Capital Punishment

[famousringo]

Capital punishment has some problems:

1. No takesies backsies. Lots of people have been convicted of murder and later exonerated as new evidence comes to light. A wrongly convicted murderer serving a life sentence might lose decades of freedom, but at least he might one day walk free once more, and enjoy a hefty pile of monetary compensation for the injustice committed against him. An expensive appeals process mitigates this problem somewhat, but also makes capital punishment more expensive than incarceration and is far from foolproof. 

So either you're killing innocent people out of a need for revenge or a misguided effort to deter crime (more on that soon), or you're spending way more money than you need to protect society from the worst criminals (and still killing a few innocent people).

If I should be wrongly convicted of something I didn't do, I'd rather not die from my misfortune. And I'd rather not spend more money than I have to on safety, either.

2. There's no solid evidence that capital punishment is a more effective deterrent of crime than life imprisonment. States with more executions tend to have higher murder rates than those without. People who commit capital offences generally either don't care about the consequences, or somehow think they'll escape them. They aren't very rational actors. 

Capital punishment isn't going to make me safer, so what good is it to me?

3. Capital crime perpetuates a cultural myth that problems can best be solved by finding the right person and killing him. I used to think this Wild West kind of mythology was why murder rates were so much higher in the US than other heavily armed developed countries like Canada and Switzerland. After recently seeing some data on how closely gun ownership correlates with gun deaths, I'm not so sure anymore, but I think it's worth keeping in mind. 

It's not such a leap of imagination that if the state thinks the worst members of society should be killed, individual (well-armed) citizens might be justified in using lethal force to be rid of people they think are most horrible.

Perpetuating a culture of where death is an acceptable solution to problems makes me less safe, especially if somebody were to decide that I'm a problem.

So there you have it. Capital punishment does nothing to enhance my personal safety. In fact, it puts it further in jeopardy by giving the state more circumstances to kill me and validating killing as a solution to problems. Furthermore, it consumes resources which would be better spent elsewhere for no measurable gains in security.