Transcript
Alabama suffocated a man to death in a gas chamber tonight after starving him so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit as they did it. And this was deemed perfectly legal by multiple courts in the vaunted American legal system.
That’s what happens when you value institutions over people.
Link for more info: https://www.reuters.com/legal/alabama-prepares-carry-out-first-execution-by-nitrogen-asphyxiation-2024-01-25/
That’s easy to answer. Justice is not perfect, and sooner or later you will execute an innocent person. We know this has happened in the UK, because DNA evidence proved that the person couldn’t have been there, and they would have been released had they not been executed.
Death is final and you don’t just respawn at your bed, so this is the worst possible outcome. Abolishing the death penalty avoids this terrible situation, and yes it means you keep people like this alive until their natural death, but it also maximises the chance that new evidence can be found that proves that person didn’t in fact commit the crime.
Sure I’m sympathetic to that argument. I’ve recently looked up lists of some of the people that most likely were found innocent post execution.
But what if we had stricter criteria. What about the people we are absolutely certain, with witnesses and camera footage, are guilty of murder? I’m specifically thinking of people like Nikolas Cruz, a school shooter who killed 17?
That’s the dilemma. The thing is, when we last executed an innocent, we believed we had absolute incontrovertible proof. We have always known a death sentence to be final.
Maybe this argument will win the day: The value of human life is so high, and the execution of an innocent is so terrible, that we convert the death sentence to life imprisonment for the benefit of all those that will later be proven innocent. And yes this means some genuine criminals will live, but that is a better price to pay than executing even one innocent. The death penalty will ALWAYS have some collateral damage, and the only way to avoid that is to abolish it.
In Cruz’s case of course another significant aspect is the lack of sensible gun control. But you Americans value guns more than you value kids, and until that changes you’ll be stuck with your Cruzes. Killing Cruz for a systemic failure is no solution.
Then it’s still a bad idea because of the literal cost to taxpayers.
Life in prison is $70,000 per year (paid by taxpayers, of course).
The legal battle around the death penalty is around $1.12 million, also paid around taxpayers
https://www.cato.org/blog/financial-implications-death-penalty
That’s 14 times more expensive.
There are tons of things I would see the state spend money on rather than literally killing people. In the case of this, maybe mental health help for the victims.