The death penalty.

[The Ghost of RubangB]

Killiana1a said:

Khuutra said:

Killiana1a said:

The exception is never the rule. We have DNA evidence nowadays, if we use it during the appeals process for the death penalty, then that is the death row prisoner's trump card. No dna evidence? You should have never been convicted.

I just don't like it when anti-death penalty advocates always argue from the logical fallacy "the exception is the rule" to try and dissuade public opinion on the issue. It is blatantly dishonest and in any system, death penalty or not, you will have innocent individuals behind bars. Getting rid of the death penalty will not rid the problem of wrongful convictions.

I agree with the appeals process eventhough it is long and expensive because we are ensuring due process with the amount of appeals and sheer time (10-20 years before executed) it takes to execute a prisoner on death row.

The problem with the appeals process is not enough money for the US courts to expediate the appeals process. If we, and I am favor of this, increased taxes to give the courts more money to speed up the appeals process, then we would not have the decades long cases of individuals such as Mumia Abu Jamal who should have been executed 2 decades ago.

Getting rid of the death penalty would not end wrongful convictions.

It would, however, end wrongful executions, which was one small part of his point.

It's not that the exception is the rule. It's that the exception is institutionalized murder.

Yes, most criminals in the US justice system are not there on death row for murder. So in comparison to the overall prison population, they are the exception.

The point I took it as, was we should get rid of the death penalty because one wrongful execution is too much. In this case, they are arguing from "the exception is the rule" fallacy.

This is disagree with. I will not quibble over death row population vs. general prison population because it is a moot point, which we have no disagreement on.

Wrongful convictions will occur death penalty or not because not all criminals have the money of OJ Simpson to hire the best attorneys to get off of a murder, that I believe and many believe he committed. Most criminals get stuck with a public defender who is not a Johnnie Cochran type lawyer, therefore evidence may be omitted or the public defender will muck up the jury selection phase and end up with a wrongful conviction.

Well, arguing about the racial makeup of a jury is contentious nonetheless. Blacks will argue that they were wrongfully convicted because a plurality of the jurors were White. Men will argue that there were too many women on the jury. This is an issue that drags out the appeals process for an inordinate amount of time.

Wrongful convictions will always be there.  That's not what I'm arguing.

My argument is this:

Because we will always have wrongful convictions, we can never have executions.

And yes, one wrongful execution is too much.  With the death penalty, we waste too much money and we waste too many lives, and it doesn't make anybody safer.  It actually has no net benefit for society.  It just takes up time and money, clogs up our legal system, and murders the occasional innocent person.