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Blogs > redmustang91 > Wild Red Mustang thoughts!

Death penalty again  

redmustang91 64M
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7763 posts
9/25/2015 9:13 pm
Death penalty again

Justice Scalia was bemoaning the fact that the US Supreme Court has four votes to declare the death penalty unconstitutional.

Whether it has evolved that way, or not, the death penalty is a very bad policy. Why?

It costs way more than it solves criminal justice problems.

If you want people to value and revere life the state should set an example of valuing human life, rather than vengeance style killing. Those who claim to be pro life should have some sympathy for the living as well as the gestating.

Fallible humans frequently find people guilty of crimes that years later they are shown to be not guilty of committing. Sadly once executed you cannot let the person out of prison, give them some money and say sorry. Death is final. If you are not troubled by the thought of executing innocent people, then you are a seriously defective person and should not claim the right to be considered compassionate, decent or empathetic. If you are willing to have the state kill innocent people then you are a psychopath.

I am also troubled by the randomness of the death penalty. Most people feel a sense of unease at the thought of lightening striking and killing people seemingly at random. Shark attacks have a similar effect. What if you have say 5,000 homicides a year and say 20 executions. Then you add the fact that no rich white person with a good defense team get executed, while lots of poor minorities get executed. Then you add the statistical proof that a consistent bias is shown that minorities that kill high value white high social economic victims are much more likely to get the death penalty. So a highly random choice of defendants to execute, with a dollop of racial prejudice skewing the results, leads to a cruel system of bizarre results. That system also costs millions and entails years of delay.

Add another problem. Our death penalty keeps Mexico from extraditing murderers to face trial in the US for fear they will get the death penalty. So if they can get to Mexico the murderer goes free in Mexico! How does that provide deterrence or justice?

Further a rational murderer facing the death penalty for one murder will have an incentive to kill witnesses and those who might apprehend the killer. He can only be executed once, so he might as well kill all who stand in his way. In prison while awaiting execution he might as well kill guards, or other prisoners who bother him.

Around the world the civilized nations have killed the death penalty. The US stands with such evil places as Russia, China, much of Africa and Asia that do not value human life the way we claim to value it, and executes people.

Pope Francis and Jesus value human life and do not approve of such killing, done privately or by the state. When will America live up to its ideals and reject vengeance and the eye for an eye justice concepts of barbaric societies that allowed slavery and pillage and other barbaric practices? We cannot promote life by the machinery of death. Just like the Nazi death camps could not make a moral German Reich by killing undesirables.

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