(November 14, 2010 at 3:34 am)Chuck Wrote: Except the death penalty appeal process is more costly by a factor of 3 then feeding and housing an inmate incarcerated for life in a maximum security facility. We are rightly highly concerned with taking a unjustly condemned life by mistake. The process in place to prevent that, which demonstrably does not work anywhere close to 100% of the time, already cost far more than simply keeping that life living for its natural life expectancy. I find it unacceptable tolerate any increased attrition rate amongst those unjustly condemned to save cost. So I think the logical solution is to incarcerate for life all those who would have been executed. It keeps the criminals off the street for 1/3 the cost, and prevents execution of unjustly condemned.
My fundamental principle is it is acceptable to let 100 deserving criminals escape death penalty in order to prevent one unjustly condemned men from being executed.
I agree with your overall fundemental principle.
However, the costs and possibility of sentencing an innocent person to death is not a problem with the idea of the death penalty itself.
That is to say I find that a problem with the appeals process and the method to which the death penalty itself is dispensed rather than a problem with sentencing a guilty person of heinous crimes to death.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
