Other important work done:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/
edit: sad to see this thread flagged off the homepage.
Why, in your view, is it much worse for the state to jail an innocent person for a long time (say, their entire adult life) instead of killing them?
Don't succumb to the Nirvana fallacy here - for sure, the American justice system has many more serious flaws than just the death penalty, and those won't be fixed right away. But this is a step in the right direction and worth taking even if many other problems still remain.
People coming out of jail after 10 years of imprisonment are used to the original iphone as the only smartphone. They don't know about Uber, Venmo, Bitcoin, Amazon and Google have both changed dramatically. Now you need an EZPass for most roads, healthcare laws are different, they missed the whole Snowden ordeal. Weed is borderline legal, gay marriage is legal, etc etc.
Things have changed a lot in the past 10 years. If you weren't allowed to keep up with it, you probably don't know how to navigate society anymore.
Their failure to adapt is our failure as a society to prepare them. By imprisoning them we become their guardians and stewards, we are responsible.
Yes, this costs money but it helps to reduce recidivism and in general is a good thing to do.
You don't know of anybody who has never been imprisoned who is managing to live their life without interacting with any of the things you've mentioned?
If not, I would recommend enlarging your circle of contact.
This isn't trolling. If you don't know how to use modern tech, it's going to be harder to socialize, especially if you are in a city (as they tend to adopt tech faster).
If even a person has successfully rejected some tech (maybe Facebook, maybe smartphones), it's doubtful that they've rejected all tech and if they have they've developed skills for living without it among people who otherwise expect them to have it.
I might be overstating this on a timeline of one decade, but it gets much worse on a timeline of 20 years.
20 years means you were likely using Windows 95. Texting wasn't a thing. Phones didn't have "apps". Banks didn't have websites. The average person's job had a lot less tech in it.
Can you survive? Sure, but your options are a lot more limited compared to someone who knows how to use the tech of the 21st century.
There are far worse consequences to being jailed for 10 years or more than not to be able to use a cell phone or the latest social media fad.
How do you compensate someone for being imprisoned (and likely raped) from the age of 28 to 45?
In many cases, the death penalty is more humane.
The you might as well kill all prisoners because it is more humane, after all where would you draw the line, 5 years, 10 years, 15 or 20, it's all time that has passed.
Compensation should be of such a magnitude that it incentivizes society to make sure it happens as little as possible.
But the degree to which it is worse (and whether it is enough to ban the death penalty) seems quite subjective.
Seems to me that you could use an identical line of reasoning to conclude that prison sentences longer than N years should be banned.
Is it a matter of degree? Or is there something fundamentally different about the death penalty that warrants a ban?
After someone has been executed, nobody pursues the case anymore.
Neither does killing people with drones...
It is a war crime. That doesn't mean any drone wielders will ever be brought to justice, but the same goes for all those Blackwater (oh, sorry 'Xe', oh, sorry 'Academi', it's hard to keep track of these scumbags) contractors during the Iraq war.
War crimes as a rule will only see their day in court if they are committed by relatively powerless people on the losing side of some conflict. Otherwise you're probably in worse shape shoplifting or stealing a car.
Heck, America doesn't even subscribe to the international tribunal for warcrimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Internat...
And they're the main users of drones for killing people in countries they are not formally at war with.
This is just the tip of the criminal iceberg in the US. But crime is really the wrong word when the people who commit and order the crime and those who protect them are the same people who write and enforce the laws.
If you want to gouge a society's level of civilization, look at their prisons. What sets humanity apart is the ability of reason to control instinct. It has taken us from beast to philosopher to The Weather Channel, and its measure is how we treat those everyone hates.
In other words: those over which society wields a lot of power who do not have much power of their own.
Your life was taken, and no one can give it back.
It's a difference of degree only, not kind.
While the innocence project has saved many innocent people, it's important to remember that they also are wrong sometimes.