The problem is that we don’t write the law for each person individually. What accounts for one accounts for them all. It matters because there isn’t a way - or at least a workable way that I can see - to have a “Oh, we’re damn sure on this guy, fry him” law that couldn’t also affect people innocent of the charges. Or grant that power to judges to decide.
The argument is applicable because there isn’t a “what is the sentence for the certainty of the crimes that this one guy did” law in the books. Law isn’t specific to one conviction. We only have one “net”; it has to work for every case. Want to make sure it has absolutely no holes at all? You can do that. But then the actually innocent people won’t have a way out, either.
How is this unique to to Dzhokhar Tsarnev? Basically you are saying you support the Death Penalty and it has nothing to do with the Boston Marathon Bomber.
I probably am not understanding your argument, but it sounds like you are extending the notion that we can’t execute people who are absolutely, positively guilty because there might be others who are not really guilty. Again, I don’t think the argument applies to those who are absolutely, posititvely guilty - it has to do with others who are only guility beyond a reasonable doubt.
And your argument that making sure there are absolutely no holes in a law is necessary only works if aboltion of the DP meant that nobody would ever be wrongfully sentenced to life without parole, and nobody who was sentenced to life without parole ever killed anyone else. There are at least as many cases of murderers who were not executed who went on to kill again as people who were wrongly executed, at least in the last fifty years or so.
IOW if you “want to make sure it has absolutely no holes at all”, innocent people will die either way. Therefore the best alternative is to implement the system whereby the least number of innocents die. We use the DP in the current system - rarely and after long delays, but occasionally - and under that system, one innocent person was executed (maybe ). But we don’t usually execute, and thus Robert Stroud and Ed Wein and Ed Kemp and Arthur Shawcross (and many others) went on to kill again.
I think the argument (which I agree with) is that there is no legal method we can conceive of to separate those who are “absolutely, positively guilty” from those who are less certainly guilty in terms of the death penalty. There’s no way to only 100% guaranteed apply the death penalty to the “absolutely, positively guilty”.
I don’t apply the same reason to life without parole, since that is reversible – new evidence can be found and brought to light, pardons can be issued, etc.
It seems to me that it tilts towards a guilty verdict. I wouldn’t vote a guy guilty of a parking ticket if there were possible doubt. It seems to me to be a legal term invented to cause a juror with a small amount of doubt to vote guilty.