If a murderer has a mental illness like being a psychopath should he get life instead of capital punishment?
What if we could someday locate the source of psychopathy and cure it. Would we let the perpetrator go?
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ANSWERS: 6
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we dont kill anyone here in Australia any more since 1967 but i reckon they should
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many mentally ill people are either officially undiagnosed or if they are diagnosed, they don't take their meds. If they don't take their meds and kill, they should get capital punishment. if they are undiagnosed, they should get life.
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They should get treatment and be evaluated based on the results of the progress.
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Psychopaths still know right from wrong. Psychopaths do not feel empathy, remorse or guilt, in fact they don't feel much at all which is why they gravitate to risky behaviour which is either criminal in it's intent, or other jobs such as surgeons, policemen, judges, lawyers etc. This is also a reason why they often take drugs. The one thing they do feel a lot of is rage, and they thrive off it.
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Legally? Insanity can be used as a defense against the death penalty. In practice, this defense rarely ever works, though. Morally, that's a different discussion. I would argue that the penal system's job is not to punish criminals, but rather to protect society (innocent people). This means getting violent people off the streets. Locking them up or killing them are both valid ways of doing that. The trouble with killing them is, ooops, turns out we were wrong and that guy was actually innocent. To me that has to do with a person's mental health only in terms of how well they could defend themselves in a court of law. However, if we returned to the axioms of "innocent until proven guilty," "proof beyond any reasonable suspicion," and "the onus is on the prosecution to establish their hypothesis of a crime," then it should not matter. I feel that those three axioms are far more important than anything else in the legal system. If you didn't do anything wrong, it should be incredibly difficult for the prosecution to convict you. We all know that this is far from the case, though.
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Why should we house and feed him?
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