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

[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.