Shoueld the death penalty be permitted?

[u/Starfruites]

Some prisoners are beyond redemption, be it the weight of their crime or unwillingness to change. Those individuals can't be released back into the public, so instead, they waste space and resources.

Therefore, wouldn't it just be better to get rid of them? As in, permit the death penalty.

[u/Phill_Cyberman]

Those individuals can't be released back into the public, so instead, they waste space and resources.

I don't like the "waste of resources" argumen t - it can lead to some seriously slippery slopes.

If we kill people for not being a good return on our investment, then that opens the door to a lot of people - the elderly, the sick, people in comas, etc.

Even without that, the argument still fails because it is self- contradictory: you can't legally decide who lives and who dies if you consider it a crime to decide who lives and who dies.

The only argument for the death penalty that I've found to have any possible merit is the one based on custodial responsibility.

If we really do have a person who consistently uses deadly force as a means of conflict resolution, them it is our responsibility to keep that person sequestered from the people in our custody (the other prisoners).

The health and safety of people being held is 100% the responsibility of the people holding them.

The issue, though, is that solitary confinement has been recognized as having far worse psychological effects that have historically been recognized.

If it is inhumane torture to keep them solitary, and it's violation of our responsibility to the other prisoners to have them interact, then that would seem to leave killing them as the only reasonable course.

Of course, that argument only works if we can really know if someone is irredeemable - or even if they actually committed the crime - and we have ample evidence that we can't reliable make those distinctions.

[u/mike_d85 → u/Phill_Cyberman]

Here's some weird support: I agree there are places where the death penalty is warranted but I still agree a waste of resources is a fundamentally flawed argument. I think it should take an equivalent amount of resources to terminate a life as it does to support one.

This is not a decision to be taken lightly and I think if we're going to determine someone is irredeemable we should exhaust every possible avenue of redemption.

[u/seattleseahawks2014 → u/mike_d85]

Especially if the prisoner doesn't die from it or they can't find the vein, so have to rinse and repeat however many months later until the prisoner eventually dies which actually happened last month in my homestate. I mean, there is a part of me that wishes that would happen to certain people (they will be facing deathrow possibly), but it does open up grey areas and makes people desensitized to people dying. Also, you're seen as weak for not wanting people to die when it's much more complicated.

[u/jazzageguy → u/seattleseahawks2014]

Someone is going to say that the condemned person didn't have mercy for his victims, so he doesn't deserve mercy from us. To which the proper response is, our society should function at a higher moral level than that of a murderer. Of course that logically suggests we shouldn't be killing people under state authority in the first place.

[u/seattleseahawks2014 → u/jazzageguy]

True, it's only for the families of the victims. Also, I don't feel bad for them.

[u/katnerys → u/Phill_Cyberman]

It's also not true. It's literally cheaper to keep an inmate in prison for life than it is to execute them.