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

[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?