Death Penalty

I am opposed to the death penalty for a number of reasons:

• It does not work to deter murder. Countries without a death penalty all have substantially lower murder rates.
• It morally corrupts the society that uses it. Utah is using firing squads to titillate the citizenry. That is heading off is the direction of increasing decadence that Rome took.
• Every day thousands of horses, dogs, cats and people are euthanised without a hitch. However, it is very common for prisoner executions to fail, with the death dragging on for hours. Why the difference? Vets who euthanise animals are trying to alleviate suffering. Vets like the animals. Executioners hate the prisoners. They want to punish them, make them suffer maximally beyond what that law specifies. They get a sexual pleasure from the executions and the prisoner suffering.
• The executing a prisoner wastes millions of dollars of high priced lawyer time.
• Every time we invent new forensic technology and use it to look at old cases, we discover all kinds of people we were absolutely sure were guilty were not.
• The whole US legal system is biased against black people. They are more likely to be prosecuted, more likely to be convicted, more likely to get long sentences, more likely to get life sentences and more likely to be executed. This is a modern day extension of the old Jim Crow system. Until that bias is removed, it is wrong to execute anyone. The Republican goal is to eliminate black voters by jailing them or disenfranchising them.
• Poor blacks are especially vulnerable to being bullied by police to take plea bargains and confess to crimes they did not commit.
• Poor blacks are more likely to be convicted by paid or plea-bargained testimony. The amount of the bribes typically can be quite small. Often the real culprit testifies against an innocent man.
• For those who are guilty, a life sentence is a stronger punishment than execution. With execution, it is over in minutes.

The death penalty is a sanitised version of lynching. It does not belong in a modern country.

~ Roedy (born:1948-02-04 age:68)