China executing 10,000 every year???

[Khornet]

Micro,

"The mere possibility of it should be enough."

With that kind of thinking you can't make a decision about anything, or even get out of bed in the morning.

It is actually a supreme act of ego, because it puts your peace of mind ahead of the duty to do justice, e.g. "Rather than make one mistake, I'll accept that many murders go unanswered."

And Micro: in the real world, the worst enemy of "good" is "perfect".

 

[Labinnac]

I got the opportunity to travel to China in 1998 while I was a senior in college. I spent time in both Shanghai and Beijing and noticed one thing wherever I went.

There is no handicap accessibility anywhere. None whatsoever.

Just a thought to compare to.

 

[MicroBalrog]

It is actually a supreme act of ego, because it puts your peace of mind ahead of the duty to do justice

Only if you believe humans can dole out justice.

I personally think justice can be only given out by God (if there is one). Humans can only do their best at avoiding extreme injustice .

e.g. "Rather than make one mistake, I'll accept that many murders go unanswered."

You know, the life imprisonment without parole (solitary confinement) is much better - you can get the person out if you're wrong.

'sides which, I think the whole process of killing a tied-up, defenceless man, regardless of what he did before, is murder in itself, and one murder does not justify another. To quote the Talmud : "The court that sentences a man to death once per seventy years is like a slaughterhouse".

In my book, killing is only justifiable in self-defense. Obviously, when a person is tied up and imprisoned, it's hard to claim self-defense.

 

[Oleg Volk]

definition of criminals include drug sellers...drug addicts

Hmmm...so you would have advocated death penalty for moonshiners (pre-repeal) or for people whose only crime was being either stupid or unlucky (as in the case of people wounded at war and treated with morphine) to become addicted. Cannot agree with that sentiment at all.

 

[Gabe]

I've never heard from any Chinese that think their execution rate is too high. Almost everyone thinks they should have far more executions. People also agree with the practice of organ harvesting.

You gotta realize the death penalty is standard for crimes that get you 5-10 here. All murder require mandatory execution. It requires special circumstances to NOT get a death sentence. Rape is routinely a death penalty case. Drug trafficking and organized crime gets short tracked to the firing squad. Usually there's a 24 hour period for appeal and then the execution is carried out immediatly.

I remember a case where the mayor of a town took money from a bridge contract which resulted in faulty construction. It collapsed and killed hundreds of people. He was put to death.

The Chinese justice system doesn't set out to catch all offenders, they catch a few and mettle out extreme punishment to set an example. Kinda of like how IRS enforce tax codes. Every year there is a movement to crack down on one type of crime. And let's say this year they have a problem with fake label alcohol makers that poison drinkers by mixing in industrial alcohol, they'll just round up a few hundred and publicly execute them.

 

[w4rma]

I don't doubt it. The Chinese government is about as fascist as you can get and, imho, they are a sleeping dragon waiting for the U.S. to weaken ourselves on unwinnable wars while they grow stronger off of us (see: U.S. trade deficit) during their period of relative peace.

 

[Khornet]

Sorry, Micro

doesn't work that way. We are charged with carrying out justice. By God, in my belief, or by whatever in someone else's. Being humans, we will sometimes make honest mistakes, and sometimes not-so-honest ones, but that doesn't get us off the hook. We still have the duty, and to refuse because of the possibility of error is to abdicate responsibility.

And how is life in prison for a wrongly convicted man any less of a taking of his life? And od not some killers get parole, only to kill again?

And when they do, the death-penalty opponent is complicit in the killing. Someone always pays for the crime.....in the case of the advocates of "humanitarian punishment", it's the victims who pay the death penalty. In the case of capital punishment, it's the guilty party in the overwhelming majority of cases, and very, very rarely it's an innocent person.

I know your intentions are honorable, Micro, and I don't mean to imply that you love killers more than their victims. I am merely pointing out that to refuse the responsibilty to carry out justce is to value one's personal sense of righteousness more than the lives of the victims of crime.

 

[MicroBalrog]

And how is life in prison for a wrongly convicted man any less of a taking of his life

He's still alive. He can still be released.

And when they do, the death-penalty opponent is complicit in the killing.

Wow! I would say the person who signed parole is.

Besides, there's some people who do deserve parole.

You should look at people as individuals, not as parts of tendencies.

 

[LeonCarr]

China executes 10,000 people a year

So?

Just my .02,
LeonCarr

 

[Mr. Clark]

The mere possibility of it should be enough.

The mere possibility of it being true should be enough to justify making up a statement that attempts to make it sound as if it is?

I'm sure it was meant as hyperbole and not an effort to mislead.

The possibility of executing an innocent person is a valid reason to hand out the death sentence very carefully. It can also be a factor in the decision not to impose it on someone at all. But, the decision should be about justice, not deterrence, not rehabilitaion, or anything else. I don't even mind five years of appeals to make sure we get it right, but in cases of extreme crime if a man deserves to die then he should die. "Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."

 

[c_yeager]

As Dennis Miller noted after China reached 1 billion in population, "If you girlfriend tells you that you are one in a million, than means there are 10,000 others that are exactly like you."

And this ladies and gentleman is a man generally considered by liberals to be the smartest among them. I agree.

FYI, there are TWO definitions of "One Billion". The brittish consider to to be 10^12 (1,000,000,000,000) and the Americans 10^9 (1,000,000,000). I would imagine that the rest of the world picks one or the other.

Neither definition works with Dennis Miller's math. (although we ALL know that he was probably thinking of the brittish number cause like most liberals he just KNOWS that the Brittish are better. Even so he was still wrong).

 

[TBeck]

He just reads the jokes his staff writes for him. What's an order of magnitude or so?

 

[Michael Zeleny]

This is old news.

The investigation report on Luo notes with approval that more than 60,000 people were killed either in the course of police work or after death sentences in the four-year period between 1997 and 2001, an average of 15,000 a year. To put this in perspective, Amnesty International was able to identify only 2,500 executions in China in 2001, a figure that it said accounted for 81 percent of the known worldwide total. Since the investigation report's figures also include police killings of alleged criminals caught in the act or trying to escape, they are not directly comparable to the Amnesty figures. But they suggest a far wider use of the death penalty than was previously known.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15737
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15673