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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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So like... why should there be a different appeal process for capital punishment vs. anything else?
Isn't guilty guilty? Shouldn't you have the same avenues of appeal, regardless of what the punishment is?
If that's the case, then wouldn't it be just as expensive to go through the appeal process for capital punishment as anything else?
There's a much more intense appeal process because you can't un-execute someone.
If some evidence turns up a decade later after someone has been imprisoned for life that proves them to be innocent, while you can't give them that time back, you can release them and give them a hefty sum of many to at least attempt to repay what you've wrongly taken from them. But if you murder them, and they turn out to be innocent, then the government has murdered a completely innocent person for no reason, and nothing can be done to ever make that right.
In a perfect legal system, I think most people would be okay with the death penalty for the most heinous crimes. But because death is a final judgement that cannot be reversed, it needs an absolutely perfect justice system. And er, I don't think anyone would accuse our justice system of being that.
So given that, it's much much cheaper to just keep people locked up, and it saves us a lot of money. The only thing lost is a kind of moral righteousness and satisfaction in seeing criminals die, which I'd personally say is one of our less noble instincts anyway.
Honestly, I'd be against capital punishment even in an absolutely infallible justice system. If someone absolutely cannot ever be trusted to return to society no matter what rehabilitative options are available, then locking them up indefinitely still accomplishes this, while also resulting in less death overall
I'd personally agree (and amusingly enough, so would the Catholic Church, though they weirdly don't talk about that as much as some other social issues).
Ultimately though, that's more a question of moral principles, which are a lot harder to argue and less persuasive than simply talking about cold hard cash.
The problem is an issue of cost. It's impossible to imprison someone for decades at a lower rate than executing them.
Executions are expensive, but they don't need to be. He mentioned the "appeal process," when I then said should be the same regardless of the punishment.
So... wouldn't the same thing occur for innocent people who die in prison? Nothing can ever be done to make it right. It's the same as sentencing them to death, only much slower and more expensive.
I don't know. I see most people against the death penalty saying that they don't support the death penalty because of some lofty "the government has no right to kill its citizens" principle. Not really based on anything, but it 'sounds nice' so I guess people go for it.
It doesn't need to be. It's at least possible to execute people for a cheaper price than imprisoning them. We just choose not to do it.
The essential difference is the ability for new evidence to come to light that exonerates the prisoner.
Simply put, there exist a non-trivial amount of people who were wrongfully imprisoned and later freed that would be dead now if we were looser with the death penalty. Some righteous bloodlust is not more valuable than their lives.
More simply, if you were wrongfully imprisoned, you'd probably be quite thankful for how hard it is to actually apply the death penalty. It's really that simple.