re: #124 Backwoods_Sleuth

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Good!

My take on the death penalty used to be that there were some crime so heinous, some murderers so dangerous, and some guilt so incontrovertible that their continued existence on this planet constituted an unacceptable risk - can you guarantee that they’d NEVER be able to get out?

I’ve never been much of one for the revenge or deterrence arguments and I have also never had a problem with the long appeals process - if we’re gonna kill somebody, we should exhaust all possibility of being wrong.

Two things changed my mind and made me oppose it:
1) the difficulty of writing what I listed (heinous crime, dangerous killer, certainty of guilt) into a law - especially the certainty part.

2) the number of people convicted and sentenced to death (and some executed) who were later completely exonerated. Not just “Oh, there was a problem with the trial”, but “Somebody else did it”.

As an aside, I was also alarmed when I heard from some DP advocates that they felt that even if someone convicted and sentenced to death were innocent of THAT murder, they probably had done something to deserve it, because “You don’t get that deep into the criminal justice system (as a defendant) without being guilty of SOMETHING!” which struck me as very much the opposite of ‘small government with limited powers, citizenry with broad, inalienable rights’ Conservatism they claimed to espouse.