Good morning blues said:
1. It's open to hideous, terrible abuse. The death penalty is the tool of choice for oppressive political regimes and social movements. It's a handy way of quashing dissent and getting rid of people your society doesn't like for whatever reason. This is true in all countries that use it. Consider the United States: in Texas, people on death row are often there thanks to completely incompetent court-appointed defense lawyers with no experience in such cases (rather than the experienced public defenders that are vital in such a system) - and do I really need to mention the race issue? You can tell me all you like that your own government would never allow such a travesty to occur (or be perpetuated), but you'll excuse me if I'm skeptical.
hmmmmm, but the United States uses it wholly different than most other countries in the world. Not many other countries allow it's states or provinces to decide on their own whether or not to partake. They left a door open, but the U.S. government rarely uses it on the accord of the entirety of the government. In countries with oppressive political regimes, it's really kind of a null in void argument, because outside of a revolution, those people are stuck with it. Is it true that political officials in the U.S. have used to further their own ends? Probably. It's not a perfect system, but regardless, it could be said that certain crimes demand a punishment that won't allow it's outlaws to merely continue to feed off the system, and the people.
Good morning blues said:
2. A common argument for the death penalty is that it is an effective deterrent, because nobody wants to get executed. This is bullshit, because nobody commits a crime if they expect to get caught. The psychological evidence here is pretty clear - nobody is going to say "maybe I shouldn't shoot this guy" because they might get executed for it in fifteen years.
Ok, you didn't present psychological evidence. Evidence means a piece of information that proves a point. Your idea here was merely a statement. An extremely biased one at that. I won't deny that I believe there to be people who either aren't afraid of punishment, or believe that they won't get caught. But it's pretty extreme to think that all people who seriously contemplate a crime that is deemed worthy of capital punishment, don't consider the consequences of their actions, and the possibility of losing their life. It's tough to say whether it's an effective deterrent, because the only people we have really to study the idea with, are people who have in fact committed a crime worthy of the death penalty. Clearly it didn't deter those people, but who's to say the thief with a gun won't think twice about his decision to kill a hostage based on the punishment they may receive. This point is a murky one, because I don't know that there is any truly compelling evidence to back up either side.
Good morning blues said:
3. The death penalty is fundamentally incompatible with the fundamental assumption of Western criminal law, which is that it is worse to punish an innocent man than it is to let a guilty man go free. (This is why you are "innocent until proven guilty," and why you need to be proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" - if there's any doubt, you should be considered innocent in order to avoid any possibility of punishing an innocent person.) It stands to reason that this principle should be enforced especially rigorously the worse the punishment is. A death sentence is about as bad as a punishment gets. Despite this, even such enlightened societies as the United States have executed innocent men. Take the case of Leonel Torres Herrera, who was executed in 1993, despite the fact that he had evidence that could have seen him acquitted. We cannot take the risk of this happening even one more time.
You bring up an interesting point here. "Innocent until proven guilty" and reasonable doubt are very compelling ideas to consider when throwing around the idea of capital punishment. Those principles are fairly unique to the United States, and you're right in a sense. But also consider that the death penalty in all of it's uses in the U.S., isn't a matter thrown around lightly. Few criminal cases actually make it to trial [http://law.jrank.org/pages/848/Criminal-Justice-Process-Plea-bargaining.html], left instead to be plead out, and most often when this is the case, the death penalty is usually taken off the table. You say the death penalty is as bad a punishment as it gets, but whose to say that some wouldn't prefer it to a lifetime in a maximum security federal prison. In these places, many inmates aren't expected to live full lives anyway, between prison riots and gang affiliations. I'm left to wonder if some inmates would prefer lethal injection, a death penalty with no pain, as opposed to a prison shank. It's true, innocent people have died with the death penalty. Nothing outlines the flaws of an imperfect system like the death of innocents, but for many, the idea of "the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few" still hold true. Thankfully, as our system has continued to evolve, and forensic evidence gets better and better, this problems becomes less. This coupled with the process of appeals will help to balance out some of the outliers. Will it always be a risk? Yes. It's an unfortunate truth. But some of us feel it's a necessary one.
To be honest, I myself, am on the fence on the whole issue. But there is a strong part of me that feels that in a democratic country with one of the highest crime rates in the world, a death penalty with considerably lower usage than many other places in the world, is an acceptable means of punishment.
