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Comment by ivalm | Hacker News Reader

At some point we should either give them life imprisonment or accept that if they are free to go then they paid their debt and need to be reintegrated (obviously if they did sex offences against minors then don’t put them in jobs with high contact to minors).

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> At some point we should either give them life imprisonment or accept that if they are free to go then they paid their debt and need to be reintegrated (obviously if they did sex offences against minors then don’t put them in jobs with high contact to minors).

If lasting penalties are right for sex offenses against minors, why are they wrong for everything else?

No death penalty if nitrogen hypoxia were the method?

I’m against death penalty because:

1. False conviction rate is unacceptably high

2. It’s financially similarly burdensome to do life imprisonment as death penalty

3. Presence of death penalty doesn’t seem to impact homicide rates

I am all for putting some people in prison and never letting them out (because of high chance of recidivism).

These are bad reasons to be against the death penalty. Even if the state were always perfectly correct, the right to life is the most basic of human rights and the state should not deprive anyone, including criminals, of human rights.

Jail already deprives people of human rights. I'm still against the death penalty though.

Is there any standard of evidence that could merit the death penalty?

Should people be able to choose it over a life sentence?

IMHO nitrogen would significantly bring that cost down

The problem of cost is not the drugs, but the lengthy process to ensure that it's not a false conviction, and even with the current lengthy process it's still really not good enough.

Should people be able to choose it? In general I'm all for assisted suicide, but I worry that it could be done coercively.

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