Attacking him for the central park case is pretty silly. If you support the death penalty, thats where it should be applied, if you can actually find whos guilty. Making a distinction based on actual damages (fatal or not) of an attack rather than brutality, inhumanity and mens reas always seemed to me a contrived and arbitrary system of law. If you rape a stranger at random and beat her, stab her, sodomize her, torture her and gag her and leave her for dead it shouldn't somehow magically preclude capital punishment because she pulled out of the coma and survived thanks to the life saving work of the doctors. And Donald Trump was certainly not in any way responsible to finding five (relatively) innocent black and latino kids to pin it on, that was the NYPD.

Not exactly on topic, but I think torture is a vastly more serious crime than murder.

Just curious, do you support Trump?



What Americans are being killed at will with drones...?

This post was edited by Voyaging on Oct 21 2016 10:48pm

I can see there being a merit to both sides of that argument. People stigmatize torture, pedophilia, even plain jane rape more than murder in america, and while the latter can be explained as societal normals and a history of puritanism, torture is trickier.
In terms of outcomes, torture is less than murder, someone can live through it. You can make them wish they were dead, but they could go on to live a long and happy and productive life. Meanwhile a robbery gone bad can take away the next 60 years of a girls life.
Of course theres the psychological aspect. Murders can be committed by mostly rational people in fits of anger, while torture usually takes a cold and sociopathic psyche, the kind of people more likely to reoffend and generally be unacceptable in civilized society.
I don't know the answers what should be the metric for sentencing, and whether or not that agrees with how the system works now. But when it comes to someone who really deserves to die, I know it when I see it, and tying up a stranger,, beating her, stabbing her, raping her, cruelly torturing her, killing her- at least intending to- that seems plenty enough I'd be happy as the next bloke to throw the switch. Of course, in that case, the NYPD didn't get the actual confirmed rapist and just picked up teenagers who may or may not have been complicit



I'm against both Hillary and Trump. I'm more against Hillary than I am against Trump.

In terms of outcome, torture is infinitely "greater" (i.e. more terrible) than murder. Murder only does harm to the people still living. Torture does far more harm.

Of course that's not to say murder isn't a serious crime, but imo it's not even in the same galaxy as torture which nothing comes close to as far as moral graveness.

If a 24 year old woman is tortured, its a tragedy, but she gets up the next day, maybe through rehabilitation, but in time she's back to living a normal life, and she'll have 60 healthy and productive years ahead of her
If a 24 year old woman is strangled to death, the rest of her life is gone. Having a relatively swift death is no consolation prize, what did it matter how much it hurt?

He's taking the perspective of greater suffering

What does it matter, this is about the legality of both, don't go beyond what is written because it doesn't matter if anyone was killed or not.