Comments by "Craxin01" (@Craxin01) on "TX Republicans Considering Death Penalty for Abortion" video.

I'm not pro abortion, but I am pro choice. I'd rather women not have an abortion as a form of retroactive birth control, but I'd rather see a woman receive an abortion rather than be forced by the state to raise a child she does not want or to entrust that child to the tender mercies of the US child welfare system. As for the death penalty, I'm going to catch a lot of flak here, but I'm one of the few liberals in favor of it, provisionally speaking. Our systems are broken, so the wisdom of applying it is sketchy at best. But there are criminals who are both unrepentant and unable to be rehabilitated. Locking such a dangerous person in a cell sounds safe, but you're putting both other prisoners, many of which aren't guilty of that level of crime and are able to be rehabilitated, as well as their guards in danger. There's a point where keeping someone alive to prove ourselves more civilized and noble is having the opposite effect. If you're going to tell me we should keep them alive as punishment, so that they have a long time to think about what they did, I refer you to Charles Manson. Unrepentant and wholly unsalvageable until the very day he died. All the time and attention, all the resources that went to this man would have been better off with other people, even if it all went directly into the prison system. Still, as I said, the system is at some level broken and there are often cases of people being freed after decades in prison for murders they did not commit. So, killing prisoners needs to be a case of last resort. And make it a firing squad. There is no gentle means of executing a man, and putting them to sleep before poisoning them to death only makes US feel better. I live in Oklahoma, where we royally fucked up an execution of a truly vile man where it took him hours to die. It would have been far more humane to face him toward a wall and put two rounds into his skull. Even if a criminal is the most evil person in the world, we shouldn't torture that person to death. Be merciful and do it quick.
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@jebkfan9146 Is it not revenge to take a hard criminal and put him or her in prison? Locking them in a tiny area with other violent inmates, forced to work against their will, losing the dignity that only privacy would rectify but could never be granted. Revenge isn't necessarily an evil, though it certainly can be. Every criminal sentence carries with it some amount of revenge. We like to think it's more noble and is entirely for the purposes of justice, but that's one of those little lies we tell ourselves. And as to the advancement of science, I wholeheartedly agree. One day we'll be able to ascertain the physiological causes of such horrible abilities as murder or rape and eliminate them, possibly even before the person commits such actions. It'll be centuries before such scientific advancements become available, I suspect, but still brings up two concerns. 1) If someone has such a mental defect and doesn't seek treatment, is that not in and of itself a type of crime? At what line would we decide a person has crossed from someone with an illness to someone who is an intolerable detriment to society? 2) Supposing a person has not committed a crime, or committed an unrelated crime to such an identifiable defect as rapist or murderer, can we as a society force said person to undergo neuro-physiological reconstruction (as that is what would be needed to repair such defects) against his or her will? We already have massive controversies over forcing medication on schizophrenics and people with correctable or treatable psychological conditions. As such, wouldn't such reconstruction be a sort of death in and of itself? We'd be intentionally destroying one personality in favor of another. The physical body is the same, but the person who we have at the end of the surgery, despite being a better and more functional member of society, would be wholly different from the one we needed to correct. Always remember, one solution invented also brings new problems not considered. There will always be people for whom some portion of society will want to protect from the sorts of punishments or treatments governments will enact or apply must never be allowed. Even now, there are people who don't want violent criminals in prison because of a perception that there are too many of one specific skin color incarcerated, in spite of the fact that they did, in fact, commit some horribly violent crimes. There are never easy solutions. And again, while I'm not opposed to the death penalty, I still question its wisdom concerning our ability to get things spectacularly wrong, and I'd sooner see one thousand guilty men go free than see even one innocent man be executed for a crime he didn't commit.
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@JakXLT I'd say we're on the same page. An execution is a failure. Not only did we fail to protect the victim(s), we failed to stop and\or help the attacker(s). The only worse failure would be to stand impotent and not have an honest discussion on what to do with said attacker(s).
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