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Re:Capital Punishment: The end of the death penalty by mistermann on Saturday May 30, 2015 @12:06AM (#9628907)
> If the death penalty was done like jury duty, where citizens were asked to take turns being executioners nobody except the deranged would agree to it.

I don't know, if I had the details and felt confident that the person was indeed guilty, I don't think it would cause me much anguish to push the button. However, if I didn't agree with the jury's decision of guilt, forcing that person to do it would be extremely inhumane, it could ruin your life.

Re:Capital Punishment: The end of the death penalty by derefr on Saturday May 30, 2015 @12:38AM (#9628999)
That's an interesting thought. Imagine if you needed the same jury of twelve people who were present at the trial, to all push a button simultaneously in order to mete out whatever punishment they had decided was fair. (Anyone other than those twelve might be acting on bias or stereotype due to a lack of information about the case, after all.)

In fact, to go a bit further with this—imaging that ongoing punishment required getting this group of people back together at regular intervals and getting them all to push the button again. (For example, meting out a lifetime prison sentence one year, or one month, at a time.) It isn't meant to cause re-evaluation due to the meeting being a hassle, so maybe they could just do this online—but it should cause re-evaluation of whether each juror still feels as strongly about the person's sentence now as they did before.

One could even imagine a situation where any capitol punishment would be measured in QALYs, and then the jury each have to do that many man-years of confirming in order to apply the punishment. (Thus, applying a sentence of death to an eighteen-year-old would require decades of total work, or years per juror.) That seems about the right weight upon one's conscience. It would also mean you'd probably never be able to do jury duty more than once in your life.