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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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