Some scary facts

Originally Posted by KittyKaiti

Not trying to be mean but damn, that's a horribly stupid excuse for not having the death penalty. I would have accepted "everyone has the right to life" as a better reason. But LOL, you chose "because it doesn't make the suffering go away". In America, we kill the worst of the worst, 1) To get rid of these horrible people who have committed astrocities 2) our tax dollars aren't funding their life imprisonment, why keep these scum alive? Just kill them, save money, save time. But the UK apparently doesn't even have life imprisonment much less the death penalty (ie: Lockerbie Bomber). I guess in England you can blow up a 747 and get out in a couple years. Nice country you have there. Imagine the U.S. having laws like that. Crime would be so rampant and out of control, especially hate crimes, gang crimes, gun crimes and terrorism that the country would degrade into a civil war. The death penalty and strict punishment keeps criminals in line. If anything we need to make punishments stricter.

One of the main reason the UK got rid of the death penalty was because of frequent miscarriages of justice where a number of innocent people were hung for murders it later turned out they'd had nothing to do with. The case of the Lockerbie Bomber may well turn out to be another miscariage of justice. When the whole prosecution case basically rests on the fact that a man very similar to him bought a pair of trousers in Malta that look quite similar to a pair that may have been in the case with the bomb - and a shopkeeper picks him out of an identity parade nearly a decade later (a shopkeeper who was also allegedly paid off by US intelligence and retired to Australia on the proceeds) it's probably understandable that the authorities were happy for the Scottish goverment to quietly release him on 'compassionate grounds' rather than have egg on their faces when his appeal proved he was most likely innocent.

There's over 60 million people in the UK, and we haven't degraded into civil war yet either - but then we don't hand out firearms to everybody who asks for them either...