[speaker001:] hello this is Tad in Seattle
[speaker002:] hello Tad this is Glenn in Portsmouth New Hampshire
[speaker001:] ah well I guess I had to wait a long time till they found somebody
[speaker002:] uh  how long were you hanging around for
[speaker001:] oh I don't know quite a while I was about to go to sleep  well you ready
[speaker002:] well I'm glad you hung in there
[speaker001:] okay you ready okay
[speaker002:] sure
[speaker001:] okay well um provocative topic as usually
[speaker002:] oh capital punishment definitely
[speaker001:] yeah
[speaker002:] most people have very strong opinions about it usually on both extremes though
[speaker001:] yeah I uh well
[speaker002:] what about yourself
[speaker001:] I'm kind of um waffling I don't know I I uh I don't really like the idea but then occasionally I hear about a heinous crime where I think well if we're going to have public capital punishment then you know this guy should definitely get it one thing that bugs me about it is the uh finality of it I mean occasionally they make a mistake and send the wrong guy to prison sometime later they you know figure it out and they release him
[speaker002:] um-hum well
[speaker001:] and uh it bugs me that uh you know this is the one kind of punishment that they definitely can't reverse
[speaker002:] well I think there's got to be clauses as far as in capital punishment that you can not execute anyone that there's not absolute positive identification and a lot of crimes you uh that a a person is convicted they rely on one person's eye witness testimony
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] something like that I don't think would be substantial enough uh you know somewhere where twenty people saw watched one person mowed gunned down you know five people that's a clear case of a person who should be executed and I unfortunately that that is not the situation right now those kinds the punishment is not set up in most states you know because as you stated earlier there are some crimes that's so barbaric they uh the person that perpetuates the crime deserves to be uh punished
[speaker001:] um-hum yeah I uh course usually the case where there's a bunch of witnesses and they see one guy uh mow down a bunch of people and those cases the guy usually turns the gun on himself anyway
[speaker002:] yeah but unfortunately not in all cases that is really the sad part about it
[speaker001:] yeah
[speaker002:] uh the case in Texas where the person uh shot the restaurant
[speaker001:] yeah
[speaker002:] I guess it's Ruby's or someplace like that he ended up killing himself but if he had survived uh by some chance I think it would have been criminal if our system had allowed him to live in prison for life
[speaker001:] well but um if uh if you don't execute sick people um for acting out their sickness uh how by definition can you execute anybody who pulls off a crime like that
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] I mean since they're obviously insane
[speaker002:] well I don't think they're necessarily insane
[speaker001:] course I guess there's a definition of insanity of whether they or not they knew what they were doing that's a little different than what I'm talking about
[speaker002:] yeah I I think some people can fool the system into believing that they're truly insane it and I'm I even if they are insane yeah I'm sort I'm sort really sort of a hard core on this well uh Dahmer as an example
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] yeah there are probably seventeen or so victims of his crimes we're going to take care of him in prison uh for an indefinite period of time you know mental hospitals and so forth rehabilitation and that's going to cost us a lot of money and I don't really think that we should be doing something like that you know whether he was uh whether he was ill or not um the crimes were heinous uh yes it's uh it's a good example of where capital punishment would come in handy
[speaker001:] yeah but uh it it there's a case where the guy's obviously ill I mean a guy that opens up people's brains and performs lobotomies
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] amateur lobotomies I mean is obviously not rational
[speaker002:] well then
[speaker001:] I don't know I don't know whether you can you know morally take the power of the state to end that guy's life I I don't know I maybe that's a good reason to end his life if if he's that irrational
[speaker002:] well it it I mean what what what would make him rational twenty years of rehabilitation is it really worth spending all that time effort to rehabilitate someone who you may never ever be able to rehabilitate and who it's questionable whether you should be rehabilitated them in rehabilitating them in the first place
[speaker001:] well yeah I don't know that there's any hope of rehabilitating him but the but then the question comes up does the does the state have the right to do you know essentially the same what he did
[speaker002:] um-hum well I think the state you know it's one thing to torture someone when you're ending their life which uh was done in the ancient times it's another thing to relatively relatively painlessly inject someone with with uh uh medication to