So in terms of guilty people, you consider the death penalty to be charitable or merciful?Life in prison is worse for innocent people, because the risk of them never getting out is the same (or perhaps higher) than the risk of them being executed. However, guilty people with nothing else to lose don't deserve to keep their lives, even if it is in prison.
Ah... so you don't actually have any evidence to back up your supposition. Good to know.The death penalty is carried out so infrequently in this country that the numbers would be meaningless. I suggest that the time to ask those questions is when we actually start to use the death penalty with any sense of regularity.
No, it's not. So "overcrowding" was a red herring when you brought it up, was it?I do... but that's not the subject of this thread.
It's a way that negates the benefit of a good, working parole system at the very least. What about the benefit of that?It may not be the ONLY way... but it certainly is a most effective and certain way.
Wait one minute.A dead person cannot kill anyone anymore. Had Kenneth McDuff been executed the first time like he should have been, he wouldn't have killed 14 people.
Kenneth McDuff was convicted in a jurisdiction that had the death penalty. He was actually sentenced to death... a sentence that was later commuted. He was then released.
Nothing in his story illustrates that things would've been better if Texas had had capital punishment, because it did have capital punishment. Nothing in his story suggests that things would've been better if he hadn't been locked up for life, because he wasn't locked up for life.
The question here is whether we should have capital punishment or not. Texas had capital punishment, and McDuff still managed to kill those 14 people. The story doesn't imply what you're arguing it does.
Not quite, but that does bring up an issue inherent in the death penalty: if you can deprive a criminal of his life without valid justification, then this damages the claim that we have the right to life generally. This hurts all of us.That's like KatNotKathy arguing that the death penalty carries the risk of executing guilty people.
I didn't say it was better. My point is that it's better for a wrongly-convicted person to have 50 years to secure his release than to have only 5.Didn't say it was... but why is it better for an innocent person to die in prison after 50 years than after 5? Is he any less innocent? Is he any less dead?