Bad liberal! Bad!

[trinityvixen]

Abolish the death penalty as a cost-cutting measure?

It's something anti-death-penalty folks have talked about for years--how much money we could save if we didn't have the death penalty. (The figures are in that article, in brief.) It's hard to convince people of that--someone being alive for 20-30-40 years in prison costing less than a few years at trial. But it is absolutely true. It's just never gotten any traction until budgets were crashing across the country and not wasting money on revenge suddenly became an attractive cost-cutting idea.

I'm of two minds, perhaps more. On the whole, I abhor the idea of justice being decided on terms of money. It's already too late to fight that battle, however, given the way our legal system is set up. The poor will always suffer. But ideologically, I am opposed to the idea of not making a clear, moral stance on the death penalty and using the cost as an escape hatch from looking the issue straight in the face. If you think the state has a right to put certain antisocial criminals to death for their crimes, have the guts to defend that stance. If you don't? Appeal to my heart and my mind, not my government's wallet. If you believe the death penalty is a moral evil and should be overturned, this is probably a fine solution as far as you are concerned. But it feels rather like a cheat--a way to win without proving your argument to of sounder mind than that of your opponent.

As it so happens, I am not opposed to the death penalty in theory. I believe it should be like abortion, only even more rare--it has to exist, it should never be used. But as moonlightalice pointed out to me, that's an ideal. The reality is so much different. She's quite right. That's quite the cognitive disconnect from abortion because abortion has to exist to catch the mistakes, the human errors. The death penalty must be free from human error in order to be just; catching human error would require nothing as permanent as death being on the table. Ergo, the death penalty should not exist.

Any yet? I still can't quite dismiss it outright. I have a firm conviction that there is just no helping some people. I want to study the Ted Bundys we catch, but I don't think they should get to live and be famous. Then again, Charles Manson has been rotting away, mostly forgotten save as a curio, for some time now. But bring up the assholes who bombed Oklahoma City and murdered children, and I get less interested in studying their psychology.

Idealism abuts reality in the form of the greater good. What would be the greatest good: to keep the death penalty or abolish it? And for whom? Which subsection of "greater" do we mean when we say that? Would abolishing it lead to a correction of abuses in our justice system? Tricky. Very tricky.

Comments

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

Actually, this has pretty much always been my view on the death penalty. I'm not using it as an escape hatch, I just -don't- have a strong moral stance on it one way or the other. I lean towards it being a bad idea simply because of false positives, but assuming our justice system works correctly (hah) I don't have much to say because on one hand, killing someone really ought to be the very last step ever taken but on the other hand I think I'd rather be killed than solitary imprisonment forever.

I do, however, think it's a waste of of money paying for all the trials and appeals and re-appeals just so we can kill a guy when instead he could spend the rest of his life in a nice dark cell.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I agree, but I find arguing this solely from a cost-benefit position abhorrent. I can use that to back me up if I need to convince people against the death penalty, but if there's a reason to be involved with life and death, there should be more to it than that.

Like you, I don't have a strong moral stance, only conflicting imperatives and a cynicism about the legal system that leaves me to consider the death penalty more problematic than helpful.

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

All of law and morality is a cost-benefit balancing system, it's just not as straightforward as a spreadsheet (and some of it is in our hardware, making it only quasi-rational).

When it comes to law, what works on a personal level doesn't directly translate outward because the incentive doesn't translate. Our legal system is already founded on trade-offs of cost. Most of the time we can think of it as moral b/c we've learned how to accept penalties and incentives in terms of years and money as part of our society (it's kind of strange if you really think about it). It's very effective at maintaining social balance. This case isn't any different, it just brings some of the mechanisms into the open.

[jendaby.livejournal.com]

Prison overcrowding/death penalty/etc. were the debate topic of the year my first year of high school. We examined prison budgets and alternatives to the death penalty from every angle. It's frustrating, because like anything else out there, you can have one circumstance that will throw everything off for everyone else.

I wish there were a fool-proof way of knowing who committed what crimes and what their intentions were. There isn't. And, really, when someone has torn apart families and taken lives and caused pain and anguish, there is really no punishment in the world that will make up for the terror that victims and their loved ones suffered.

I realize I have a sort of backwards way of thinking about this, and certainly there is no one thing that would stop violent crime once and for all while still allowing us to have a free society, but I really do think that if we focused more money on better education - and specifically better SEX education - there would be fewer unwanted children out there, and so more children would (in theory) be well-cared for, less children would be abused, and fewer people would be broken enough to think it was okay to go out and commit violent crime.

Honestly. There is so much that could be done simply by improving education. It wouldn't solve everything, but it would, I believe, lessen the costs down the road. As for the death penalty for people who have already missed that boat, I have mixed feelings. I really understand the desire to be able to say without a doubt "that monster will never hurt anyone again" but I also understand the concerns of wrongful accusation, the cost of appeals, and the thought that executing someone may just be bringing them a peace they don't deserve. I agree: very tricky.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Education is intimately linked with prosperity. What we could stand to do moreover is recognize the class system in our society and how it hurts people of all castes.

It is tempting, given the multitude of appeals processes, to think that it would be hard to execute people for crimes they did not commit. Tempting, but wrong. That temptation, combined with the grief of victims' relatives, more often than not provide the salve on the consciences of the individuals supporting the death penalty. I think they owe it to themselves when seeking to preserve the death penalty to consider the offenses to blind justice that we've discussed here and consider if any of them might not be worse.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

What we could stand to do moreover is recognize the class system in our society and how it hurts people of all castes.

Not to be a pain, but I think this is kind of an untrue cliché -- our class system does quite well by the brahmins, and that's why it's so tenaciously persistent; some people remain attached to the class system because it really does benefit them. (Others remain attached to it despite it hurting them, but eh... at least some of those are expertly manipulated by those the system really does benefit...)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Pardon: I was not talking about the elite. The elite benefit regardless of the type of system.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I've always been against the death penalty. At first because I was a completely unrealistic idealist. Now I believe there are some people who deserve to die for what they've done, but I don't think any government should have that ability. Let alone one that uses it the way ours does.

But in all my time being anti-death penalty I have always argued from cost. Because that's not about morals or beliefs or racism or corruption. It's straight fact, so a hell of a lot easier to defend.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think you get right at it: I believe some people don't deserve to live, but who would I trust to make sure that any individual person is one of those types of people? Very touchy sort of area.

While cost/benefit is easier to argue, I don't like reducing the question of a human life to an expense. We do enough of that already.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I support the death penalty, and find the cost argument to be the least convincing argument against. I also find the deterrence argument to be a crappy argument for, so all the people quoted in that article strike me as silly. I view it as a simple matter of justice--there are some people who have committed crimes so awful and heinous that they deserve to die. Recent examples in NY include the attempted torture/murder of a Columbia grad student and the guy who beheaded his wife as what looks like an honor killing. I would prefer to restrict use of the death penalty to cases where we know that the defendant is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I find gross indifference to human suffering on top of murder to be at the top of my "Does Not Deserve To Live" shit list. It's hard to justify, though, which cases are irreparable or irredeemable across the board, which is why people tend to find simpler, harder to argue excuses for one position or another.

However, as I said above, it's also difficult to trust that any group of lawyers will be able to prove depraved indifference beyond shadows of doubt. It really depends on the crime and the criminal's circumstances. As our system stands, there are too many instances of problematic prosecution and imbalances in representation for me not to harbor doubts over convictions--especially those of poorer defendants. You can catch your Jeffrey Dahmer's red-handed, but those are often the exceptions.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

I laid out my death penalty position here. As noted there, I only accept capital punishment for murders committed in prison, for murderers who escape from prison, or for killers in times of unrest, when the jails are not secure.

However, I really don't care for arguments like edgehopper's, "I support the death penalty because some people are scumbags." Of course some people are! Nevertheless, disgust shouldn't be the guiding principle for our justice system. The safety of the American people should be.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't think he meant "people suck, set them on fire." Rather, I think he and I both are not interested in keeping people are monstrous alive. We're not talking even about gang-bangers, hit men, or people who use violence as part of lifestyle that might not have been attractive were their financial circumstances better, but more like people who abduct, torture, and murder their victims for the thrill of it. Those people are wastes of space--useful for study to a point, and thereafter not worth a minute of our time.

Now, I admit that that sounds like we're splitting hairs, but I guess we are. There's a difference to me between loathsome people who made a bad choice (or series of them) and people fundamentally broken in the head to a point that they enjoy killing. Those people, by your own guidelines vis a vis the reasons to support the death penalty, are a problem for society and sort of a threat to it. (I keep coming back to Manson in my head.) They should definitely go.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

I know he didn't mean "kill random folks in the street cuz humanity sucks." Even applying it to killers, though, involves a subjective and fairly arbitrary judgment that I'm just not comfortable with. To me, the guy who kills for sexual gratification is not inherently better OR worse than a hitman who kills for cash. Sure, the former makes us go "ewwww!" but that's not a good basis for policy. And if "wasting space" was a crime we would've sent Carrot Top to the death house years ago.:)

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

The hitman can be controlled b/c he's still a person. The other guy can't and isn't. The hitman presumably isn't an addict to death, the psychopath is. Addiction destroys rational agency, and that's the biggest change that can happen to someone.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that lack of rational agency makes the person more culpable, though. I think you could make a strong argument for the reverse (not that I, personally, would believe that argument).

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

Doesn't necessarily make him more culpable, but does make him more dangerous b/c he's less controllable. The hitman at least has a basic incentive system society can tap into. Max-security psych wards are always an option. They might as well be prisons.

I take it as asking "when a person is a person and by how much?", but that's me. At some point someone can lose their humanity, though it has to get pretty extreme (case in point) to get that far. When it comes to sanity, the law is muddled.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

And if "wasting space" was a crime we would've sent Carrot Top to the death house years ago.:)

Oh if only...

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

If killing them is due to lack of interest in keeping them alive, then surely a budgetary argument should be exactly the sort to sway you. I think tossing someone into a supermax facility for life without parole is tantamount to killing them as far as society is concerned. If that's so, then you have to ask whether killing them is "worth" the trouble, chance of wrongful conviction, and, as this report cites, expense, just as you do ask whether keeping them alive is "worth" our time (and presumably expense, space, etc). If these people have no value to society, which method of "disposal" is less costly?

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Well, here's a question for you -- could this actually be a bad thing, in that if we revoke the death penalty as a cost-saving measure -- and the expensive thing about the death penalty is all the money spent to be that much more sure that we have the right person and he was given a fair trial -- does this mean that we'll be consigning people to a life-imprisonment sentence with less careful scrutiny? Because fair trials are more expensive than just locking the guy up?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The article mentioned that sentencing rates/severity are about the same in places with or without the death penalty. That's why people who say it's necessary to use as a threat in plea bargains are looney tunes. I doubt the abuses of other sentences will be the result.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

I don't think I expressed myself clearly -- I was just saying that to the extent that spending money on all those extra appeals actually results in better justice, are we lowering standards of justice by taking the higher stakes of the death penalty off the table? I.E. will spending less on the cases (because they're no longer capital trials) mean that people might get convicted who would be set free during the second million dollars of appeals?

Probably a stupid thing to wonder about anyway since it's not at all obvious that the extra cost of capital trials actually means better justice... would I be interpreting the article right to think it said most of those death penalty cases were reduced to life in prison, rather than having the accused just go free, and that that was the result of all those appeals?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

What I think they mean as regards the trials "costing less" is that people are less likely to appeal (and appeals are less sympathetic) when the death penalty is a non-issue. I don't think that less effort will be put into a trial that's "only" trying it as a life sentence.