1. How is any situation ever improved by intentionally making someone suffer until death? Note that saying that a person "deserves" punishment because they did something bad is skirting the premise; you are not explaining why a person who does something bad deserves anything, or who will benefit from the administration of punishment.
2. Name any loophole by which we can do despicable things to people and go on pretending to be better than them.
1.) letting someone rot in prison isn't supposed to make anything better. that's not the point. it's just a punishment. he wasn't killed on the scene and it's not like I'm going to turn him free. a person who does something this bad deserves punishment. it's as simple as that. you seem to prefer execution, I prefer long term anguish. and no one is supposed to benefit, that was never the point either.
2.) religion.
duh.
I'm starting to think that you're trolling, too.
the logic in your arguments is somewhat inconsistent.
lemme illustrate this by rolling back to a previous point you made and tie it to this latest point. you said that:
Life imprisonment can be motivated by two things
one of which is:
2. A desire for "get back" at them, which is pointlessly spiteful and mean-spirited.
so I'm sorry, but how the hell is capital punishment or street justice
any different than wishing someone rot in prison?
execution and/or shooting someone in the head in order to "dump them" in a ditch is
at least as spiteful and mean-spirited as life in prison, if not more so. your logic doesn't match your rhetoric.
which brings us to this:
When did you decide that? This is actually a thread about Batman, if you want to go there. If you don't want to talk about it that's fine, but you can't negate the point by saying it doesn't fit within some arbitrary parameters you've invented.
I didn't decide anything.
but what are we talking about here?
the guy who shot up the movie theater before surrendering to the police.
he's now in custody and entered into the legal system.
the discussion is about capital punishment, not a bunch of hypothetical scenarios about what could/would/or should be done with other people in similar circumstances. I have no interest in discussing theories outside of the law. my concern is what happens to people under the law, not who sorts them out in the street.
if you want to have that debate, I suggest starting a new thread.
that way we can discuss all your rhetorical hypotheses without them being attached to any specific person or case.
...and now for something completely different.
[m]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSyIvr6C7zY[/m]