Thank you, Steve, that is the sort of reasonable argument I would expect of you.
There are two proportionalities here: one, a sense of responding with due seriousness to the crime; the other, a sense of maintaining some sort of adequate differentiation among crimes. Otherwise, the main point of punishment is lost, and we become arbitrary, either hanging people for stealing (which is unjustly harsh), or giving them 15 years for premeditated murder (which is unjustly lenient). I argue that simple murder should be met with life imprisonment (otherwise we are not maintaining the first proportionality) and that taking away the chance of parole is an inadequate differentiation between simple murder and truly horrific crimes. As it stands, our calibration is crude, and we cannot do much to reflect levels of heinousness, but at least we can maintain a crude distinction between simple murder and "murder most foul". The only defense against sheer arbitrariness that I can see is such reasoning.
Now, I did not argue execution is therefore the right conclusion. I argued that we begin with the premise that it is fitting, and then work from there. If it can be shown that there are sufficient reasons, either moral or practical, to not exercise our right to execute, then we should curtail the practice. Absent such a showing, we should continue to execute. That, to me, is the conservative position, because we need no practical justification to execute......... |
