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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

From a practical aspect a lot of benefits for death penalties: 1) Low cost. No need for jails and their associated costs 2) Great scaling. You can kill as many as you want, but you cannot build a jail every day 3) Safe. People don’t come back to repeat their mistakes. 4) It’s the only language that many criminals speak and understand.

The downsides are of a moral nature and twofold:

1) We should not punish innocent people. As societies we consider this as a huge and irrecoverable loss (What if we executed Einstein). 2) The state should not have the right to take the lives of its citizens. (Literally numerous examples from history why this can end up really bad)

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I've heard the "1) Low Cost" is false. [1]. Mainly because it takes time and effort to actually execute someone, to give plenty of time to find evidence exonerating them. That delay and proceedings end up being way more expensive than just letting them live.

Re 2): Again from [1], I've heard executions are actually quite expensive. Thus, it doesn't scale well.

Re 3): It doesn't make me feel safe if somebody can frame me and get me killed. It makes me feel safer knowing I have time to prove my innocence.

Re 4): I am very skeptical of this claim. Any solid evidence for this being true? Anecdotal evidence shows the opposite. Most criminals don't have good long-term thinking skills, so they won't recognize the tradeoff between 40 years in prison and death, and use that to not commit a crime.

[1] John Oliver on death penalty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kye2oX-b39E

Arguably the USA should be granting all those same levels of appeal to someone NOT sentenced to death too.

If 4% on death row are innocent, despite all the extra appeals and proceedings we grant them, how many people serving life are innocent?

The idea that America is imprisoning innocents left and right but it's fine because at least they're not being executed is twisted to me. I would marginally prefer being alive to being imprisoned for life, but the latter is pretty terrible too.

The death penalty is extremely expensive ($1.26 million is the median [1]) and not low costs at all, where do you find it being cheap? I'm assuming you're referring to the United States?

[1] https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt....

Can be done for free if you are a good demagogue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_drug_war#Early_mo...

If the US us worried about cost, maybe they could stop throwing people in jail for non-violent drug charges -- particularly marijuana? That would reduce our prison cost a heck of a lot more than executing murderers, even if execution was much cheaper than lifetime imprisonment (which as others have pointed out, it's almost certainly not).

As much as I dislike the idea of a government killing someone for a crime, the cost and potential elimination of future trouble with an individual is tempting.

Assuming that we absolutely know that someone is guilt (ignoring how that would happen), it doesn't need to take years and millions of dollars to simply shoot someone.

Then there are the people who are not only a financial burden on society, they are actively making it worse, much worse. Sometimes we just sit back an wonder why even spend resources keep this person terrible person imprisoned for decades. People who have killed, raped or tortured and been in and out of jail multiple times, no we really need to keep them around?

Regardless of how much we may hate the idea of the death penalty, there is some cold, brutal logic to simply shooting someone.

> Sometimes we just sit back an wonder why even spend resources keep this person terrible person imprisoned for decades.

Because they're a human. Humans are capable of change. And killing a human "because it's expensive" is a barbaric mindset.

> Assuming that we absolutely know that someone is guilt (ignoring how that would happen), it doesn't need to take years and millions of dollars to simply shoot someone.

The years and the millions of dollars are spent establishing your premise.

Is there there, though? It might justify someone's perverted sense of justice but that's about it. There are many other people who might be considering not contributing anything to the society, but they haven't yet done anything egregious enough to warrant a death penalty, following this logic it's only logical to "just shot" them as well.

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