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Comment by beervirus | Hacker News Reader

Lots of countries have laws that are abhorrent to us. Death penalty for weed, death penalty for being gay, etc.

The article is about the relative opposition to this policy in Malaysia, compared to in many other countries where these things are banned and heavily penalized, and therefore the possibility that this man will become a "cause celebre" for changing the regulation around medical marijuana.

... death penalty for anything is pretty much a sign for a barbaric society.

There will always be a tiny sliver of the population who prove themselves unsuitable/unable/unsafe to live freely with society and that society has to deal with them somehow.

Whether it’s better to lock them away to suffer an isolated existence for life or sentence them to die is a matter that can be debated I think, as both paths have elements that are more terrible than the other.

Locking them away might sound better, but remember the state has to pay for them until they die, which really sucks.

What really sucks is killing someone that we find out later was not guilty. One of the many problems with the death penalty is that it's permanent.

Locking someone away wrongly for a year or twenty years is also permanent in that they can’t get that life/time back, even if they’re still alive when found not guilty. It’s just permanent and slightly smaller, but still a horrific theft IMO.

Agreed. I hope nothing in my original comment makes anyone think otherwise.

Not at all; I do think some people imagine "life without parole" is somehow safer or lower-risk than the death penalty.

Weighing economic costs against a human's right to live looks like a very strong indicator for a barbaric society to me. Although I'm aware that this is done (implicitly) in probably all societies to some degree.

It's a good thing the extra rigor applied to death penalty usage in the US causes it to be more expensive than life imprisonment. Giving the state a fiscal incentive to execute would be heinous.

When you get down to it, every country has the death penalty for something.

Don't believe the Netherlands does? Try shooting into a crowd of police officers over there.

What an idiot comment. I don't understand why people make such obviously and easily verifiably false claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Neth...

There is no capital punishment.

They're saying that you'll be shot on the spot and left to bleed out, not that you'll be arrested tried and then executed.

I couldn't tell either fwiw but that's an interesting point; sounds more like a suicide method than an act of state punishment though

Urgh I missed that, but I maintain that his comment is firmly "idiot comment" material as it's pretty obvious that the context is about capital punishment and not getting into a gunfight.