Death Penalty

[bennyboy]

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.

You can't be serious.  How is releasing a wrongly jailed 90 years old matter better than wrongly executing a 90 year old man?  It is better because you didn't kill him.  Fuxxake, what a stupid question.

Boru

Are we talking about moral absolutes, or about the greater good?

Consider the cost of sustaining someone who almost for sure committed serial killings:
http://www.tcpalm.com/news/newspaper-inv...h-row-cost

A million dollars per person.


Now look at convicted criminals, especially those convicted of aggravated assault, manslaughter, etc., and consider what that money could mean.  Let's say a truly staggering 20% of death-row inmates didn't commit their crime.  If you execute 10 men, you save 10 million dollars, at the cost of two "innocent" men (quotes because they almost always have long histories of violent or criminal activity anyway).  Now, consider that actually about 4% are eventually found innocent of the crimes for which they were executed, and we are looking at more like 25 million dollars for one wrong death.

Could you save more 1 civilian life by putting that 25 million dollars into better monitoring of paroled convicts, or rehabilitation programs, or better resources for police, or even just improved health care in lower-income areas? I don't know the answer, but I strongly suspect it's a yes.

So in terms of guaranteeing indiviuals the maximum chance of eventually getting justice, execution is wrong. But in terms of preventing the greatest possible number of innocent deaths, it seems to me that execution, EVEN WITH some mistakes, might still represent the numerical greater good.