Quote:
Originally Posted by downquark1
These are largely solved problems. You can put multiple charges to the jury, explain which the death penalty can be considered. It is then the judge who decides the punishment - with multiple levels of appeal.
It is of course always technically possible you kill an innocent person, but that is probably far less likely than getting murdered in prison at this point. The objections to it are largely hand wringing or some very committed pacifist principle.
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The easiest way to make sure we don't kill an innocent person is to avoid the death penalty in the first place.
It's not cheaper, given all the appeals you would need to have and the circumstances in which it would both apply and reach a standard where you feel confident enough to give it as a sentence.
As the Americans have found, convictions aren't always are clear cut as they seem. Confessions can be forced or made by the mentally ill, eyewitnesses lie or misremember and you can find evidence was flawed decades on from the case.
Wikipedia has a list of
exonerated death row inmates. These are people who would have been killed, or were killed, by the state for crimes they didn't commit. Innocent lives taken by the justice system. For nothing.
Thankfully, ours doesn't go into recent decades because we abolished it, although that is little comfort to those on that list who were killed.
Really, what do we gain in the end for the risk we would be introducing? Are there people whose crimes are so awful that they would be better off dead? Yes. But I don't think we or the state should have the power to make that decision.