It’s interesting to me that, at the end of the day, so many supporters of the death penalty want me to imagine that terrible things will be done to my family; the death penalty seems to thrive on keeping people generally terrified. In truth, though, I have a pretty good idea of how I would feel if something so awful as what you’re suggesting were ever to happen: I would be overwhelmed by grief and anger. I’d want to find and kill the offender myself, I suspect. That’s a normal human reaction. But it has nothing to do with the death penalty system. People who have been the victims or co-victims of violent crime don’t actually get to decide what the punishment should be in their cases, or in other cases with related crimes. We do this because we want our justice system to treat people objectively and dispassionately; crime victims are neither objective nor dispassionate, as they generally feel the way you suspected I’d feel (at least initially). If we let crime victims or co-victims decide punishments, offenders would likely get the death penalty for rape, for child abuse, and even for cruelty to animals.
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Running Chicken: The Great Death Penalty Hypothetical (via azspot)
And more: “The worst thing, in all of this discussion, is that our society spends an inordinate amount of money on a handful of executions, the end result of violent crime, and very little money on homelessness, services for the mentally ill, and drug treatment and prevention. But these things are often root causes of violent crime; these are the things that, if treated, might make your nightmare scenario less likely to occur. Why don’t we try to make violent crime less likely rather than throwing money at the problem after it’s already happened and pretending that we’re somehow doing anyone any good?”
(via azspot)
