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

[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.