One of these things is not like the other one

[Joe Allonby]

Not "eye for eye" at all. Government should be concerned with justice,
not vengeance. Some people are irredeemable. Putting them in a prison
population endangers the other prisoners. Enduring that threat is not
part of their sentence. Capital punishment permanently removes a
threat to society. But so many people have gone through the process
and been found "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" only to be
exonerated. Some of these people have been sentenced to death and
released (particularly in Illinois). The threshold of no doubt about
the identity of the perpetrator was assumed to have been met. Race and
socioeconomic factors (victims and suspects) are definitely involved
in the sentencing. I'm leaving aside my own feelings about the value
of human life for this. Just dealing with a rational argument. If you
accept capital punishment you must also accept the inescapable
inevitability of the execution of an innocent person. That is not
justice. It's state sponsored murder. Deliberate. Premeditated. In
cold blood.I'm not willing to accept that.



On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 2:35 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Two things about your statement:
>
> 1.  "Perfect sentence" would, I assume, mean in the "eye-for-eye"
> sense.  So this would apply only in murders with specific parameters
> (which I'll decline to pursue here).
>
> 2.  It is clearly the "ultimate" sentence, in that there is no
> reversal possible after its application (thus your invoking a "perfect
> criminal justice system" as a guarantee against what I'll call an
> ultimate injustice by the justice system).  Since this is invariably
> true, the only reliably just application of capital punishment would
> be (assuming #1 above threshold to have been met) in cases where there
> is no doubt about the identity of the perpetrator.  This is also an
> acheivable threshold.
>
> On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Capital punishment is the perfect sentence in a perfect criminal justice system. If you acknowledge that the system is not perfect, and you practice capital punishment, you have to be willing to accept that eventually the state will commit murder by executing an innocent person. To deny this is intellectually and morally dishonest. There is no way around this.
>