Should Death Row Inmates Be Used for Experiments?

Foxbat Flyer

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Jul 9, 2009
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Well, i suppose, give them a choice... Become test subject or death penalty... We all secrety know this happens already to the ones without people who will ask questions...
 

Yopaz

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Jun 3, 2009
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zerobudgetgamer said:
Yopaz said:
Human experiments on prisoners? Sure, why not torture them too?
I am against the death penalty, and against torture of prisoners so there's a big fat no on this question.

Also regarding your edits. You should do some research. Shortest complete life sentence is 16 years with parole after 8.
Yes, but it's not the average. Most countries seem to run a general average of 15-25 years before parole, with a LOT of places not having a maximum limit. 8-16 is only in Iceland. And for that matter, it is possible to have multiple life sentences, IIRC, and to have life sentences without parole, so even Iceland lifers would be forced into 16 years.

Woodsey said:
zerobudgetgamer said:
some of these inmates are possibly innocent,
You've answered the question yourself. And the answer as to why death row shouldn't exist.
Once again, not debating the validity of death row. I understand a lot of people don't like it, and the alternative would probably be having to serve (multiple) life terms, which is why I added the second Edit, and emphasized that the experiments don't have to be lethal. However, even if someone might be innocent doesn't give my idea any less merit. As I've said, a potentially innocent man could consent to non-lethal experimentation, help it succeed, and might be able to use that as leverage to either get off death row or push his appeal to prove his innocence. I may not know much about the justice system, so I don't know how well that would go through, but I'm being at least slightly optimistic that the system would see his volunteering in a positive light.
Oh, seems like I missed that part of your post.

For those who don't know, depending on where you live in the world, a Life Sentence can be anywhere from 15-30 years before having a chance at parole, with some places having a max sentence of as little as 25 to as many as 50 years.
It says average right there in your own words. Wait... you said life sentence can anywhere from 15-30 years before having a chance of parole.
Now you mentioned Iceland's life sentence, but New Zealand got parole for some cases after 10 years. Sweden got parole after 10 years, South Korea got parole after 10 years, Belgium has after 10 years. This list isn't that long, but hardy something to shrug off as "not average", not worth considering.
 

Gottesstrafe

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Oct 23, 2010
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evilthecat said:
Gottesstrafe said:
There's a multitude of cognitive, psychological, or even physiological tests relating to stress/stimulation that could also be implemented.
No, there isn't.

The sample would be methodologically unsound. Again, this isn't 19th century criminology where we all assume that prisoners have some kind of genetic predisposition which makes them violent (a predisposition which suspiciously always had a lot to do with the colour of their skin and the curliness of their hair).

You're not going to find anything useful from a sample which is selected on an incredibly rare occurance dependent on a huge number of factors. Well.. you could try, but noone is going to take anything you say seriously.
Thanks for quoting me out of context. I was saying that experimentation wouldn't/shouldn't necessarily be limited to purely medical testing. Nowhere have I explicitly said that these test would be used to determine why that particular crop of subjects were driven/predisposed to criminal activity, just that there were other types of experiments that they could consent to outside the realm of testing the latest vaccine or experimental gene therapy.

On the side, I was under the impression that 19th century criminology put more stock in the size of hands, height of foreheads, and protrusiveness of brow ridges than hair (as if all criminals were merely the descendants of some Cro-Magnon ancestor).

evilthecat said:
Gottesstrafe said:
And if a prisoner faced with capital punishment chooses to take part in a potentially lethal experiment (which I'll assume is already under strict safety requirements and ethical review) of their own volition, who am I to say no?
I think you assume wrong.

You're not going to get some wholesome tenured professor single handedly pioneering a new cancer drug from his university science lab and who just needs to experiment on one guy to make it all happen.

You're going to hand several hundred people at once over to a medical corporation (the people who actually do medical research nowadays) and you're damn right you 'assume' it's all ethical because they're paying a big fat contract to the local government for the privilege of that assumption.

Of course, they're not going to tell you what actually happens because they want the patents which will come out of it, because that's how they make money.
... Which is clearly infringing on the CIA and U.S. Army's turf when it comes to unethical medical testing on prisoners, right?
 

Ramzal

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Jun 24, 2011
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viking97 said:
i fail to see why medical experiment = fatal and extremely painful scientific research
Actually, it is. For any results to be reached with lab mice, the ones that are infected and show no satifying results are usually killed by breaking their necks. Do you want to star breaking mens necks for the sake of research yourself? I'm betting half of the people on here supporting the idea have never had to even think about themselves killing someone for results.
 

Deathlord665

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Nov 23, 2009
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I think it should be with consent for life sentences and death row as it will help our medical scientists out heaps
 

Astoria

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Oct 25, 2010
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Hmm as long as the inmate gives consent I don't see a problem with that really. It would be a tricky thing to arrange though, what with security measures and making sure the experiments are ethical and all.
 

bader0

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Dec 7, 2010
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Sinisterspider said:
If you've done something deserving of the death penalty you've forfeited your humanity. Give them the choice, certainly, don't force it on them, but as far as i'm concerned no one on that row is human.
okay first of all. no
second of all. you're freaking me out when you say things like that.
every human is a human i don't care what you did. There are definitely unforgivable crimes but the perpetrator is still a human. Death is the worst possible thing that can possibly happen to anyone and no human deserves to die.
 

Joepow

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Jan 10, 2011
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This could only be acceptable if you offered every person, prisoner or not, this choice.
 

Korolev

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Jul 4, 2008
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It wouldn't be of much use. No, really, it wouldn't. Medical and Pharmaceutical testing requires stringent controls and a large supply of model organisms with known genetic backgrounds and living conditions. Prison inmates have an uncontrolled genetic background, would be difficult to work with (being large and presumably violent) and most of their life would have been spent outside the control of the lab - so you wouldn't know what their background was, which might screw up the tests. Also, modern drug testing protocols require hundreds, if not thousands of volunteers and patients. There's just not that many death-row inmates available. Plus, we like to test the drug on multiple organisms with similar genetic backgrounds when we can - we can accomplish this with mice by back-crossing and other such mating strategies to ensure that we get a nice even genetic background to test on. We can't do that with prisoners, and even if we could, it would take years for human test subjects to grow.

Oh, and it's immoral! Almost forgot to mention that part.

Working with humans just isn't feasible. There have been three known instances in which human test subjects were widely used for biological/medical research: The concentration camps in Nazi Germany and Japanese-occupied China, and during syphilis research in the US (which was illegally performed on african-americans). In all cases, nothing even remotely useful found. The Nazis experimented horribly on Jews to find cures for Malaria and other tropical diseases - and it didn't work. The Japanese experimented on Chinese civilians to test the effectiveness of biological weapons - nothing remotely medically useful came out of those experiments (although the US was very eager to snap up the weapons researchers for military purposes after the war). The US experiments to find a cure for syphilis didn't work either (the US didn't infect the men with syphilis, but they did withhold a known cure to test out some experimental cures).

Human based testing just ISN'T feasible. No reputable scientist, in this day and age, would do toxicity tests or early stage drug test on humans. We do stage I and stage II CLINICAL trials on humans, when the drugs have more or less been proven to be safe for mammals (a few dangerous ones get by, but by and large Stage I, II and III clinical trials are safe). And as for the Clinical trials - we test that on patients WITH the disease and with similar lifestyles in order to limit the variables in the test subjects. We can't do that with Prisoners, the vast majority of whom wouldn't have the required disease.

It's just not feasible or practical. It would give us bad data.
 

InfiniteSingularity

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Apr 9, 2010
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If they consent then why is it a problem? It's their choice, not societies. And if they're going to die at least do something useful with them. Should offer a replacement for animal experiments
 

StANDY1338

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Korolev said:
The Nazis experimented horribly on Jews to find cures for Malaria and other tropical diseases - and it didn't work.
Actualy I belive alot of advances came from the nazi experimentations. Our cure for hypothermia is one that springs to mind. Will have a look for some more.
 

Vivec93

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May 18, 2011
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I'm for the death penalty but there are some lines people should not cross; human experiments being one such line.
 

TacticalAssassin1

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May 29, 2009
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evilthecat said:
Congratulations, you are now on the moral level of this man:

Incorrect.
That man did not care whether consent was given.
He did not care if you were innocent or not.
He did nothing to dull the pain.
He did not care at all for his subjects whatsoever.

It's insulting to tell somebody that they have the morals of that man.

I think it's a very good idea, one that would benefit our society and race immensely.
Let's get started, shall we?
For Science!
 

alandavidson

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Jun 21, 2010
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No. It is barbaric and inhumane. All life should be valued and only taken when absolutely necessary. The due course of the law is being acted upon these people, there is no reason to use them as guinea pigs.