Death Penalty

[Chad32]

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.

He would rather live in a city with 100 psychos running around free than know one innocent person died there. Why?

I have never argued that it deters crime. I don't care if it does or not, especially if they only did it extremely rarely. The idea is that it keeps this person from torturing children to death because they flirted with the opposite sex again.

If you consider it mere revenge, or state sanctioned murder, ok. I don't know what to tell you to change your mind. Personally I've read too many stories about people who were so off the wall about the messed up stuff that they did, that I would deem them worthy of death. A quick one, which would be much more merciful than the guilty deserves.