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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (15569)	6/26/2002 2:43:43 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

NOTHING lessens crime more reliably than the perp no longer being on the planet. That particular perp, guilty or innocent, chosen by bias or chosen fairly, can't commit another crime after he is dead. All those the state kills won't kill again, whether they are children or adults, guilty or innocent, chosen by a rigged lottery or chosen without the rig (a trick not yet pulled off), chosen to get a judge re-elected or chosen because the jury believed they should die. A demographic study will produce profiles of those most likely to commit violent crimes. If we kill them now, those crimes will be prevented. These thought-experiments about what we would like to do to one individual or another have nothing to do with the social problem of lessening violent crime, statistically. It costs a great deal more, for example, to conduct a capital trial, house the prisoner on the extremely expensive death row, fund the appeals, and finally execute, than it does to maintain a prisoner in the regular population for 40 or so years. I would rather put that money into programs that will keep my family safer and assist victims than into programs for which there is no evidence they will do that. I'd rather have fewer victims than more dead murderers. And innocents. Rapists keep getting released because of DNA. Because they were still here to insist on the test. There is no reason to believe trials for rape are any less fair than trials for murder. Often, rape trials even feature a close-up, living eye witness, and often murder trials don't. We do the best we can to be fair, but mistakes are made. Still, we've done the best we can, and although it's of course subject to human error, it's as good a system as I know of. Except I don't think we're doing the best we can in the case of the death penalty. I think we patently aren't. In a generation or two, it will be different, I believe.