Mort-Hog
If moral relativism is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
Posts: 4,192
The state still carries out the execution.
And there is a frequent problem of juries not being informed of the option of life without parole.
But anyway, it doesn't really change anything. If a jury are presented with a particularly violent murder, they are going to want blood, they will want revenge. The death penalty doesn't provide justice, it provides revenge. It satisfies bloodlust.
And all the prejudices of the jury are most prominent here. Someone charged with the murder of a white victim is much more likely to recieve the death penalty than someone charged with the murder of a non-white victim. Unfortunately, the race issue is very much at the centre of capital punishment in the US.
As well as that, there is the poverty issue. Someone that can't afford a lawyer will be appointed one, and those lawyers are awful. Most of them will not have done a capital case before, and they are quite likely to miss important details that might prove their defendent's innocence.
Put simply, the American legal system simply isn't good enough to warrant capital punishment.
And there's still the question of whether it actually works - whether it actually deters criminals. It certainly seems that it doesn't, and seems to have the opposite effect. It devalues human life.
If a society values human life so much that it considers that it can never be taken, then it would make sense that the crime rate is lower. The death penalty proposes the idea that "if you do something very bad, you should die", and individuals may very well take that on board when they consider others to have done something they consider 'very bad' worthy of death.
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. " - Bertrand Russell
The Triumph of Stupidity in Mortals and Others 1931-1935