Xenophon wrote:I oppose the death penalty mostly because of the inaccuracies within our current justice systems. There are far too many instances of wrong convictions for me to be comfortable with the idea of executing someone. I also suspect that even if the justice system was 100% accurate, guaranteed, we would probably still over-apply the death penalty but that may just be indicative of my experience as a Southerner.
As MeDotOrg points out, rehabilitation should obviously be the first and foremost goal.
To the idea of "Life in prison is far worst than the death penalty". I think that is belied by the fact that a fair portion of death-row inmates spend the majority of their time trying to get off death-row and serve life sentences. If it is the punishment one opts into, I don't see how it could be considered "more severe" (masochists aside). Even behind bars, being alive is a favorable condition to death, IMHO.
I agree with that 100%. Due to the fallibility of human reason and memory, it is estimated that as many as 10% of the inmates on death row at any one time are innocent of the capital crime of which the juries found them guilty. Some legal experts consider this a conservative estimate. Most people have heard of cases where convicted murderers were found to be innocent due to new evidence or careful re-examination of the original evidence, sometimes within days or even hours of their scheduled execution, Can there be any reasonable doubt that some have been unjustly executed! I don't care how rare such wrongful executions are. If it can happen even once in a thousand years, that is enough to make me unalterably opposed to capital punishment! There is no way you can recompense a falsely convicted innocent after the execution has already occurred. As far as I am concerned, this one argument against capital punishment trumps any conceivable argument in favor of it!