ALL HAIL CAPITALISM

[Tempus]

Crimes are graded and punished accordingly. Typically we recognise rape as being less significant than murder, theft as less significant than rape, and selling drugs as less significant than theft. There are, of course, circumstances where this is not the case but it is generally so. The problem with punishing a set of crimes (rape, paedophilia and murder in this case) equally - that is, with the death penalty - is that it provides an incentive for people who are rapists but don't normally murder people to also kill their victims. This is because the penalty for murder and rape is now the same. All rapists might as well kill their victims and witnesses now because if they're caught they'll be punished as if they had anyway.

The reason life imprisonment is a good compromise is because you don't kill any innocent people, giving them / their lawyer / their family a chance to mount a "hey, I'm actually innocent" case, while protecting the public from the guilty ones. Is this flawless? No, it's not. Guilty people get paroled and innocent people serve out life sentences. But the solution isn't to refuse to recognise the gradient of crimes and their proportional punishment, for the reason I outlined in the preceding paragraph.

I agree with your sentiment, Cinjin; if someone exists who's only going to cause more suffering why should why keep them around? Yet I think we're looking at the problem the wrong way. We're saying "what do we do with these murderers and rapists?" and this is important - they're an immediate threat to society at large which needs to be dealt with, please don't mistake me for saying otherwise. But, what we also need to be asking is "why are there murderers and rapists?" What predisposes people to commit these actions and how can we prevent it? Killing offenders isn't going to prevent more offenders replacing them. I think you're focusing too much on bandaging the wounds rather than preventing the injuries. My personal opinion is that violent crime is heavily tied into educational and economic factors. Rather than spend time trying to instate the death penalty for rapists I'd rather look into the backgrounds / statistics of rapists and see what I can do to reduce the chances of a society producing one. I don't think that's the be all and end all solution, but I do think understanding the problem is better than condemning people.