A Death Penalty Opponent Weighs in on the Execution of Troy Davis

 

Executed murderer Troy Davis.
 
By Nicholas Stix

I wasted my time debating the mook below on a blog whose owner has since posted other comments, but not mine. If he gets around to posting my comment, I’ll mention and link to him.

thestray
What you fail to understand is that I have no sympathy whatsoever for convicted murderers. If they are guilty I hope they burn in hell. They are the scum of the earth.

That being said… WE. CAN’T. TRUST. OUR. JUSTICE. SYSTEM. TO. KILL. THESE. PEOPLE. What don’t you get about that? I don’t want to spare murderers you idiot, I want to spare INNOCENT people who may be wrongly convicted. Our justice system is not infallible, anyone who believes otherwise is delusional. It’s fallible because humans are fallible.

It’s a FACT that there have been people convicted for murder and then later exonerated. I think the number in America is about 140, you can look it up for yourself and check if that figure is correct. Do you really trust a justice system that has PROVEN it can make mistakes… to put people to DEATH? It’s unconscionable, period.

Imagine YOU are sitting on death row for something you didn’t do. How would you feel about the death penalty then?

What I don’t get is that we just had a righteous execution of a man who was guilty not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond a shadow of a doubt. I suppose the utter wrongheadedness of your position is why you felt the need to abuse the cap button, and the period.

“Imagine YOU are sitting on death row for something you didn’t do. How would you feel about the death penalty then?”

More caps in a bad cause. If social policy is to be based on every individual’s imagination, then you have anarchy.

Let’s work out the consequences of your argument: ‘Imagine YOU are crossing the street, and get run down and killed by a motorist. How would you feel about motor vehicles then?’

Your specious reasoning would also entail closing all jails and prisons, because you demand perfection from fallible humans.

How would you punish cold-blooded killers like Troy Davis? “By putting them away where they can’t hurt anyone else,” as anti-death penalty proponents like to say? The only place where a killer can no longer harm anyone is six feet under. Killers continue committing crimes, including murder, in prison. And since almost all killers thus sentenced are eventually released, there is no such thing, in practice, as “life without parole.” “Life with the possibility of parole” is an oxymoron.

If you murder someone, anything short of your forfeiting your own life is an injustice.

So what about disincentives to discourage people from railroading innocents to the death house? We might need to consider extending the death penalty to cover anyone who deliberately causes the execution of an innocent, e.g., through false arrest, malicious prosecution, perjured testimony, withholding evidence, etc.

I know. That sounds loopy. But civilization requires the death penalty. Otherwise, you are telling survivors that their loved ones’ lives had no value.

The alternative is to head down Mexico way, where ever fewer killers are convicted, and sentences are so weakened that even those who are convicted do less and less time. In Mexico, the longest a killer can be sentenced is for 20 years, no matter how many people he murders. And if the state cannot be relied on for justice, people are perfectly justified in taking justice into their own hands, as they routinely do in places like New Orleans and Detroit. The social contract is conditional on the state keeping up its end.