+19
Besides being fundamentally against the practice, in practical terms the criminal justice system is too big and too many inequities exist, as a result FAR too many errors are made, meaning innocent people wind up convicted of crimes they didn't commit. With the death penalty, obviously this is something that cannot be remedied after the person has been killed.
There's a weird paranoid fantasy thing where for some reason most can imagine the pain of having a loved one raped or murdered so they feel the visceral need for the death penalty, but at the same time they cannot fathom a loved one being falsely convicted of a capitol crime and put to death for something they didn't do. Obviously poorer communities with less access to good legal counsel and such are more likely to understand the pain of the false arrest and conviction. Most of us from the middle to upper middle class can't seem to imagine being at the wrong place at the wrong time to be fingered incorrectly, but can imagine their Mother or Sister going down the wrong alley. Unless you live in the most crime-ridden areas of our country, I think statistically it's a wash which of these tragedies, victim of violent crime or mistaken perpetrator, would befall your family, yet in most people's minds the former is a nightmare scenario they actually fear while the other a Kafkaesque impossibility saved for "Law & Order" episodes that might happen to other people but not to them.
When the science of DNA evidence exploded in the late 1990s it was shocking to see how many cases were overturned. There are hundreds and hundreds more, and even with the advance of technology some that can't be cleared in such a way. So while Equilibrium can have a specific case in mind with a monster who most of us would probably be fine with being killed for what he did, what about the untold numbers of people who would be put to death for something they just plain didn't do?
I would urge everyone on the fence especially to rent Erroll Morris' excellent documentary The Thin Blue Line. Pick up the DVD of Exonerated, which is a filmed version of a play based on the stories of actual people who have been cleared of capitol crimes. With these kinds of errors being made, I don't see how you can be for killing even the monsters, because there's no way to tell the difference too much of the time. How can we be a just and moral society if this is happening in the system? Does it matter if it's 8% or 2% or .003% of the death row population? If it's happening at all (and it most certainly is), then we just can't allow the practice to continue.
I think.
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