The easiest thing to reduce death row sentences is to give a life without parole option (and have places like the Innocence Project work on those cases as well); in doing so, Texas’ death row sentences have dropped 70 percent, and have nearly disappeared in Harris County. I think jurors, given cases like Davis’ and all of the cases that came out of Illinois, will hedge their bets if given an alternative that allows them to seem tough on crime.

Of course, since death penalty cases take so long in appeal, we’re still hearing the echoes of the fucked-up testimony in older cases, like the racist sumbitch “expert” who testified in numerous Harris County sentencing hearings.

I completely support the death penalty and have no problem with executing murderers. Frankly, I think it should be extended to rapists, child molesters and corporate polluters.

But you’re right: there are just too many cases where someone like poor Mr. Davis is being railroaded to satisfy bloodlust or the political dimensions of a prosecutor’s job. I only support the death penalty if it’s held to a much higher standard of proof: eyewitness testimony is suspect, jailhouse informants need to be excluded, the defendant needs to be provided with excellent lawyers at state expense, etc. And by this point you might as well just throw it away, or at least reserve it for a tiny minority of truly depraved cases, because the expense alone makes it unjustifiable.

Yet I’ve had this argument with many a liberal friend—just the other day, in fact—and constantly run into this wall of moral certitude you describe. They get angry with me, even though I’m agreeing that the death penalty just doesn’t work, because I’m not arguing from this blank moral perspective. It’s very frustrating, and you’ve expressed the frustration very well.

It seems to me that, when you are crafting your arguments based on procedure and possible innocence, you are conceding that capital punishment is, or can be, appropriate if there really is no question concerning guilt.

There are times when it is necessary to kill, for defense, but someone you can execute, against his will, is, by definition, helpless, and it is at that point wholly unnecessary to execute him.

There’s a ton of evidence to back this up, but you can also summarize the argument into a soundbite by saying, “The death penalty is too final to be left to fallible humans who make mistakes all the time.”

Assuming (as is usually true) that the person you’re arguing with is a Republican/Tea Partier, you can throw in “You don’t trust the government to pave a road right, but you think they’re completely flawless when it comes to this?”

Like you Amanda, I object to the death penalty because it is administered by human beings, who make mistakes.  What I can’t stand is that so many death penalty supporters are people who also don’t trust the government to do anything else (except maybe bomb brown foreigners).

Or, what RickMassimo said (must post faster!)

Capital habeas appeals consume an enormous amount of financial resources, and at the federal level where everything is more expensive.  If the death penalty disappeared tomorrow, a bunch of ostensibly pro-death judges and prosecutors would breathe a quiet sigh of relief.  If all current death sentences were automatically commuted to life, it would be a loud sigh.

I think another way religion plays into this is that it (often) changes one’s views on the finality of the death penalty. As far as I’m concerned, if an innocent person is executed, there’s no way to set it right; to many religious people, it’ll get sorted out in the afterlife. Conversely, to me, if the person really is depraved and deserves the worst punishment we can offer, execution is the last thing we want, because it ends the punishment; life in prison is far more severe. Whereas to many religious people, it hustles the person off to a far worse punishment than we can devise.

I doubt there’s a way to bridge the gap between those two ways of looking at it.

While my opposition may be steeped in my belief, which ties itself to no church anymore, I couched it thusly:

“This man’s death can right no wrong. It cannot resurrect the victim of the crime for which Mr. Davis is being punished, rightly or wrongly. It certainly does nothing to advance the cause or care of humanity, for there is no more important admonition than one person shall not take the life of another. Surely, if we truly honor that admonition, we are left to ask: if one person may not take a life, what greater right do many people have to do so? The State, for being a multitude of human beings, can have no greater right or privilege than that of its least member, and even that person may not kill another.”

I agree that religion is a limiting factor, but I think because no one attacks the inconsistency in people’s beliefs, especially Christian beliefs, head on. If you are going to go against a person’s beliefs, you cannot come out the chute denigrating them and telling them that you feel they are an idiot for believing “an invisible man in the sky.” I believe we have to speak against this starting with the most human of terms, and encompassing the arguments for the death penalty with reason, not recrimination. The worst thing that can happen, should Troy Davis ultimately be killed, is for there to be a massive backlash against Officer MacPhail’s family, the Board, and the State of Georgia.

From my (admittedly limited) experience, I think we’re getting to a point of critical mass in populist opposition to the Death Penalty where we will have to do away with it simply so that justice can be served. By way of anecdote: when I was called in for Jury Duty in Philadelphia, I was sitting in the panel of potential jurors while the details of the case were read: this case was a murder case and a capital crime. A black man was sitting in the box in front of us. At this point we were told to raise our hands if we had particular conflicts, including general “hardship” (most of the women raised their hands because they couldn’t get childcare, which is another matter). When the conflict over the death penalty came up (basically, if you felt you would be unable to render a fair verdict based on the potential punishment), a majority of the people on the bench raised their hands, and I was one of them. If the possible punishment was life without parole, I wouldn’t have raised my hand because there is still the potential that if I fucked up and delivered a guilty verdict based on bad or missing evidence or unexamined prejudices, that there was still the possibility that at some point the truth and justice would be served. But there is no way you can have that failsafe in a death penalty case, and more and more people, when put to it, will look at their own potential culpability in sentencing someone who could potentially be innocent and they balk at that. In order to preserve our constitutional right to a trial by jury of our peers, we have to revisit the death penalty.

If the government is too incompetent to run Social Security or Medicare, or shouldn’t be allowed to run FEMA, conservatives should believe that the government has no business deciding who lives or dies. Government tyranny at its worst.

I believe in the death penalty, but only for wealthy defendants.

What I can’t stand is that so many death penalty supporters are people who also don’t trust the government to do anything else (except maybe bomb brown foreigners).

If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that these death penalty supporters don’t see how the government acts in carrying out executions in the same way they see the government acting in other areas. To them, death row inmates weren’t convicted by the government; they were convicted by a jury consisting of fine folks like themselves. They see that there’s an appeals process, and will likely think that the death row inmate gets more chances to avoid his/her fate than most people get when the government comes knocking to do something to them. This may or may not be true, but maybe that’s the perception.

I’m continuously surprised at how the conservative mind works.  I’ve had this very discussion with some and their answer is, “Better to kill a few innocent ones than to let guilty ones live.”  It’s the same mindset that says, “Better to have some poor go without than allow ONE person who doesn’t deserve it to get TANF or Food Stamps.”  Because NO ONE is actually innocent and they must have done SOMETHING to get them where they are now. 

Liberals have a different outlook.  We’d rather see a 100 guilty people live than see one innocent person die.  We’re rather have 100 people abuse the system than see 1 deserving and needy person do without.  And ‘innocent’, in our parlance, is “did not actually commit the crime for which he was convicted” not “has never done anything wrong ever.”

People have an institutional attachment to the death penalty, and thus cases where the guilt of the subject is in doubt or clear malfeasance of the judicial system are involved are actually more threatening to death penalty supporters, because you’re casting down on the institution itself. It’s actually going to be imperative to DP supporters to execute Davis and cover up malfeasance in other cases (as Rick Perry has done) in order to keep the death penalty system alive. So you’re actually arguing against some pretty strong headwinds when bringing up these cases.

I’ve also seen the liberal moralizing taken to extremes where attitudes may be hardened in the other direction. Sound as it may be to argue that Hitler or Osama bin Laden should not have been executed, that’s not an argument you will win in America. Don’t even go there.

In Pennsylvania, there have been only three executions since the reinstatement of capital punishment, and in all three cases, the condemned men dropped all of their appeals; they basically volunteered to get it all over with.  Prosecutors and judges know this, and, in effect, the purpose of a capital sentence in the Keystone State is to say, “We think that you did something really, really bad, and we strongly disapprove,” because executions are simply never carried out.

We waste millions doing this, but we keep doing it, and there’s no real thought given to stopping it.

  I think that its important for death penalty opponents to realize that in many European countries, the decision to get rid of the death penalty was very much a top down one and in active opposition to the majority public opinion. When France abolished the death penalty in 1960, 60% of the French still supported it. If I am remembering polls correctly, substantial minorities support reinstanting the death penality in many European countries and it took a lot of top-down social engineering to get the majority against it.

  The death penalty is popular because it seems just to most people for reasons Amanda outlined above and others outlined elsewhere. To get rid of the death penalty European politicians had to go around the will of the masses rather than with it. Similar action is going to be needed in the United States.

I was listening to an interesting podcast this morning (Skeptically Speaking, with Desiree Schell, talking about this paper, “Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas,” from the Renssaeler Polytechnic Institute. According to the press release:

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

If this research is valid, I wonder what it takes to bring the number of committed anti-death penalty opinion holders to 10 percent?

I keep thinking of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”—I think there’s a powerful emotional pull in some people toward the death penalty. I don’t understand it, but I’ve had too many arguments not to believe it’s real.

And god love George Ryan, who basically said “the whole system is so corrupt that we’re calling off all death penalties.” Sure, he had other issues, but on that, and because it was the memory of Cardinal Bernadin that inspired him, he’s got what’s left of my formerly-Catholic prayers.

I do think the state or anyone else for that matter has any right to kill a helpless person, even out of justified vengeance. But, I agree that this argument won’t get us very far. It’s too blatant a values clash. And a good proportion of current and potential opposition to the death penalty do think that it’s theoretically justifiable, but practically immoral. That is a much easier argument to make, and there are plenty of evidence to point to to show how messed up the death penalty is in practice. I also think that discussion of the practical problems with the death penalty are good start towards broader discussions of the other systemic problems with our criminal justice system.

Amanda, my POV about the death penalty is to quote the late commentator Alstair Cooke, who believed that life behind bars was less humane than the death penalty, which is, of course, why I support the former.

It blows peoples’ minds to have a liberal come across as ‘tough on crime’.

Or,

“I make mistakes.  You make mistakes.  Mistakes are a part of human life.  Can you be so sure that anyone sitting on death row anywhere isn’t there because of a mistake?  What if it was your loved one sitting there because of a mistake?  Mistakes happen in all societies. Killing people because of mistakes isn’t the hallmark of a civilized society.”

I do blame, as with many things, religion for this lack of inspiration for backing up your moral arguments. The notion that killing is always wrong is rooted in “turn the other cheek” Christianity. And while I suppose I’m glad that many liberal Christians actually pay attention to their god’s teachings, I think it shows how foolish it is to state a moral idea and then leave it to a made-up god to rationalize it. After all, religion is an empty set.

Yes, thanks for pointing this out! It’s one of my biggest pet peeves about religion: it robs people of imagination. For example, I recently started watching more horror movies, a genre I was never particularly interested in before. I quickly learned that “religious” horror movies have a less than 50% chance of being any good at all, because as soon as you insert “Satan” or “demon from hell” or “anti-Christ” into the equation, the filmmaker tends to just sit back and assume that you’re going to be horrified and terrified by the goings-on. Rather than showing and explaining what’s so horrifying and scary about demons or Satan or hell, the filmmaker just allows your culturally programmed aversion to these things to sit in for actual inspiration and/or the hard work of filming a convincingly scary story. Of course, if you lack that programming, then it’s just horribly boring.

In any case, I completely agree with your analysis. It’s really not a foregone conclusion that all murder is wrong. Anyone can think of a number of situations—defending yourself or a loved one from violent attack, for example—where killing another person, outside the boundaries of the law, would be considered justified. The question is, do we want to empower the state to take a person’s life? Funny how people who are so skeptical of government’s ability to do anything right are suddenly convinced of the utter incorruptibility of government when it comes to executing living people.

Better to kill a few innocent ones than to let guilty ones live.

Then quote Blackstone to them:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

I think some folks would bring back trial by ordeal if they could.

A point of information: Georgia’s governor does not have the authority to grant clemency.  Such is solely the authority of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Anyone else notice how there’s kind of ironic feel-goodyness about the death penalty?  People get “closure” (a term I don’t get at all) and “it’s what the victim’s family wants” (so?).  I honestly don’t know what I would think because no one I am close to has ever had a major crime committed against them.  I just think all this pop-psychology talk about the death penalty is ghoulish and creepy and just another example of how annoying TV Talk shows rule our society.

I agree with this post, but it leaves me wondering, is there no objective basis for morality?

felagund, if you dig into the Innocence Project and other research on it, you’ll find that your standards for executions are basically impossible for meeting. The reason is that the death penalty becomes a feather in political hats; once politicians benefit from executions, there’s so much pressure to lower the standard of evidence that railroading becomes impossible to avoid.  In some murders, people want to see someone pay in blood. If that option is off the table, it just calms everyone down and makes them think more clearly about this.

I’ve often had to struggle with my impulse to make the “pure” argument against the death penalty, but when I’ve stepped back and looked at it in the cold, hard light of day, I have to accept that I’m in a tiny minority with that view, and I’m not going to convince people with that argument.

Besides it being way easier to convince people that the death penalty can’t be applied fairly and accurately in any reliable way, that’s the type of opinion which, once adopted, can coalesce into the harder moral view. If adopted society-wide, after a generation I doubt that there would be that many people still shouting that they support the death penalty in theory but not in practice.

What would it take to shift public opinion on the death penalty?

Prosecutors and courts applying it as vigourously to rich, white Republicans as they do to poor blacks.

But the rwRs can afford good lawyers, so will never receive the same treatment.  You live in a land where justice is a game.

Also, how do you counter the argument that it’s okay for some innocent people to die if it allows us to punish the guilty. This gallup poll (http://www.gallup.com/poll/123638/in-u.s.-two-thirds-continue-support-death-penalty.aspx) shows there there must be a considerable number of people who support the death penalty and believe that innocent people have recently been executed. How do you counter their argument without resorting to morality?

Also, how do you counter the argument that it’s okay for some innocent people to die if it allows us to punish the guilty. This gallup poll (http://www.gallup.com/poll/123638/in-u.s.-two-thirds-continue-support-death-penalty.aspx) shows there there must be a considerable number of people who support the death penalty and believe that innocent people have recently been executed. How do you counter their argument without resorting to morality?

You can’t, because the working assumption is that it won’t affectthem.  that relates to the who problem right-wing authoritarians have with empathy until they themselves are affected.

The only way to change the RWA view on that would be for them or a close family member to be picked up and charged with a death penalty crime they didn’t commit.  Only then would they perceive the flaw.

Cue an airport novel with a secretly left-wing police chief stitching up the kid of a loud-mouth w1ngnut for a crime they didn’t commit…

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

I’ve never gotten this argument, especially if letting ten guilty people escape means loosing them on the public. You’ll end up with a lot more innocent victims than you would have otherwise. Why is it acceptable to create innocent victims as long as you don’t fry or hang them yourself? I guess it’s a good thing I’ve never taken a moral philosophy course.

Having no deeply-held opinions about the morality of a Death Penalty (I reckon it’s up to a society to decide amongst itself, and thereby reflect the mores of the group), I am in total agreement with Amanda regarding looking at the issue in a procedural light. We do death penalty very badly. There are really no controls, no uniformity of standards, few checks and balances. It’s frought with error and few ways to correct them (certainly no ways at all once the switch is thrown). That really has to change.

@Phoenician there simply are large segments of the public who are not troubled by innocent people dying as long as those who die are not themselves. the only way to get across this barrier seems to be to appeal to mutual humanity, make the plight of these people relatable. the way fire hoses and dogs helped others understand the realities of the civil rights struggle

@Comment #4: RickMassimo on 09/21 at 10:51 AM

Assuming (as is usually true) that the person you’re arguing with is a Republican/Tea Partier, you can throw in “You don’t trust the government to pave a road right, but you think they’re completely flawless when it comes to this?”

Nah. Don’t accept their “I just don’t trust the Government” framing, attack it or sidestep it instead. The problem is that if you accept their frame them you convince no-one at all. Because the frame “I just don’t trust the Government” is a dishonest one meant to confuse. Everyone knows it is horseshit, including the Tea Baggers themselves on some level.

Tying into considerations of the cost in money and court resources, I suspect that for many who are pro-death penalty they see it as ‘getting a person out of the system’ so that money is not spent on keeping a murderer in prison. Personally I come at it from the angle of not wanting innocent people killed for things they didn’t do, but I do wonder what the effect would be to focus instead on the economics of the death penalty vs. life in prison.

While I agree that procedural arguments need to be made, I think that the idea of making them primary over ‘value of human life’ arguments is flawed, for two reasons:

1.  Sure it’s controversial whether state killing can be morally justifiable.  But so is the importance of fairness in the justice system.  Granted, people tend to get exercised when innocent people are put to death, but people who favour the death penalty are much less likely to care about racial disparities, or even the fact that a number of executions are politically motivated.  They tend to be the same people who see murderers and the like as no longer part of the human race, and so not deserving of ‘fairness’.

2.  You’ve given *some* idea of why the death penalty might skew the system more than life imprisonment, but the most biting criticisms tend to indict the whole justice system.  Death penalty proponents who do care about fairness and procedural issues will at best be inspired to improve the system as a whole, hopefully making the executions more equitable.  I find it hard to believe that many people will turn against the death penalty as a whole purely for procedural reasons, when there are clearly other improvements that could be made.

Conservatives (the strongest proponents of the death penalty) tend to bang on about the value of human life, so it only makes sense to try to use this shared value in arguments about the death penalty.  Of course we should not forget procedural arguments, but they tend to be dryer and simply less persuasive.

“The only way to change the RWA view on that would be for them or a close family member to be picked up and charged with a death penalty crime they didn’t commit.  Only then would they perceive the flaw.”

...and even then people directly affected would be the only people who actually had their minds changed — the rest of the kill-‘em-all-and-let-god-sort-‘em-out, clapping-when-Rick-Perry’s-appalling-record-is-mentioned crowd would continue to automatically assume that anyone accused of a crime must be guilty, and if they are given the death penalty it must be deserved.

I strongly believe there are people whose crimes are so egregious they merit capital punishment.  However, over the last few decades, I’ve come to agree with those who say the system is so fundamentally flawed that it is too easy for the right (wrong) kind of headline-seeking weasel cops/prosecutors/politicians to game the system and put innocent people on death row.  It’s been done many times.

Therefore, it would be better to leave life-in-prison as the highest penalty.  At least it’s possible to eventually release a living human being wrongly convicted of a crime.  Once they’re dead, it’s a little too late for justice to prevail if it was originally denied…

I’ve never gotten this argument, especially if letting ten guilty people escape means loosing them on the public.

Historical expressions of the principle

The principle is much older than Blackstone’s formulation, being closely tied to the presumption of innocence in criminal trials. An early example of the principle appears in the Bible (Genesis 18:23-32),[1][2] as:

Abraham drew near, and said, “Will you consume the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous within the city? Will you consume and not spare the place for the fifty righteous who are in it?[3] ... What if ten are found there?” He [The Lord] said, “I will not destroy it for the ten’s sake.”[4]

The twelfth-century legal theorist Maimonides, expounding on this passage as well as Exodus 23:7 (“the innocent and righteous slay thou not”) argued that executing an accused criminal on anything less than absolute certainty would progressively lead to convictions merely “according to the judge’s caprice. Hence the Exalted One has shut this door” against the use of presumptive evidence, for “it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.”[1][5][6]

Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae (c. 1470) states that “one would much rather that twenty guilty persons should escape the punishment of death, than that one innocent person should be condemned and suffer capitally.” Similarly, on 3 October 1692, while decrying the Salem witch trials, Increase Mather adapted Fortescue’s statement and wrote, “It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that the Innocent Person should be Condemned.”

Other commentators have echoed the principle; Benjamin Franklin stated it as, “it is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer”.[7] But more authoritarian personalities are supposed to have taken the opposite view; Bismarck is believed to have stated that “it is better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape;”[1] and Pol Pot[8] and Wolfgang Schäuble[9] have made similar remarks. The latter said in the context of crime prediction (not crime punishment) that he believes that it is not better to let ten terrorist attacks happen than to try to hinder one possibly innocent person to conduct one.</blockquote>

Blackstone’s formulation

I reject the question, JonE, because it assumes there’s a person who could somehow overcome their subjectiveness to perceive this objective basis of morality. Baldly asserting a moral opinion without arguing it doesn’t make it more “objective”, it just makes it poorly argued.

There are a few people who are like rabid dogs. If you don’t put them down, the madness and misery has a chance to continue. Ted Bundy and Tim McVeigh, for example. Neither seemed to have any remorse and if released or escaped, would undoubtedly have continued.

That said, I agree with benvolio that we do the death penalty very badly. There should be absolutely no chance of people being murdered by the state for a crime they didn’t commit.

Yeah, thanks, I actually do *get* the argument. I was expressing through hyperbole how ridiculous I find it.

JonE @32: No one is saying you have to convince ALL the people. We’re talking about getting that mushy middle.  Hard line right wingers who would probably line up behind random executions aren’t the audience here.  We’re talking about convincing people who have a visceral and understandable reaction to violent crime, and haven’t really thought through their support of the death penalty.  By making assertive instead of deductive arguments, you’re insulting them and they will shut down.

junk, it’s a much easier argument to get if you’re a person without racial privilege. Then the possibility that you could get convicted unfairly rises dramatically, and so becomes way easier to see.  What philosopher was it that had the argument that a way to build a just society is to have people imagine they could be *anyone* in it.  If you assume that you could be the unjustly prosecuted criminal, the ramifications become clear.

It seems to me that, when you are crafting your arguments based on procedure and possible innocence, you are conceding that capital punishment is, or can be, appropriate if there really is no question concerning guilt.
Comment #3: Dana on 09/21 at 10:50 AM

Yes, you are conceding that. If your goal is to eliminate capital punishment, you don’t need to convince the people who already believe it is never justified. You need instead to convince people who believe it is appropriate when guilt is certain.  That’s what Amanda’s approach attempts to do: not to convince them that state-sanctioned killing is wrong (they won’t be persuaded of that) but to convince them that the state can never be certain enough of guilt.

One could argue from an economic and criminological standpoint, that execution is far more expensive than life in prison (generally no more than 25 years, based on past data) and that the death penalty is not a crime deterrent.  But few who favor the death penalty would pay attention to these points over the more visceral moral issues.

I agree with this post, but it leaves me wondering, is there no objective basis for morality?

No, there’s really not. I value human well-being, but there’s no objective foundation on which to rest that value. You can argue about which things are likely to result in well-being for more people (the death penalty definitely isn’t). But as far as an empirical reason to value human well-being? I can’t think of one. It’s ultimately self-interest for me.

Assuming (as is usually true) that the person you’re arguing with is a Republican/Tea Partier, you can throw in “You don’t trust the government to pave a road right, but you think they’re completely flawless when it comes to this?

The problem with the trust in government argument is that I’ve heard too many right wing assholes who get a big hard-on from proclaiming that executing a few innocents is a price worth paying for the benefit of executing evildoers. They view false positives as an acceptable penalty for justice (I think that this is the opposite of how liberals tend to see the justice system - that it should be more likely to give false negatives than false positives. The irony is that this is more in line with the anti-government viewpoint, because it is a protection from governmental tyranny at the possible expense of some degree of personal safety.)This is an easy view to hold if you are a middle to upper-class white person, and an asshole. In general, the problem with procedural arguments is that assholes are fairly impervious to them because they don’t care that the system is unfair. But they are better arguments than making a moral statement and sitting back. And most people, I would hope, have some investment in the idea that the justice system is supposed to be fair; but it’s harder to have a significant investment if you are less likely to be prosecuted, less likely to be convicted and less likely to be executed because of your class or race.

The issue highlights that death penalty reform is just part of what should (and is, for many activists, I’m sure) a much larger project of trying to reform the justice system in general. It’s a difficult problem to solve, because a justice system that is unfair, but only unfair to a certain subset of the population, isn’t going to cause people who aren’t likely to be negatively affected by it invested in the fairness of the institution. White middle class people can be pretty confident that they won’t be executed for a crime that they are innocent of, so why change anything? After all, the system is working for them. There’s not a lot of reward for questioning the judgments made on people who look like criminals to them, that is, the poor and non-white people.

If you assume that you could be the unjustly prosecuted criminal, the ramifications become clear.

I’m not okay with innocent people getting the death penalty. I’m also not okay with them being victims of violent crime. That said, I very much agree the death penalty is too flawed to actually work in a society as racist and reactionary as ours.

Sorry, I see that a lot of people already made my points.

Regarding the moral argument, I just want to say one more thing: one reason it doesn’t work is that majority of moral systems that people hold make a distinction between wrongful and justified killing; this goes back to prehistory. Trying to argue that killing is always wrong, full stop, simply isn’t convincing to most people, and I honestly see no reason why it should be - even to very kind people who would never pull a trigger on someone else’s life themselves.

One could argue from an economic and criminological standpoint, that execution is far more expensive than life in prison
Comment #48: ganews_ on 09/21 at 12:43 PM

Yes, but that would involve facts.

I forsee this exchange:

[You] The death penalty is much more expensive than life without parole…
[Them] Nuh-uh, it costs less because they’re dead so you don’t have to pay to feed them anymore.
[You] ...no, it costs more because the Constitution requires a long and complex judicial process for capital cases.
[Them] Well, we should eliminate all that bureaucracy and just shoot them in the back of the head.

Maybe that’s just my dad talking. He likes to be provocative.

it costs less because they’re dead so you don’t have to pay to feed them anymore.

Now this is an argument I could totally have gotten behind as an ignorant eight-year-old. You don’t have to feed a dead person.

[Them] Well, we should eliminate all that bureaucracy and just shoot them in the back of the head.

Exactly. Your RWAs are extremely likely to favor simply taking the defendant out behind the courthouse and shooting them in the head the moment the verdict is delivered. “The death penalty is expensive!” you argue. They reply, “Well, it doesn’t need to be. Bullets are cheap hurf de durf.” The fact that executing someone same-day would only massively increase the number of unjust executions of innocent people means jackshit to such people.

But as has already been said, those RWAs aren’t the people we need to try to convince, because they’re not going to be convinced.

Addendum: my stepfather is a big-time RWA and he has argued in the past that we should just go ahead and execute someone for any crime, because in his mind, humanity is separated into evil godless criminals, and good godly law-abiding citizens. So according to him, if somebody shoplifts, they’re equally likely to murder, so we might as well go ahead and execute them and cleanse the world of their evil godlessness.

So I’m just saying, clearly the extreme right-wingers are not going to be reasoned with. Focus on the people who are capable of imagining why a decent individual may suddenly find him/herself on the defendant stand, for reasons that don’t involve the devil.

One of the problems if an innocent person is convicted of a crime is that the guilty person is still out there, able to commit futher crimes, and nobody is really looking for him/her or even considers the possibility that he exists, because everyone thinks the guy whodunnit is in jail.  See Randall Adams and The Thin Blue Line—while Adams was convicted and faced the death penalty, his co-defendant David Harris, who almost certainly committed the murder Adams was in for, but IIRC did a plea bargain to testify against Adams in exchange for a minimal sentence, was free and killed somebody else while he was out.

I’ve found the Adams story helpful in discussing the death penalty with its supporters, because among other things I’m able to ask how the victim’s family in the original is helped by David Harris’ additonal murder. 

I’ve also found that a lot of the people who support the death penalty in theory are not committed zealots about it and will respond to the practical arguments about how it’s applied in practice. 

I’ve forgotten the title of it, but Scott Turow wrote a very good nonfiction book about his service on George Ryan’s commission that led to Ryan stopping the Illinois death penalty.  Turow started out as a supporter of the death penalty and the book is about why he changed his view of it.

I may be wrong (as usual), but I believe the argument about the death penalty showing respect for life is recent.  I’ve been opposed to the death penalty for decades, and I seem to remember this argument as what they came up with after it was demonstrated that the death penalty was not a deterrent to crime.

The real reason for the death penalty is blood lust.  The enjoyment of vengeance.  Human history is buried under just tons of evidence that people were tortured and/or executed for the crowd’s enjoyment—to set an example and to entertain.  Lynchings used to be social events—3-day picnics you took the family to.  This isn’t about anything other thing other than an appeal to the human id.  Republicans cheering on the death penalty and letting a sick man die—that’s not coming from reason.  The arguments flow to justify the enjoyment of cruelty, to rationalize what seems like vice in a colder light.  And the argument that satisfied the lust crowd for a really long time was the deterrence argument.  That was disproved, then the respect for life justification emerged.  That’s the way I remember it.

Mighty Ponygirl - I have wondered how one could consider a jury so created a legitimate jury.  After all, by excluding those people who have a moral objection to the death penalty, I’d think you’re also excluding a demographic with other characteristics whose exclusion is more questionable.  I’d think it would end up being prejudicial against a defendant.

My arguments hit on two fronts:

1. Innocent people are sometimes convicted of crimes. When an innocent person is executed by the state, you can’t take that back. They’re dead. I’m most familiar with innocent Canadians who were convicted with murder and were later cleared of the accusation. They, at least, could then be released and offered some compensation. (Not that there is any compensation that can re-pay the trauma and the lost years of your life.)

2. It is currently more cost effective to keep someone in jail then it is to execute them (because of all the appeals and “special accommodations” of Death Row). Of course, US prisons are woefully overcrowded, but more executions is not the answer for that! (Ending the war on drugs and black men would be a good start in that direction.)

felagund, if you dig into the Innocence Project and other research on it, you’ll find that your standards for executions are basically impossible for meeting. The reason is that the death penalty becomes a feather in political hats; once politicians benefit from executions, there’s so much pressure to lower the standard of evidence that railroading becomes impossible to avoid.

Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. I support it in principle, but human institutions are so fallible and corrupt that we simply can’t trust them to reach the level of proof required to execute someone.

Amanda @ 46, I believe you’re thinking of John Rawls’ “original position” argument.

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

@Comment #59: James

In fact, that’s true.  There’s some research to show that death-qualified juries are more likely to convict. 

Death penalty opponents have been arguing for years that the death penalty is more expensive than life imprisonment, does not deter other criminals, and is applied in a racially discriminatory manner, and that was before the Innocence Project demonstrated quite tangibly that it’s applied with alarming frequency to persons innocent of the crime with which they were charged.  To me, the problem with executing the wrong person isn’t only that it’s unjust (which it is), but also that the real criminal is still free. 

I don’t know. I wasn’t raised Christian by any means yet I do see the finality of the death penalty as inexcusable in and of itself. There is no requirement to come up with any further argument against the sickness that is the belief in the death penalty. Of course, those further arguments are also valid, so there’s no reason not to continue making them.

And I disagree that *Good people can look at someone who viciously ax murders a family and think, “They don’t deserve to live. You know who deserved to live? The family that did nothing and then got viciously ax murdered.”*
That’s not a *good* person, that’s a wounded person at minimum, conflicted with overwhelming empathy for a victim. There’s a reason victims don’t get to set punishments. It’s that same reason that those with overwhelming empathy for a victim shouldn’t get to set the punishment either.

[You] The death penalty is much more expensive than life without parole…
[Them] Nuh-uh, it costs less because they’re dead so you don’t have to pay to feed them anymore.
[You] ...no, it costs more because the Constitution requires a long and complex judicial process for capital cases.
[Them] Well, we should eliminate all that bureaucracy and just shoot them in the back of the head.

Yup; I’ve been there. “If we weren’t such wimps about killing people everyone else would be scared straight.” They say that about health care, welfare and even Social Security now.

Nah. Don’t accept their “I just don’t trust the Government” framing, attack it or sidestep it instead. The problem is that if you accept their frame them you convince no-one at all. Because the frame “I just don’t trust the Government” is a dishonest one meant to confuse. Everyone knows it is horseshit, including the Tea Baggers themselves on some level.

Yeah, but the Tea Baggers THINK they’re putting one over on me - heck, they’ve fooled every Beltway Village commentator for the past two years - and I like to let them know they’re not fooling me. Which, when you’re dealing with a True Believer asshole, is I think the best you can do. They wanna kill black people, that’s all there is to it, and they’ll never admit it.

One of the problems if an innocent person is convicted of a crime is that the guilty person is still out there, able to commit futher crimes, and nobody is really looking for him/her or even considers the possibility that he exists, because everyone thinks the guy whodunnit is in jail.  See Randall Adams and The Thin Blue Line—while Adams was convicted and faced the death penalty, his co-defendant David Harris, who almost certainly committed the murder Adams was in for, but IIRC did a plea bargain to testify against Adams in exchange for a minimal sentence, was free and killed somebody else while he was out.

Thanks for pointing this out - it’s the appropriate response to the argument that junk science is making about guilty parties that escape conviction. In terms of letting perpetrators of violent crime get away without punishment or imprisonment, there is no mathematical difference, in simple terms, between convicting innocents and failing to convict guilty individuals. Convict the wrong person and close the case, and the guilty party is still out there. Fail to convict a guilty person for whatever reason and close the case, and again, the guilty party is out there. The results are probably similar; it’s probably difficult to estimate, since the legal system commits both Type I and Type II errors. But I know that from a social perspective, a justice system that is more likely to deliver false negatives is a nicer place than one that delivers false positives.

@Comment #65: RickMassimo on 09/21 at 02:19 PM

Yeah, but the Tea Baggers THINK they’re putting one over on me - heck, they’ve fooled every Beltway Village commentator for the past two years - and I like to let them know they’re not fooling me. Which, when you’re dealing with a True Believer asshole, is I think the best you can do. They wanna kill black people, that’s all there is to it, and they’ll never admit it.

Exactly. So I guess if you want to mock the Tea Baggers on an individual basis, then go ahead point out the incoherence of their argument. It is certainly fun, and I do it all the time.

But if you’re in a public debate where you might actually convince some folks who’re watching, then you probably want to sidestep the “Trust in Government” frame and hit your main points, about the process and/or morality of the death penalty, again. Because if you engage the “Trust in Government” frame you will only help the Tea Bagger confuse the undecided audience. That is the frame’s purpose, after all.

Mighty Ponygirl - I have wondered how one could consider a jury so created a legitimate jury.  After all, by excluding those people who have a moral objection to the death penalty, I’d think you’re also excluding a demographic with other characteristics whose exclusion is more questionable.  I’d think it would end up being prejudicial against a defendant.

Precisely.

I didn’t sit on the jury because I had a legitimate hardship, but I have to believe the jury they ended up with was MORE likely to convict.

It seems odd that the same wingnuts putting their faith in the infallibility of capital punishment are the loudest voices saying “she’s probably lying” whenever there’s a high-profile rape case. Actually, it would be interesting, in a morbid way, if the death penalty were imposed for rape cases. Then we’d see how their “women always lie”/“she was asking for it” mentality would compete with their “hang-‘em-high”/“tough on crime” impulses.

The death penalty used to be imposed in rape cases, until the Supreme Court held that it could only be imposed in homicide cases.  Usually, though, the cases involved the use of violence by a stranger, rather than acquaintance rape.  Except for serial rapists, I’m pretty sure the defendants were either poor or minority, and the victims were usually white.  It was as spectacular an example of racial injustice as you can imagine.

I’ve never gotten this argument, especially if letting ten guilty people escape means loosing them on the public. You’ll end up with a lot more innocent victims than you would have otherwise.

Because the State has an overwhelming power in comparison to any individual.  For justice to survive, it HAS to bend over backwards to give people the benefit of the doubt, lest the exercise of jurispudence become merely a matter of expedience.

But there is no way you can have that failsafe in a death penalty case, and more and more people, when put to it, will look at their own potential culpability in sentencing someone who could potentially be innocent and they balk at that.

Or more and more people are using the death penalty as an excuse to weasel out of hearing an extremely stressful and disruptive capital case.  I only oppose the death penalty for practical reasons, but even I would be sorely tempted to claim moral opposition to get out of jury duty.

There is no requirement to come up with any further argument against the sickness that is the belief in the death penalty.

And it’s this kind of patronizing attitude that is precisely why the death penalty will be legal until the Supreme Court overturns it.

I think you’re giving too much credit to the average death-penalty supporter. Your argument assumes that your average racist cares if an innocent man is executed. You underestimate the racism of the average white person—I know lots of people who have a hard time thinking of African Americans as people with full human and civil rights. In their ignorance they figure most black or brown folks are probably guilty of something, if only by association with other black or brown folks, so they’re happy to have executions continue until morale improves, as it were. 

Then there’s the bogus claim that the victim’s family needs “closure”. What this really means is, they need to see someone pulled of the street and killed as revenge for the loss of their loved one.  Delaying that revenge for silly reasons like due process, let alone making distressing insinuations that the wrong person was convicted and the real criminal is still at large, is too hurtful to the survivors to be allowed, civil rights be damned.

They look so self-satisfied when they say bullets are cheaper…
I wonder if the average life expectancy in prison is even less than 25 years these days.  (Looks like a commonly googled question).

I’m not okay with innocent people getting the death penalty. I’m also not okay with them being victims of violent crime.

You do realize that if the death penalty is being considered, the violent crime has already happened, yes? You can’t un-happen it by executing the criminal. And that as many above have mentioned, several studies show it is not an effective deterrent, so you don’t save other innocent people from being victimized (aside from by the one specific criminal. Which you could still accomplish by life imprisonment without parole).

I am so late to this because of the media work we are doing today on this issue, probably nobody will read it, but I appreciate so many of the comments here. Thank you.

I give everybody 138 reasons not to support the death penalty, and you can read some of their stories here:
www.witnesstoinnocence.org

I work with these men (and now the first and only woman exonerated from death row, Sabrina Butler).

Note to Amanda: I agree with you 101%, which is why our exonerated death row survivors tell their stories about HOW they got to be on the death row to audiences around the country.  The moral argument is not nearly enough to sway those on the fence or those who support the death penalty.  The way they do it actually does change hearts and minds on the issue. Thanks so much for this post.

I’m not okay with innocent people getting the death penalty. I’m also not okay with them being victims of violent crime.

Your unspoken assumption is that the death penalty is effective as a deterrent.  I don’t agree with that premise and you’ll have to prove it to me if you want me to accept your conclusion.  When it comes to many types of crimes, there’s a low recidivism rate.  Most murderers only murder once, even they get away with it or get out of prison somehow.  As for career criminals, putting them in prison doesn’t help them and makes them more likely to commit crimes like robbery when they have even less chance of getting a job.  You could lock them up for life but I don’t think that’s really helping anyone.

The problem with conservatives is that they truly believe the death penalty is an effective deterrent, and they truly believe that executing a few innocent people acceptable collateral damage if it prevents some people from committing murder.  They wrongly believe that it’s an effective deterrent because they don’t understand human behavior and psychology and how we evaluate risk and rewards.  They overestimate how rational we are and like to imagine a would-be murderer holding a gun to his victim’s head, but then rationally thinking out the possibility of the death penalty and deciding it’s not worth it.  They also vastly underestimate human empathy and conformity and fail to realize that most of wouldn’t murder even we had a 100% guarantee of getting away with it.

So that’s the problem, but I don’t really know what the solution is.  They tend to be impervious to facts, so showing them that murder rates generally don’t rise when the death penalty is stopped won’t have much effect on them.  They also won’t believe any explanation of human psychology because it’s too abstract for them.

In some cases, it may be helpful to ask the person to think if there was ever a time that they were willing to commit murder but chose not to out of fear of punishment.  This might be helpful for the more insightful ones, but not all of them.  It’s hard to convince certain people with an appeal to human goodness.

I don’t think that death penalty supporters think that the death penalty is an effective deterrent.  I think they don’t care.

Re the death penalty being a deterrent—the late former Governor of California, Pat Brown, wrote a book about how he, too, changed his mind about the death penalty.  One of his recollections was of two men sentenced to death who had at one time worked as construction workers BUILDING THE DEATH CHAMBER at San Quentin.

Nut graf:  He decided that if they didn’t see the death chamber they had built as a deterrent, there wasn’t much chance anybody else would, either.

I worked for ten years doing criminal appeals, and believe me, nobody—NOBODY—involved in any of the murders I worked on did the kind of cost benefit analysis that is suggested by the idea of death penalty as deterrent.  A lot of capital murders are felony murders—murders in the course of committing some other crime and the original plan was just to commit a robbery, car theft or whatever and then things escalated, some fool fired a gun, and somebody’s dead.  You can be sentenced to death for felony murder even if you’re not the person who fired the gun, if you participated in the underlying crime. 

Also the vast majority of homicides don’t even qualify for the death penalty.  I don’t mean the prosecutor asks for it and does not get it;  I mean the prosecutor does not even consider charging the crime as capital murder.  Many of these are drunken fights that escalate into homicide and they get treated as manslaughter.  I don’t know what would deter those since the perps never intended to kill to begin with.

Right, a lot of murders are either committed in the course of another crime, like a robbery, or are committed in the heat of passion.  Very few are rationally chosen or planned out, with the exception of murders for hire.  People just aren’t thinking about the possible punishment—they’re drunk, or jealous, or angry. 

Plus, I think there’s also some work to suggest that it’s not the severity of the punishment that deters, it’s the certainty and immediacy of punishment.  If you think you might get away with it, you don’t necessarily consider the possible punishment.

I don’t always agree with (or like) Pen & Teller’s Bullshit, but their death penalty episode did a really good job of arguing the points that are probably most convincing to death penalty supporters (cost, possibility of executing innocent people, whether or not it’s really a deterrent, etc.) without implying that execution might be acceptable under other circumstances.  I think death penalty opponents are often worried about that implication, but the solution is just to argue both.

I don’t think that death penalty supporters think that the death penalty is an effective deterrent.  I think they don’t care.

Correct.  Innocent pre-born babiieeees must be saved at all costs (to be paid by the slutty sluts who have them, naturally).  Scary black people must die, even if probably innocent.  After all probably innocent means possibly guilty, and did we mention they’re scary and black?

I’m not sure the “moral” explanation for the anti-DP stance is necessarily based on the same kind of “it’s self-evident” attitude as those religious people have. That seems similar to suggesting that being athiest and anti-murder is based on the same logic as “God says murder is wrong, so it is”. I’m anti-murder because of rationalizations that have nothing to do with God (taking away people’s freedom and choices is cruel and wrong, and killing them is the ultimate way to rob them of those things), and I’m anti-death penalty (even if false convictions, etc. weren’t an issue) for reasons I can articulate as well (because I am generally anti-revenge and against punitive rather than rehabilitative action against criminals- I think killing someone for revenge has little purpose other than providing brief pleasure for those affected, a pleasure which generally undermines the reasoning behind why we are not supposed to enjoy violence in the first place).

But that said, you’re completely right that focusing on the many other things that can go wrong in the system is the way forward in changing attitudes, because it engages with people who disagree with what I’ve said above on an issue which most decent people would care about.

What to do about the “it takes balls to execute an innocent man” douchebags, who wouldn’t be moved by such an appeal, I have no idea.

I attended the execution of a client (and friend) about 15 years ago.  There had been a hanging in my state just a few days earlier, and that had gotten all the press (the guy had to choose lethal injection, or else he would be hanged, and he said that no one was going to make him choose how the state could execute him; thus, the neato gallows that looked sort of like a playground set, made out of untreated 4x4’s.)  My client wasn’t willing to be a spectacle, and it wasn’t my death to make a statement over, so he got the needle.  Very little press was present.  My co-counsel and I were very sad.  My now ex-wife cried when she got the letter in the mail from him two days later saying how good I had been to him; he had mailed it a day or so before the execution.

My client had been involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in a gruesome double murder way back when I was in 11th grade.  I don’t know whether he “deserved” it.  His legal representation at trial was so bad to be the stuff of legend, literally, in the prosecution community, but the courts glossed over everything, and it was extremely discouraging to see people I believed would do the right thing refuse to.

A couple of years ago, I got called to be on a jury in a capital case, and I sure got dismissed for cause in a flash.

  Historically, the death penalty used to be applied much more frequently because until the advent of modern policing, criminals often went un-caught. It was thought that the death penalty was needed as deterrent because the chances of catching any criminal for even minor crimes was low.

I have often heard people say that although they are against the death penalty, this guy, or that guy “really deserves it”.  In other words, they are against it in principle, but for it in practice.

I am on the other side; I’m for it in principle, but against it in practice.  I’m sure that there are things, that, if I had done them, I’d be unable to live with myself, and would prefer death.  But where other people are concerned, it’s just too easy to make a mistake, as we now know from the Innocence Project and other recent discoveries.  And once the mistake is made, it can never be reversed or mitigated in any way.

It’s true that there are people who are “like mad dogs” as someone said above, although murder is the crime least often repeated.

But even these people may have something to offer society, if they are alive to do so.  I would like to remind you all of the “Birdman of Alcatraz”.  This was a man who was sentenced to life in prison for murder, and who spent his life in solitary confinement. 

Whenever he was let out of solitary, he killed someone, or tried to.  But in his solitary cell, he became a scientist and a noted expert on the diseases of birds.  He made most of his equipment from scraps and discards, including a microtome to prepare sections of tissue for microscopic study. 

He published his findings in professional journals, and was invited to professional conferences, which of course he could not attend. He would politely explain that he was in prison, on a life sentence without possibility of parole.

Who knows what a person may have to contribute, if he can be prevented from doing damage?  At the very least, it should remind us that the crime is not all there is to a person.

Once you have the death penalty in place, politicians and prosecutors start getting competitive, seeing the number of successful executions achieved as a number they can use to prove that they’re “tough on crime”. This lowers the standard of evidence to get someone executed even more.

This might be more pronounced in capital cases, but it’s a problem across the entire system.

I wonder: If the jury that passed a death sentence had to carry it out, would that ensure that any conviction would be beyond all reasonable doubt? Is it easier to be quote tough on crime endquote when you yourself are insulated from direct responsibility for punishment? If the jurors couldn’t tell themselves “my rifle contained a blank” or “the stone I threw wasn’t the fatal one”, but knew that they might be personally responsible for the killing of an innocent person, how many could vote for the death penalty?

I know I couldn’t. Am I too optimistic when I think that only a psychopath could do otherwise?

@Golgaronok—there is a famous story that may even be true that Clarence Darrow once walked up to a jury box, said, “if you want to impose the death penalty on the defendant, here, go do it right now,” and offered the nearest juror a knife.  All the jurors supposedly shrank back in horror and Darrow went on to argue that they had made his point, that people talked about imposing the death penalty but shrank back from the actual reality of death.  IIRC the client was acquitted.  (I’ll try to dig up a link or other source for that.)

Here are some interesting links I did find.  The first is an article from Slate about how often death sentences are carried out, at http://www.slate.com/id/2304328/ and i,t raises an interesting point.  People who are scheduled for execution now were sentenced years ago.  I wonder how many death sentences are being IMPOSED now? 

Second, if you scroll down to the bottom of this Wikipedia article, there is a link to the U.S. District Court’s decision last year that Davis had not met his burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that he was not guilty.  Since he was the petitioner, it was his burden, after conviction, to show that his convictin was erroneous.  But what I found interesting was that this judge went through the whole trial record and wrote a 172-page decision.  I have not read this yet, but writing 172 pages does not sound to me like he just blew the whole thing off. 

Here’s wiki:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Davis_case

It should be noted that while Troy Davis is waiting to hear from the Supreme Court on his appeal, Texas (where else?) has executed Lawrence Brewer, the white supremacist who dragged James Byrd, Jr, to death.  James’s son was among those who objected to this execution.

While the world focused on Troy Davis, Perry’s machinery of death in Texas kept rolling on.

Troy Davis’ execution has begun. Within the next ten minutes, a prison official will announce that the execution has been carried out and that Troy Davis is dead. And the state of Georgia will have killed a man that was very likely innocent.

:(

Two more deaths in our names. :-(

I became a vicious opponent of the death penalty the second I learned about the Innocence Project. You really can’t argue with the disturbing reality that there are innocent people on death row, and that there’s no way in hell the Innocence Project is saving them all. Executing just one innocent person means whatever justice is achieved by the execution of criminals is completely invalidated.

When Justice Harry Blackmun announced, “I will tinker no more with the machinery of death”, I had the sense that he was as frustrated by those who deserved death but escaped it as he was by those who didn’t and couldn’t.

Even if you favor the death penalty, you’ve got to recognize that it’s nearly never applied to a well-to-do white murderer, while a poor or black defendant is liable to be executed on the flimsiest of evidence. More than anything, it has to do with the quality of your legal team. The average poor defendant is offered as a lamb to the slaughter by an overworked and underpaid public defender.

The problem isn’t so much whether the death penalty is unjust, a philosophical question which may be impossible to resolve, but that it is never applied fairly here and now in America.

Troy Davis is dead. So is Lawrence Brewer, for chaining James Byrd Jr. to the back of a pickup truck and dragging him to death, scattering parts of his body along a country road in Texas.

There is no justice in execution. You can’t pay anyone back for killing them. Should Brewer have been dragged to death instead of being humanely executed? Closure is something you can’t attain until you die yourself.

Well, I’m going to go ahead and say - why not make all the arguments, procedural and moral, and see what sticks. What makes the case for one person might be something different from what makes the case for another.

Just in these comments above we can see that.  We have Dana opposing it on moral grounds, and a large number Pandagonian liberals opposing it on procedural grounds.

I’ll start with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVMho2cP1NE&feature=relmfu

It seems dishonest and manipulative—which I think is why liberals are reluctant to do it—to have a position for a particular reason in your own heart but argue for it for a different reason. People think “if I really have the courage of my convictions, I should argue from there” (overlooking that “the death penalty is barbaric” and “it’s too easy to execute an innocent person” aren’t at all contradictory).

Another weakness liberals have WRT execution is that it’s not a huge litmus test. You won’t be drummed out the way you will for being, say, anti-choice or overtly racist. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m all for litmus tests, and I don’t think this is something on which reasonable people can disagree, but it seems less pervasive than other issues. The world is full of POCs and fertile women; there aren’t as many death row inmates.

Chet, 21:

I think it’s time to recognize that being punished for a crime you’re factually not guilty of is a cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional.

Yes. In general I understand the principle behind not reviewing issues of fact on appeal but if we have to have a death penalty, irreversability alone is reason to have special rules.

vladimir, 89:

Once you have the death penalty in place, politicians and prosecutors start getting competitive, seeing the number of successful executions achieved as a number they can use to prove that they’re “tough on crime”. This lowers the standard of evidence to get someone executed even more.
This might be more pronounced in capital cases, but it’s a problem across the entire system.

Unless you rape an immigrant in Manhattan.

Another weakness liberals have WRT execution is that it’s not a huge litmus test. You won’t be drummed out the way you will for being, say, anti-choice or overtly racist.

That’s interesting, because on this side of the pond, it absolutely is.

The “killing is always wrong in every circumstance” argument is also exactly the argument smug anti-choicers make. In neither situation is the issue that simple, and simplifying it like that makes you seem like a real asshole arguing in bad faith.

Personally I find execution as a means of punishment morally repugnant, but I’d agree that saying so is a poor way of changing someone’s mind - people rarely react well when you tell them their position is immoral and reprehensible.

It also opens up a counter argument that if you are arguing that it’s wrong for the state to kill someone because it’s wrong for an individual to kill someone, then surely it’s wrong for the state to imprison someone if it’s wrong for an individual to do so. Perhaps that’s a can of worms not to be opened just now.

As to those who so glibly accept that sometimes innocent people get executed and that’s a fair price to pay to ensure the guilty get executed, it’s time to ask whether they would like to see themselves or a loved one being the innocent thrown to the wolves.

The “killing is always wrong in every circumstance” argument is also exactly the argument smug anti-choicers make. In neither situation is the issue that simple, and simplifying it like that makes you seem like a real asshole arguing in bad faith.

That makes no sense.  People like me who are firmly against the death penalty aren’t saying “killing is always wrong” -I’d kill someone in defence of myself or my family, or probably a complete stranger if the circumstances warranted it.  If the police kill someone who was trying to kill them or other people, then that’s a necessary use of force in self-defence by someone who is part of the state apparatus.  There are numerous cases where I’d accept that killing is justified and necessary, sometimes by the state.  I just don’t think that execution of criminals (yes, even the guilty ones, even in a perfect system) by the state is one of those cases.

Katherine wrote:

We have Dana opposing it on moral grounds, and a large number Pandagonian liberals opposing it on procedural grounds.

It seems to me that when you base your argument on the position that the convicted killer had diminished capacity or there were problems with procedure or anything along those lines, you are conceding, inter alia, that convicted murderers about whose guilt there is absolutely no question—Lawrence Brewer, executed the same day in Texas, admitted to being one of the three men who dragged James Byrd to death—can be put to death legitimately.

I think Dana has actually captured my dislike of using any argument other than “it’s barbaric,” fo all I concede it might be more effective at least in a foot-in-the-door sort of way.