Death Penalty

In attacking your first argument... Contrary to the statistics, common sense has it that it costs much more to keep someone in the prison system for life than it does to kill them. What costs so much about the death penalty is in how we exercise it; it is the media coverage, the methods we use, the detailed trials. These are not necessary for the death penalty to be exercised. I ask you to think for yourself of some of the much cheaper ways to judge and kill people. I imagine, you’ve already thought of several. The true price of the death penalty, as with most things, comes from bureaucracy and all the pretences of society. No to say that these pretences are entirely false. The central problem posed to the judicial system is that of definitive proof, ensuring that our actions are justified and right; without the expense processes of our system, you may ask, how can we assure that innocent people are not convicted under false judgements? We value human life so when do we ever have the right to suspend it? In self-defence? Recompense? Albert Camus said ‘no cause justifies the death of the innocent’ (1); he said nothing of the sort about the guilty. Sure, it might have been a great injustice when innocent people like George Stinney or Derek Bentley suffered the death penalty without having committed their crimes. Yet, with a qualification of certainty, knowing guilt, does the death penalty suddenly become acceptable? Either it is moral or immoral (I again refer you to the hypocritical nature of US foreign policy, devaluing individual terrorist lives because of their assumed guilt). I see no reason why innocence should matter to your claim that the death penalty is intrinsically immoral as a practice. To this I offer a simple challenge: given that man is a truculent animal, why is murder wrong? If you cannot prove murder immoral, then you have to concede all of your arguments. Why do you have a right to live? I see no reason why those who are caught in the act in US law cannot be put under the death penalty (providing their normative sanity and right-mindedness). Or, if the evidence is so overwhelming, that there is no possibility of error in their conviction—why not face them with life’s precipice? These scenarios I have presented would allow for the death penalty to occur under some circumstances, getting around your problem of those innocent people it has unintentionally murdered believing them guilty. I see the problem of expenses as a problem of how our judicial framework uses the death penalty instrumentally. I could hit someone over the head with a spade for virtually nothing to the same ends having judged them for their crime. What is left is proving it immoral to murder, which I leave to you. But, to help you out, I’d like to remind you that comments like, ‘it is bad for society’ or ‘it infringes our human freedom’ do not prove it immoral. The first suggests that if one was outside of society (say living off-grid) it is morally permissible murder. The latter presupposes the unfounded human right to ‘freedom’ or another right, the assumed right to our bodies. Transcendental rights or morals, beyond nature, I will treat with nothing but incredulity. The intuitive argument as I understand it usually goes as this:P1 I don’t want to die P2 Killing others means it is more likely that I create a climate in which I might die C Killing others is against my desire not to die Perhaps, you might say, we have a natural love for our fellow man. To which I would respond, we also have a natural hatred of our fellow man and desire to dominate and survive him. As horrible and as irreversible as death is, Voltaire wrote that ‘all animals are perpetually at war; every species is born to devour another’. History will show that man is not an exception. Murder is a mundane occurrence whether occurring abroad in foreign conflict or at the end of a trial. (1) https://books.google.co.uk... (p147)(2) http://www.bartleby.com... In defence of my own argument, I of course extend my point. If murder isn't in a utopia, you have to prove that murder is wrong. This of course pertains to a defence of the Hippocratic Oath as well. In regards to solitary confinement, they do not reflect about their actions for their lifetime. In many cases, the tedium of the cell brings them to self-destructive behaviours and limited cognitive and physical ability. It is true that books and activism can abate some of these symptoms. But, could you imagine being locked up in a cell every day for 22-24 hours a day? The justice system doesn't 'correct injustices'. What is justice but a judgement just as fallacious as death penalty judgements? Understaffed, overpopulated and underfunded, prisons harms and do not reform convicts. It beats them down in adverse conditions and conditions so poor, rioting is frequent and then releases them into an environment where employers reject them, encouraging their recidivism. In the case of the Angola Three (Black Panthers in solitary confinement for over 30 years) the two on the outside suffer still from the deleterious effects of institutionalisation. https://www.theguardian.com...