(January 27, 2014 at 7:27 pm)Chad32 Wrote: That really depends on how long they've been in jail.That is a matter of degrees, though. The government may not be able to properly compensate a man who spent decades in prison and is finally found innocent of the crime he was convicted of. But imagine that they had established his innocence just a few months after executing him?
The issue with capital punishment is twofold for me. One, there is the risk of killing an innocent person, though there are many crimes for which this is not an issue. Second, because we have a system in place that is designed to minimize the risk of killing an innocent person, the process for executing a person is excruciatingly time-consuming and very, very expensive. It fails to provide the closure that victims or their loved ones seek and instead drags out their suffering, and does so at a greater economic cost than life imprisonment.
This is not to say that I don't think that many killers don't deserve such a fate. I just don't think it's practical to do it as a policy.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
