The murder of this man is tragic. The death penalty is awful. All it does is kill innocent people or make martyrs of sadistic killers. For those who worry about letting the guilty off too easily, life in prison without parole seems like a far crueler punishment, anyway.
The only time the death penalty has been useful is when taking it off the table is used as leverage to get a serial killer to reveal where he has buried some of his victims. But that could be replaced by offering incentives/privileges to killers if they accurately help police locate his victims' bodies.
The conclusion has to be that the only people the state executes are the most marginalized with the fewest resources to fight. The ones with means (including political means) can escape the consequences of their actions while those relegated to the grossly under resourced public defenders are doomed. How many innocents have been harmed because the larger public never even knew their names?
The murder of this man is tragic. The death penalty is awful. All it does is kill innocent people or make martyrs of sadistic killers. For those who worry about letting the guilty off too easily, life in prison without parole seems like a far crueler punishment, anyway.
The only time the death penalty has been useful is when taking it off the table is used as leverage to get a serial killer to reveal where he has buried some of his victims. But that could be replaced by offering incentives/privileges to killers if they accurately help police locate his victims' bodies.
I tend to agree.
I'd like to believe the trend (toward fewer executions) is based on structural improvements rather than random forces.
I would like to agree, but unfortunately I don’t see a lot of evidence of those structural improvements being anything more than random.
The conclusion has to be that the only people the state executes are the most marginalized with the fewest resources to fight. The ones with means (including political means) can escape the consequences of their actions while those relegated to the grossly under resourced public defenders are doomed. How many innocents have been harmed because the larger public never even knew their names?