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Last week, during the discussion of the Marcellus Williams execution we had a brief aside discussing my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil. That got me to thinking about the topic more and with the spate of executions last week, my social media feeds had a lot of discussion of them. Much of the commentary are sentiments that I find repellant, like this:
To be clear on who Littlejohn was:
…
To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be. Two men walked into a store with no intent other than robbing the owner at gunpoint. One of them shot him in the face. I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary. Perhaps one adheres to a generalized claim that the state should just never execute anyone, which I still strongly object to, but the idea that the case hinges on who pulled the trigger is either ridiculous or in completely bad faith. The latter possibility brings me to the second example of a post that caught my eye:
Readers will probably immediately spot what I think is in bad faith. Am I to believe that Ms. Gill’s objection to what she saw is that this method of execution is simply too brutal? That if only we could figure out some way to end Alan Miller’s life without suffering, she would agree that it’s appropriate to execute a man that “shot and killed two of his co-workers, 32-year-old Lee Holdbrooks and 28-year-old Christopher Yancy, at a heating and air-conditioning distributor, then drove five miles to a business where he had previously worked and shot and killed his former supervisor, 39-year-old Terry Jarvis”? No, of course not. Nonetheless, I want to treat this, for a moment, as a serious objection on the object-level to make a point in favor of execution that I don’t see made with much frequency.
How do you feel hearing that Miller may have spent five or ten minutes suffering before he died? Some may extend a degree of empathy to the monster on the table that I am not personally capable of, but I feel the same as many of the people replying on Twitter do - Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath. In fact, I’ve sometimes seen people argue that the death penalty is too good for the worst people, that life in prison is a worse penalty. This is presumably because they’re imagining a life in prison that’s filled with brutality, misery, and possibly rape and torture for decades. What this highlights to me is that the death penalty is not the worst punishment that a society can mete out - far from it, a swift execution is a cap on the amount of suffering that the justice system may inflict on someone. Truly, I think people like Dahmer deserve much worse than a simple firing squad, but putting some cap on it is a good way to prevent people from exacting revenge in a dehumanizing fashion.
I don’t really have any coherent argument to piece together here. I’m mostly expressing my frustration with empathy that is so misplaced that it seems like faulty wiring to me. Seriously, a man walks into a store with his buddy, shoots an innocent man in the face, is finally executed decades later, and people say, “rest in power” because it might have been his buddy that shot the innocent man in the face. How can I describe that other than evil? The only miscarriage of justice in the Littlejohn case is that the system allowed him to live for decades when no one even had any follow-up questions about whether he was one of the robbers. Other policies are more consequential, but there are none that I feel more conviction about my opponents being just plain wrong than the question of what to do with men like Littlejohn.
I disagree with you there. Modern society has the means to imprison people for decades.
I see the punishment of the worst criminals not in terms of revenge, but merely as society deciding 'you have hurt people badly enough that we will reduce the amount of freedom to enjoy to a degree where you will not be able to hurt anyone again'.
I do not believe that a state should punish murderers by killing them. Or torturers by torturing them. Or rapists by raping them. Or cannibals by eating them. There is all kind of scumbag behavior which decent society should not reciprocate.
Of course, I am also not going to glorify the median inhabitant of death row as some kind of martyr. Murderous fuck got himself caught and killed in some weird rite by the barbarians inhabiting the new world. Not gonna shed many tears for him.
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I think that having the death penalty seems like a weird hill to die on for anti-crime people. It is not universally accepted in the US, only 12-13 states still execute people. It provides a rallying point for the people opposed to it, from BLM to pacifists.
I get abortion as a CW topic. It matters. I would estimate lifetime abortions per capita to be somewhere between 0.1 and 2. Depending on your stance, that is a lot of innocent fetuses brutally murdered or a lot of women forced to give birth.
The death penalty might have been more cost effective than lifelong imprisonment in 1800 or 1900, but these days it is not (thanks to the efforts of the anti crowd). Clinging on to it for reasons of tradition only seems weird, like running a coal powered train line through some suburb.
The fight is worth it merely to distract that crowd. They aren't the types to stop fighting battles, and if you can have them spending years on end getting death sentences reduced to life in prison, that stops them from shifting the focus to getting pedophiles sentences reduced from life to 3 weeks or whatever cause celeb comes next.
That is a reasonable argument.
I think that you meant "people who have committed sex crimes against children" when you wrote "pedophiles". There is certainly a large overlap between the two groups, but using the one term for the other discards the criminals who are not exclusively attracted to pre-pubescent humans but still fuck kids when the opportunity arises and the poor fucks who find themselves attracted to kids exclusively but don't break any laws regarding their fetish.
Sure. As someone who has prosecuted people who committed sex crimes against children, I assure you we and the police involved in such cases are not so careful with our words. And frankly, all we care about is what you do, not what is in your heart. Its simply like the "you fuck one goat" situation as far as I am concerned.
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