What does erk me though, is the amount of people willing to support the death penalty when they are unwilling to actually execute someone themselves, and I find it hard to believe that many of those who say they would, would be able to take a needle, jab it into her or him, while he or she begs for mercy, and the family watches.
This, I think, is a point to make. It takes a lot of something -- guts, determination, whatever you want to call it -- to actually take the path of the lesser evil, because it's much more
immediate. Condemning the irredeemable to a slow death via torture (read: incarceration) is a lot
easier than just killing them. The effect isn't as immediate, even though it's a
worse (To wit: Likely years of suffering, followed by death. As opposed to simply death, ideally as painless of one as possible.
It's a death sentence either way, one just takes longer and has more hardship before it.) "vengeance" than just killing is. For some reason, this lack of immediacy seems to sooth most people's moral misgivings about killing someone. It doesn't sooth mine, unfortunately, which is why I
do advocate execution
over lifetime imprisonment. To me, it's the more moral -- or at least less
immoral (if nothing else, the path of less harm) -- choice.
The genuine issue, as I see it, isn't about the killing of the irredeemable versus lifetime imprisonment (They're effectively the same thing, with the latter being crueler), it's about what the bloody hell the moral response to an irredeemably dangerous human being
is. We haven't found a (moral, anyway. Lobotomies or dismemberment might work!) way to make it so these people aren't a threat (and often a deadly one) to our communities, and so our moral compasses seem to implode.
The only options I can see are to fix the problem (i.e. neutralize whatever it is about the individual that makes them a threat) -- which we can't seem to do and can't afford to make a mistake in trying to do -- kill them quickly, or kill them
slowly. When confronted with a choice of unworkable, immoral but workable, and
more immoral but still workable, I can't see a rational choice to make besides option two, the choice of actual effectiveness and least harm.
It's a pisspoor situation, to say the least, and gods alive if only there was a 'workable but not immoral' option, but in a scenario where someone's been grievously harmed and the person who inflicted it is going to suffer (either through rehabilitation or death), I'd rather the net suffering be as little as possible and as thoroughly contained to the person who did the original harm as possible.
All that said, the Davis case did seem like a miscarriage of the legal system and it's damned enraging to see pissant technicalities put a human to death, especially one that, at least on the surface of things, looked innocent. But what to do about it? A person was just effectively murdered by the system, and the worse someone might be punished for it is disembarrment or (not life-time) imprisonment. We can (and should) try to prevent things like this from happening in the future, but for the present, how is that equitable? The effect (punishment) won't fit the cause (murder). Th'hell can a person genuinely do about this?
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Topic: Chill and Relaxed Progressive Irritation and Annoyance Thread (Read 871091 times)