Is there much call for posthumous investigation of death penalty victims?
Personally, I see no point in keeping serial murderers, rapists, violent criminals, Enron executives etc alive. Why pay for them to live?
BUT... Absolutely the only qualm I have is about wrongful execution (AKA judicial murder). But although I've seen US defenders of CP say that there have been no executions of those proven innocent - has anyone actually checked? I can't see the police, or FBI, or justice dept, exactly happy to go through a case where they've had someone executed and painstakingly prove "Whoopsie. Silly us. We killed someone innocent.", after all...
Plus, most of the executed, as I understand, tend to be poor, disproportionately black, often mentally weak, etc. They don't have much leverage, they don't have influential friends who do, basically no one cares - so who'd bother? I don't see treasonous CIA executives - who happen to be well-paid and white - getting death for betraying their people and their country. Pity.
In the UK we've had various notorious wrongful convictions that would have been death-penalty material - especially in some big terrorist mass-murder cases. The pressure to investigate and re-solve these came because the 'guilty' were still alive, behind bars... |
