Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?

[bennyboy]

The problem you're clearly avoiding by this point is that killing someone is irrevocable.

Granted, you cannot give someone back 14 years of incarceration after discovering them innocent. But you certainly can compensate them financially and release them from imprisonment.

Once you've killed someone, you cannot undo your mistake.

You're right that a life sentence is serious, but comparing it to a death sentence without addressing this problem is facile, at best.

There are lots of mistakes that we can't undo, and many of them involve death. Doctors fuck up on a shockingly regular basis, and people die-- but they say, "I did the best with the information I had," and for the most part we take that at face value. My own friend was turned away from a hospital WHILE HAVING a heart attack, and he exists no more. I see fuckers driving with their phones out all the time-- if one of them kills my kid crossing the street, they'll get maybe aggravated manslaughter, do a few years, and Bob's-yer-uncle. "I'm sorry," they'll say, "I made a mistake."

We allow behaviors all the time that jeopardize the lives of good, honest, innocent civilians, many THOUSANDS of them per year. But if the judicial system ever makes a mistake involving a life, suddenly it's the end of all that's good and decent in America. What a strange asymmetry in standards that is.

And consider the OP-- we're talking about war criminals here. At best, you'll have killed an "innocent" combatant from an enemy nation. That's bad, but not as bad as bombing a wedding full of women and children, proudly proclaiming in breaking news that "We gottem!" So how much, REALLY, do we value life in this country anyway? Not too much, apparently, unless it's a convicted violent felon crying that HIS rights are being ignored.