China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty 260
formaggio writes "According to the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government is now allowing courts to punish those who commit environment crimes with the death penalty. The new judicial interpretation comes in the wake of several serious environmental problems that have hit the country over the last few months, including dangerous levels of air pollution, a river full of dead pigs, and other development projects that have imperiled public health."
Re:Thou hast angered thy King (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't saying you are executed for littering. This looks to be establishing the maximal punishment.
Think more along the lines of "knowingly poisoning hundreds of thousands of people."
Re:Thou hast angered thy King (Score:5, Informative)
That scenario really isn't different from murder. In the US you could be tried for second degree murder for something like that.
Re:Thou hast angered thy King (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good? More like "Good Luck" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thou hast angered thy King (Score:4, Informative)
There is no almost certain chance it will never actually happen. Over 3/4 of people sentenced to death row are actually executed eventually. Most criminals newly arrived on death row rate their chances of eventually being executed at less than 1%, despite the actually figures.
The typical person who gets the death penalty in the US has great difficulty imagining they will still be the same person in six months, let alone 20 years. More than a third of them can't pass the tests used to see if fifth graders are learning to project long term consequences as far as the month level. A t least half typically have little to no ability to empathize with anyone not very like them in race, gender, age, and even accent. By some studies, up to 60% of them have a mental health history involving incidents of psychosis. By others, over half were abusing a psychoactive drug at the time of the offense.
If you want to deter them with the death penalty, you need the time from the actual comission of a crime to execution, to be less than two weeks, with all appeals. You need to show them somebody sufficiently like them being executed, within two weeks of the time they consider a death penalty crime of their own, and what you show them needs to be substantially for the same crime, as in, they won't shoot the clerk at the all night gas station, if they have seen a man who looks like them shoot a victim who looks like that clerk,in a similar setting, at night, for similar reasons, and then be given the death penalty for it. Show them a realistic dramatization of the crime and follow it immediately with showing the actual execution, and you have a good chance of deterring them from committing that particular style of crime for a few weeks to a few months. show them something with differences, including ones you probably think should make no difference, and that chance drops.
I don't really want to live in a nation where we have to televise 10 executions a week to cover all the possible combinations, and always sentence somebody within a week of the crime so that we have a week to squeeze in the appeals and actual execution. I don't think that's a workable deterrent. Considering that the time for deterrence basically is between the crime and the execution, not from arrest to execution, deterrence sounds like it just can't work with the typical subject.
A good starting source: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/CunninghamDeathRowReview.pdf [deathpenaltyinfo.org]
For the mental ability assessment and mental state portions, try starting about page 198.
Re:Good? More like "Good Luck" (Score:0, Informative)
If you bother to read what you link to, there is more context (in one of the comments):
What the 23-year-old Rand actually wrote in her journal, for no one but herself, was: âoe[My hero is] very far from him, of course. The outside of Hickman, but not the inside. Much deeper and much more. A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.â
Interpreting this as âoeadorationâ or Rand as a sociopath is just plain wrong. Iâ(TM)d like to offer a bit of advice, if I may.
When you set about to initiate or perpetuate a smear campaign against someone like Ayn Rand, it would serve you better to pick a subject that someone other than the ignorant would actually believe. Anyone who knows anything at all about Ayn Rand would never believe that she would admire someone for any kind of violence, much less for killing children, as no one was more adamant in opposing aggression (initiation of force) than she.
Of course, you may simply have been wishing to appeal to the ignorant in this discussion; if so, you seem to have succeeded.
Anyway, better luck with your future smears.
I've read a lot of her stuff but didn't delve too much into journals and random musings. You're only firm opinion seems to be that people can't have imaginations.