My response to the Weekend-Engagement topics: WEEK 206 prompt, "Capital punishment (the death sentence) - Are you for or against?"
I am absolutely against the death penalty. I am open to the use of lethal force in self-defense against man or beast when there is reason to believe imminent death or grievous bodily harm is about to be inflicted. However, absent that kind of immediate lethal threat, killing another human being is becoming that lethal threat.
I know there will be resistance to drawing a moral equivalence between executioner and murderer, but what is execution if not premeditated murder at the behest of government? Even if we grant the assumption that police investigators, prosecution, court procedures, and the rest of the so-called "justice system" work perfectly and can be guaranteed to only convict the guilty, the executioner must deliberately take the life of another human being who does not present an immediate threat. This is not in any way, shape, or form self-defense or defense of others.
Then we must address the problem of courts, because they do not guarantee protection from wrongful accusations. It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. Many convictions are being overturned using modern forensic evidence after coerced confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, jury bias, and other systemic failures of the "justice system." The risk of miscarriage of justice is compounded when police and prosecutors are rewarded based on capture and conviction, but immune from accountability should they err or be corrupt.
If justice could allow for death penalty, it would differ greatly from our present system. If a murder victim's family were to take responsibility for the execution and reciprocal equal consequences for wrongful execution, there could be an argument for it. The victim's heirs name the price to balance the scales of justice. Historically, there was the concept of murderers paying a weregild to dissuade vengeance in many cultures. Biblically, those who committed accidental manslaughter could seek refuge. I'm not convinced this would always be just, but it is far less unjust than the government simply declaring people must die. There is a built-in mechanism for accountability. There is a path to redemption.
Our entire concept of courts and prison requires an overhaul. Right now, prisons around the world, and in the US in particular, are flooded with nonviolent "offenders." Byzantine laws make "criminals" out of people for victimless crimes. Vices are not crimes. Protesting is not a crime. Failure to comply with government's myriad bureaucratic mandates is not a crime. Where there is a crime, restitution is owed, but the courts rarely address this key component of true justice. Prison could be a place where criminals who have trespassed against the life, liberty, or property of others can earn a living and provide restitution while gaining marketable skills so they can return to society as productive members if possible. Today, they are warehoused like livestock at taxpayer expense in inhumane conditions.
But what do we do with truly violent criminals? For those who cannot conceivably be released due to egregious crimes like premeditated murder, prison can still offer a place where the guilty could earn their keep, and if prisoners are treated with a modicum of humanity through the understanding that courts can fail, this means the wrongfully-convicted will not have suffered as much as they do now on death row awaiting a final punishment they know they did not earn.
Is any of this feasible in this day and age? I don't know. But is it really feasible to entrust the government with the power to kill? Certainly not. We have the long record of history as proof.
Well said.
Along the lines of "explain the workings of planet Earth to an alien species," I always felt that the observation "so you kill people to show people that killing people is wrong?"
Politics, governments and philosophy aside, even the logic is a bit sketchy.
Sometimes it seems like a very solitary world when everyone around me is more worried about obedience to laws and writing new ones instead of analyzing what we have and asking whether it really works in the first place.
Oh!, well written, I am wow right now, I do not know where to start and add up my opinion, because every sentences and words have a clear meaning to what is happening today.
Yes, rewarding prosectors when they brought someone who commit a crime to law is energize by their department but can be something unlikely too, what if, some people are Innocent and everything is done for the rewards, innocent people really surfers for a crime they didn't commit and no one has the right to take life.
When prosecutorial misconduct cannot be prosecuted, and police claim legal immunity for everything including the most egregious violations of the people they claim to serve and protect, you have a recipe for disaster even when people choose those professions with virtuous motives. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Lord Acton said.
Methodical and intentional killing by the State is a big problem, whether with an lethal injection that performs in minutes, or other injections that takes years. Either way, methodical and intentional killing by the State is a big problem.
Is that a reference to the Fauci Ouchie or other mandatory/routine jabs?
@jacobtothe totally agree.Have a nice weekend. 🤗
When is it ethical for a government to do that which is unethical for its 'citizens' to do?
Capital punishment, warfare, the prison-industrial complex, it all fails the smell test or whatever they call it for 'obscenity'.
That double-standard when government policy is a felony when we do it should be more obvious to more people.