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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

The death penalty does not dissuade future offenders from committing crimes. It does not teach us about why those crimes are committed, either. With the death penalty, you create a society of anger, hatred, revenge, and violence. You improve nothing.

Its only purpose is revenge, and that has no place in our legal system.

Instead, this criminal should be removed from society so he no longer does harm (jail), and it should be studied why he committed those crimes, and we should attempt to rehabilitate to learn more about how to build a better society.

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I don't think we should have a death penalty, so I don't agree with the parent either. However, pretty much all the data we have on the efficacy of the death penalty relates to one crime, murder, and even then it's under a narrow range of conditions. I don't think you can reliably take those findings and apply them to e.g. white-collar corruption.

I'd say that if ones white collar corruption is directly linked to deaths of uninvolved people (disregarding clear cut advice from scientists that results in a major catastrophe - the example could be a landslide into a reservoir in italy mentioned in the mosul dam thread [sorry but im on mobile]) If one's egregious disregard or maybe incompetence results in something like that I am not too concerned with executing them

The death penalty can have two purposes:

1) First, fear is a motive to not commit those crimes. 2) Second, it's purpose can be to completely get rid of the evil that he or she was. If you kill the person, there's no more of his evil. Wealthy or powerful evil people can have devastating and evil effects on so many people, and so it might not be worth keeping them alive.

If killing people is evil, which it is, because you can never ever be convinced of a truly righteous killing (there is always doubt), then killing a person does not remove all evil. It may reduce evil, depending on whether the murder of the person is as evil as the actions the person committed, but it never completely removes evil.

I believe in truly righteous killing. Killing hitler is righteous, is it not? Even though it might have been a suicide.

fair enough, but killing can never be performed ethically by a state actor. Unless it is in self defense or an act of war, in which case the morality varies with the situation.

This. As GP mentioned, we pit them in jail as an attempt to remove them from society.

If you or your family have enough money (and we're not even talking about the billionaire, or even tens-of-millionaires here, but far smaller sums of cash), prison is merely a speed bump.

My anecdotal experience is that 1 is simply not true.

In this case the death penalty is to ensure silence.

Locking him up would mean keeping an enemy of the state alive, an enemy with powerful friends and a very large bag of dirty laundry.

This isn't justice (this is Iran were talking about after all it's judicial system is a joke) this is spring cleaning, the sanctions have been lifted so he isn't needed anymore.

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