| scrapking said: I don't find it necessarily unsurprising that you support the death penalty. I live in British Columbia, but don't believe in cutting down old growth forests, not everyone who lives in Washington State wears socks and sandals, not everyone who lives in Alberta believes in destroying their province by exploiting the oil sands, etc. The world is full of amazing diversity. :) Keeping a person incarcerated is cheap compared to keeping someone in a death row institution. The last time I saw statistics, California paid an average of $308 million for every person they murdered on death row (taking death row costs divided by the number of people actually murdered). The death row institutions are vastly more expensive than other prisons, the legal costs are far more expensive as a free and fair society generally doesn't want to murder its citizens without letting them exhaust all legal means to protest their innocence, etc. Death row is about a public's desire for vengeance, not against responsible management of public finances. Unless you want a guilty-until-proven-innocent kangaroo court, a system where some people are ultimately murdered on behalf of the public will always cost more than locking people up and throwing away the key. Then there are the postumous pardons as new evidence comes to light, which has been common in recent years with new DNA evidence. No system of murdering people is perfect, to murder anyone you have to accept that some innocent people will be murdered. I don't accept that. Finally, whatever happened to two wrongs don't make a right? One of the first lessons most of us learn as children. I'm often amazed that those who believe "Thou shalt not kill" seem to not apply it to the government murdering on their behalf. It's not "Thous shalt not kill... unless they do something you strongly disagree with, and then it's cool." EDIT TO ADD: If anything, the fact that the death penalty is ruinously bad for public finances, I might expect someone from Texas to be deeply concerned about that. Texas' reputation is both fiscal conservative (save money), and socially conservative (which is where "thou shalt not kill" should be kicking in). I know that a lot of Texans seem to support the death penalty, but that seems wildly anachronistic to their other beliefs. Perhaps there isn't a lot of education in Texas as to the true nature of the death penalty. *shrug* |
What you say is correct, but it is much more a splendid example of absurdely high and inefficient public spending than a reason against death sentence. I mean, if this cost is real... this is unreal !
Also, it's not that much about spending (if reasonable). I mean, if someone steal a car and get 6 months of jail, I'm pretty sure it costs a lot more to put the guy in jail, than to forgive him. But the thing it is not just about this guy, it is about deciding if we can't live in a society where it's legal to steal a car (in term of morale and cost). Especially for murder, we would not cut the cost by halving the duration.
Last but not least, I don't really think there is a really morale inconsistency in death sentence. Thou shalt not kill... for greed, jealousy, racism, angst, hate, etc. But thou shalt get killed after a proper trial if you kill for these reasons. I find it morally acceptable, frankly, and I'm not an uneducated texan. Even Europe have exceptions for army, in certain circumstances for police and self-defense, suicide, and perhaps someday for euthanasia. But still, I'm moderatly in favor of death sentence, I believe that there is nothing wrong about being against it, I would not fight for it, but I would even less fight against it.
