Wednesday, September 23

Against the death penalty

I don't have a clear position, just a vague wish for the threshhold of evidence to be extraordinarily high. Yet this conflicts with another wish: for the process to not take decades and not be more expensive than life in prison.

Lately the arguments against it have seemed more persuasive to me...

1 comment:

  1. For me, capital punishment simply isn't a deterrent. It's never been shown to be one, and proponents of the death penalty only half-heartedly make the argument for good reason: the sort of person who's likely to face the death penalty is generally the sort of person who's expecting death at any given moment.

    I think most people support either explicitly as a form of revenge, or indirectly by claiming it is justice. Of course, taking someone's life to me is inherently injust, and the whole thing to me smacks of some sort of ancient rite of property exchange--lose a son, get someone else's dead son. There's some sort of deep level on which that logic makes sense to people, but that's the sort of emotion that most of the Western World has tried to remove from the public sphere, as should we.

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