Capital punishment

This is a topic we haven't discussed in a while, and it's also one that I think can foster a meaningful debate (unless we're all disgustingly in tune again). The poll is deliberately binary, by the way: I know there is a lot of space here for "yes, but" and "no, but" answers, but I just want to see the general opinion.

Rather than wasting lots of time writing a very long post, I'm going to outline my argument against capital punishment. If anyone wants to challenge any of these points I shall be happy to elaborate.

I think capital punishment is one of the most barbaric practices still sanctioned anywhere in the world. I have never heard a single argument in its favour that has held up under close scrutiny, and there are plenty of arguments against it. In descending order of importance, here are my reasons:

The right to life is unimpeachable. I believe that absolutely nothing trumps the right of a person to their life. This is reflected in many international declarations of human rights (for example, in both the UN Declaration of and EU Convention on Human Rights, the right to life is the first enumerated), but even if it weren't, I firmly believe there are no circumstances under which any authority, individual or institutional, has the right to deprive someone of their life. (Including, incidentally, the right to self defence). I realise this is a very personal opinion, though, and is not going to convince anyone who doesn't already agree.

Justice can never be entirely accurate. The Innocence Project has, to date, used DNA evidence to exonerate 18 people on death row. It is incredibly naive to assume that no innocent person has ever been executed; indeed, some governments have admitted to wrongful executions. Again, though, even if this weren't the case, even if, as far as we knew, every execution ever carried out was, in this sense, right, the mere possibility that an innocent person might be executed is grounds enough to ban capital punishment. Nothing can justify the possibility of the murder of a citizen by the state. This is important, and I think more people should be forced to admit it: unless you think the occasional murder of an innocent is an acceptable price to pay for capital punishment, you must oppose it.

In my view, these two reasons are enough. No argument in favour of capital punishment is more important than they are; even if the rest of my points were not true, I would still be opposed to capital punishment.

Justice should be about rehabilitation, not retribution. Capital punishment is, clearly, pure retribution. The fact that crime does not happen in a vacuum must be recognised; crime happens in a specific social and cultural context, which is influenced in part by the state. This gives the state a measure of culpability. It is therefore the duty of the state to attempt the rehabilitation of criminals.

Capital punishment is inhumane. All forms of capital punishment currently in use inflict (or have the potential to inflict) a great deal of pain on the victim. Lethal injection, for example, is misadministered terrifyingly often. Such treatment is clearly inhumane.

Capital punishment is not a deterrent. This is more of a counter-argument, and I acknowledge that it is difficult to show causation in cases like this, but the fact remains that the use of capital punishment does not correlate with lower crime rates. Abolishment of capital punishment is one of the requirements of joining the European Union, which has, on average, far lower crime rates than the United States. Obviously there are other factors at work - like the States' absurd gun laws - but if capital punishment was truly a deterrent I can't help but think the situation should be a little less polarised.

Capital punishment is not cheaper than alternatives. First I should emphasise that this is definitely not an important consideration. We should not put a price on justice. But this is an argument frequently brought up in favour of capital punishment, so I feel obliged to point out that capital punishment is actually more expensive than, say, life imprisonment. This is due to legal costs associated with the many challenges brought against death sentences, so I imagine the situation is different in countries like China with dubious due process, but the point is moot unless you want to argue that we should do away with due process.

There. I think I've covered all the important points. Now I just need to hope that someone disagrees. :D

while this isn't necessarily an argument for abolishing capital punishment per se (since I'm sure some clever dickey could argue that if we sorted it out, execution would be completely morally just) and is specific to the US rather than a generalised issue, it's also worth adding that capital punishment is racist. people of colour are more likely than white people to be given the death penalty for the same crimes.

also, again not actually a formal argument against the death penalty, but I find this sort of thing (which happens alarmingly often) to be absolutely disgusting. lord knows how you can claim that a man with such severe learning disabilities that he can't even dress himself or hold down a job should be held accountable for his actions and thus deserves to die.

edit: oh and suffice it to say that I'm completely against capital punishment, if that wasn't already clear from my post.

capital punishment is the most horrible

Yeah, that people have been executed while innocent should really be the only reason anyone needs.

I'm terrified of 'pro-life' people who support capital punishment.

I'm not in favour of capital punishment, but I would like to add one thing: The right to life may be unimpeachable, but the murder also took it from someone, and violated that right. In how far can you argue that a murderer, who is willingly ignorant of this right to life, can be considered to have this right? Is your right not forfeit if you willingly fall foul of respecting it? Why, besides our own innate sense of mercy, should we take the right to life seriously given that the murderer does not do so himself?

Justice can never be entirely accurate. The Innocence Project has, to date, used DNA evidence to exonerate 18 people on death row. It is incredibly naive to assume that no innocent person has ever been executed; indeed, some governments have admitted to wrongful executions. Again, though, even if this weren't the case, even if, as far as we knew, every execution ever carried out was, in this sense, right, the mere possibility that an innocent person might be executed is grounds enough to ban capital punishment. Nothing can justify the possibility of the murder of a citizen by the state. This is important, and I think more people should be forced to admit it: unless you think the occasional murder of an innocent is an acceptable price to pay for capital punishment, you must oppose it.

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I think the problem you're raising here is not one that in and of itself reflects on the morality of capital punishment, but instead deals with the consequence of how well we can actually establish the true perpetrator of a crime. What you're saying is "Humans are fallible, therefore we cannot deal out death in judgement, because we might be wrong a little too often!" I personally agree with this statement, but would like to remark that that doesn't mean capital punishment itself is the immoral thing to do, it is just impractical because we are imperfect researchers. And that, in my view, is a caveat concerning this argument.

(I still agree though, I do not believe the life of an innocent is a good price to pay; but I can imagine if we had 100% accuracy, that some people's opinions on the death penalty might change).

Justice should be about rehabilitation, not retribution. Capital punishment is, clearly, pure retribution. The fact that crime does not happen in a vacuum must be recognised; crime happens in a specific social and cultural context, which is influenced in part by the state. This gives the state a measure of culpability. It is therefore the duty of the state to attempt the rehabilitation of criminals.

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Not everyone can be rehabilitated. Some people are just loonies. What do you do with loonies? You are probably gonna lock them up. They will have the right to life, but a terrible life (and considering they are probably loonies, it's not even their own fault). I agree that we should try and rehabilitate, but some people are lost cases and in that case I don't want them wandering my streets. That does not make retribution the answer (we should always first try to rehabilitate), but in the case that people are beyond rehabilition, I fail to see why you would want to keep them locked up other than to prevent them getting onto the streets.

Capital punishment is inhumane. All forms of capital punishment currently in use inflict (or have the potential to inflict) a great deal of pain on the victim. Lethal injection, for example, is misadministered terrifyingly often. Such treatment is clearly inhumane.

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I don't think someone committing a crime that could potentially be under pain of capital punishment really gets to call on this argument. If you are a serial killer who ritually burns people in fire or some shit like that, or cuts up bodies and stores them in the freezer, then maybe (and this comes back to my first argument) you have already violated humanity yourself. In that case, what is the motivation for us to still abide by being humane to the perpetrator? Only our own mercy, our own innate desire to be nice. That's pretty much it.

Capital punishment is not a deterrent. This is more of a counter-argument, and I acknowledge that it is difficult to show causation in cases like this, but the fact remains that the use of capital punishment does not correlate with lower crime rates. Abolishment of capital punishment is one of the requirements of joining the European Union, which has, on average, far lower crime rates than the United States. Obviously there are other factors at work - like the States' absurd gun laws - but if capital punishment was truly a deterrent I can't help but think the situation should be a little less polarised.

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This, I agree with. Most people that willingly commit murder do so because they are either fucked in the head or have some ulterior motive like gang involvement (which is a phenomenon that occurs due to poor social circumstances). Both are groups that have nothing to fear from a death penalty - their life is shit anyway.

Capital punishment is not cheaper than alternatives. First I should emphasise that this is definitely not an important consideration. We should not put a price on justice. But this is an argument frequently brought up in favour of capital punishment, so I feel obliged to point out that capital punishment is actually more expensive than, say, life imprisonment. This is due to legal costs associated with the many challenges brought against death sentences, so I imagine the situation is different in countries like China with dubious due process, but the point is moot unless you want to argue that we should do away with due process.

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You can do a cost-benefit analysis on this one. Personally, though, I am inclined to ask why the legal costs are necessarily so high? If they are that high maybe lawyers shouldn't earn outrageously much, is my belief. But that's a different discussion. I don't know the figures. In any case, you still have to institutionalise some people for a long time, because some of them are just not going to be rehabilitated.

goldenquagsire said:

while this isn't necessarily an argument for abolishing capital punishment per se (since I'm sure some clever dickey could argue that if we sorted it out, execution would be completely morally just) and is specific to the US rather than a generalised issue, it's also worth adding that capital punishment is racist. people of colour are more likely than white people to be given the death penalty for the same crimes.

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I'm pretty sure it's sexist in a similar way - I was doing some reading about it quite some time ago, and (iirc) a man who commits the same crime as a woman is more likely to be put on death row, and you're more likely to face execution if you commit a violent crime against a woman.

Tarvos said:

You can do a cost-benefit analysis on this one. Personally, though, I am inclined to ask why the legal costs are necessarily so high? If they are that high maybe lawyers shouldn't earn outrageously much, is my belief. But that's a different discussion. I don't know the figures. In any case, you still have to institutionalise some people for a long time, because some of them are just not going to be rehabilitated.

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The reason the legal costs are so high is because, I believe, when the sentence of capital punishment comes up, the case is retried several times to make sure they aren't getting the wrong guy. Take an expensive defense attorney (and prosecutor) and have them do their job several times over, and, well.

I don't actually remember where I got this information, so it might be completely wrong, I guess.

Tarvos said:

I'm not in favour of capital punishment, but I would like to add one thing: The right to life may be unimpeachable, but the murder also took it from someone, and violated that right. In how far can you argue that a murderer, who is willingly ignorant of this right to life, can be considered to have this right? Is your right not forfeit if you willingly fall foul of respecting it? Why, besides our own innate sense of mercy, should we take the right to life seriously given that the murderer does not do so himself?

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That's not what "unimpeachable right" means, as far as I know. Your eye-for-an-eye reasoning strikes me as really petty, basically amounting to "He started it!"; the basic assumption behind it seems to be that we shouldn't hold a principle to be more important than our indignation when somebody else violates the principle. Would you say a person values being polite if they'll cheerfully resort to curses and insults the moment somebody else is rude to them? If I believe the right to life is unimpeachable, I believe the right to life is way, way more important than my desire to punish someone who violated it.

Although capital punishment being applied disproportionately to people of color is deplorable, I don't think it's a very relevant argument - universities are racist in who they accept, too, but that's an argument against racism, not against universities. If capital punishment really were a social benefit in some way, then we should obviously be trying to fix the racism, not abolishing capital punishment.

The possibility of executing an innocent could technically be said to be irrelevant on the same basis, but it's not quite the same thing because the injustice there is more severe and much more connected to the root of the issue: killing is inherently irreversible, and killing any innocent at all is abhorrent on a level that incarceration isn't. Racism in how capital punishment is applied presumably doesn't have anything to do with the fact it involves killing.

opaltiger said:

Rather than wasting lots of time writing a very long post

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Lies and slander.

Tarvos said:

I'm not in favour of capital punishment, but I would like to add one thing: The right to life may be unimpeachable, but the murder also took it from someone, and violated that right. In how far can you argue that a murderer, who is willingly ignorant of this right to life, can be considered to have this right? Is your right not forfeit if you willingly fall foul of respecting it? Why, besides our own innate sense of mercy, should we take the right to life seriously given that the murderer does not do so himself?

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Tarvos said:

I don't think someone committing a crime that could potentially be under pain of capital punishment really gets to call on this argument. If you are a serial killer who ritually burns people in fire or some shit like that, or cuts up bodies and stores them in the freezer, then maybe (and this comes back to my first argument) you have already violated humanity yourself. In that case, what is the motivation for us to still abide by being humane to the perpetrator? Only our own mercy, our own innate desire to be nice. That's pretty much it.

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Actually, I'd say there's more to it than that. I think it's important we do take the right to life more seriously than the murderer because if we don't, it's questionable whether we really have any ground to stand on in condemning the murderer. If we don't hold ourselves to higher standards than criminals, to what extent do we have any meaningful moral authority to justify our condemnation of them?

Tarvos said:

I think the problem you're raising here is not one that in and of itself reflects on the morality of capital punishment, but instead deals with the consequence of how well we can actually establish the true perpetrator of a crime. What you're saying is "Humans are fallible, therefore we cannot deal out death in judgement, because we might be wrong a little too often!" I personally agree with this statement, but would like to remark that that doesn't mean capital punishment itself is the immoral thing to do, it is just impractical because we are imperfect researchers. And that, in my view, is a caveat concerning this argument.

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I think the reason this is specifically an argument against the death penalty is that at least you can free someone who's been given a life sentence, then proven innocent. It's somewhat more difficult to do so when you kill them.

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As for my own views, I'm absolutely against the death penalty as a form of punishment in civil society. In addition to my aforementioned belief that the state must hold itself to a higher moral standard than criminals (and, more important, hold itself to the moral standards of its own laws), I'm a proponent of rehabilitation over retribution. Since you obviously can't rehabilitate a corpse, I think the death penalty runs very much counter to that concept. That said, I'm not sure I'm necessarily against allowing life-without-possibility-of-release prisoners to be given a choice between serving their sentence and checking out early, since I am of the opinion that the right to live necessarily contains the right to die. I think I'd need to discuss the idea more before I reached a definite position on it though.

And I just made it 18-0.

I can understand why some would want capital punishment, but it's too much of a risk and there's no way to restore justice for those wrongly convicted. What if, for example, after someone is executed, evidence arises that the criminal was innocent?

Sounds like I'm the only one in favor of capital punishment, at the moment. Keep in mind that I'm very loosely in favor of it, and I don't have very strong opinions, and I'll probably be persuaded. I feel that in very severe crimes (like very brutal murder or rape), capital punishment is necessary. And only if the criminal is known for sure that they convicted the crime. But I haven't given too much thought on this subject.

Hippy said:

Sounds like I'm the only one in favor of capital punishment, at the moment. Keep in mind that I'm very loosely in favor of it, and I don't have very strong opinions, and I'll probably be persuaded. I feel that in very severe crimes (like very brutal murder or rape), capital punishment is necessary. And only if the criminal is known for sure that they convicted the crime. But I haven't given too much thought on this subject.

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Please read my first post. It's impossible to ever know for sure that someone committed a particular crime. Are you okay with your government potentially executing innocent people?

I remember doing research in seventh grade that the amount of money it takes to kill someone via capital punishment is about the same as what it takes to put them in prison for a good 40 years. I think it was, like, $1 million per person per year on death row, and people on death row generally stayed there for a good, like, 12 years or so before actually getting executed.

Also, for what it's worth, my mom claims to have a friend who was friends with someone who worked as an executioner. That person was against the death penalty, not necessarily because it was inhumane and killed innocents and was expensive, but because he figured the prisoners got off too easy -- the guilty people got to go straight into the sweet embrace of death, instead of rotting in a jail cell and having to live with the knowledge that he did something horrible, like kill someone, and reflect on that for the rest of his life.

Superbird said:

Also, for what it's worth, my mom claims to have a friend who was friends with someone who worked as an executioner. That person was against the death penalty, not necessarily because it was inhumane and killed innocents and was expensive, but because he figured the prisoners got off too easy -- the guilty people got to go straight into the sweet embrace of death, instead of rotting in a jail cell and having to live with the knowledge that he did something horrible, like kill someone, and reflect on that for the rest of his life.

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this reminds me a bit of Plato's Apology, wherein Socrates argued that he's not afraid of death, therefore the death penalty is an inappropriate punishment since it doesn't punish him at all, and he offered several alternatives. Naturally, though, the court didn't take him up on his offer and sentenced him to death anyway, which really didn't do shit to him.

Death is not always a 'punishment'.

Polymetric Sesquialtera said:

Death is not always a 'punishment'.

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Death is really more of a "punishment" to that person's friends and family. In other words, it's a very shitty way to punish someone.

That's not what "unimpeachable right" means, as far as I know. Your eye-for-an-eye reasoning strikes me as really petty, basically amounting to "He started it!"; the basic assumption behind it seems to be that we shouldn't hold a principle to be more important than our indignation when somebody else violates the principle. Would you say a person values being polite if they'll cheerfully resort to curses and insults the moment somebody else is rude to them? If I believe the right to life is unimpeachable, I believe the right to life is way, way more important than my desire to punish someone who violated it.

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Not exactly. I agree with you entirely concerning the second part of your reasoning. This is why we refrain from punishing, because we happen to morally believe in the right to life being unimpeachable; my problem is that the perpetrator, having violated that right to life himself, does not get to CLAIM that we should be merciful to him. It is only because we are moral enough that we recognise that the right thing to do is not capital punishment is why he will live. In my view, those people should count their lucky stars that we as a society have decided that this morality is the norm.

But the murderer cannot claim that we should be moral about this. He violated the right and is to suffer whatever consequence we have in store for him. I personally would let him live (living by the adagium two wrongs do not make a right), but I would impress on him that he is lucky he is dealing with me and that someone else who he pulled this trick on might not be so forgiving. The murderer absolutely gets no say in what is moral concerning judgement of life and death if he willingly takes one.

I agree the murderer would be massively hypocritical to try to claim the right to life is unimpeachable in his defense, but if he had been caught by somebody else and killed, I would still condemn the killing; what the murderer could claim in good conscience has nothing to do with it.

I support capital punishment, though probably because my morals are what most of you would deem sociopathic. As in, I don't agree with the top human right being "the right to live", and in my view, people can deserve to die.

yiran said:

I support capital punishment, though probably because my morals are what most of you would deem sociopathic. As in, I don't agree with the top human right being "the right to live", and in my view, people can deserve to die.

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Are you okay with your government occasionally executing innocent people?

opaltiger said:

Are you okay with your government occasionally executing innocent people?

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No, of course. But there are things such as wars which kill far more innocent people, and many governments don't try to avoid those either, so I wouldn't put it above them to make too much effort to prevent executing innocent people, other than for their reputation.