Capital  punishment is murder; if you are a Christian murder is a
mortal sin.  See you all iln the warm place eventually.
>
> 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
> >
>