Issodhos must be headed somewhere with this thread and I expect his motive is
currently hidden and will emerge to surprise us all at some point. Let's take
his temporary contention
>    Your statement supports my contention that capital punishment in America
>is not lightly applied.
>Yours,
>Issodhos  [full text below]
Since the numbers he provides are relatively stable  over the time period, we
might suppose that some equilibrium is satisfied. I start with the assumptions
that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent to homicide, is
expensive
and has problems being palatable to the public  when in large numbers.
Conversely, if it were cheap and popular, we'd see more. The fact that it is
expensive points to a revenue stream benefiting the criminal justice side.
Clearly, there will be a balance between public cost and benefits accrued to
the personnel involved in mandating and implementing capital punishment. If
the
process was cheapened then the personnel would simply have to work harder for
the same revenue and do more volume. There are political and job-related
benefits accruing to elected officials such as governors, district attorneys,
prosecutors,  judges, and to police unions, etc. It can be argued that an
inexpensive and effective criminal justice system would not go after all
offenders but would take a few at random and really hurt them. There is
another
trade-off in considering what is cruel and unusual punishment. Now I might
naively assume that when you go to court, you don't get justice, you get
procedure. I might also suppose that both Issodhos and Tresy are on the
criminal justice side and have a penchant for head games involving fine points
of logic and numbers pulled from a large aggregate. I might even think that
1820 dead cops is just a good start.
In Los Angeles, we have some rips in the fabric showing some unpleasant facts.
Convicts currently serving time exonerated by the fact of lying cops coming to
light and better yet--the words of the sentencing judges having actually
called
them "animals".  My advice to those who work with procedure is to fix it
rather
than hide behind it. I will continue to use the Burkholder incident as my
starting point since it means something to me. Burkholder's survivor was
awarded a lousy $628,000 in a wrongful death suit and the officer walked. The
sheriff's department is paying $23mil for breaking heads at a private wedding
party which didn't need to be broken and LAPD is paying $4mil with the Fed
pitching in $1+mil for a stunt involving a recent wrongful death where the
victim's real estate was the sought after prize yet the legal costs to get the
award are $4mil.
Issodhus' FBI numbers appear to trace the outline of a funnel with a very
large
inlet and a properly constricted outlet. I'd modify his contention to state
that capital punishment in America is profitably applied and ineffective.
 With respect to deaths in the "line of duty" we have occupational fatalities
for 1990 through 1992:
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/1617stdy.html
Age    All -  Motor Veh. - Homicide - Machinery
16-17   111     32          24         18
18-19   325     71          56         43
20-24  1389    309         243        151
25-34  3975    870         610        424
35-44  3762    789         618        402
45-54  2786    710         404        309
55-64  1996    470         257        310
65+    1227    234         153        349

From the same website we have for just the one year 1992:
Farms were listed as the location for 539 ... [occupational] fatalities.
==========
Issodhos @aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 5/11/00 7:45:29 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>[log in to unmask] writes:
>
>> Although I support abolition of the death penalty, the statistic you offer
>>  is not surprising. The Supreme Court, when it reinstatated the death
>penalty
>>  in 1976, explicitly said that it's not enough to kill someone to get
>>  executed; there have to be sufficient aggravating circumstances, coupled
>>  with insufficient mitigating circumstances, to warrant imposition of
>capital
>>  punishment. Thus, there are explicit legal hurdles to overcome before
>>  capital punishment can be imposed. Then there is the legal distinction
>>  between premeditatedd murder and other kinds of homicide, which your
>>  statistic blurs. Only intentional, premeditated homicides are death
>>  penalty-eligible. Your numbers, I think, include all types of homicide.
>
>    Your statement supports my contention that capital punishment in America
>is not lightly applied.
>Yours,
>Issodhos
>