LETHAL REJECTION'S THREE FATAL FLAWS

July 2, 2002 -- DO YOU support capital punishment, but fear that poor, innocent people are executed in America?

Then you've probably fallen for the Three Big Myths that are passed along as gospel by those with a moral or political anti-death agenda.

Hmmmm.

I don't exactly buy the first one. Considering the increasing number of innocent people being released from Death Row, as DNA evidence comes out, a logical statistical conclusion can be drawn that there is a halfway reasonable chance that at least ONE person was PROBABLY killed for a crime they didn't commit. BUUUUT, I imagine if it's happened, we could count the number of times it has on one hand, at most.

I don't think that the Death Penalty is a real crime deterant. Most of the people we kill are yobos who have a massive suicidal death wish anyhow. On one hand, who wants to spend money to keep them alive? On the other hand, why give them what they want? Maybe we should keep these people in lifetime solitary. THAT would be punishment to them.

If we've been lucky enough that this statement is true, we've come uncomfortably close. And it would be right to call it luck; the "system" that has saved some of the exonerees is the unsolicited confession of another party. I can't see abolishing the death penalty; but the level of proof required should be ratcheted higher than it is now. In terms of sheer dollars and cents, considering the levels of appeals required even in, say, Texas, it is actually cheaper to put the person in jail and "throw away the key."

Yeah, I didn't really even get the point of the first one myself. And he's just throwing out the third one without any statistics to back it up. I'm not saying he's wrong but it would be nice to have a statistic to ooh and ahh over.

My position is, the standard should be really high. The anti-death penalty crowd does a lot of crowing over DNA evidence being used to exonerate people but, in my head anyway, this implies that DNA is also an acceptable level of proof for conviction.

I don't want the execution of an innocent person on my conscience. But equally troubling, I find, is forcing the victim to pay for the killer's continued existence (taxes). As Hi Tech Redneck has pointed out, it may be cheaper though to just lock 'em up and throw away the key. For myself, I know that I would prefer to spend much more money on obtaining justice than just taking the efficient way out- ie, even if cost ten times as much to execute an individual who really had it coming, I would still consider it money well spent.

One idea I toyed with in my mind is on the day you test for your driver's license you have to sign a release (if you're in a death penalty state) that says you are fully aware that the state can invoke the death penalty for certain crimes and that you understand this fact. The gyst of this proposal would be that on that day in court, the prosecutor could flap that document around and say "You knew you could get the death penalty for this but you did it anyway". It is obviously just a way to stack the prosecutor's deck though and everyone doesn't get a driver's license anyway so it's usefulness is dubious. Perhaps getting the citizen to check a box that says whether he/she supports the death penalty and then sign it?

You could never get anything like the "check here" idea on drivers licenses to fly in a court. It would be struck down very quickly, and frankly, I'm not too sure what it would accomplish. Ignorance of the law shouldn't be a good excuse for breaking it.

Like I said, most of the people who get the death penalty are suicidal yobos who don't care if they die anyhow. Or real nut and fruit cases like that Karla Faye Tucker. Oooooh..lookie look...they want to kill a woman who just converted to Christianity, and all the sudden the Pope and Pat Robertson are her bestest friends, and don't want her to die.

Bush did the right thing that day, applying the law evenly...

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