Death Penalty

[Ravenshire]

First off, is isn't in any way a loaded question.  You intimated earlier that as long as the number of wrongfully executed people continues to decrease, you're OK with it.

I readily grant that people killed by the State is more often in accord with the law than not.  But so what?  As long as ANY innocent people are executed, the system is horribly, horribly flawed, and MUST be thrown out.  The 'occasionally something bad happens' isn't like getting shortchanged at the grocer's or having your car recalled, it is the taking of a human life.

But it's actually very easy to 'not have anything less than perfection'.  Simply stop executing people.  If you don't execute anyone, you'll never execute an innocent person.  A lot of countries have done this, and it seems to work.

Boru

Addendum:  What Snake said.  If you lock someone up unjustly, you can make amends.  You can apologize, you can give them back their freedom, you can pay them large sums of money.  How do you make amends for killing someone you shouldn't have?

If you never jail anyone, you'll never jail an innocent person. But we must do something to people who break the law, and sometimes we get it wrong. If someone spends the rest of their life in jail, and we find out they were innocent, but they're too old to do anything with it anymore, how is that better than killing them? You can give them money, but you can't give them time.

"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."
~Benjamin Franklin

So, Chad, at least one of the people who helped create our judicial system seems to disagree with your attitude of "a few is ok."

We're talking about the potential death of people innocent of a crime, a punishment that is more expensive than incarceration and has no compelling argument that it deters the crimes it's used to punish (a point you've ignored once already).

I understand some people feel a need for revenge state sanctioned murder but I'll never understand that need.