There is a third reason: the death penalty is about revenge, not justice. Revenge feels good for a few moments, but it cheapens our society as a whole.

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Member of the vast Radical Middle conspiracy.

And exactly shouldn't the justice system be about revenge? Do you really think we should just love our criminals to death?

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Theodore Lamar Heiks
BA, History/Political Science, Western State College of Colorado, 1984
MBA, Entrepreneurship/Marketing, City University of Seattle, 1993

I hope not. It should be about taking criminals off the street and making an attempt at rehabilitation. It the case of an offense that would be puishable by death it should be about keeping these people off the streets forever. Never about revenge.

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Acceptance is the answer

"Im a Tarte, what! you want some of this?"

It is about removing a threat to society, not revenge. An individual who has proven he is unable to deal with the rules society has in place, and live their life witout being a threat to the lives of others.

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There are only two things wrong with this great nation of ours, democrats and republicans!

Not necessarily in that order.

The death penalty is fully within the scope of justice.

The very word "justice" implies both fairness and equality. Perfect justice would be every murder being put to death.

But perfect justice is not always best for society, partly because we are incapable of carrying it out.

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"It is extremely difficult for our contemporaries to conceive of the conditions of free banking because they take government interference with banking for granted and as necessary"

-- Ludwig von Mises

I fully concur.

So, because humans are imperfect (i.e. "incapable of carrying it out") we should abandon our attempts to achieve perfect justice (or at least something close to it)?

That makes no sense to me.

The two problems with the death penalty are:

1. The cost of the legal system to convict someone and punish them with the death penalty.

2. The fact that innocent people are sometimes wrongfully convicted and then punished with death.


These problems are inversely proportional to one another. In other words, the closer to fixing one problem you get, the worse the other gets. The reason is that the costs of the legal system are there to make sure that innocent people aren't wrongfully executed. Having speedy trials with no appeals would make things less expensive, but would increase the number of wrongful convictions and deaths. Fully eliminating wrongful deaths would take an inordinate amount of money more than we are already spending on it.

And when two things are inversely proportional to one another, you can never eliminate both of them, and eliminating one makes the other infinitely greater (only truly infinite in the mathematical sense, but still very large in real world terms).

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"It is extremely difficult for our contemporaries to conceive of the conditions of free banking because they take government interference with banking for granted and as necessary"

-- Ludwig von Mises

Perfect justice would be every murderer repenting and working the rest of their lives toward atoning for their guilt in the service of others, particularly the family of the victim...

Alas, that's impossible too.
It's even less possible with the death penalty.
That's the one thing I took from the whole Tookie thing. Someone being kept in prison with no chance of being released could possibly do some good.
Most likely they won't.
But what advantage is there to assuming not?

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"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

That problem is eliminated with an easy change to the appeals process.

I'm curious about something, though. If we were to eliminate the death penalty and just lock up all the murderers and serial rapists for the rest of their lives, we'd have to build MANY more prisons and pay MANY more people to guard them and employ MANY more mental/physical healthcare people to care for the ever-aging inmates as they slowly go mad and physically deteriorate. Where will all that money come from? (And wouldn't all that healthcare funding, which will grow to be astronomical, be better used in, say, providing healthcare for law-abiding citizens?)

The chance we might put an innocent person to death decreases every day. New and more advanced practices, policies, procedures, and technology make it increasingly improbable that this will happen in the future. Add to this groups like The Innocence Project, and the odds shrink further.

Pretending that the above is not true, and eliminating the death penalty based on that alone, is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Violent criminals will remain violent even if there is no death penalty; innocent people will continue to die at their hands.

What WILL change with the death penalty, is that habitually violent criminals will no longer have the opportunity to prey on law-abiding citizens, and honest, hard-working taxpayers won't have to foot the lifelong bill for their housing, food, and medical services (when many can't even afford healthcare insurance for themselves). Eliminating them from society with the death penalty (even from society behind bars) ends their violence, full stop, as well as eliminates the lifelong costs of inmate housing, guards, food, medical care, etc.

You have limited your reasons for not supporting the death penalty to cost and the possible loss of innocent life. There are myriad more reasons to consider.

You're aware, aren't you, that hundreds of murders are committed IN prison every year? Granted, I'm sure most of those murdered prisoners were fairly rotten humans to begin with, but is it ok with you when another inmate acts as judge, jury and executioner to an otherwise "innocent" person?

Here are some other things you might want to think about in your deliberations as to keeping or eliminating the death penalty (from my earlier post):

• Not all murderers that are incarcerated are incarcerated for life. Paroled murderers - those murderers who do NOT get a life sentence and who serve their time - can and do murder again.
  
  
• It often takes more than one murder conviction to receive a life sentence. According to the Justice Department, 1 in 12 death row inmates have prior murder convictions.
  
  
• Murderers who are locked up (for life or otherwise) are still a threat. Prison inmates can and do assault/murder other inmates, corrections officers, visiting clergy, legal counsel, etc.
  
  
• Crime/murder among the general public can be ordered from within prison walls. Prison bars, even those of SuperMax prisons, do not stop convicted murderers from a life of crime, both inside AND outside prison walls.
  
  
• Lifers can and do escape to murder again. Granted, the number is small, but it still happens. "In its latest roundup of death penalty statistics, Capital Punishment, 2004, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics notes that at least 101 murderers now on death row were already in prison when they murdered their victims; at least 44 others were prison escapees."
  
  
• Solitary confinement/incarceration often results in madness. "Many psychiatrists who have studied the issue, including Dr. Henry Weinstein, argue that the stress of prolonged solitary confinement can cause psychologically healthy inmates to exhibit emotional disturbances and even psychosis, including 'memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions and, under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy.'"

I'd be interested to hear your take on the above.

I would say that that would be the most beneficial thing to society, I would not call that justice. Justice is fairness in rights. If you do something to another person such as killing them, then you receive in response what you gave (by the government of course. Murder victims can't punish the people who killed them).

Can't people in prison volunteer for service?

I'm not sure, but that would sound like a sensible thing to me, and I have heard of it before.

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"It is extremely difficult for our contemporaries to conceive of the conditions of free banking because they take government interference with banking for granted and as necessary"

-- Ludwig von Mises