A system that allows state sponsored murder is going to kill people that never committed a crime. You can’t avoid it. Justice is blind. You’re going to get overzealous prosecutors, hanging judges, and unsure witnesses that are desperate for revenge or closure.

Such a position is about as bad as the right saying health care is a privilege.

What would Superman say?

Not any kind of reason for having a death penalty. If the purpose is eye-for-eye retribution, to make things “fair”, the death penalty fails miserably. Someone repeatedly raped and then slowly tortured their victim to death, so you’d have them painlessly killed with a lethal injection. Doesn’t seem fair.

And even if the law were to say the criminal shall be put to death in the same manner as their victim, what of the person who’s killed several people by different methods?

“It’s unfair” is the argument of children who haven’t accepted the truth that life isn’t fair and the scales don’t always get perfectly balanced.

So in the end I err on the side of caution and accept long or infinite jail terms as the only solution to this complex problem of human frailty.

Agreed.

Why? Elaborate on your statement up a bit. What is the benefit to society that outweighs the cost?

If there is a law that allows for Druce to be executed then it would allow for others to be executed. (If it applied only to Druce you’d be saying that Druce and only Druce is so terrible that he should be killed.) And any law that allows for executions will inevitably be used against an innocent. Unintentionally, but still it will happen. That’s not in society’s interest.

Wow.

Of course, we can just let them go if they’re innocent, assuming we’ve not killed them yet.

Of course death is a punishment. Among other things, you’re depriving somebody of their freedom.

However, I do believe where somebody is so evil like Joseph Druce (mentioned above Jay Tea), it may be in society’s best interest to put that person to death.

What if Druce didn’t really do the crimes for which he was convicted?

What do they have to lose if they’re awaiting socialized vengeance on death row?

There is no such thing as someone so heinous, so despicable, that it is worth killing innocent people just so that he may be executed as well.

I have a very good friend who works at the DOJ whose opinion is the same as Oliver’s; she’s a reasonable person with an open mind, she understands all the arguments, she has no illusions about what the death penalty accomplishes, and still: she believes that some people are so evil that they simply need to be put to death. Period.

She’s honest enough (as is Oliver) to acknowledge that this belief has an emotional basis rather than a logical or ethical one. I respect her point of view, but I cannot agree with it — for Jody’s reason, and for a host of others.

I’m not sure that this analogy is perfectly apt, but I see some parallels to the torture question. There’s the moral argument (state-sanctioned torture, like state-sanctioned murder, is unequivocally wrong) but also the practical one: it doesn’t achieve its stated objectives. Torture won’t get you the correct intel; the death penalty won’t get you deterrence. (Jay, deterrence has to do with persuasion, i.e. convincing people to make different choices. It’s been shown that the DP doesn’t deter other criminals, and it doesn’t deter those to whom it is applied, because they’re dead — and thus unable to be persuaded of anything).

But Oliver, if retribution is what you’re after — doesn’t a long lifetime of staring at four gray walls fit the bill better than a quick and permanent lights-out?

To endorse the death penalty in this day and age is to state that you are okay with the deaths of innocents. Period.

You going to suggest that any convict who is innocent will get exonerated if they wait patiently long enough? You going to claim that a high percentage of innocent convicts are set free? The system as it is is stacked against that.

Far more realistic: “I’m not guilty of the murder I’m convicted of, but that guard’s pissing me off. I could put all my hopes on the very slim chance my innocence will be proved or, since I’ll already far more likely to spend the rest of my life here I might as well remove this aggravation. Folks think I’m already a killer anyway. Hmm… six hundred thousand of one, a mere half a dozen of another.”

The genie’s out of the bottle now,

You mean prior to Druce no death row or life sentence prisoner never ever figured out that they had nothing left to lose? Ever?

Well, the solution is really simple in any event. Don’t allow prisoners access to books.

I mean, if you’re going to keep focusing exclusively on the specific Druce case then, clearly, preventing those particular circumstances solves the whole problem. Right?

Jay, really, work on your reading comprehension. Several comments have been posted here that suggest solutions to that problem that don’t involve the death penalty. Why so studiuosly avoiding responding to the substance of those posts?

That wouldn’t work out too well for him if he’d already been executed when his innocence had been discovered. So even if he’d kept his nose clean, he’d still have been executed. Until we can deliver 100% certainty and 100% fair (also a problem, but superseded by the certainty situation) capital punishment, I’d rather not run the risk of killing someone who didn’t have it coming.

J.

What if he was convicted of murder but didn’t really do it?

The situation I outlined applies to those serving life without parole — they are the ones with nothing left to lose. Those in prison for “relatively minor offenses” have their future freedom to risk.

“I’m outta here in six months, but that guard’s pissing me off. I could just put up with it for those six months, or I could spend the rest of my life in here for killing him. Hmm… six of one, half a dozen of another.”

J.

I just think for the truly evil and wicked we need to end their lives.

Why? My view is that there are people who will not or cannot control their behavior so consequently they need to be removed from society and put in places where their behavior is closely monitored and controlled. I don’t think it matters whether they are “truly evil and wicked” or not. I don’t support the death penalty at all. It’s barbaric but I do believe that we have an obligation to permanently remove certain individuals from society regardless of whether they have committed murder or not.