I’m probably as strong of a pro-death penalty person as you’ll find on this board, but even I wouldn’t suggest the death penalty for crimes that don’t involve the death of the victim. No amount of property is worth the life of another human being. To impose the death penalty on someone for anything short of unjustly taking the life of another implies that the lifes of some citizens are worth less than the lives of others. By the same token, I’d argue NOT imposing it in those circumstances implies the same, but in fact, valuing the lives of the victims less, but that’s neither here nor there, since it’s not really relevant to the OP.
I also think the three strikes laws are dumb because it sends a mixed message. Either the punishment is just for the first two offenses, at which point the third is excessive, or it’s appropriate for the third, in which case the first two offenses are insufficient. In the former case, we’re either punishing inhumanely, or essentially encouraging them to do worse things if they think they’ll get caught for a third offense. Imagine someone is robbing a bank for their third offense, under those laws, they now have nothing to lose if they think killing someone might help them get away, when they might not otherwise want to. In the latter case, we create incentive for the first two offenses because the punishment is insufficient. That’s not to say that I believe that punishment is a deterent or should be used as one, because I don’t, but rather that a lack of sufficient punishment certainly isn’t going to make the situation better.
The real problem, as I see it, is that at some point the punishments stopped fitting the crime. When some people are being harshly punished for relatively minor crimes, drug offenses being the most prevalent by far, and others are being let off easy for relatively serious crimes, it undermines the very concept of justice in our society. When, law stopped being about protecting the rights of the citizens and started being about morality, social engineering, and even profitteering, we stopped being a just society. First, let us return to justice, then let us worry about those that don’t fit in.
That said, I do think that we, as a society, do have a right to effectively exhile people who don’t want to play by the rules. But I think the death penalty goes much too far, and so does over-punishing, even for repeat offenders.
