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What I got wrong about the death penalty [1]

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Date: 2023-03-17  

As soon as I was old enough to have an opinion on the subject, I was in favor of the death penalty. It seemed simple enough to me: if a person intentionally kills someone, that person should be killed. So what if innocent people are executed by mistake? People die in car accidents too. That’s not a reason to ban cars, that’s a reason to make cars safer and try not to have so many accidents.

Harsh, right? I totally did type that first paragraph out with my own two hands. Today, my stance is that the death penalty should not be an option. It’s not like I ever have warm sentimental feelings about the life of a serial killer or a terrorist. It’s just bad public policy, and it should be abolished.

What soured me on the death penalty first was states like Texas handling capital cases in a sloppy manner. In my mind, a murderer should only be executed if it was 100% certain that he did it. State governments just were not meeting this standard.

So I came to the opinion that only the federal government should impose the death penalty. You know, for those cases where somebody kills a lot of people? This was Hillary Clinton’s stance on the death penalty when she was a candidate.

It was ultimately TFG who got me to adopt Joe Biden’s stance on capital punishment. Did you know that between the moment the Superspreader-in-Chief lost the 2020 election and the time that he finally reluctantly left the White House, six people were executed by the federal government? Three of those executions happened between J6 and Inauguration Day. With everything else that was at stake in that time period, Cult 45 still found the time and energy to put those people to death. I don’t even feel sorry for those dead murderers, I just find it astounding that is what Von Clownstick’s priorities were. For that alone, no Democrat should support the death penalty ever again.

To be sure, most people who support the death penalty aren’t Democrats. Some of them just really like the idea of executions, and there isn’t much you can say to change their minds. The more reasonable (but less informed) death penalty supporters seem to believe one or more of the following:

1. The death penalty is cheaper than life without parole. Except the lengthy appeals process makes the death penalty more expensive than keeping an inmate locked up for the rest of his life.

2. Execution eliminates the possibility of escape. Which is undeniably true, except prisoners wait around on death row for so long that they often become too old to become credible escape risks. Besides, since the first ADMAX prison opened in the 90’s, not one inmate has ever escaped from one.

3. The death penalty is the ultimate deterrent. In the twisted minds of would-be killers, the death penalty is an incentive. Because if you truly value your own life, you already don’t want to be a killer. A federal death sentence can be scene as a Nobel Prize for Terrorism, the rare kind of dubious honor that only a madman would crave. Since the possibility of being killed by the government clearly does not faze these people, we have to conclude that it actually might be a goal for some of them.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/17/2158672/-What-I-got-wrong-about-the-death-penalty

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