The mistake isn't worth someone's life.
I personally do not agree with the death penalty (and live in a country without it) not because mistakes happen because murder is wrong, whether it's state sponsored or not. The fact that mistakes do happen just makes it even more ludicrous to me that ANYONE supports the death penalty.
This is the entire reason people petition against the death penalty.
IMHO, capital punishment should be so rare that it makes the news, and also sets a deterrent for future criminals wishing to do something similar.
> I firmly believe that some people have to pay the ultimate price for their deeds, but I insist that these people should have so much evidence pointing them to having done the act that there is no possible way that they could be innocent.
I would say that condition is 100% impossible to meet, and would present that as an argument against the death penalty.
> also sets a deterrent for future criminals wishing to do something similar.
This does not exist. At least, it has not been reliably shown that this exists. The intensity of the punishment for a crime has not been shown to correlate with the number of criminals committing the crime. There have been studies that show both results (that increasing punishment decreases future crime, and that it doesn't).
You cannot base real ideas on the assumption that the death penalty will deter potential future murders. There's no reason to believe that's the case.
Without getting into the pro/con discussion, that doesn't sound right to me. I was under the impression that the vast majority of criminal cases were complete walk-overs: You have weapon, forensics, motive, opportunity, confession and what not all aligning perfectly.
By a stroke of tautology, we never hear about them because they are boring.
Or at the other end of the spectrum: Where is the wiggle-room for less than 100% certain guilt in the Anders Behring Breivik case in Norway?
I would say that condition is 100% impossible to meet, and would present that as an argument against the death penalty.
Exactly my point. So it'd be so rare that you'd never hear of it happening.
Regardless of people's moral/religious/practical stance on capital punishment, it is never a black and white issue. If anything, there exists only a grey area. I can always find someone who vehemently disagrees with capital punishment, but then makes exceptions to the rule in the most heinous of violations (killing of family, children, cultures).
My Google skillz are failing me but there is a famous quote from a judge ruling on obscenity laws. It went something like: "I know obscenity when I see it". For me, this is the same issue with capital punishment. The worst part is that you can't write laws based on that type of subjective judgement.
What you're asking for is a two-tiered system of guilt. In one tier the convicts are Definitely Guilty, while in the other tier the convicts are Definitely Definitely Guilty.
I don't believe a system like that is stable. Every juror who convicted Carlos DeLuna (or Cameron Todd Willingham) did so with a very firm belief in their guilt.
For example, right now, in one of India's jails lies a man named Ajmal Kasab. He is one of the terrorists involved in the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. He was caught on tape mercilessly killing people with his AK47.
If you do away with the death penalty entirely, how do you execute this fucker and others like him?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks
Edit: A lot of people asking similar questions. So I'll just answer them here.
Being identified by eye-witnesses and being caught on camera are not the same thing. People make mistakes while remembering. Cameras don't. Further, he was apprehended by the army/police in the middle of his killing spree. There is NO WAY it was someone else.
Handing him a life imprisonment just puts the system at risk. It will just lead to terrorists resorting to kidnap to release him as has been done in the past. A well known example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Airlines_Flight_814
The criminal system isn't for punishment. It's for reform. It's not to 'get back' at people, it's to help integrate people back into society and act as a deterrent to stop crime in the first place. You're not trying to 'execute this fucker and others like him', you're trying to figure out what's wrong, how you can reform (if possible), and deter other crimes like it. If you're just executing it's a hell of a deterrence, but you're not reforming at all.
Remember the Oslo masscare? Read up on the perpetrator and his sentence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
There's a big difference between somebody who's medically declared insane and a member of a terrorist organisation who killed people as his masters wanted for the sole purpose of creating terror.
The death penalty is the ultimate irreversible penalty. Don't you think it's better to give people life in prison instead of death.
You should read up about the death penalty as a deterrent. Do you really think Ajmal expected to even get out of the mission alive? Do you think he didn't know about the death penalty if he managed to escape alive.
Every person ever convicted is, in theory, because there was enough conclusive proof. Mistakes will always happen.
To me, that's absurd on its face. Such persons are beyond reason. Don't forget, amongst this group are suicide bombers.
In the U.S. at least, its widely accepted that the death penalty is not a deterrent for murder, much less terrorism.[1]
[1]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/files/DeterrenceStudy2009.pd...)
Its one thing to die a hero another to sit in a cell for forty years in your own filth.
You may argue that it is a false dichotomy, but I disagree, because the people who will kill to get their compadres released will adjust their tactics until they find the lever that works.
I agree that it would probably be fairly tough to institute in a democratic country. But I think it could be doable in a reasonably (but realistically!) rational country. The long-term effect should be a vast reduction in the quantity of kidnappings, since you render them ineffectual.
Such policies are already implemented sporadically. Look at various navies' responses to Somali pirates and their hostage-taking, or the way the US negotiates (or, rather, doesn't) with the occasional terrorist who kidnaps a US citizen and threatens to behead them.
As for Ajmal, I wouldn't want him to be executed simply because that is probably what he expected.
what