scrapking said:
The costs aren't unreal. It costs more in every free and fair jurisdiction to have death row than it does to not have it.
I don't believe in murder. I don't want the government murdering on my behalf. Especially since a certain percentage of all convicted felons are actually innocent. What percentage of innocent people will you accept dying in exchange for murdering the guilty ones? 1% 3%? 5%? Most estimates I've seen of the number of actually innocent people on death row are in the 3-4% range. There's no perfect system, if you are murdering the guilty you'll also be murdering the innocent to some degree. So let's put a number on how many innocent you'd accept dying in exchange for the death of the guilty. I'm genuinely curious on what acceptable collateral damage number you'd put on it.
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The lower the better, but there is no percent I'm good with, at the end of the day innoncent are murdered. But this morale argument is biased, as this problem is just ignored in most other cases. Did we renounced to war even if civilian casualties don't go lower than 25% of the total casualties ? Even if it's not that direct, when you allow people to buy cars, cigarets, guns, you know a given percent of innoncent people will die from it. Anyway, you are in favor of life sentence, but I don't ask you the percent of (non fixed) mistakes you accept, because it's not on you.
As for how high is the percent of innoncent, it's hard as the numbers are based on organizations against death sentence (I don't think the State itself claims to have 4%). I believe it could be extremely low if it was enforced to be necessary to have multiple direct proof (DNA, etc.), and if people involved were really accountable and faced strong charges in case they mishandled the case. Because every case of "mistakes" I've heard about were not that much mistakes than cops extorting confessions, sentence despite absence of tangible proves, and extremely carlessness. Have you ever heard any of them facing severe charge in a prosecution ?
About cost, I think I have a little idea of what you can have for 300 millions $. In software development, it's about 1000 people, full time, good wages, with diploma, massive hardware and facilities, for years. So is it really necessary or even really what you get for this cost ?