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When its gone I'll miss the justice it provided because of its controversy. We already know that Y% of death penalty cases are overturned before the victim is
by VLM 10y ago
When its gone I'll miss the justice it provided because of its controversy.
We already know that Y% of death penalty cases are overturned before the victim is killed due to judicial misconduct and Y% is ridiculously large. We can assume that whatever the percentage of justice system failure is for mere life or mere 20 yrs w/o parole, its much higher than Y% due to having less attention paid to it.
The end result of getting rid of the death penalty is we'll be stuck living with (100-Y)% of really bad people, which is an inherent bad for all of us, and we'll have far more than Y% serving life and 20 yrs and so on unjustly and unexamined because those aren't death penalty cases anymore.
You can't seriously claim the people overturning unjust death penalty cases are going to transition to overturning unjust 20 yr cases.
Obviously some fraction of the (100-Y)% of those deserving the death penalty today will find a way to cause more human suffering years after they'd be dead if the penalty existed.
The net result, paradoxically, of getting rid of state killing of people, will be more total human suffering due to massive increase in false imprisonment at lesser sentences and obvious increase in number of victims of the worst of the bad guys because the worst of the bad guys won't be dead.
There are also weird cultural double standards issues, where its great and patriotic to kill brown people on the other side of the planet, but not here. Why does the dirt they stand on matter more than the flesh they're made of?
- euyyn 10y ago> We already know that Y% is ridiculously large. That premise for the rest of the argument warrants more evidence than a non-backed vox populi. Apart from that, it also failed to consider the percentage of executed people that were indeed innocent.
- icebraining 10y agoIt's an easily findable number: "Those sentenced to death are almost three times as likely to see their death sentence overturned on appeal and to be resentenced to a lesser penalty than they are to be executed." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/17/most-death-penalty-sentences-are-overturned-heres-why-that-matters/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/1...
- euyyn 10y agoWhy would that make it "ridiculously large"?
- icebraining 10y ago75% isn't very large?
- d0mine 10y agoHave you considered that US government shouldn't kill brown people whether their US citizens or not?
- VLM 10y agoYeah that's kinda my point that deciding who lives and dies based on a line on a map seems kinda silly. There is a peculiar similarity between foreign and domestic policy right now, in that at this time most of the minorities killed by the USA are being killed unjustly regardless of where they are on a map. Seems unfair to stop killing the locals and keep slaughtering innocent foreigners unless you invoke really weird doctrines like our folks have souls but theirs don't so they're not human, or that crossing a magic line in the dirt is the most important criteria of human rights rather than say, being human being the most important criteria of human rights. We consistently treat life as cheap now. It'll be interesting to see what happens if we change to treat some life as separate but more equal than others or whatever ends up happening. I suspect rather than a decline in globalist neoconservative warmongering we'll get a big dose of cognitive dissonance.