Warren J. Dew

I guess that depends on the details of his crime.

I think execution is indeed a better deterrent than life imprisonment. The very fact that executions get national headlines and life sentences barely get local headlines shows that people pay more attention to them.

I also think execution is better prevention. People imprisoned for life do occasionally escape, and then you have things like the misguided "weekend furlough" plan that got Dukakis into trouble.

Finally, from a moral standpoint, I'm far from convinced that life imprisonment is more humane than execution, at least in some prisons.

All that said, I do worry about people falsely convicted. While I don't agree it's a common problem - belated reversals due to new evidence tend to grab headlines, but they are a tiny fraction of all convictions - even a rare false sentence is problematic. While the current system in the U.S. focuses on death sentences only for particularly egregious crimes, I'd rather see it focus on higher standards of proof.

Warren J. Dew

It's not guilty beyond "all" reasonable doubt, it's guilty beyond "a" reasonable doubt. Basically, you need at least one reason to think that they're innocent to return a verdict of not guilty - though you can do that in the face of lots of reasons to think they actually are guilty.

The problem is, sometimes they're not guilty, but the jury doesn't happen to think of the correct reason why they are innocent.

dean

It's all about revenge. It isn't a deterrent, it's more expensive than life sentences, and it's never been administered equitably in its entire history in the US. Support for it is almost entirely emotive and not based in objective reality.
I'm always amused by the folks who constantly bemoan the overall incompetence of our government, yet entrust that very same government with administering the death penalty.

Warren J. Dew

Actually, it's entrusted to a jury, not the government.

tommyra

I don't believe the death penalty stops others. I don't believe the person committing the crime even thinks about what will happen to them. They may after but most don't believe they will be caught and/or believe the will somehow get off.

mikegarrison

This is a very complicated issue.

I think Dean mostly has it correct. The death penalty is institutionalized vengeance. People feel the emotion of vengeance because it is like a deadman's switch. When you and Joe down the street are feuding, it may occur to you that you never really liked Joe all that much anyway. So why not just kill him and never have to worry about the problem again? The problem is that Joe has relatives who live nearby. If you kill Joe, they may take revenge by killing you. So you may back off and try to find some other way to resolve your conflict. Or, maybe you kill his relatives, too.

This chaos can lead to blood feuds, needless violence, etc. So people end up creating some arbitration process. Essentially we have professionalized vengeance. Rather than allowing people to work this sort of thing out on their own, the state (or clan leader, or priest, or whatever the form of justice is in your society) prempts the vengeance. The law punishes the guilty party.

But how much punishment is enough to prevent the private feuding? That's the question. Different societies have found different answers to that. In the modern "first world", most societies have decided that the death penalty is literally overkill. But some (including the US) have not.

Personally, I think there is a place for the death penalty, but I also think that the process by which it is executed is very flawed. Punishment works best when it is swift and certain, and the death penalty is neither.

Kill your wife, and do you get the death penalty? Well it depends on what state you are in. And perhaps exactly how you killed her. And whether the prosecutor thinks he can convince a jury that your crime deserves death. And whether the jury agrees. And whether the appeals court agrees. Etc.

Then you add in the concept of the plea bargin, and you get situations where some people who plead guilty to much worse crimes get prison, while someone who refuses to plead guilty gets the death penalty for much less severe crimes.

Basically, I think the death penalty should be reserved for very limited circumstances. Much more limited than we use it for now. Perhaps it should even be restricted to only being used on people for whom life in prison is a meaningless punishment -- people who are already serving life in prison.

RC - Ryder

If I lived elsewhere in the world where the murder rate and number of truly horrific murders was miniscule, I could go along without a death penalty. But, in the US that is not the case. I think the reason much of the rest of the countries of the civilized world thinks differently has a whole lot to do with their history, which is rife with barbaric treatment of prisoners and death sentence applications for seemingly the most miniscule offenses.
It does bother me that there are no agreed upon standards among states that justify and invariably result in the ultimate punishment.

Filthy Beast

Patty, i know you remember this, because it happed in California. The next door
neighbor that raped and murdered that couple's 4 year old daughter. I could flip
the switch on his ass and sleep very well at night.

Kyras

^Yeah, I think I could do it on that animal.

S1997

Not totally true. The jury doesn't decide whether the accused is "eligible' for the death penalty or in the end whether the people seek the death penalty in a specific case. The jury cannot impose the death penalty willy nilly without it's being presented with the judicial option. Much of the decision gets made without the jury -- and additionally, jury verdicts are often overturned. And isn't the jury just a specifically dedicated part of the judicial system anyway, however temporary? Maybe it's a subtle distinction you are making, but I'm not sure it is valid for me. It is the government apparatus that legalizes it, allows it, seeks it, imposes it, and carries it out.

I think Texas is the state that is known for imposing the death penalty more often than other states. In most cases it is still as barbaric as it must have been in the Wild West. There isn't any clear evidence that it deters criminal activity. In Texas we talk about 'closure for the victim's family' as a way of justifying so many executions. But that is a notion that is very difficult to separate from 'vengeance'.