The Death Penalty Ought to be Banned

You make an excellent argument against the death penalty - this should be a very interesting debate... I'll keep to your three objections and try to respond to your points in them. A. It's Cruel and Unusual. >>"Ought being a moral term, not legal" That is an unwarranted assertion, considering the system that determines cruelty and unusual-ness is a legal system. Determination of cruel and unusual must stem from a legal and objective source rather than a moral ideology. What is moral for one person may not be for another... case in point - polygamy is usually considered immoral, but used to be perfectly fine according to Mormonism. Such division cannot be present in a courtroom. >>"It's cruel because it's a terrible way to die. The victim is made a spectacle of, with the death audienced by political figures and journalists. The victim is tied down and forcibly injected with poison. The victim is given months, perhaps years, for the weight of impending extinction, a hopeless type of wait where life loses meaning since it's a death that cannot be deflected. And of course it's cruel because it's a view shared by many in both America and abroad." The way people die isn't what the issue here is. You're arguing that lethal injection is cruel - not that capital punishment is cruel. I'm interested in capital punishment on its face, not how it's applied. The point you make about waiting around is a failure of the judicial system. A death sentence should be carried out immediately upon deliverance. Granted, there should be some leave for appeal, but if there is a unanimous decision by the jury, there is no reason the criminal should not be killed within an hour of leaving the court room, and certainly not more than 24 hours. Again - you're arguing specifics, whereas I'm interested in talking about capital punishment on it's face. Lastly, I'm not sure why many people viewing something as cruel makes it objectively so... many people view nature as cruel, but that does not make it objectively cruel or evil. Perhaps cruelty can be granted as a social construct, but then again, capital punishment as a deterrent and necessary evil is part of that social contract the public has implicitly signed. >>"It's unusual because we are the Only Western Democracy where the death penalty is legal. Most nations with governments and laws heavily influenced by the Enlightenment ideals of Locke or Montesquieu, have eschewed the death penalty, making its use in America therefore unusual." In the global scope, it's not unusual. There are three competitors for the Global Hegemony - the US, the EU, and China. In the US and China, the death penalty is legal, and in China, it's a powerful deterrent to crime. One can easily argue that the reason it's not more powerful in the US is because we're pretty wishy-washy about implementing it. As far as Enlightenment philosophy, why are these philosophers so much more valuable than Eastern philosophers that we need to follow them to the exclusion of other ideologies? America is the melting pot, both of culture and philosophy. Our practices are not unusual simply because other Western democracies don't do what we do. Other WD's do a LOT of stuff we don't do, and we call them unusual... who's right? B. Innocent People Die >>"People are convicted of crimes, including capital crimes, on a regular basis. But despite everything possible to ensure a fair system where criminals are convicted only when the evidence is convincing beyond all reasonable doubt, let's face it, the jury, even when there's 12 of them, are still only human. Of the inmates on death roll today, how many are guilty? Most of them probably, but for the State, which exists to protect the people, to execute an innocent individual? That's a monstrosity. A perversion of what the State stands for." Yes, indeed, they are still human, and in principle, I agree that the execution of innocents is a pervasion of the duties of the State. However, the flaw here is not in capital punishment, but in the state's application of it. A simple solution to this problem would be to only allow the execution of criminals that either plead guilty or receive a unanimous jury verdict by a jury larger than 12... We can never eliminate the uncertainty from the system, but after a point, there's nothing more that CAN be done to ensure that there are NO innocents being harmed by the state. When capital punishment is blamed for the death of an innocent, it is akin to blaming the gun for killing a man, while ignoring the other man that fired it. Take away the gun, and you save the innocent man, but make it easier for other, NOT innocent men to take advantage of the man you take it from. >>"Life sentences increases the likelihood of innocent convicts being vindicated." It also increases the likelihood that my taxes will be used to keep a convicted child molester or rapist or sociopathic killer alive. I'm not going to pay for that if I don't have to. C. It improves our relationship with other Western Democracies. >>"The furthering of relations with the European Union is worth more than killing a few hundred inmates who might be innocent isn't it? What's more important, the economic health of America / potential allies for our impending invasion of Iran? Or the lethal injections of potentially innocent falsely convicted Americans who would otherwise be imprisoned and kept safely away from society even if they were guilty?" The EU and the US are sufficiently close that our having a death penalty won't really affect the relationship, either positively or negatively, so the point is kind of moot. As far as economic health is concerned, we need to be more focused on pleasing China than the EU - after all, China is the most favored trade partner, not the EU. While I dread the day we invade Iran if we indeed do, the EU will not help regardless of the situation. We MIGHT get help from the UK, Danes, Poles, and maybe Canada if we're lucky... NATO will not sanction another invasion in the Middle East, and the UN security council will never give us a go-ahead for it either. France and China will be diametrically opposed to it, and the international community will be highly displeased as a whole... So actually, balanced against the evidence you present for pleasing the rest of the West, it's actually not that compelling that we should stop using capital punishment. You present the alternative of life imprisonment... I assume that means with no chance of getting out on good behavior and no chance they'll escape. In a properly structured system, that should be FAR more expensive than simply killing a killer, and that's kind of a problem for me as a taxpayer - I'd just as soon kill the killer than keep him alive.