Atheism & the Death Penalty.

[robvalue]

I used to be in favour of it, but I'm now I'm somewhat more on the fence. Those are all valid arguments you make, except the free will one. If we assume there is no free will, then those handing out penalties have no free will either, to "change" the punishment. But if there in fact was free will but we assumed there wasn't, then we'd be adding unecessary leniency. However, if it was shown we have vastly reduced free will compared to how things appear to be, but still some free will, the implications would be very interesting. I've already seen cases where people have got reduced sentencing due to their brain structure acting as a mitigating circumstance (psycopathy).

In theory, of course I'm against it. If unlimited resources existed to safely house all criminals who commit all crimes, then that would be fine. But here in England we have prisons so clogged up with people that new offenders are getting more and more suspended and light sentences due to lack of space. So it all has a knock-on effect. How much of an effect, I'm not qualified to say. But people seem to rarely talk about this side of things. It may well be this isn't a big factor after all, in which case I'd come down more strongly on the side of no death penalty.

Ideally, I'd like to see those people unsafe to be in society put to productive, supervised work. Then they are giving something back to society. How you deal with those that refuse is difficult, but there could be incentives and so on.

Ricky Gervais made a comment that stuck with me a while back, although he probably didn't originate it. He said that if you start giving death sentences for crimes other than murder, you get to a point where people are more likely to commit murder as well as whatever non-murder crime, as the stakes are already as high as they can get.