This is a display of savagery that is unfortunately expectable of too many parts of the world.

Sure it was.

Ofcourse it was.

You saw Rock, Paper, Saddam!

Will I choose rock, scissors, or paper? YOU DON'T KNOW!

Look, it's called justice. Some people like confining people to 10x5 cells until they die naturally, some people kill them out right. Either way societies defend themselves by expelling people from their societies that harm comparatively defenceless people. This society chose death. They obviously don't give a flip about you're idea of good and bad. Everyone's idea of good and bad is different, and unless we agree on the standard to which good and bad will be judged, this argument is pointless, so stop dropping sarcastic remarks calculated to start a fruitless argument.

The death penealty agrument can't be made unless everyone already agrees on the correct system with which to judge good and bad, and this is not the thread to agrue that.

Funny, Saddam said the same thing when he killed those people for trying to assassinate him. Great minds think alike, I guess.

Please explain how legally killing people makes the world a better place.

Frankly, I don't see much difference between legal killing and illegal killing. Killing is killing.

I was tempted to post a long dissertation in this thread about why this was a mistake, but I don't feel any particular urge to discuss this issue with people who honestly are not aware of a distinction between the words "justice" and "revenge".

So I'll go about my business while you go about yours, killing bears for being dangerous animals and taking an eye for an eye. Go on. Amuse yourselves.

[QUOTE=IRG SithLord]Sure it was.[/QUOTE]

Um, yes, it was. Do you think he got a fair trial? He was going to be put to death no matter what. There's no way he'd be left alive.

Saddam's death isn't justice, it's revenge. Nothing comes of the "justice system" except bad people no longer are allowed to do bad things. Killing them is just people feeling like they can get closure.

Saddam's death is stupid, and will only cause more deaths. Yay! More dead people!

If the Republican Party says it was a fair trial, it damn well was!

Damn communists.

Where is the justice in killing? I don't see any.

Initiate countdown to youtube link...

[QUOTE=Duo Maxwell]Explain how it benefits us to drain taxpayer money keeping him alive?[/QUOTE]

The cost of keeping him alive on three cold meals a day in an 8x6 cell with just a steel mirror and a toilet is pretty negligible.

And yeah, Saddam's trial was a friggin' circus.

1.) ...I never said there was and I wasn't talking to you. Although I'm quite certain that you don't have a very good handle on the difference between revenge and justice either.

2.) Execution can be just in situations where allowing the person to live would harm society more than trying to rehabilitate them. Situations like Grand Treason, for instance. It's unlikely that Saddam Hussein would have been able to exert an influence on Iraq while he enjoyed a humble life in a Guantanamo Bay outdoor cage.

3.) Justice is for the people to decide, not for a select group of elites or foreign career politicians trying to feel better about how bad they are at their jobs. This was never Iraqi justice and you are lying to yourself if you say it was. Baathism is still a strong secularist movement (even if the US military chose to outlaw it), and Saddam himself was Sunni - a fact which has even fueled sectist violence before his execution. This situation is going to get much worse. Much, much, oh-Christ-save-us worse. This "justice" has damned thousands more to die.

Can't really add much, but no matter whether you think Saddam's execution was right or wrong, the Iraqi PM has a massive pair of balls for signing Saddam's death warrant. He did it publically in front of TV cameras and I suspect he was also writing his own death warrant with the Sunni insurgents.

I'll have to go with Jon'C on this one..

Lifers file appeals too, but the jacked up biased statistics everyone uses don't show or include that.

The point being the societies have had to kill incarcerate, or otherwise get rid of unruly members of society for society to function. Not we have a bunch of people comming in the thread starting with the assumption that all killing is wrong. I don't know what the basis for this claim is.



His actual death might be a flash in the pan to increase violence for awhile, but basically his death has given no one else a reason to start violence. The people mad about his death are already just about as mad as they can be. I'll bet his capture probably resulted in more violence than his death will. I don't think he'll make a particularly good martyr.

Right. The death of a leader of a political party would never inspire any kind of revolt.

You know... it's not like him simply being incarcerated caused any kind of havoc or anything...

Prepare for madness. As far as I'm concerned, this was a stupid decision.

The death penalty serves two purposes:

1.) Removal of an active threat from society.
Very few murderers are sociopathic enough to kill people without feeling remorse. The overwhelming majority of murderers killed under specific circumstances and are extremely unlikely to ever do it again. Even the cooler, calculating murderers - first and second degree murderers - probably won't do it a second time because they had very specific motives.

2.) As a deterrent.
Once again, this is not effective. The majority of murders are done when a person is really, really angry. If you walked in on your new wife going down on your best friend you're going to be mad. You aren't going to care that you'll get the axe for murdering them, you just want to kill them. Hell, religions teach that the punishment for murder is eternal suffering and even that doesn't stop people from being people.


True justice would be to rehabilitate the remorseful and make them work to fix the damage they've done. Most of the time the death penalty is nothing more than petty revenge.


I didn't think a long-haired rebellious cult leader who basked in the company of prostitutes and lawyers would have made a pretty good martyr either, but time will make fools of us all.

If you read about Saddam Hussein you'll start to understand why I'm suggesting that, in fact, he will. He was Sunni. He was a Baathist. He spent much of his time promoting Palestine, Arabic supernationalism and denouncing Israel. The only one of his policies that his contemporaries disagreed with was his policy on secular government*. Like I said when his sentence was announced: Saddam Hussein will be remembered as the great Arab King who was killed by the zionists, the American infidels and the traitor who the Americans replaced him with.

(* This deserves a special note. Baathism? Yeah, it's about getting Islam out of government. Congratulations to the Americans for forbidding it in Iraq. Good job. Not that American politicians actually know the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites or anything, so they probably thought the Baath Party was some sort of gay bathhouse thing.)

I just know that some baaaaad ****'s gonna go down in 2007.

Much like it always has since late 2004. >.>;;

And if you rejoice in someone's death and would happily view it you kind of kick the moral high ground from underneath yourself and put yourself on a level equal to or lower than Saddam's really.

It doesn't matter. Either way you have to punish murderers. If you don't you get mafia style organization but x 100. As long as murderers are controlled you can't gain power through terror. If murder is not controlled you get a bunch of little feudal "nations" that are formed for people's protection. If we do punish murderers, we eliminate almost all murder except murders of passion like you described above, which is really 2and degree murder. The only reason those two resons you mention over are true is because we have punishment for murder.



You're points are good, but I think we've already been seeing the repercussions of this martyrdom since we removed him from power. I'm just saying that his actual death doesn't bring the mayrterdom to a new level. The damage was done when we took Baghdad, not when we executed him.

Dude.... it's gonna get worse. I mean... come on. First we coup him... then we kill him... which do you think they'll be more pissed about?

"Punish" is not the word for the death penalty. Punishment is a terroristic tactic. My hand will slap your *** if you do this. It doesn't work on 4 year olds, and it won't work on murderers.

And Saddam is a political murderer. That's as if someone arrested Bush in another nation and tried him for murder. Well no ****, he murdered someone.

The normal legal system isn't applicable here.
"Justice" and "Punishment" are suddenly "Revenge" and "Intimidation."

Not to turn this into a child care and development thread, but yea, it does work on 4 year olds. Except the really dumb ones.

DUMB!? .... You're quite mistaken.

What kinds of kid's you raising, son? My dad belched that out and I sped off lighting quick.

Um... what?

I crunched some numbers. Approximately 1/3 of homicides were triggered by arguments. About 1/5 were felonies (involving rape, theft, narcotics, essentially the kind of crime you're trying to describe). Gang-related violence accounted for about 1/20th and the remainder are unknown or unsolved (which really doesn't help to validate the legal system as a source of deterrant, does it?)

Less than 1% of all homicide cases involve multiple offenders killing multiple victims, which indicates that the Sicilian mafia shootout in an Italian restaurant isn't a major problem.

Data from: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/overview.htm

The data on that site shows that most murders are a 'heat of the moment'-type deal, except in the case of the felony murders which often result from botched attempts at other crimes that do not carry the death penalty (armed robbery, burglary). Hell, the DOJ website even says that people from the southern states are 4 times more likely to react violently to an argument or an insult! That doesn't sound like a group of people who are afraid of the death penalty!


Snarkiness aside, the following US states both still have the death penalty and have executed more than 30 people since 1976: Texas (366), Virginia (95), Oklahoma (81), Missouri (66), Florida (60), North Carolina (42), Georgia (39), South Carolina (35), Alabama (34).

Murder rates:
Texas: 6.2
Virginia: 6.1
Oklahoma: 5.3
Missouri: 6.9
Florida: 5.0
North Carolina: 6.7
Georgia: 6.2
South Carolina: 7.4
Alabama: 8.2

This is with an average national homicide rate of 5.6.

Data from: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/


Some states with the death penalty have a homicide rate lower than the national average. Some of the states have a homicide rate higher than the national average. So what do these numbers prove? Absolutely nothing! There is no demonstratable correlation between having the death penalty and either increasing or reducing the incidence rate of homicides. These numbers illustrate how execution does not deter murderers any more than incarceration.

Furthermore, Canada (a first-world country in North America with no death penalty and a society principally influenced by American media) has a murder rate of 2.04 per 100,000 compared to the Americans' (a first-world country in North America with death penalty and a society principally influenced by American media) of 5.6.

I shouldn't have had to type this all out. Jesus. The information is out there and you'd know this already if you spent even 5 minutes looking into it.


I beg your pardon, sir, but I don't believe you've actually been reading my posts. This is not a debate, I am not trying to make points. This is not my opinion.

Even with premeditated murders, the death penalty would be of little deterrent. Because those murderers probably think they are too good to get caught.

so... wait a minute. WHAT! you mean theres going to be sectarian violence! holy crap this has never happened before! sunni's and Shi'ite's would never have thought about killing each other over something like this before. oh... wait. thats right, they have been killing each other for THOUSANDS of years! in the islamic extreemist world anyone who is killed that you look up to is automatically considered a martyr.
yes, of course there will be more violence, just like there always is. will it be worse this time? yeah, in all honesty it may be. do i personally think that sadam deserved to die? yes. is it more revenge than justice? that depends completelyon your point of view. but, yes if there is an element of justice in sadams execution then there is also probably an element of revenge.

Islam hasn't existed for thousands of years.

It's...1,406 years old right?

Sometime in the 7th century, so yeah.

fine over a thousand years. point still stands.

No it doesn't, since you're pulling stuff out of your ***. I don't know a whole lot about Islam and its various sects but you don't see me spouting off about them.

A video has surfaced on google video of his hanging (it skips the actual drop/moment of death .. it's a jump and then him hanging there, dead).

Texas is a gret deal BIGGER than all of the states on that list.

Murder rates are per 100,000 people. Texas has a higher homicide rate per 100,000 people than the national average per 100,000 people.

alright. in 656 bc/ce whichever you prefer. the caliph Uthman ibn Affan was murdered. he was considered to be the last "Rashidun" or rightly guided Caliph. Ali ibn Abu Talib mohamads cousin/brother in law was one of the people who conteded for the caliphate, and eventually took it. this was within 24 years of mohamad! he even fought and defeated mohamads widow. the Umayyads, Uthman's relatives never recognised Ali as the Caliph. in 661 Ali was killed by a Khariji assassin and the Umayyads claimed the Caliphate. there was never again a united islamic empire and the faith diverged also into Sunni and Shi'a.

there! is that un-pulled-out-of-my-*** enough for you? as i said before these guys have been fighting almost from the get go.