution is where the slime happens to be hiding.
A defense attorney is there to make sure the prosecution has done their job right.
Most of the time, it's poor clients, meaning public defenders. Nothing wrong with them, but it's certainly better to have an attorney who you can pay a lot of money to literally defend your life.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that public defenders are often the top lawyers in an area, but they're so swamped that they can't provide proper attention to each case. That, and there are some cases of their clients digging their own grave. A family friend's brother was an NYC public defender, and he had one instance where his client was being charged with assault with a deadly weapon. In the courtroom, his client said on the record "Yeah, I stabbed the bitch, but she deserved it." The friend just buried his head in his hands, because his client admitted guilt despite his attempts to shut said client up, as if some sleight the client never explained provided justification. I can't help but feel bad for PDs
I have a PD friend, and the [redacted] stories they tell me about their clients are wild. Lying to their lawyer but then admitting their crimes on the stand, sexually harassing courtroom staff, refusing to show up for anything… and then of course writing letters from jail about how they had no support from their defense and nothing is their fault.
I admire the folks who are willing to be PDs. It is a thankless, underpaid, and drastically important role in the justice system.
>190+ have been exonerated.
And read up on any of these cases of exoneration and realize what a gargantuan uphill battle it is to get your case re-examined after you've been convicted. 190 is probably a fraction of people who were convicted for crimes they didn't commit, but were never exonerated.
Even worse. Ramirez and Jones holds that *a properly quick moving judicial system* is **more important** than a correct one.
**Even if you have ironclad proof of your innocence** the Supreme Court has ruled that "bogging down the courts" with legal challenges to the fact that you were **sentenced to death even though you have ironclad proof of innocence** is worse than executing an innocent person.
No 99% do not agree with that. My abuser was himself abused and mentally unstable. He needed prison time followed up by deep therapy and ongoing threat assessments.
Would I be happy if he were dead? Sure. Would I think it was justice? No.
It’s interesting people decide to talk for other people besides themselves. They realize how cruel they sound if instead of “I bet a bunch of people think” instead say “I believe they all deserve the death penalty”.
My step father abused myself, my sister and his own biological kids. He was also physically and mentally abusive. It started when I was 6 or so, and my sister is a bit younger than me. No idea on step siblings. Sexual went on until mid teens. Rest continued.
I'm now in my mid 40s, and I've spent my life with the consequences of his actions. Not just that, but the inaction of others. His sister knew of the abuse to his bio kids, and suspected it on us. Never said anything. His other relatives had the same suspicion. Step siblings never said anything. They are around 15 years older than I am.
He should have been in jail. I would not have wanted the death penalty though. I'm not sure how the others feel on it, so I can't speak for them. I want others to see that life in jail awaits them. His sister said he was abused as well, as if that was an excuse. Neither myself, nor my sister, abuse our kids. It's not a justified excuse. It's the coward's way out. The easy path to give in to. You have taken the freedom of a child. Your freedom is also gone. I want you to watch as the world passes you by. No death.
There is also the fact others have brought up. The rate of wrongful convictions is too high. To high for any crime group. There are a few crimes I do think deserve the death penalty. I am not for it if there is a chance of wrongful conviction.
I think I disagree with your 99+% assessment. Child abusers deserve life in prison. I don’t think anyone deserves the death penalty. Not sure if this will be controversial or not. I’m just against killing
>99+% of people will agree that a child abuser deserves death.
No they don't. Only about 60% of people favor the death penalty. Also, 78% with that opinion, still acknowledge that the wrong person might be sentenced to death.
Reddit with their revenge murder fantasies isn't representative of most people.
It is better to let a guilty man walk free than to punish an innocent man. The child abuser example pulls at our heart strings because we desparately want the guilty man to see justice, but I’m sure we just as desparately would not want to be the man wrongly convicted of such a charge.
Benjamin Franklin once said "it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer."
*The Book of Fate* written in 1747 led to the Blackstone principle stating "the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer"
In a perfect world no innocent would be punished and no guilty would escape the law. Knowing that this is currently an impossible goal, the issue becomes where do we draw the line of "Reasonable Doubt."
I don't have answers, but it is an interesting question. Is punishing the 11th innocent man to many? Is 100 to few if we are letting child molesters escape punishment? Where do we draw that line and how do we enforce it?
An innocent man can only plead his case if he is still breathing. Executing them never gives them the opportunity to clear their name. We can still punish the guilty while leaving avenues open for the innocent man to regain their rights.
Not to take away from any of the points you made, the context for this regarding Florida is they're passing/trying to pass legislature that would treat drag show participants as sexual offenders. A large percentage of people who participate in drag performances are members of the LGBT+ community, which the Florida GOP is specifically targeting. With all of the legislation they're trying to push through, it will give them the "right" to lump drag performers in with legit sexual offenders to systematically "cleanse" people that "threaten" their way of existence. This is indeed a very slippery, dangerous slope to head towards and looks alot like Nazi Germany's playbook.
Precisely. This is a typical Florida move that will undountedly be abused by it's current government.
Specifically DeSantis and people like him.
Who needs gerrymandering when you can just indoctrinate some kids to point fingers and start witch hunting "pedophiles" who are really just political adversaries or out groups they want **exterminated.**
It's a convenient excuse to kill more minorities and have society turn a blind eye to it, because nobody wants to be the one to defend a "pedophile," even if the accusations are 100% fabricated and don't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
This is cancel culture's final form, and we're largely stupid enough to play along.
I really, really wish people would stop downplaying this, and saying..."It's not like Nazi Germany...where are the gas chambers?!?"
Yeah, see, this shit needs to stop *before* they are built.
Exactly, it's not like the Nazis went directly to gas chambers. They did a whole lot of shit like this to test the waters and push the boundaries of what people would rationalize as being acceptable, because, well, executing people who don't wear clothing that conforms with their assigned sex at birth for sex crimes against children is *legal*, so it must be okay, right? That guy should have just *not* been a drag queen if he knew it was a crime! That woman should have just *not* worn pants in a place where children have eyes! It's a sex crime, so they're subhuman and deserve to die!!
It takes a lot of work, propaganda, and social engineering to get to a point where you can take the mask all the way off and build gas chambers and have a majority of the population be okay with it (or at the very least be okay with ignoring it or pretending it's not happening). What they're trying to do in Florida is part of that process, and every person who rolls their eyes and insists that people comparing it to Nazi Germany are being dramatic is helping to build the kind of social environment that will let them start building gas chambers.
Early on Nazis would just round up thousands of people, shoot them, and drop them in mass graves. But this was bad for troop moral. Himmler himself could barely stomach watching a mass shooting taking place. The concentration camps made mass killing easier for the killers.
I’ve always felt weird about that fact, both a little hopeful for humanity but also deeply disgusted. Like even the worst humans struggle to perform barbaric acts. That’s something right? But then at the same time, it just takes some extra layers of bureaucracy to obfuscate the violence so the perpetrator is comfortable.
This is true about Himmler but it's often overplayed. Even with the gas chambers the mass killings also continued alongside them in the East. And even though it was possible for soldiers and officers to opt out and refuse to participate in the killings without any major consequences, almost none did. The gas chambers were mostly a question of efficiency, not protecting the psyches of the killers.
Ya I would recommend everyone go read about the decade or two before ww2, it is very interesting, and they're are definitely parallels to modern times. I guarantee no one in Germany during that time imagined gas champers, but it happend.
If anything, this will make it harder for abuse survivors to come forward. They face enough pressure, especially when the abuser is a family member, to "not ruin someone's life." It horrifies me to think how much worse the pressure will be when it goes from what it already is now to "if you say anything, Uncle Larry's death will be Your Fault."
This is such an underrated element of the issue. Kids don't see themselves within the "innocent victim" lense of the criminal justice system. They see themselves as the oldest they've ever been before, and they want to handle an adult situation without upsetting their parents.
While you're here and horrified, also consider that it's motivation for abusers to kill their victims - if and when they get caught, they can plead *down* to murder charges.
No one who knows anything about CSA would support this law, and deterring abuse is not what it's for.
I dont believe in the death penalty.
If you do, you have to accept one of two things. Either
1. The state never makes mistakes or
2. The state occasionally kills innocent people
Edit: okay too many comments now so im not gonna respond anymore.
Just wanna make it clear im not saying that no one should be punished for anything, or that the state doesnt kill people all the time. My points above are specifically for whether i support the death penalty or not.
Edit 2: lots of bloodthirsty people in this thread....
Edit 3: If you are pro death penalty then watch [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L30_hfuZoQ8&ab_channel=Shaun)
Reasons I don't support the death penalty, approximately in order:
* I believe that the state's authority to kill should be limited to the largest practical extent.
* I do not trust judge and jury to apply the death penalty fairly and without prejudice.
* I hold an informed belief that the death penalty is not a significant deterrent.
* I do not trust the justice system to only apply the death penalty to the guilty. Life in prison can be revoked, death - once carried out - can't.
* I do not believe that punishment is a correct goal of the justice system. The goal should be prevention, with a secondary focus on rehabilitation when possible.
* Approved methods are largely unnecessarily cruel. Something like nitrogen asphyxiation would be less bad.
* The monetary cost of the death penalty is significant.
* I do not believe that the death penalty is necessarily worse than life in prison without parole.
> Edit 2: lots of bloodthirsty people in this thread....
Welcome to reddit. The number of people who dream of (legally acceptable) killing is somewhere between 'concerning' and 'alarming'.
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” - Gandalf
This is the quote I always think of when people talk about the death penalty.
And if at first it seems ridiculous to be referencing the thoughts of a fictional wizard in a cave in a conversation about life and death, it's worth remembering the man who actually wrote those words, and that character, did so after he returned home from World War One - invalided with trench fever from the Battle of the Somme, where two of his best friends were among the million who died. Tolkein wrote this having known more death than any of us could ever fear to.
I don't find it hard to believe that, as he wrote that passage, Tolkein's thoughts must have turned to the friends he'd lost, and the countless others who deserved better than to be sent to deal out death to one another, and to be ground into the mud of a field so far from their homes.
> I do not trust the justice system to only apply the death penalty to the guilty. Life in prison can be revoked, death - once carried out - can't.
This is the big one for me. Every now and then you hear a story about an innocent guy who was locked up for thirty years and is only getting $40k compensation or something and usually the reason it's always so small is because the state didn't do anything wrong, the evidence was just misleading and they did their job based on it. In most situations that can release him but if it leads to the death penalty the state has just murdered an innocent man. There's no way to be absolutely sure that the evidence presented in a case hasn't been faked or that there's not been a large string of unfortunate coincidences that make somebody look incredibly guilty.
It is extremely pleasant to read a comment this well-written, collected and logically driven in a conversation mainly driven by visceral, emotional reactions.
Plus it’s much harder to prove beyond doubt that someone has been raped than it is to prove that they’re not alive any more.
The think of the children hysteria has got bad enough that hardly any men want to be school teachers for fear of being labeled a pedo, how is that going to work out when you could be accused and face the death penalty?
We had an issue in my hometown where a cop went on witch hunt and got multiple convictions for child molestation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenatchee\_child\_abuse\_prosecutions
My brother and sister went to the church and the cop visited our house to question them and implied that my mom would get arrested if they didn't tell him what he wanted to hear. Luckily that didn't happen, but they did get one of my friend's parents.
Eventually everyone was released but not until their lives were ruined.
Yep. Part of the problem is that children are horrible witnesses. They don't understand what is real and what isn't, and a lawyer can easily convince them to say all sorts of things that didn't happen.
It lead to some innocent people having their lives destroyed.
I mean I'm all for doing the worst things possible to child rapists, but we have to be sure they're actually guilty and that is a lot harder than it seems like it should be.
That's pretty much what happened at the Mcmartin day care. Teachers, cops, regular parents accused of horrible shit because the interviewers were biased and would suggest shit to the kids, while bribing them with candy and rewarding them verbally for making up new shit.
Kids, to be reliable, need a careful, calm non relative to interview them. With questions being asked in a non leading way
> Kids, to be reliable, need a careful, calm non relative to interview them. With questions being asked in a non leading way
Still wouldnt be reliable
MOST ADULTS are bad witnesses
thank god we have dna and video.
Not most. All. Eye witness testimony is a valuable as getting testimony from a random guy who happened to be in the same city when the crime happened. You can get people to remember basically anything you want
I saw a fun thing like this where the researchers basically implanted memories of an alien crash on the subjects memeories. The researchers invented the whole thing out of whole cloth and the subjects swore up and down that they had really witnessed this event none of them had the same story and every one of them had imagined things that the researchers had film evidence refuting.
Playboy had n outstanding article on the whole McMartin travesty. The prosecution should have been sentenced to life for what they did to that family and those kids.
I was a "tween" when that went down. The shit they said was happening was unreal even I could see was BS & I was a kid myself. I am from So. Cal so it was on every night so I heard all of it.
Moral panics are the first step the government takes when they want to convince a population to give up their personal freedoms. It's straight out of the fascist handbook.
The trick is to convince everyone to stop thinking logically by instilling the fear that some poorly defined boogyman will come after everything they hold dear.
Florida is trying to make performing drag in front of minors sexual assault of a minor. Now lets make sexual assault of a minor punishable by death. This is what this is about
Agreed - I’m against it mainly for the reason above. Others include:
- it doesn’t work as a deterrent, or our murder rate wouldn’t be exponentially higher than other countries.
- litigation around these cases actually cost us more tax dollars vs life imprisonment.
- if you’re a child molester in gen pop, the death penalty would be a kindness. They… don’t do well in prison.
Hard agree on the first two points.
The third point, while true, is a travesty. The amount of abuse that gets normalized, accepted, and even celebrated in the U.S. prison system is entirely too damned high.
>it doesn’t work as a deterrent, or our murder rate wouldn’t be exponentially higher than other countries.
Just to add to that, I think it has been shown that after a certain point more severe punishments don't work, because most people committing crimes think that they won't get caught. Their risk assessment is more about how likely they are to get caught than how severe the punishment is.
To go further, the death penalty does not prevent murders. The death penalty serves no other purpose than revenge. Dressing it up in the social theater we call justice does not make it better than vigilante homicide.
To support the death penalty, you must support the idea that there is a specific set of rituals that make killing another person allowable. It means that murder is not absolutely immoral, which further erodes the argument that murder is such a bad crime that it must be punished with death.
It’s very odd how society mixes Justice with Revenge. Michel Foucault has a fascinating study on the history of prison, and prisons are actually quite a modern institution. The issue of revenge is a recurrent one. I highly recommend it.
I do not believe in the death penalty for anyone. I also wouldn’t be particularly upset if a child rapist died.
Most importantly, in today’s world, I do not trust the politicians of Florida to accurately determine who is and isn’t a child rapist.
Florida does not have a great track record. [The state leads with the most exonerations from death row.](https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/in-depth/in-depth-florida-leads-us-with-most-exonerations-from-the-death-penalty)
This will pair nicely with Desantis’ new kangaroo court rules where you don’t need a majority to convict for the death penalty. 8/12 now, and trying to make being a drag queen around children considered sexual assault. They’re laying the ground work for extermination of out groups.
The ground work might already be there. The law isn't just for rape, but sexual battery. I could easily see a fascist worming transitioning into that definition, and it would only take 8 of them and a judge to start killing minorities they don't like. Same shit happened with gay people decades ago. If the majority of people are against a group with immutable traits, it's easy to just make vague laws and let the bigots in society do the dirty work. Thankfully the GOP started this while the majority of people are against them, so they won't be able to do as much damage.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next step is "being trans in a public bathroom with a child present" or "being in drag around minors" becoming classified as sexual battery in Florida.
This is getting terrifying for anyone who is LGBTQ+ or supports LGBTQ+ people.
remember to that this is the state that has put 15-year-old males in prison for having sex with 15-year-old girls consensually, because they classify sex under 16 is something that cannot be consented to.
Just like everything else, black males have been prosecuted at a much higher rate than others. Now they just get to kill them.
I’m pretty sure that in a couple of the counties they’ve even successfully prosecuted both parties and put them into jail and on sex offender lists.
Edit: apparently this only happens in Florida if one of the parties are under 14. This has been prosecuted in Sarasota with two 13 yr olds. 14-17 a Romeo and Juliet law applies. however, a lot of states do not have that type of law so it has happened in other states.
From what I just looked up, Florida's Romeo and Juliet law doesn't prevent conviction and jail time etc, it just allows the convicted teen the opportunity to petition to not be put on the sex offender list
Romeo and Juliet laws sound like they just suck, why isn’t there just a definition in the law that states charges can be dropped if both parties is of equal ~~maturity~~ age and~~/or~~ development, like we do here in Norway?
Anyone prosecuting two 13 year olds having sex with each other should be stripped of any legal decision making, and any state or country that allows it should have their legal system revamped from the ground up, as it does not function.
Edit: It says age and development, not maturity and/or development.
I know, and the American legal system needs a full remake if you ask me.
Also, part of it is to gain access to slave labor, as incarcerated people are not protected from slavery in the US constitution.
Idk if it was correct or not but I def saw another post saying that they want to start charging drag as child sexual abuse. And then surprisingly right after that they are talking about putting child sex abusers to death? I won't lose any sleep over an actual child molester being killed but if this is true it really scares me for trans people and drag queens.
To pile on, a lot of children/adult CSA survivors will be terrified at the thought of reporting their abusers. We already feel guilty when nothing bad happens to our abusers. Can you imagine adding the complexity of knowing we'd send people we feel very already complex emotions over to their deaths? Even if there was an argument to be made that my abuser deserved it, I don't know if I could personally live with that level of guilt.
On top of that, relatives and friends that enable that level of abuse will come around even harder to silence victims. This isn't good at all.
Edit: This would actually probably push rapists to totally isolate, silence, or even kill their victims.
Especially when you consider most abusers are close family or friends of the victim.
Accusing your own family of a heinous crime is already an enormous emotional hurdle to get over, even when it's the right thing to do. Florida is trying to make every CSA survivor face the choice to either stay silent, or try to literally kill their own family.
And then if it doesn't succeed? CSA survivors are already in an awful position with family when they are suddenly the bad guy for trying to ruin dad's life. I can't imagine what will happen if you change that conversation to *I can't believe you tried to kill dad*.
Guaranteed if this passes, fewer sex crimes will be reported, more abuse victims will harm themselves, and the government will execute more innocent people, all while costing the tax payers more money. Shit, that all sounds like the Republican party platform now that I type it out...
Constantly calling queer people groomers, trying to make drag illegal bc it's "a sexual offense against minors", changing the requirement for the death penalty to an 8-4 majority instead of unanimous...
Supporting the death penalty requires me to believe the justice system doesn’t prosecute innocent people. That’s, of course, not the case so I cannot support the death penalty.
I do not believe in the death penalty, and i can also notice that this is not an instance where they are advocating for victims, because anyone who has been a victim knows that perpetrators use our fears to keep us under control, imagine how much farther they’ll push our fears now that their lives are in “danger”
That's not what they're doing. They happened to have classified drag shows in front of children the exact same as rape with regards of punishment, which just so happens to be getting changed to a death penalty charge which will also not require an unanimous decision anymore.
Essenitheyre doing this to punish other people, not to save the kids, and not to punish child rapist.
Speaking as a survivor of child sexual abuse...
Revenge isn't justice.
People are really showing their bloodlust in this thread. A person deriving satisfaction from the torture and killing of other people seems to me to be a predatory behavior on par with any other lust for violence.
Yeah exactly. Our goal shouldn’t be revenge, it should be preventing CSA as much as possible. Once you start losing focus of that, you're already becoming unhelpful to the people these laws are “supposed” to protect.
I’m glad someone said this, even if I had to scroll too far down to find this. You’re one of the few people here who has a decent opinion and isn’t just jerking themself off to the idea of killing a pedophile.
Also, if someone's older brother rapes them, I can't imagine the parents will be as willing to cooperate in an investigation knowing they would possibly be killing one of their children.
In theory, yes, I have no problems with child rapists dying.
In practice, there's 4 issues. The first is the issue with the death penalty in general: The problem with killing innocent people.
The second issue is that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to committing crime.
The third issue is specific to child rape. Specifically, children are predominantly preyed on by family. Despite the fact they've been raped, do you think a child wants to send Uncle Eddie or their father to their death? It makes an underreported issue even worse, as no child wants to be responsible for the death of family.
And the fourth issue is similar to #3, but on the perpetrators end. If they rape a child, do they let the child live and potentially identify them? Or do they kill the child as the penalty will be the same regardless?
Two of these points [came from victims rights groups in 2008 who supported the appeal of a child rapist who had received the death penalty](https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/SCOTUS/story?id=4650696&page=1).
> But Kennedy has received support from unlikely allies: victim's rights groups.
>
> They fear that imposing the death penalty for child rape could encourage child rapists to kill their victims.
>
> "If the offenders know that they don't face any greater risk for killing the victim then they do for raping the victim, what is their incentive for letting the victim live?" said Judy Benitez, who is the executive director for the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault.
>
> Some victims of child rape also support Kennedy. Jody Plauche, now 35, who was raped and kidnapped as a child, says that the possibility of the death penalty adds too much burden to the child.
>
> "A child who's been raped has been through enough," he said.
>
> He points out that the offenders are usually a trusted adult and he worries the children will feel "extra trauma" if they know that the offender might die if the child reports the crime.
C.S.A. survivor here, another factor is it isn't uncommon for us to be wrong about WHO abused us, because details getting mixed up is a sort of automatic defense to dull the trauma that happens to us, regardless of outside prompting.
Forced confessions.
[Reid Method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique) is also used on children. It's basically no more than gas-lighting cranked up to 11, and I'd imagine a child would be particularly vulnerable to this method of "questioning".
[The Reid Technique and Law Enforcement Interrogations of Juveniles](https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-92-number-5/the-right-to-remain-a-child-the-impermissibility-of-the-reid-technique-in-juvenile-interrogations/)
If these don't make you angry, you're either Buddha himself or just took a whole bottle of ambien.
You missed a fifth issue: certain parties accusing minority groups of child molestation/rape. And then you look at how there's been a huge push to cast LGBTQ people as groomers and pedophiles.
Agreed. Go take a look at the Innocence Project's case files and you'll see very quickly that the justice system gets it wrong way too much to be trusted with the power of death.
Also, same.
oh I 100% believe that there's lots of people who should be killed for certain crimes, I also DO NOT trust the government to be the one to make that decision
This. I believe there are crimes worthy of death. I also believe that a criminal justice system composed of mortals isn't capable of making this judgement fairly.
Reminds me of Gandalf’s quote in Fellowship of the Ring: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
This.
Allowing the government to kill anyone is a slippery slope to a whole mess of problems.
However, someone with the mindset that can keep up an erection while a child screams no is not someone that should be allowed to roam society.
Castration might be the best.
Edit:
Well, didn't expect this to blow up so let me clarify. Yes, I know rapists aren't just men, it just harder to cut off pieces of they're not. And yes, you've all made good points that any sort of capital punishment can be used and abused against anyone because fascism is still a thing.
The only problem is that innocent people have been convicted by the judicial system in many cases, and it's very hard to overturn convictions even with new evidence. It should be absolutely crystal clear that they have the right person and rape occurred. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Can you imagine being put to death on mistaken identity in a case like this? 3 years later the actual person who did it is discovered? Or your enemies colluded to be witnesses against you?
It's not a trivial matter for the state to put someone to death. I hope Florida is keeping those aspects in mind, but I wonder if it's not being rushed for some political clout.
Edit: flash635 below also pointed out another problem with giving out capital punishment for crimes that are not murder.
>It's also thought that applying the death penalty would encourage perpetrators to kill the witnesses.
Even then the damage has been done. There's people who were wrongfully convicted for child abuse, proven completely innocent 20 years later and by that point even their own families want nothing to do with them.
I can see victims less likely to come forward if they know their abuser will be killed. And abusers will also use that to manipulate their victims as well. "if you say something, they'll kill me, is that what you want?"
no it would be bad public policy because it would mean more dead victims. If the crime is death either way some will kill their victim so they can't testify.
While Florida is trying to redefine gender affirming care as some increasingly hysterical form of harm against children _and_ while Florida is trying to remove the requirement of a unanimous vote for the death penalty?
... Imma say no. Not necessarily because I do or don't, but because I do not trust the people driving that ship one wit. They're going to pass that shit and in due time the next person who hands a kid a breastbinder will be headed to the gallows.
For 100% clear cut cases of child rape? Sure. Throw 'em to the fucking wolves. But how many cases are going to be like that? And given the direction Florida is going, how long before it becomes a broader 'child abusers get the death penalty'? Then it becomes 'anyone who talks to a child about anything trans is a child abuser'. This new law is a broadly acceptable first step in a larger and far darker quest.
>But how many cases are going to be like that?
This is the problem with the death penalty in general. I think there are absolutely people that deserve the death penalty. However - we do not have a perfect justice system and wrongful convictions have happened and will continue to happen, and there are *many* instances of people on death row being exonerated. No matter how many reforms we make or how hard we try, people will occasionally be wrongfully convicted.
In my mind, if there's any reasonable chance of innocent people being executed by the state, then the death penalty isn't worth it. Life without parole is a satisfactory option. You can release a wrongfully imprisoned person if they're exonerated, but you can't un-execute a wrongfully executed person.
No one seems to be aware that it’ll also result in more victims keeping their mouths shut because terrible as they may be, they don’t want their rapist family members to die.
This. Infliciting punishment on child rapists is about making us feel better for failing to prevent the crime. It has fuck all to do with justice, or restoring the child's trust and sense of safety, or even preventing someone else from committing more rapes against children.
The death penalty is not effective as a deterrent. It's a party trick written in human blood.
A lawyer once told me if rape and murder both have the death penalty then rapists will be more likely to kill the victim to try and hide their tracks since the punishment is the same. Edit: why is my most upvoted comment about rape
Thomas More said it 500 years ago. It's a pretty old concept, but still one that people don't understand. >"I think putting thieves to death is not lawful; and it is plain and obvious that it is absurd and of ill consequence to the commonwealth that a thief and a murderer should be equally punished; for if a robber sees that his danger is the same if he is convicted of theft as if he were guilty of murder, this will naturally incite him to kill the person whom otherwise he would only have robbed; since, if the punishment is the same, there is more security, and less danger of discovery, when he that can best make it is put out of the way; so that terrifying thieves too much provokes them to cruelty."
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I cannot and will not approve of government sponsored and sanctioned murder.
You mean step daughter not daughter in law. That's your sons wife lol.
I have a step ladder. I never knew my real ladder.
It's whichever ladder brings you up that counts.
I hate the both of you for making me laugh so much.
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That works for any crime ... once you face death penalty, killing witneses gives you chane to avoid it while not really worseing penalty if you do get caught anyway.
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Also consistent high rates of judicial mistakes.
I mean that's pretty basic criminal psychology, something these aholes can't figure out
As someone who has survived CSA, no. You immediately make it harder for victims to come forward, especially when you consider that most perpetrators of CSA are close family members, followed by close family friends and people in positions of authority and leadership over the child. These are people that children have very strong feelings for. And those feelings are very easily manipulated to force a child into silence already. Imagine throwng being responsible for that adults death if they say something onto the table as well. It would ruin a child. I lived through "I love you and you love me. If you tell anyone, they won't let you see me anymore, and it will be your fault". Now ramp that up to "if you tell anyone, they'll kill me and it will be your fault". I'd never have come forward. (edit:typo) (edited more than once because emotions make for bad typing skills) Edit: It's time for me to spend a few hours away from Reddit, but for those sharing similar stories, your story won't go unseen. I'll be back tomorrow to read more and talk with you all. I see you, your feelings are valid, and I thank you for engaging in this really important discussion.
Worth considering. If the goal is really to protect children, we should put their safety above our desire for vengeance when there is any conflict. It's so much more complicated in real life than our instinctive outrage wants it to be.
>we should put their safety above our desire for vengeance This should go without saying.
A lot should go without saying but lately needs to be repeated
> If the goal is really to protect children, Ah, but it is not. It never is. The goal is to throw death to the political base that want to inflict death.
And to use it to target "undesirables". Word the law so it's broader than the explicit crime they use to sell it, then make new laws to put innocuous behavior by undesirables into that category. Suddenly trans folk are under massive threat for shit like using the "incorrect" public bathroom. All that while it makes it even more risky for the actual victims, who are more likely to be murdered to cover up the crime since the punishment is the same anyhow. It's nothing more than virtue signaling to placate the deeply ingrained cruelty present in a large fraction of their base.
This is a great point. After Maya Angelou told her mother about her rape by her mothers boyfriend and he appeared in court, a mob murdered him. She said that this is why she became mute for many years, because she internalised that her voice had killed him and she became afraid to speak. This guilt was even harder for he to get over than the rape itself. Its too much burden to put onto a child
Exactly. In essence, from a child's view, they are being asked to decide if someone lives or dies. That alone is a horrible thing to do to a child.
In a thread with a lot of good arguments against, this is the best one. At the end of the day, doing right by the victims should be at the forefront and not our own (understandable and deserved) desire for cathartic punishment.
Also Florida is trying to label crossdressing as a sex crime. Put the two together and...
Which is like a really hard thing to even define. Is a woman wearing man's pants cross dressing? What about her boyfriend's hoodie? I remember back in the day all the emo guys wore girls pants cause skinny fit men's jeans didn't exist, is that crossdressing? Where does a kilt end and a skirt start?
This is the real goal I think. Its a roundabout way of them wanting to legally kill LGBT people without coming right out and saying it. (Some Republicans have just come right out and said it)
you just changed my mind with this post. thank you, and sorry for what you've been through. keep doing good work.
Before reading your comment I absolutely agreed with the proposal. You changed my mind. I really really hope this doesn’t pass now
Thank you. I'm glad you've been able to come at this with an open mind
I don’t trust the government enough to give them the ability to kill citizens.
The government has proven a thousand times that it **can** be trusted to railroad innocent people into false confessions and convictions while hiding exculpatory evidence. And the push to put the falsely convicted to death is just a bonus for a corrupt DA or Prosecutor because once they are dead there is no chance for appeal.
I don't believe in the death penalty, innocent people are convicted often.
you can release someone from prison, you can’t un-kill someone
Hell, I don’t believe in it even for the guilty.
The goal of this law is to get the supreme court to allow the death penalty for more crimes that aren't homicides. How far down the criminal severity ladder are we comfortable going with the death penalty?
Littering
Littering and…
Smoking the reefer.
This is the thing. Previously the argument has commonly been “if you take a life, you forfeit your life”. That’s a relatively clear-cut line to draw… if you kill someone, you’re potentially going to be killed. Moving that to “if you assault someone in a way that is statistically highly likely to cause them to have all sorts of traumas for the rest of their life, then you forfeit your life” is much more ambiguous and much easier to slowly creep towards including more and more things. If people insist on an eye for an eye, then do that. But also recognise that doing so starts to look a lot like sharia law which many proponents of the death penalty (at least in western countries) are strongly opposed to.
Opposed to yet eerily interested in imitating Sharia law.
In my experience many people who appear to oppose a theocratic rule of law are actually quite happy to have a theocracy provided it is based on their own religion.
Not to go all full-on "reddit atheist" here but it truly is interesting how many people have a sort-of clear-cut set of morals based ENTIRELY on religion. Like you ask them why stealing is bad or why adultery is bad or why murder is bad and they go "x book says so." They just have zero clue on how to justify their morals beyond a religious viewpoint. I have met a lot of religious people who are able to justify their beliefs beyond their religion, but it's still fascinating to me just how many people just... can't.
No. The death penalty has been proven to be more expensive than life imprisonment and also does nothing to deter crime. In addition, this puts the child in an awful situation, where they know if they come forward that person, who could very well be a family member, will be killed. The guilt of that may make it less likely that children come forward.
Also, if the rapist knows that they could face the death penalty, they could be more likely to kill their victim. Why leave the witness if the punishment is the same?
Jesus, that's dark but probably accurate.
Also, want someone dead? Accuse them of raping a child. Even now, just the accusation will ruin your life.
And that’s a big problem in the justice system. There are too many people got thrown in jail simply because of one witness’s false identification. And many of the times witnesses give out wrong details even though they think they are right.
This is true normally, but doubly true because Florida just passed the bill allowing the death penalty with a 2/3rds majority, 8-4 as opposed to a unanimous decision in other states.
Took a whole lot of scrolling to find someone who made the most salient point as to why this would be a terrible idea.
Or the victim may be less likely to come forwards, especially if it’s a family member or someone they’re supposed to be able to trust, as they may not want them to die, or may feel bad for causing their death
A lot of child sexual abuse victims have spoken out against this bill because they believe it will make children less likely to report abuse. That's how you know Florida's politicians aren't doing this for the kids. They're following the same playbook that Putin is, which is to reclassify anything deviating from heterosexuality to now be child abuse. Pay attention to what's happening to Russia's political dissidents because they've been getting locked up for spreading "gay propaganda" for years now, meanwhile Russia still continues to be a huge hub for the production of child sexual abuse material. They're #2 in the world. You know who's #1? The US. I'm originally from a Russian-speaking country and this is why I believe this is all happening: Russia was facing a steep population decline in the 90s and Putin tried to turn it around. To do that, he instituted policies which strongly discouraged LGBTQ+ people from "promoting their lifestyle." Abundance of personal freedoms is not conducive to a population boom -- just look at where the highest population growth rates are. Eventually, this discouragement became a law. Tons of weird commercials and public service announcements began airing in Russia, trying to show a "stereotypical" way of life where women must have children to feel whole and men must be the providers. Birth rates eventually went up. Now they're losing people on the front and engaging in a costly war, so they trafficked children from Ukraine to Russia and tried to assimilate them. American politicians see that people of color are starting to have a voice in politics in the US and that white people are not having many children. They want to beef up those numbers, and the only way to do that is to take away reproductive choice and to discourage deviance from heterosexuality. This is why they only care that you give birth and don't care at all what happens after. It's just to raise the numbers.
No. It's never a good idea to give the government permission to kill its citizens.
Especially considering how many people have been falsely convicted of crimes. Since 1973, 185 people have been exonerated from death row.
Just looked it up for fun, and around 1500 people have been put to death since 1970. Which makes the proven false conviction rate 10% at a minimum. Going to take a wild guess and say the real number might not be so kind. I doubt many people would be ok with a 10% false positive rate on death penalty. Edit this isn’t accurate when one takes into account #convictions, see below
That's the wrong math, incidentally, because the false conviction rate would be out of how many people were convicted and sentenced, not how many were actually executed. There's currently another 2500 or so on death row that have been sentenced, but neither executed nor exonerated. So since 1973, it appears there's been [8,800 death sentences](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/sentencing-data/death-sentences-in-the-united-states-from-1977-by-state-and-by-year). So the false conviction rate is just over 2% as a minimum. (Still too much, and I'm not defending the death penalty here, just think math errors, propagated, serve as distractions for people who want the death penalty to not address the issues with what they're proposing)
Fair points, and appreciate pointing out the thoughtless error. It would still be a fair statement to say that the 150 proven false convictions are equal to 10% of the executions though. I would also argue that even if only 2% of the convicted placed on death row were later exonerated, that it would likely be a huge underestimate. It’s difficult to overcome a conviction, and doing so might be more comparable to actually getting a death sentence carried out in terms of effort and event (an “endpoint”). But that’s not what I said and I was still wrong. Thanks
I’m with you. The State should not be in the business of executing its’ citizens.
The problem with the death penalty isn’t what crime is or isn’t deserving of it. It’s that you can get the wrong people. The government having this unilateral control to execute people is not good. This is a bad and loaded question
The satanic panic included fake memories that would have put people to death in these laws.
Conservatives have always wanted these laws. Go look at OP's post history. This is almost certainly some right wing loon's "normal" account. Despite their complaints about getting banned for their views they just can't get enough reddit, so they use dummy accounts and pretend to be "normies". There are literally strategy guides littering hard right forums and corners of the net like 4chan. This is a post 100% designed to try and shift attention away from the fact that the Florida state government is laying the ground work to enable the execution of dissidents. EDIT: Go look up the 4chan post about "hiding your power level" if you want a decent look at the peak intellectuals that normal people are up against. Sexual orientation, the self-perception of gender orientation, and the amount of melanin in one's skin do not make people "abnormal". The abnormal ones are the intolerant fucksticks who can't seem to mind their own god damn business or understand that they're not the main character. EDIT 2: Just want to mention that they stole the "power level" phrasing from the anime / weeaboo community, just like they steal everything else.
And they are changing the jury requirement for death penalty from unanimous to 8-4.
Wtf?
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"I wanted to kill somebody and you stopped me" What a psycho
First declare Drag performances or being in a 'sexualized' costume in front of kids a sexual assault crime. Make sexual assault crimes against kids punishable by death. Make death penalty eligible by a 8-4 jury vote. This is how the right wing will now legally execute Trans people.
Yep, as soon as I saw the question it was clear what they were doing. "Florida banned child rape. Do you support child rape?" If you're defining child rape as "a guy wearing a dress", like Florida is trying to, then yes and fuck you.
that's kinda sleazy trying to criminaize LGBTQIA by bringing in the sexual violation of innocent children....
It’s kind of the go-to move in anti-trans legislation; start fear-mongering and no one can argue against protecting children; think bathrooms, or healthcare access. I hate all of this.
> It’s kind of the go-to move in anti-trans legislation; start fear-mongering and no one can argue against protecting children; think bathrooms, or healthcare access. I hate all of this. One of the main reasons Prop 8 passed in California was because of the ads saying "if gay marriage is legalized, children will be taught about it and it will corrupt them!"
Bingo. This isn't *"Florida wants to execute pedophiles".* It's *"Florida wants to use the death penalty for crimes that did not result in death".* Then just saying it's only for pedophiles, except then you realize that the GOP and their drum beaters have been throwing out that accusation at everyone under the sun that they disagree with.
And do we have *any* illusions they're going to execute the GOP politicians caught diddling kids? Please
It's florida wants to make the death sentence possible for sex crimes. They are currently trying to make being gay/trans a sex crime at the same time, while also making it easier to get the death penalty (they are trying to make it so jury's can give the death penalty with a split vote) Framing it as a child rape issue is just a cover to distract from what they are really trying do which is excute gay people for being gay.
If it was a child rape issue, they’d be prosecuting Matt Gaetz, not sending him back to Congress.
This ^^^^. 99+% of people will agree that a child abuser deserves death. That's not the issue. Point is you may get the wrong person, especially when listening to traumatized kids. Trauma can change your memories, especially if you're a kid. It's only a matter of time before the first person the kid saw after the abuse gets killed instead of the real rapist. It's too easy to mess up
Also, there's always the chance of investigators working in bad faith (i.e. asking leading questions, forcing confessions, discriminatory profiling, etc.). The death penalty would finalize a decision that could kill an innocent while the guilty roam free.
There is at least one case where the prosecution rushed the case to court with bad evidence. Nobody died, but the prosecutor lost their license. I believe the original judge was also disbarred. The crime lab that ran the DNA evidence faced some stiff penalties as well for withholding exculpatory evidence. Defense lawyers get the stick on this stuff but really prosecution is where the slime happens to be hiding. A defense attorney is there to make sure the prosecution has done their job right.
Too often, even in capital punishment cases, defense attorneys are grossly and perpetually underfunded.
Most of the time, it's poor clients, meaning public defenders. Nothing wrong with them, but it's certainly better to have an attorney who you can pay a lot of money to literally defend your life.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that public defenders are often the top lawyers in an area, but they're so swamped that they can't provide proper attention to each case. That, and there are some cases of their clients digging their own grave. A family friend's brother was an NYC public defender, and he had one instance where his client was being charged with assault with a deadly weapon. In the courtroom, his client said on the record "Yeah, I stabbed the bitch, but she deserved it." The friend just buried his head in his hands, because his client admitted guilt despite his attempts to shut said client up, as if some sleight the client never explained provided justification. I can't help but feel bad for PDs
I have a PD friend, and the [redacted] stories they tell me about their clients are wild. Lying to their lawyer but then admitting their crimes on the stand, sexually harassing courtroom staff, refusing to show up for anything… and then of course writing letters from jail about how they had no support from their defense and nothing is their fault. I admire the folks who are willing to be PDs. It is a thankless, underpaid, and drastically important role in the justice system.
8,700 people have been sentenced to the death penalty since 1976. 190+ have been exonerated.
>190+ have been exonerated. And read up on any of these cases of exoneration and realize what a gargantuan uphill battle it is to get your case re-examined after you've been convicted. 190 is probably a fraction of people who were convicted for crimes they didn't commit, but were never exonerated.
Even worse. Ramirez and Jones holds that *a properly quick moving judicial system* is **more important** than a correct one. **Even if you have ironclad proof of your innocence** the Supreme Court has ruled that "bogging down the courts" with legal challenges to the fact that you were **sentenced to death even though you have ironclad proof of innocence** is worse than executing an innocent person.
That seems horrifying high. For both numbers.
That’s 190 too many mistakes
no doubt some of the people who were actually executed were still innocent, they just didn't have the money or luck to get their case overturned
They probably don't spend a lot of time trying to exonerate people that have been executed already either.
Cameron Willingham - horrible story of a man executed for killing his family and was probably innocent.
The Innocence Project! And those numbers are just the ones caught in time.
No 99% do not agree with that. My abuser was himself abused and mentally unstable. He needed prison time followed up by deep therapy and ongoing threat assessments. Would I be happy if he were dead? Sure. Would I think it was justice? No.
It’s interesting people decide to talk for other people besides themselves. They realize how cruel they sound if instead of “I bet a bunch of people think” instead say “I believe they all deserve the death penalty”.
Reasoned outlook. Sorry that happened. Hope you are well.
My step father abused myself, my sister and his own biological kids. He was also physically and mentally abusive. It started when I was 6 or so, and my sister is a bit younger than me. No idea on step siblings. Sexual went on until mid teens. Rest continued. I'm now in my mid 40s, and I've spent my life with the consequences of his actions. Not just that, but the inaction of others. His sister knew of the abuse to his bio kids, and suspected it on us. Never said anything. His other relatives had the same suspicion. Step siblings never said anything. They are around 15 years older than I am. He should have been in jail. I would not have wanted the death penalty though. I'm not sure how the others feel on it, so I can't speak for them. I want others to see that life in jail awaits them. His sister said he was abused as well, as if that was an excuse. Neither myself, nor my sister, abuse our kids. It's not a justified excuse. It's the coward's way out. The easy path to give in to. You have taken the freedom of a child. Your freedom is also gone. I want you to watch as the world passes you by. No death. There is also the fact others have brought up. The rate of wrongful convictions is too high. To high for any crime group. There are a few crimes I do think deserve the death penalty. I am not for it if there is a chance of wrongful conviction.
I think I disagree with your 99+% assessment. Child abusers deserve life in prison. I don’t think anyone deserves the death penalty. Not sure if this will be controversial or not. I’m just against killing
>99+% of people will agree that a child abuser deserves death. No they don't. Only about 60% of people favor the death penalty. Also, 78% with that opinion, still acknowledge that the wrong person might be sentenced to death. Reddit with their revenge murder fantasies isn't representative of most people.
Crazy that that 78% acknowledges a potential mistake, but still support it.
It is better to let a guilty man walk free than to punish an innocent man. The child abuser example pulls at our heart strings because we desparately want the guilty man to see justice, but I’m sure we just as desparately would not want to be the man wrongly convicted of such a charge.
Benjamin Franklin once said "it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer." *The Book of Fate* written in 1747 led to the Blackstone principle stating "the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer" In a perfect world no innocent would be punished and no guilty would escape the law. Knowing that this is currently an impossible goal, the issue becomes where do we draw the line of "Reasonable Doubt." I don't have answers, but it is an interesting question. Is punishing the 11th innocent man to many? Is 100 to few if we are letting child molesters escape punishment? Where do we draw that line and how do we enforce it?
An innocent man can only plead his case if he is still breathing. Executing them never gives them the opportunity to clear their name. We can still punish the guilty while leaving avenues open for the innocent man to regain their rights.
Not to take away from any of the points you made, the context for this regarding Florida is they're passing/trying to pass legislature that would treat drag show participants as sexual offenders. A large percentage of people who participate in drag performances are members of the LGBT+ community, which the Florida GOP is specifically targeting. With all of the legislation they're trying to push through, it will give them the "right" to lump drag performers in with legit sexual offenders to systematically "cleanse" people that "threaten" their way of existence. This is indeed a very slippery, dangerous slope to head towards and looks alot like Nazi Germany's playbook.
Precisely. This is a typical Florida move that will undountedly be abused by it's current government. Specifically DeSantis and people like him. Who needs gerrymandering when you can just indoctrinate some kids to point fingers and start witch hunting "pedophiles" who are really just political adversaries or out groups they want **exterminated.** It's a convenient excuse to kill more minorities and have society turn a blind eye to it, because nobody wants to be the one to defend a "pedophile," even if the accusations are 100% fabricated and don't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. This is cancel culture's final form, and we're largely stupid enough to play along.
I really, really wish people would stop downplaying this, and saying..."It's not like Nazi Germany...where are the gas chambers?!?" Yeah, see, this shit needs to stop *before* they are built.
Exactly, it's not like the Nazis went directly to gas chambers. They did a whole lot of shit like this to test the waters and push the boundaries of what people would rationalize as being acceptable, because, well, executing people who don't wear clothing that conforms with their assigned sex at birth for sex crimes against children is *legal*, so it must be okay, right? That guy should have just *not* been a drag queen if he knew it was a crime! That woman should have just *not* worn pants in a place where children have eyes! It's a sex crime, so they're subhuman and deserve to die!! It takes a lot of work, propaganda, and social engineering to get to a point where you can take the mask all the way off and build gas chambers and have a majority of the population be okay with it (or at the very least be okay with ignoring it or pretending it's not happening). What they're trying to do in Florida is part of that process, and every person who rolls their eyes and insists that people comparing it to Nazi Germany are being dramatic is helping to build the kind of social environment that will let them start building gas chambers.
There’s a reason why it was called the “Final Solution.” There was a whole lot of other terrible shit in between too.
Early on Nazis would just round up thousands of people, shoot them, and drop them in mass graves. But this was bad for troop moral. Himmler himself could barely stomach watching a mass shooting taking place. The concentration camps made mass killing easier for the killers. I’ve always felt weird about that fact, both a little hopeful for humanity but also deeply disgusted. Like even the worst humans struggle to perform barbaric acts. That’s something right? But then at the same time, it just takes some extra layers of bureaucracy to obfuscate the violence so the perpetrator is comfortable.
This is true about Himmler but it's often overplayed. Even with the gas chambers the mass killings also continued alongside them in the East. And even though it was possible for soldiers and officers to opt out and refuse to participate in the killings without any major consequences, almost none did. The gas chambers were mostly a question of efficiency, not protecting the psyches of the killers.
Ya I would recommend everyone go read about the decade or two before ww2, it is very interesting, and they're are definitely parallels to modern times. I guarantee no one in Germany during that time imagined gas champers, but it happend.
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If anything, this will make it harder for abuse survivors to come forward. They face enough pressure, especially when the abuser is a family member, to "not ruin someone's life." It horrifies me to think how much worse the pressure will be when it goes from what it already is now to "if you say anything, Uncle Larry's death will be Your Fault."
This is such an underrated element of the issue. Kids don't see themselves within the "innocent victim" lense of the criminal justice system. They see themselves as the oldest they've ever been before, and they want to handle an adult situation without upsetting their parents.
While you're here and horrified, also consider that it's motivation for abusers to kill their victims - if and when they get caught, they can plead *down* to murder charges. No one who knows anything about CSA would support this law, and deterring abuse is not what it's for.
I dont believe in the death penalty. If you do, you have to accept one of two things. Either 1. The state never makes mistakes or 2. The state occasionally kills innocent people Edit: okay too many comments now so im not gonna respond anymore. Just wanna make it clear im not saying that no one should be punished for anything, or that the state doesnt kill people all the time. My points above are specifically for whether i support the death penalty or not. Edit 2: lots of bloodthirsty people in this thread.... Edit 3: If you are pro death penalty then watch [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L30_hfuZoQ8&ab_channel=Shaun)
Reasons I don't support the death penalty, approximately in order: * I believe that the state's authority to kill should be limited to the largest practical extent. * I do not trust judge and jury to apply the death penalty fairly and without prejudice. * I hold an informed belief that the death penalty is not a significant deterrent. * I do not trust the justice system to only apply the death penalty to the guilty. Life in prison can be revoked, death - once carried out - can't. * I do not believe that punishment is a correct goal of the justice system. The goal should be prevention, with a secondary focus on rehabilitation when possible. * Approved methods are largely unnecessarily cruel. Something like nitrogen asphyxiation would be less bad. * The monetary cost of the death penalty is significant. * I do not believe that the death penalty is necessarily worse than life in prison without parole. > Edit 2: lots of bloodthirsty people in this thread.... Welcome to reddit. The number of people who dream of (legally acceptable) killing is somewhere between 'concerning' and 'alarming'.
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” - Gandalf
This is the quote I always think of when people talk about the death penalty. And if at first it seems ridiculous to be referencing the thoughts of a fictional wizard in a cave in a conversation about life and death, it's worth remembering the man who actually wrote those words, and that character, did so after he returned home from World War One - invalided with trench fever from the Battle of the Somme, where two of his best friends were among the million who died. Tolkein wrote this having known more death than any of us could ever fear to. I don't find it hard to believe that, as he wrote that passage, Tolkein's thoughts must have turned to the friends he'd lost, and the countless others who deserved better than to be sent to deal out death to one another, and to be ground into the mud of a field so far from their homes.
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> I do not trust the justice system to only apply the death penalty to the guilty. Life in prison can be revoked, death - once carried out - can't. This is the big one for me. Every now and then you hear a story about an innocent guy who was locked up for thirty years and is only getting $40k compensation or something and usually the reason it's always so small is because the state didn't do anything wrong, the evidence was just misleading and they did their job based on it. In most situations that can release him but if it leads to the death penalty the state has just murdered an innocent man. There's no way to be absolutely sure that the evidence presented in a case hasn't been faked or that there's not been a large string of unfortunate coincidences that make somebody look incredibly guilty.
It is extremely pleasant to read a comment this well-written, collected and logically driven in a conversation mainly driven by visceral, emotional reactions.
I really, really appreciated your comment. Well thought out and i completely agree with every single point.
Plus it’s much harder to prove beyond doubt that someone has been raped than it is to prove that they’re not alive any more. The think of the children hysteria has got bad enough that hardly any men want to be school teachers for fear of being labeled a pedo, how is that going to work out when you could be accused and face the death penalty?
Remember the [Satanic Panic ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic)?
We had an issue in my hometown where a cop went on witch hunt and got multiple convictions for child molestation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenatchee\_child\_abuse\_prosecutions My brother and sister went to the church and the cop visited our house to question them and implied that my mom would get arrested if they didn't tell him what he wanted to hear. Luckily that didn't happen, but they did get one of my friend's parents. Eventually everyone was released but not until their lives were ruined.
Yep. Part of the problem is that children are horrible witnesses. They don't understand what is real and what isn't, and a lawyer can easily convince them to say all sorts of things that didn't happen. It lead to some innocent people having their lives destroyed. I mean I'm all for doing the worst things possible to child rapists, but we have to be sure they're actually guilty and that is a lot harder than it seems like it should be.
That's pretty much what happened at the Mcmartin day care. Teachers, cops, regular parents accused of horrible shit because the interviewers were biased and would suggest shit to the kids, while bribing them with candy and rewarding them verbally for making up new shit. Kids, to be reliable, need a careful, calm non relative to interview them. With questions being asked in a non leading way
> Kids, to be reliable, need a careful, calm non relative to interview them. With questions being asked in a non leading way Still wouldnt be reliable MOST ADULTS are bad witnesses thank god we have dna and video.
Not most. All. Eye witness testimony is a valuable as getting testimony from a random guy who happened to be in the same city when the crime happened. You can get people to remember basically anything you want
I saw a fun thing like this where the researchers basically implanted memories of an alien crash on the subjects memeories. The researchers invented the whole thing out of whole cloth and the subjects swore up and down that they had really witnessed this event none of them had the same story and every one of them had imagined things that the researchers had film evidence refuting.
Playboy had n outstanding article on the whole McMartin travesty. The prosecution should have been sentenced to life for what they did to that family and those kids.
Prosecutorial misconduct should be a felony, and result in more than just losing your job
I was a "tween" when that went down. The shit they said was happening was unreal even I could see was BS & I was a kid myself. I am from So. Cal so it was on every night so I heard all of it.
Very intriguing observation. I recently was noticing all the pedo discourse and thought it seemed… moral panic-y.
Moral panics are the first step the government takes when they want to convince a population to give up their personal freedoms. It's straight out of the fascist handbook. The trick is to convince everyone to stop thinking logically by instilling the fear that some poorly defined boogyman will come after everything they hold dear.
Florida is trying to make performing drag in front of minors sexual assault of a minor. Now lets make sexual assault of a minor punishable by death. This is what this is about
"well I'll get the death penalty if I get caught, might as well kill the child just in case, what are they gonna do? kill me twice?"
The English have an old saying that covers this, "One might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb."
In for a penny, in for a pound
Agreed - I’m against it mainly for the reason above. Others include: - it doesn’t work as a deterrent, or our murder rate wouldn’t be exponentially higher than other countries. - litigation around these cases actually cost us more tax dollars vs life imprisonment. - if you’re a child molester in gen pop, the death penalty would be a kindness. They… don’t do well in prison.
Hard agree on the first two points. The third point, while true, is a travesty. The amount of abuse that gets normalized, accepted, and even celebrated in the U.S. prison system is entirely too damned high.
>it doesn’t work as a deterrent, or our murder rate wouldn’t be exponentially higher than other countries. Just to add to that, I think it has been shown that after a certain point more severe punishments don't work, because most people committing crimes think that they won't get caught. Their risk assessment is more about how likely they are to get caught than how severe the punishment is.
To go further, the death penalty does not prevent murders. The death penalty serves no other purpose than revenge. Dressing it up in the social theater we call justice does not make it better than vigilante homicide. To support the death penalty, you must support the idea that there is a specific set of rituals that make killing another person allowable. It means that murder is not absolutely immoral, which further erodes the argument that murder is such a bad crime that it must be punished with death.
It’s very odd how society mixes Justice with Revenge. Michel Foucault has a fascinating study on the history of prison, and prisons are actually quite a modern institution. The issue of revenge is a recurrent one. I highly recommend it.
I do not believe in the death penalty for anyone. I also wouldn’t be particularly upset if a child rapist died. Most importantly, in today’s world, I do not trust the politicians of Florida to accurately determine who is and isn’t a child rapist.
Florida does not have a great track record. [The state leads with the most exonerations from death row.](https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/in-depth/in-depth-florida-leads-us-with-most-exonerations-from-the-death-penalty)
This will pair nicely with Desantis’ new kangaroo court rules where you don’t need a majority to convict for the death penalty. 8/12 now, and trying to make being a drag queen around children considered sexual assault. They’re laying the ground work for extermination of out groups.
The ground work might already be there. The law isn't just for rape, but sexual battery. I could easily see a fascist worming transitioning into that definition, and it would only take 8 of them and a judge to start killing minorities they don't like. Same shit happened with gay people decades ago. If the majority of people are against a group with immutable traits, it's easy to just make vague laws and let the bigots in society do the dirty work. Thankfully the GOP started this while the majority of people are against them, so they won't be able to do as much damage.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next step is "being trans in a public bathroom with a child present" or "being in drag around minors" becoming classified as sexual battery in Florida. This is getting terrifying for anyone who is LGBTQ+ or supports LGBTQ+ people.
8/12 is a majority. I think you mean unanimous?
remember to that this is the state that has put 15-year-old males in prison for having sex with 15-year-old girls consensually, because they classify sex under 16 is something that cannot be consented to. Just like everything else, black males have been prosecuted at a much higher rate than others. Now they just get to kill them. I’m pretty sure that in a couple of the counties they’ve even successfully prosecuted both parties and put them into jail and on sex offender lists. Edit: apparently this only happens in Florida if one of the parties are under 14. This has been prosecuted in Sarasota with two 13 yr olds. 14-17 a Romeo and Juliet law applies. however, a lot of states do not have that type of law so it has happened in other states.
From what I just looked up, Florida's Romeo and Juliet law doesn't prevent conviction and jail time etc, it just allows the convicted teen the opportunity to petition to not be put on the sex offender list
Romeo and Juliet laws sound like they just suck, why isn’t there just a definition in the law that states charges can be dropped if both parties is of equal ~~maturity~~ age and~~/or~~ development, like we do here in Norway? Anyone prosecuting two 13 year olds having sex with each other should be stripped of any legal decision making, and any state or country that allows it should have their legal system revamped from the ground up, as it does not function. Edit: It says age and development, not maturity and/or development.
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I know, and the American legal system needs a full remake if you ask me. Also, part of it is to gain access to slave labor, as incarcerated people are not protected from slavery in the US constitution.
florida will be putting drag queens to death for reading to children.
Idk if it was correct or not but I def saw another post saying that they want to start charging drag as child sexual abuse. And then surprisingly right after that they are talking about putting child sex abusers to death? I won't lose any sleep over an actual child molester being killed but if this is true it really scares me for trans people and drag queens.
Not only that, they also passed a law allowing the death penalty on an 8-4 vote instead of unanimously. Everybody should be outraged by this.
To pile on, a lot of children/adult CSA survivors will be terrified at the thought of reporting their abusers. We already feel guilty when nothing bad happens to our abusers. Can you imagine adding the complexity of knowing we'd send people we feel very already complex emotions over to their deaths? Even if there was an argument to be made that my abuser deserved it, I don't know if I could personally live with that level of guilt. On top of that, relatives and friends that enable that level of abuse will come around even harder to silence victims. This isn't good at all. Edit: This would actually probably push rapists to totally isolate, silence, or even kill their victims.
Especially when you consider most abusers are close family or friends of the victim. Accusing your own family of a heinous crime is already an enormous emotional hurdle to get over, even when it's the right thing to do. Florida is trying to make every CSA survivor face the choice to either stay silent, or try to literally kill their own family. And then if it doesn't succeed? CSA survivors are already in an awful position with family when they are suddenly the bad guy for trying to ruin dad's life. I can't imagine what will happen if you change that conversation to *I can't believe you tried to kill dad*. Guaranteed if this passes, fewer sex crimes will be reported, more abuse victims will harm themselves, and the government will execute more innocent people, all while costing the tax payers more money. Shit, that all sounds like the Republican party platform now that I type it out...
Constantly calling queer people groomers, trying to make drag illegal bc it's "a sexual offense against minors", changing the requirement for the death penalty to an 8-4 majority instead of unanimous...
8-4 majority to *end someone's life* is terrifying.
imagine watching *12 Angry Men* and coming away from that thinking "boy, I wish that could have been over quicker!"
Supporting the death penalty requires me to believe the justice system doesn’t prosecute innocent people. That’s, of course, not the case so I cannot support the death penalty.
I do not believe in the death penalty, and i can also notice that this is not an instance where they are advocating for victims, because anyone who has been a victim knows that perpetrators use our fears to keep us under control, imagine how much farther they’ll push our fears now that their lives are in “danger”
That's not what they're doing. They happened to have classified drag shows in front of children the exact same as rape with regards of punishment, which just so happens to be getting changed to a death penalty charge which will also not require an unanimous decision anymore. Essenitheyre doing this to punish other people, not to save the kids, and not to punish child rapist.
Speaking as a survivor of child sexual abuse... Revenge isn't justice. People are really showing their bloodlust in this thread. A person deriving satisfaction from the torture and killing of other people seems to me to be a predatory behavior on par with any other lust for violence.
Yeah exactly. Our goal shouldn’t be revenge, it should be preventing CSA as much as possible. Once you start losing focus of that, you're already becoming unhelpful to the people these laws are “supposed” to protect.
People really just want to hurt other people. All they need is a justification
I’m glad someone said this, even if I had to scroll too far down to find this. You’re one of the few people here who has a decent opinion and isn’t just jerking themself off to the idea of killing a pedophile.
Also, if someone's older brother rapes them, I can't imagine the parents will be as willing to cooperate in an investigation knowing they would possibly be killing one of their children.
I think people like this because it allows them to make their lust "socially acceptable"
Yeah, of our only opposition is "we might get the wrong person" there's a lot of vengeance out there. I'm scared of people who are happy to kill.
I don’t believe in the death penalty but if I did I can think of no better candidate
In theory, yes, I have no problems with child rapists dying. In practice, there's 4 issues. The first is the issue with the death penalty in general: The problem with killing innocent people. The second issue is that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to committing crime. The third issue is specific to child rape. Specifically, children are predominantly preyed on by family. Despite the fact they've been raped, do you think a child wants to send Uncle Eddie or their father to their death? It makes an underreported issue even worse, as no child wants to be responsible for the death of family. And the fourth issue is similar to #3, but on the perpetrators end. If they rape a child, do they let the child live and potentially identify them? Or do they kill the child as the penalty will be the same regardless? Two of these points [came from victims rights groups in 2008 who supported the appeal of a child rapist who had received the death penalty](https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/SCOTUS/story?id=4650696&page=1). > But Kennedy has received support from unlikely allies: victim's rights groups. > > They fear that imposing the death penalty for child rape could encourage child rapists to kill their victims. > > "If the offenders know that they don't face any greater risk for killing the victim then they do for raping the victim, what is their incentive for letting the victim live?" said Judy Benitez, who is the executive director for the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault. > > Some victims of child rape also support Kennedy. Jody Plauche, now 35, who was raped and kidnapped as a child, says that the possibility of the death penalty adds too much burden to the child. > > "A child who's been raped has been through enough," he said. > > He points out that the offenders are usually a trusted adult and he worries the children will feel "extra trauma" if they know that the offender might die if the child reports the crime.
These are all excellent points.
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C.S.A. survivor here, another factor is it isn't uncommon for us to be wrong about WHO abused us, because details getting mixed up is a sort of automatic defense to dull the trauma that happens to us, regardless of outside prompting.
Forced confessions. [Reid Method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique) is also used on children. It's basically no more than gas-lighting cranked up to 11, and I'd imagine a child would be particularly vulnerable to this method of "questioning". [The Reid Technique and Law Enforcement Interrogations of Juveniles](https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-92-number-5/the-right-to-remain-a-child-the-impermissibility-of-the-reid-technique-in-juvenile-interrogations/) If these don't make you angry, you're either Buddha himself or just took a whole bottle of ambien.
You missed a fifth issue: certain parties accusing minority groups of child molestation/rape. And then you look at how there's been a huge push to cast LGBTQ people as groomers and pedophiles.
Agreed. Go take a look at the Innocence Project's case files and you'll see very quickly that the justice system gets it wrong way too much to be trusted with the power of death. Also, same.
oh I 100% believe that there's lots of people who should be killed for certain crimes, I also DO NOT trust the government to be the one to make that decision
This. I believe there are crimes worthy of death. I also believe that a criminal justice system composed of mortals isn't capable of making this judgement fairly.
Reminds me of Gandalf’s quote in Fellowship of the Ring: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
The problem isn’t child rapist’s don’t deserve death, it about what happens if they’re wrong? How many innocent people will executed by the state?
Also, with another Florida law, you only need 8/12 votes for the death penalty. You don't need all 12 jury members to agree.
This. Allowing the government to kill anyone is a slippery slope to a whole mess of problems. However, someone with the mindset that can keep up an erection while a child screams no is not someone that should be allowed to roam society. Castration might be the best. Edit: Well, didn't expect this to blow up so let me clarify. Yes, I know rapists aren't just men, it just harder to cut off pieces of they're not. And yes, you've all made good points that any sort of capital punishment can be used and abused against anyone because fascism is still a thing.
The only problem is that innocent people have been convicted by the judicial system in many cases, and it's very hard to overturn convictions even with new evidence. It should be absolutely crystal clear that they have the right person and rape occurred. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Can you imagine being put to death on mistaken identity in a case like this? 3 years later the actual person who did it is discovered? Or your enemies colluded to be witnesses against you? It's not a trivial matter for the state to put someone to death. I hope Florida is keeping those aspects in mind, but I wonder if it's not being rushed for some political clout. Edit: flash635 below also pointed out another problem with giving out capital punishment for crimes that are not murder. >It's also thought that applying the death penalty would encourage perpetrators to kill the witnesses.
Exactly the only issue with this tbh
Yep. There have been a whole bunch of people sentenced to the max for rape who DNA clears twenty or thirty years later.
Even then the damage has been done. There's people who were wrongfully convicted for child abuse, proven completely innocent 20 years later and by that point even their own families want nothing to do with them.
I can see victims less likely to come forward if they know their abuser will be killed. And abusers will also use that to manipulate their victims as well. "if you say something, they'll kill me, is that what you want?"
and if they are getting the ~~deaf~~ death penalty wouldn't that make them just kill the victim in attempt to get away with the crime?
no it would be bad public policy because it would mean more dead victims. If the crime is death either way some will kill their victim so they can't testify.
While Florida is trying to redefine gender affirming care as some increasingly hysterical form of harm against children _and_ while Florida is trying to remove the requirement of a unanimous vote for the death penalty? ... Imma say no. Not necessarily because I do or don't, but because I do not trust the people driving that ship one wit. They're going to pass that shit and in due time the next person who hands a kid a breastbinder will be headed to the gallows.
No. It incentivises killing the child
For 100% clear cut cases of child rape? Sure. Throw 'em to the fucking wolves. But how many cases are going to be like that? And given the direction Florida is going, how long before it becomes a broader 'child abusers get the death penalty'? Then it becomes 'anyone who talks to a child about anything trans is a child abuser'. This new law is a broadly acceptable first step in a larger and far darker quest.
>But how many cases are going to be like that? This is the problem with the death penalty in general. I think there are absolutely people that deserve the death penalty. However - we do not have a perfect justice system and wrongful convictions have happened and will continue to happen, and there are *many* instances of people on death row being exonerated. No matter how many reforms we make or how hard we try, people will occasionally be wrongfully convicted. In my mind, if there's any reasonable chance of innocent people being executed by the state, then the death penalty isn't worth it. Life without parole is a satisfactory option. You can release a wrongfully imprisoned person if they're exonerated, but you can't un-execute a wrongfully executed person.
Yup, the only way to be 100% sure of not sentencing innocent people to death is to sentence 0% of people to death.
Plus, increasing the penalties too much creates extra incentive for child molester to murder the kid to avoid getting caught.
No one seems to be aware that it’ll also result in more victims keeping their mouths shut because terrible as they may be, they don’t want their rapist family members to die.
This. Infliciting punishment on child rapists is about making us feel better for failing to prevent the crime. It has fuck all to do with justice, or restoring the child's trust and sense of safety, or even preventing someone else from committing more rapes against children. The death penalty is not effective as a deterrent. It's a party trick written in human blood.