Let me offer some thoughts about the death penalty, nihil. For a change, we see something differently.
<<I, setting scientific tolerance limits from
psychometry, will be willing to preemptively kill one who has
only a 5% chance of being innocent, in order to save the 19
kids who (with 95% confidence would have been killed had
the sociopath lived free.>>
I would agree with you on this, if our premises were the same. In this case, your words seem to imply that the death penalty has been demonstrated statistically to be a deterrent to crime, and a very strong one, at that. In fact, that is not the case. Of course, if you kill someone, that person can't kill again. But there's more to it than that.
First the argument for crime-deterrence: We have legal rights to due process in our country that none of us wishes to yield. It is a fact that it is, therefore, extremely expensive to run capital trials. It is also extremely expensive to run a death row. It is facile to say, "I don't want to pay to house the creep," but unless you eliminate a lot of our constitutional protections, it may be a lot cheaper to house the creep than to execute him after a lengthy tax supported trial.
I put this under deterrence for a reason. It is so unbelievably expensive to execute, an exercise that does not, apparently, effect the crime rate, that deterrence might be better achieved by putting those taxpayer monies into effective crime reduction measures.
Politicians just love the death penalty issue. No thinking involved. Just get people's revenge juices flowing.
But that's a passing thought. I probably should say up front, that opposing a state -implemented death penalty for various reasons does not mean that I wouldn't, if someone I loved were harmed by some monster in human form, want to kill the son of bitch myself.
Here's the strongest reason I oppose the death penalty-- even stronger, for me personally, than that it doesn't deter crime and in fact, by funneling resources into an ineffectual crimefighting measure, takes cops off the street who might really deter crime. The reason is that it is bizarrely implemented.
I don't see how civilized people can have a death penalty that is implemented via a rigged lottery.
If you are rich and commit a capital offense, your lottery ticket says, "Home free."
If you are a woman and commit a capital offense, your lottery ticket says, "You will be very, very unlikely to die for your crime"
If you are white and kill a black person, your lottery ticket says, "Good choice! You will probably not have to die!" (I read a book on this subject a few years ago, and at that time there were states in our country in which NO white person had ever died for murdering a black person, and no rich person had ever been executed at all.)
If you are black and kill a white person, your lottery ticket says, "GET READY TO DIE, unless you are very rich!"
If you are poor and uneducated and male and the wrong race and kill someone of the wrong race your lottery ticket says, "Too bad about your demographic, you lose-- death for your kind."
We are not, therefore, really killing people for their crimes, it seems to me, unless those who commit that crime, most of them at least, die. But only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of those who kill others die! Those who do, have been killed, then, effectually, for their location in our demographic design.
And then there is the problem of killing innocent people. I take that very, very seriously. Over the decades capital punishment in our country has claimed a lot of people who were later proven to have been put to death unjustly. And a considerable number have managed to prove their innocence and be freed from death row. Imagine how many died whose cases were never reopened after they were no longer there to beg, and so their deaths have never appeared on the Unjustly Executed lists.
So I'd say if you put the fact that it hasn't been proven to deter, that money could be spent on deterrence instead of on lengthy capital trials, that innocent people die, and that it is applied not for crimes alone, but for crimes combined with lottery tickets rigged in favor of females, the rich, the educated, and those who kill blacks... if you put all those together, I think it's wrong. Under those circumstances, it's wrong.
If it could be applied evenhandedly, I might still vote against it. But I won't ever be offered that vote.
I had a friend who died recently, who used to argue this subject with one sentence. Whatever anyone said in support of the death penalty, and inevitably the comments would be about the monsters in human form whom it seems an instinct for us to want to kill, he would say, quietly,
"It's not about them, it's about us."
That made a deep impression on me.
What kind of society applies the sanction of death unevenly across social strata? |
