I love all the responses I've seen so far. Here's my thoughts on a few of them...
Dick Cheney's Mechanical Heart wrote:1) I don't really trust the government to kill people. It's the ultimate violation of liberty, so if they're going to do it they better get that shit right
This is the biggest issue I have with the death penalty generally. All criminal punishment involves the removal of liberties, but you don't get any bigger than this.
Dick Cheney's Mechanical Heart wrote:2) The death penalty is racist (largely as a byproduct of how fucked up the justice system in general is)
I always hear this, but it's largely based on the numbers themselves. "More black people are get the death penalty," ergo "the death penalty is racist." I don't buy that, since it could just as well be that more black people commit crimes warranting the death penalty (whether the crime itself or aggravating circumstances that push it into death penalty territory). I'm not saying it's not possible, just that making that conclusion solely on the basis of its application, blind to anything else, is BS.
Dick Cheney's Mechanical Heart wrote:3) The death penalty either has no or a limited effect on crime reduction (depending on which study you look at)
Deterrence is just one of several purposes for criminal punishment, others including retribution, rehabilitation, and prevention. A lack of deterrence doesn't by itself gut the "value" of the death penalty. If you were scoring the death penalty from 1-10 on how effectively it met the different theories, it might be a 2 in deterrence, 8 in prevention (or whatever score you might give to life in prison), 1 in rehabilitation, and a total 10 in retribution.
Dick Cheney's Mechanical Heart wrote:4) The death penalty costs more money than life in prison
Another argument I find unpersuasive. Since when is the government concerned with efficiency?
PissedOffMonkey wrote:Most of the people executed seem to have mental issues of some sort. Society prefers to not have people with issues that may have caused them to murder others. Those on death row likely didn't worry about the consequences of their actions beforehand.
Well, anyone convicted in our system has to have already been found to be not mentally ill (or else they'd have asserted and prevailed on an insanity defense), so unless you're saying that anyone that would kill in cold blood has mental issues by definition, I don't see how this holds up.
PissedOffMonkey wrote:Relatives of the victims generally want revenge. Closure is blood. I would probably desire the murderer of my relative to be killed, too. From my current standpoint, though, life in prison is a worse punishment. Locked in a cage every day for the rest of their pathetic life to rot until they finally die. I don't care how much cable tv they get to watch. They can lift weights forever. As long as they can never get their freedom back they are punished every single day. That is the ultimate revenge in my eyes.
That's your opinion, but I think most people would think death is worse than a life with some limited freedoms, but still 3 meals a day and maybe as you say cable TV. Now, if we toed the line of "cruel and unusual" with a lifetime sentence of hard labor and
real unpleasantness (note: I'm not supporting torture, but chain gang sort of stuff), I might be more inclined to agree.
Rikaelus wrote:
- Our court system doesn't yield 100% accuracy and with the more severe charges that would warrant the death penalty, emotions would run higher and there'd be a higher chance of people "just looking for someone to blame".
On the one hand, the inability to revisit a case with new evidence if the criminal has been executed is probably the biggest strike against it. But on the other, we still have to have confidence in our judicial system in order for society to function. If you take PissedMonkey's argument, for example, where he says life in prison is actually
worse than death, then isn't imprisoning someone for 30 years, only to be exonerated later, nearly as great an injustice as having put him to death?
Rikaelus wrote:- I believe there's always the chance for rehabilitation, though admittedly our current system sucks at it.
I respectfully disagree. Or, well, I think some people are so close to beyond rehabilitation that it's not worth it for society at large to take the chance of letting them out again.
Rikaelus wrote:- It's cruel and unusual psychological punishment to wave death over someone's head who's on death row for a long time.
That's a catch-22, since the long delay is a result of the constitutionally mandated appeals for someone before being put to death. It should also be noted that the criminal has the option to waive their appeals and significantly expedite the process if they feel the wait so arduous (see: Timothy McVeigh).
Rikaelus wrote:- If someone commits a crime they know is punishable by death then they have no incentive to stop it, and could continue it until they're caught - what more could they lose?
You're assuming all criminals do it serially, which is far from the case. It might work with actual serial killers, but I think they already have plenty of screwed up motives of their own to do what they do, and the possibility that they might be put to death isn't a major factor. Either way, I don't put much/any stock in the death penalty's deterrent effect.
HolyJaw wrote:In the end, everything Endyss said.