Death Penalty for Drug Dealers?

[drusso]

Trump officials study death penalty for drug dealers in opioid epidemic

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[hyperalgesia]

I'd rather decriminalize it, require license/registration to sell. Tax it and use the revenue for voluntary tx programs. Age limit. Buying and selling drugs among consenting adults is free market capitalism. You can electrocute and hang people when you don't like aspects of it but you can't stop it.

I would like our criminal justice system to focus on and keep people in jail who are a real threat to free-thinking, responsible people.

 

[WhiteCoatWonder]

I'd rather decriminalize it, require license/registration to sell. Tax it and use the revenue for voluntary tx programs. Age limit. Buying and selling drugs among consenting adults is free market capitalism. You can electrocute and hang people when you don't like aspects of it but you can't stop it.

agree. putting the responsibility of the epidemic onto the shoulders of distributors is not logically sound. the product is here, people will find it and it will continue to freely exchange hands. why are we even putting people in jail for self harm via substance abuse? decriminalize, register and tax. definitely.

 

[Agast]

The drug dealers at my school were all rich white kids. Somehow I don’t think they would be the ones getting the death penalty out of this deal.

 

[Steve1111]

No. The death penalty has always been reserved for murderers, and anything other than that is simply un-American. Frankly, I think that drugs should be decriminalized. People should be free to choose what substances they wish to consume. Honestly, if this law were to go through (not that I think it will), I would be very concerned that the US is sliding into a dictatorship-like type of government. The death penalty should only be applied to murderers and even then only when the person is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. This law, if it passed, would be the sort of thing that goes on in dictatorships.

 

[willabeast]

I am against the death penalty for all crimes. The death penalty in the USA is more expensive than life in prison and makes the criminals harder to catch. Additionally the justice system is far from perfect, getting a fair trial costs money, and seems to get more fair for the defendants the more money is spent. Wealthy people never get sentenced to death, even in the unlikely event they get convicted.

 

[bedrock]

I am against the death penalty for all crimes. The death penalty in the USA is more expensive than life in prison and makes the criminals harder to catch. Additionally the justice system is far from perfect, getting a fair trial costs money, and seems to get more fair for the defendants the more money is spent. Wealthy people never get sentenced to death, even in the unlikely event they get convicted.

How does the death penalty make criminals harder to catch?

 

[willabeast]

How does the death penalty make criminals harder to catch?

Presumably if a perp is guilty of murder first degree they know that if caught they will be on death row then executed, so they will do anything (including killing more people) to keep from getting caught. OTOH if no death penalty possible then it is not a matter of life or death. You might read this article. What follows is a part of it
//
He points to a particularly uncomfortable example, the case of Henry Lee McCollum, sentenced to death for the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in North Carolina.

In 1993, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited McCollum as a poster child for why the death penalty is justified. Compared with what McCollum had done to the girl, Scalia wrote, "How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection!"

Last year, McCollum was exonerated and released from prison after 30 years. DNA from the crime scene that had never been tested was matched to a man in the same neighborhood who was serving a life sentence for a similar crime around the same time.//

 

[Mad Jack]

I'd rather decriminalize it, require license/registration to sell. Tax it and use the revenue for voluntary tx programs. Age limit. Buying and selling drugs among consenting adults is free market capitalism. You can electrocute and hang people when you don't like aspects of it but you can't stop it.

I would like our criminal justice system to focus on and keep people in jail who are a real threat to free-thinking, responsible people.

I say decriminalize use but life imprisonment for distribution. Free markets don't solve everything, particularly in the case of products that can cause crippling addiction

 

[Mad Jack]

No. The death penalty has always been reserved for murderers, and anything other than that is simply un-American. Frankly, I think that drugs should be decriminalized. People should be free to choose what substances they wish to consume. Honestly, if this law were to go through (not that I think it will), I would be very concerned that the US is sliding into a dictatorship-like type of government. The death penalty should only be applied to murderers and even then only when the person is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. This law, if it passed, would be the sort of thing that goes on in dictatorships.

There are other criminal acts, mostly involving various types of treason, that can and have resulted in the death penalty

 

[bedrock]

Presumably if a perp is guilty of murder first degree they know that if caught they will be on death row then executed, so they will do anything (including killing more people) to keep from getting caught. OTOH if no death penalty possible then it is not a matter of life or death. You might read this article. ]

I respectfully disagree. This idea is a false fact pushed by the bleeding hearts to support their political position.

Someone who has committed other major crimes for which they would face 30 years or more in prison, would also do anything to avoid capture. For example, plenty of bank robbers and drug dealers do extreme things including killing to avoid capture (when they weren’t originally being pursued for murder).