The weak and the strong argument against the death penalty.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

There are, essentially, two types of argument against the death penalty.

The former says that it's morally wrong to kill even those people who have committed horrible crimes - deliberately taking a human life, no matter how evil that human is and what they have done, should always be avoided whenever possible.

In general, these arguments strike me as weak. An awful lot of them revolve around emotive language rather than rational argument, and while occasionally you see them being presented in a more thoughtful and sophisticated fashion, I think they're still generally pretty unconvincing in the face of, say, Richard Ramirez or Fred West.

The second argument is that, since courts are operated by fallible mortals, if you ever execute anyone, you're sometimes going to get it wrong and execute innocent people.

I think this argument is essentially unanswerable. I'm willing to accept a slight risk of being wrongfully imprisoned, and the moral hazard of being partly responsible (as a voter) for having a few other people wrongfully imprisoned, as a price worth paying for the massive gain in my own personal safety and the moral good of making other people massively safer that comes from imprisoning criminals. But I'm absolutely not willing to trade the additional risk of being wrongfully executed myself, and the additional moral hazard of having innocent people executed on my behalf rather than just imprisoned, for the comparatively small additional gain that comes from executing rather than imprisoning criminals.

If you give me a magically infallible, impartial and omniscient jury, I will think very hard about the death penalty, and almost certainly come down in favour of it. But while the courts are run by human beings, it's not even worth thinking about - if you support ever executing anyone ever, in effect you're supporting sometimes executing innocent people. And even if you think that executing guilty people is a good thing in itself (and I think it probably is), it's certainly not worth executing innocent people for.

As soon as you make the case against the death penalty be about the rights of the guilty, rather than the risk to the innocent, you've missed the main argument against it, I think.

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Since this has been argued at least since Socrates...

there have been more than two trains of thought.

For one thing, the DP has been used for more than criminal punishment (just what was Socrates crime?) and until recently has been more a penalty of convenience. After all, if you kill someone you can't along with, problem solved.

Worse than simply being a cheap way to dispose of the miscreants or the inconvenient, public hangings, witch burnings, and such were once entertainment for the masses. The Romans did it best, but even in the US we had our share of death spectacles. Look up Rainey Bethea for our last public hanging. And why it was the last one.

We don't begin the discussion with the DP, we begin the discussion with how we value human life. Only after we have decided our basic values can we decide how life can or should be ended. Annoying as it is, you can't talk about the DP without bringing up suicide, abortion, mercy killing, war, and pretty much anything else that involves death.

[Major Nikon]

2. One shouldn't have to make an argument AGAINST the DP

The arguments should actually be for the death penalty rather than against it. Looking at it the other way shifts the burden of proof from making a case for the DP, and when you hear those arguments they inevitably involve some sort of half-fast appeal to emotion rather than anything ethically substantive. If one had to consider such arguments against the DP, there's really only one that matters which is there is no ethical case for the DP.