Then I guess we may as well abolish the justice system altogether since we can never know whether anyone is guilty of anything.
No, we don’t impose irreversible punishments.
The added surety is not worth allowing some people to continue to draw breath in the meantime.
A death sentence is fully reversible up to the point where there is no further mechanism by which the convicted can be shown to be innocent.
No, it might be that evidence surfaces years after the conviction. If sentenced to life, you let the wrongly convicted man go. If you’ve already executed him, there is no remedy available. Perhaps you need to look into why it’s so important to you to kill people.
Sounds to me like a majority is for it.
It was avoidable state induced pain. Torture in my book.
Majority for what?
Remedy: execute the people responsible for executing an innocent man.
Because they’re not worth keeping alive, and just locking them up and letting them die of thirst would be cruel.
It is falling out of favour in the USA:
Pew Poll Shows Sharp Drop in Death Penalty Support (2/2014).
Support for the death penalty has fallen sharply by 23 percentage points since 1996, reaching its lowest level in almost two decades, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. The 2013 poll also found a 10 point drop in just the last 2 years in respondents who say they “strongly favor” the death penalty, from 28% to 18%. The percentage of Americans who say they oppose the death penalty has risen to 37%. In 2011, Pew asked respondents about the reasons behind their views on the death penalty, finding that the top two reasons for opposition to capital punishment were the imperfect nature of the justice system and a belief that the death penalty is immoral. The drop in public support coincides with an overall decline in use of the death penalty during the same time period, with both death sentences and executions falling dramatically since the 1990s. Six states have repealed the death penalty in the last six years, and three governors have recently imposed moratoriums on executions.
(M. Lipka, “Support for death penalty drops among Americans,” Pew Research Center, February 12, 2014).
Morally reprehensible and just getting a little silly.
I don’t see how it’s morally reprehensible. If you fail in your job so horribly that you get an innocent man executed, then the same sentence you wrongly foisted on him is justly delivered to you.
If you believe that the only two options are executing and letting them die of thirst then perhaps you need to expand your thinking.
There are many that WERE released. 144 such cases between 1973 and March 2014
Heated debate! I was going to respond with an expletive, but since this is GD I will just take exception to the fact that you think the US, Japan, China, India, Taiwan, etc… aren’t civilized.
By the way, how do you feel about abortion? Pro-choice? Pro-life? Inquiring minds want to know…
So the system works, then.
They need to die somehow. I’m open to suggestions.
We should also extend that to those who support the execution of people without certainty of guilt, then - and make no mistake, it’s impossible to be certain of guilt. Beyond reasonable doubt is an extremely high standard, probably the highest achievable, but is not sufficient to impose irreversible punishment, as it is not certain.
We don’t keep people alive who we believe are guilty for their sake. We keep them alive for the sake of the rest of us, those who are innocent, both to protect us from the possibility of injustice and to prevent us being complicit in unnecessary killing. The government is the people and so forth, so if the government kills someone it is you or I doing it (or because as far as I know we’re in different countries).
I don’t wish to kill people when there’s another realistic option - and jailing someone for life is perfectly realistic.
They will. We all will.
I meant now.