foxnews.com
There are plenty of well-reasoned arguments for capital punishment. In 1987, Stanford Law School published a study concluding that at least 20 innocent people had been put to death since 1905. The authors contacted Ernest Van den Haag, the author of a 1986 Harvard Law Review article titled, "The Ultimate Punishment: A Defense," and asked if their finding altered his views.
As if he were Andy Grove speaking of defective computer chips, Van den Haag replied, "If true, a very acceptable number. All human activities — building houses, driving a car, playing golf or football — cause innocent people to suffer wrongful death, but we don't give them up because on the whole we feel there's a net gain. Here, a net gain in justice is being done."
There's an obvious flaw in Van den Haag's reasoning. If an innocent person dies while driving a car, it is ordinarily the result of negligence — an "accident." If an innocent person dies at the execution of a death sentence, it is always deliberate — unless you adopt Van den Haag's premise, which seems to be that our public institutions are entitled to a certain amount of negligent conduct in their application of capital punishment. |
