Death Penalty

Over at Boaty and D, they've been discussing the death penalty, and felt it was worth a quick post.

Now I proclaim myself as someone who is for the death penalty in principle, but not in practice - the concept of some people needing to be permanently removed from society is a sound one. If you have someone who cannot or will not be rehabilitated, or has committed a crime that any length of incarceration would exceed their lifespan, then it is only rational that they need to be excised from the world.

Now that only works on the assumption that the person is 100% guilty, and that is where the doubts creep in. The police and justice system hardly provide comfort in that regard. There are plenty of tales of miscarriages of justice, and no doubt more will come out of the woodwork - in such cases any execution would be cold blooded murder.

And I'm not sure I could sanction such a thing in my name.

There are arguments that in some cases, in the US for example, where death would be seen as a preferable to having to live in jail - one that makes Lord of the Flies look like an Enid Blyton book - for years of rape and beatings, before being released. As arguments go it's pretty pisspoor, and is, if anything, an argument of making prisons a place to punish criminals and not enclaves of barbarism.

All said and done, there is a place for a death sentence, but the criteria to which it is applied must be so strict that it is only ever applied to the true monsters, and with such a weight of evidence required it is even then a rarity.

As technology improves, that too would have to be taken into account - a CCTV tape of someone killing someone now pretty much proves it happened, short of a TV show plot or two, but in another 10 years? Then you could probably kill someone, film it and edit it to show Elvis committing the crime.

Death is the ultimate sanction, and should be treated with all the care, paranoia and surplus of doubt it deserves.