Saturday, November 28, 2020

The Death Penalty and Exonerating the Innocent

 Although the death penalty is appealing in a lot of ways, it is irreversible, which means that if it turns out there is a miscarriage of justice and someone is executed for something they didn't do, nothing can be done about it. For 30 years Anthony Ray Hinton was on death row for a murder he didn't commit, until the Equal Justice Initiative picked up his case and got him exonerated. Knowing what I know about the tendency to rush to judgment, and the racism inherent in the justice system in our country, I have trouble trusting the system enough to retain the death penalty.



4 comments:

Kevin said...

I am also against the death penalty for largely the same reason, though I don't need racism to be a factor. The fact that an innocent man or woman of any skin color might be executed is reason enough to oppose it.

One Brow said...

Agreed. At the very least, there should be a higher standard for applying the death penalty than for less extreme punishments.

Victor Reppert said...

You end up with more appeals allowed because of this. But that means delayed executions, and it also means that victim's families have to relive the whole thing whenever there is a hearing, undermining the closure argument.

Starhopper said...

There is no justification whatsoever for the United States to continue having a death penalty. It does not make the public safer, since it is for all practical purposes impossible to escape from a maximum security prison nowadays. And if you're looking for commensurate punishment for a crime, life imprisonment seems (at least to me) a far worse fate than execution. Even from a fiscal standpoint, it has been proven time and time again that t is far more expensive to execute a person than it is to lock him up for life.

And from a Christian standpoint, life imprisonment at least allows a soul to repent, whilst execution may send him to perdition. That alone should sway the balance against capital punishment.