I know I must come out as a bore, but again I have to protest the limited options.
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Yes, I support the death penalty for a wide range of crimes
That would be absurd. There is only one crime that can be logically punished with death: murder. Otherwise any other criminal (robber, rapist, arsonist) who legitimately feared being punished with death would be strongly tempted to resort to murder to conceal the first crime.
Or maybe there are two crimes that can be logically punished with death, the other being treason. But to support the death penalty in cases of treason requires being loyal to State first place, so it shouldn't apply to disloyal people such as revolutionary leftists...
So I can't vote for this option.
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Yes, but only in certain cases
So we have limited the cases in which death penalty can be logically applied to only two (or one, in the case we aren't loyal defenders of the State). Now we would have to understand whether the death penalty really works in such cases. Does it? There are very few actual serial killers; most murderers do so in extreme cases, and don't posit a real danger of reincidence. But such people as serial killers are more likely mentally ill than anything else, so we would risk killing people for being ill, instead of as a punishment.
Further, there is the problem that the death penalty sends to society at large - and this is quite clearly that killing is (at least sometimes) OK. Now, unless the conditions for OKing killing are related to the State (it is OK for the State to kill people, it is not OK for individuals to do it), this would mean OKing the killing of people by other individual under at least some circumstances. Or, if it is the nature of the killer - the State, as opposed to individuals - this implies a level of sheer irrational worship of the State that cannot be held by anyone who fancy themselves as revolutionary leftists.
Then, of course, there is the unavoidabe issue of mistakenly sentencing innocents, in which case the execution of a death sentence would mean the absolute impossibility of redressing the wrong in any significant way.
So, again, I can't vote for this option.
But...
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Under no circumstances should someone be executed.
I cannot vote for this either, for I certainly can think of circumstances where executing people is absolutely unavoidable, even without proper trial. Such are the realities of war, civil war and revolution included. Sometimes it is impossible to be humanitarian without risking military defeat, and so it is impossible to hold such an absolute position as "under no circumstances".
So I am not voting. Can someone who voted please PM me the results of the poll up to now?
Luís Henrique