The death penalty, again

Booman: Give up on the death penalty

B wrote,

I'm opposed to the death penalty, but not because I think that no one deserves to die for their crimes. . . [b]ut there are at least three problems.

The first is that innocent people do occasionally get convicted of capital crimes.

Once you kill someone, you can't unkill them if it turns out you convicted the wrong person.

The second is that there is a lot of wisdom in our religious traditions that counsel that we shouldn't judge lest we be judged, and that we should forgive those who trespass against us, so that we might be forgiven for our own trespasses.

The third is what everyone is talking about today, which is that it's hard to kill people in a humane way that doesn't entail constitutionally-banned cruel and unusual punishment.

To which I commented, thus.

Any penalty can be fully carried out in error.

If you are sentenced to 10 years and serve the 10 years when somebody discovers you are innocent, too bad.

If the possibility of erroneous application is good against one punishment it is good against all.

And it's not good against all.

But I do agree the American justice system is way too sloppy and it would be nice if someone would make it better.

I do not agree that only death penalty cases need to be handled better.

As for religious tradition, phooey.

I am a secularist, and you are suggesting we write religion into our law.

As for humane methods, phooey, again.

How humane do we need to be with people who have shown no humanity at all, themselves?

Not very.

The real points of punishment are revenge, deterrence, and individual incapacitation.

Nothing either avenges or incapacitates quite so effectively as death, and no one seems to think anything else deters more effectively (though one might wonder why not).

But I'm open to transportation for life to some sufficiently dreadful place, I suppose.

Perhaps the Russians would rent us rights to Siberia for the purpose.

I forgot entirely to mention that the liberal understanding of the constitutional prohibition that he, of course, takes for granted, is an egregious lie.

Oh well.