For many, myself included, there is no "other than that." My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible and there's too many documented cases where executed prisoners were likely wrongfully convicted.
I could perhaps support capital punishment if we had a higher level of guilt we could establish in our legal system reserved only where the evidence is entirely(!) unequivocal for particularly heinous crimes. I don't know exactly what that means, and is probably just another bad idea.
I am very much in favor of executing the worst criminals but I find myself generally against the death penalty due to the risk of executing an innocent person. I am conflicted and find myself moving back and forth on this topic.
Ah, this meme again.
I have no problem with the reasoning "it's irreversible" in itself. However, I wonder how many of the people repeating it are just mindlessly parroting something they heard, sounded good, and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds.
Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years is also irreversible. There is nothing you can do to reverse the fact that you unjustly stole 40 years from someone's life. Are you then also against prison terms of 40 years, given that they're irreversible? What about 20 years? What about 1 year? Those are all irreversible.
Now you can say that it's a matter of degree. Sure it is, but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?
You are using linguistic tricks to make a bad argument.
The fact that the past is immutable doesn’t mean that things can’t be reversed.
If you’re planning your day in the morning and you decide you’re going to have chicken tonight, you can never change the fact that you decided that you’re going to have chicken, but you can choose to not have chicken.
One way to stop yourself from making these sorts of bad linguistic arguments is to ask yourself, “does my argument mean that a word has essentially no use or meaning?”
That applies here, because your argument basically makes “irreversible” a nearly useless word. Any time your argument is effectively making an adjective tautological, there is a problem. Because otherwise, why does the word exist?
> but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?
And now you have moved to making a like kind argument that the death penalty is essentially the same as a slap on the wrist, since the past is immutable.
Here is another opportunity for a sanity check on your argument.
When the state has executed someone, that person can never be apologized to. That person can never receive any sort of restitution. That person went to their death, very often in extreme physical agony. (Both electric chair and lethal injection have horrific failure rates on this. Firing squad, hanging, and guillotine are all much more humane). That person dies while a roomful of people who hate them watch through a pane of glass, sometimes cheering. They die, knowing that most people think of them as an awful person undeserving of pity, sympathy, or love.
“””It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.”””
To make an argument that this is essentially the same as any other punishment, even life in prison, is really kind of gross.
> and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds.
Sometimes more than 2 seconds is good, too.
Ugh. This comment starts out in bad faith and delivers the full way through using linguistic tricks as some sort of "gotcha". I actually find your comment kind of disturbing, even. The word "irreversible" seems to be sticking for you, so instead let me be more precise: the death penalty precludes the state from acting on new evidence which may change the course of action the state takes against the convicted person.
> Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years is also irreversible
Here's what you don't have to do: remind me or anyone else that we're all bound by time. Of course time lost cannot be recovered, this is not some great revelation you've stumbled upon. But until death there is an opportunity for the state to make a better decision - not undo them, not "make them right". A wrongfully-convicted person isn't dead, they still have a life to live.
> Are you also against life in prison?
I am against life sentences without the possibility for parole, and I am against any system of justice that does not allow for new evidence to be reviewed in favor of the convicted.
So you ARE aware that nothing is reversible? Bad faith.
>The rest of the world is letting crime run rampant on their streets through lenient sentencing...
There is extensive evidence that the severity of punishment has very little to no effect on crime rates. It's simply not something criminals generally consider when actually committing crimes.
Privatizing prison builds an economic model that incentivizes creating repeat offenders. Withholding or making rehabilitation unattainable for the majority benefits the prison, but offers zero benefit for America as a society.
On your second argument - if death penalty had the very least effect of turning people away from crime, USA would have much better crime stats than "rest of the western world". Most criminals operating at that level (murder, rape etc.) operate on the assumption that they will never be caught.