Let’s pretend that all crimes with a possible death sentence are prosecuted by the Feds under the same laws … essentially, serious crime is nationalized, Federal laws are added or changed so the rules in all such cases are reasonably uniform nation-wide. We do what we can to assure fair trials and similar sentencing for similar crimes.
My personal theory is that any such laws that we create and enforce would end up with a politically unsustainably high number of death sentences. The laws are arbitrary enough now that prosecutors can pick and choose who to put to death – people who look or sound different, whose victims are more sympathetic seeming to the public, who are of a particular religion or skin color, etc…
But if we have truly uniform rules for applying the death penalty (and I’m not real confident we can) all the sudden we’d have 3 o4 4 (maybe more, a lot more) times the number of executions as before. And we’d we killing more white men, a lot more women, and possibly children is higher proportions then before.
Any thoughts about possible outcomes? Will we accept more state sanctioned killing? Will we shock ourselves out of executions altogether by getting a clearer glimpse at what a fairly administered death penalty will cost in lives?
We have to keep quite a few of them alive, though, for the shareholders of the private prison corporations, unless we give them a piece of the execution action.
I would only execute the truly incorrigible, serial-killer, no-hope-for-rehabilitation-by-manmade-methods ones. Even then that might be several dozen executions a year.
The right number to execute for such crimes is equal to the number who commit them, no more, no less.
This of course means no innocent people executed, and no guilty people spared, and every miscreant caught and brought to justice - all of which are impossible to accomplish.
But the number described above is the correct number.
I’m not generally in favour of death penalties, but one benefit, in the case of ‘truly evil’ serial killers is closure for the families of the victims.
These two continued to cause fresh and repeated pain for the families of their victims by falsely offering to reveal the location of the bodies.
Also, they were the focus of repeated media circus events every time one of them suffered an illness, said anything that the media thought was worth plastering across the front page (always with the same scary photo of Hindley), or, in some cases, where they were treated inhumanely by individuals in the prison service. Again, fresh pain for the families of the victims every time that happened, I imagine.
Now, I’m not going to argue that execution is the best or only way all of that could have been prevented, but it’s one way, and it would have made some things better for some people.
So the correct number is dependent on the number of incidents in which “closure” is required by the families of the victims. What is the metric to be used to establish this number? Who is entitled to closure, when they experience a tragedy? How do we execute enough people to bring closure when the deaths are from tornadoes or plane crashes? Throw vrgins in a volcano, to make everyone feel better?
There is a multiplier effect here. “Closure” is a word that was invented in my lifetime, to coddle everybody who feels sad abut an event in their lives, including the loss of pets. A couple of generations ago, all kinds of terrible things happened in people’s lives, that they just bucked up and got on with it. The more closure you give people, the more they will demand and expect. Closure is a catastrophic application of an ugly form of vindication.
And now the only justification people can come up with for murdering a human being is the pat on the back for the survivors who lack the psychological wherewithal to get on with their pitiful lives following a tragedy.
There, there now, we just made a man in Alabama spend 13 minutes coughing and choking down a poisonous cocktail. Do you feel better now? Set your oven timer for 13 minutes and see how long his torture lasted. Oh, and he had an innocent family, too. Where is their closure?
I can only imagine you didn’t read or understand what I wrote. I am not arguing that the death penalty is the best or only solution to the problems I mentioned.
You asked ‘how that would accomplish anything of benefit to anyone?’ I answered that specific question, not any other question - i.e. ‘here is a possible area of benefit’.
The correct number of executions = total number of convictions for murder + total number of convictions for forcible rape + total convictions of sexual molestation of a child < 12 years old.
The feds won’t do this, unfortunately.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - no factually innocent person has been executed in the US since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1977. That is to say, no factually innocent person has been executed in the US since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1977.
I asked for a possible benefit from execution, and closure was the only one you mentioned, and I challenged the benefit.
If society assumes the responsibility for administrating closure on demand, there will be open-ended escalation of response, leading to an unlimited number of executions, if executions are the approved response to a need or a wish or a whim for closure.
Zero. The death penalty is about the morality of the State that carries it out and not the morally of the crime. I don’t wish to live in a State that puts its citizens to death.
Strongly agree with these statements. If we’re going to claim to be better than people who kill, we shouldn’t be killing people. I’m just as safe from a murderer who is behind bars as I am from his corpse.
Seriously, it all depends on the number and types of crimes, the local laws where those crimes occur, and the sort of plea deals their lawyers and the prosecutors can work out. There is no “right” number that anyone short of a deity could come up with, and even then it would only apply to a single year, and any other year would only have the same number by sheer happenstance.