Yes, I'm reasonably well-read on the subject. I don't deny that these people do exist. Rather, I argue that the "killing is worse than perpetual imprisonment because the later can be rescinded" argument is weak.

This is because either way, people's lives are being ruined. There are a great many people who have been freed from jail only to continue suffering on the outside as a direct result of their incarceration.

Incidentally, I think you've made some assumptions about my position on capital punishment that are mistaken...

EDIT: I seem to have been unclear and this is causing a lot of visceral reactions. Yes, it's worse to be wrongfully killed than wrongfully incarcerated for life (or incarcerated for some length of time and then released). The argument is that it's still close enough that the argument of irreversibility should apply (IMHO) to life sentences. As such, I don't think this is a very strong argument against capital punishment. As an auxiliary point: I think there are other, much stronger arguments against CP. tl;dr: a life sentence is bad enough that the irreversibility argument should apply to it as well.

Nobody is going to argue that lives aren't being ruined, but you said the difference between being killed and being freed after a decade is marginal, which is almost too ridiculous to respond to.

It's one argument of many, but it's useful for people who think capital punishment is morally justified, but don't want innocent people killed.

> The argument is that it's still close enough that the argument of irreversibility should apply (IMHO) to life sentences.

That doesn't make sense. While irreversibility is, in fact, an absolute trait of a death sentence, the irreversibility argument is an argument about the relative features of death sentences vs. life imprisonment.

Its true that any imprisonment includes some harms that are (or some probability of harm that is) irreversible, those harms can stop being compounded at any time during the imprisonment by terminating the imprisonment -- as has been done, in fact, not only for innocence but for other causes -- and, even while irreversible, can in some cases be compensated for in some extent, which also (though more rarely) occurs.

To the extent either of those can happen in the case of death sentences, it is only because death sentences are, in practice, sentences to long-but-indefinite terms of imprisonment followed by death, and the imprisonment portion of that sentence behaves exactly like any other sentence of imprisonment. (And note that death sentence proponents often argue that this feature of the death sentence is, itself, a misfeature imposed by resistance to the death penalty which should ideally be eliminated.)

I think the parent is right that society should not regard life sentences and capital punishment differently with regard to permanency. Yes on an individual level, there exists the possibility of reversing a life sentence any time prior to the inmates death, but I think it's wrong for society to regard a life sentence as somehow a "less serious" sentence than a death sentence. Yes there are some innocent people serving life sentences whose convictions are overturned before their death -- but there are also some innocent people sentenced to the death penalty who are freed prior to execution.

We cannot ignore that there are also innocent people who are sentenced to life in prison -- who die in prison. From the perspective of maximum damage, surely society has harmed these people (and their families) more than it harms the innocents who are executed.

So, do all of those people released from life imprisonment feel they'd be better off if they'd been killed?