3H1P: Death Penalty

3H1P is a blogging project wherein three heathens (Ziztur, Flimsy and Petter) and one pastor (Keith) answer questions posed by readers of the blog and discuss various issues related to religion, philosophy, science, etc. If you have a question that you’d like to see answered by 3H1P, ask it in the comment box. We promise we’ll probably get to it. The following comment is asked by David B. Ellis, a long time reader/commenter of this blog, who apparently has 3 blogs of his own. It is answered (sort of) by Ziztur.

1. Do you advocate the death penalty? Why or why not?

    -David B. Ellis

First, let’s talk about what exactly the death penalty is, in the context of United States law:

In the US, federal policy reserves capital punishment for murder, treason or espionage. Of the 38 states that allow capital punishment, it is done primarily for murder of varying severities. I don’t think people should die because they’ve committed an act of treason or espionage, and the reasons behind why someone might commit treason or espionage may or may not be moral (think of committing treason against the Nazi party…), so I’ll focus on capital punishment for murder, and ignore the other reasons for capital punishment for now.

Here are some of the common justifications for advocating the death penalty for murder:

1. The death penalty serves as a deterrent to crime.

Bullshit. States without the death penalty have constantly lower murder rates. Clearly people are not being deterred.

1. It improves the community by making sure that convicted criminals do not offend again.

Bullshit. There are other ways of doing that which do not involve killing people.

1. It provides closure to surviving victims or loved ones.

Bullshit. “Closure” is not a commodity that should be purchased with death. Really. If someone murdered Flimsy in his sleep, I would surely want them to die. But this is an emotional reaction and not a rational reaction.

1. And eye for an eye is just.

Maybe. I don’t find this argument very compelling either. Without even arguing for whether or not “eye for eye” is just or not, one can point out that coupling the permanence of death the with capacity for humans to make mistakes, there is a very real possibility that we may, in the course of convicting someone and sentencing them to death, wrongly kill someone. If we take the life of someone, we’ve taken all that they have away from them, forever. Personally, I think that a life in prison is a worse fate than death.

1. It’s expensive to keep people in prison forever. It therefore costs less to eliminate murderers from society.

One could argue that it’s not.

So basically, I do not find the arguments for the death penalty compelling, and so I do not advocate the death penalty.