Consider this: it costs more to keep an inmate on death row and execute them than it does to imprison them for life.
If what you like about the death penalty is the punishment aspect, it’s a greater punishment to hold someone in jail for life.
AND if we discover - as does happen a lot - that person is actually innocent, they can be released and still have some sort of life outside of prison. That’s not a great fate, but I would argue it’s much better than depriving them of their life only to find out later they were innocent.
Isn’t the reason it costs more to keep someone on death row largely due to the appeals they get?
I’d much rather we spend more making sure we aren’t destroying the lives of innocent people than save money by not giving them as many chances to get an unjust sentence overturned. Which isn’t necessarily a pro-death penalty position, as it could also be a call to reform the appeals process for everyone else.
So the argument is, it costs so much to maintain the filter that tries to keep innocent people from being executed, so let’s make it cheaper by removing some of that filter.
It costs more to execute somebody than keep them in prison forever in order to make as sure as we can that a person is guilty before executing them, by allowing more appeals.
Suggesting the solution to that is fewer appeals is directly saying that it is better to kill more innocent people at a lower cost than it is to not kill anyone.
Also, that it’s worth killing innocent people as long as bad people die. Not to prevent them from committing further harm, but just to kill them.
I’m struggling to see the benefit in that cost/benefit analysis. It’s not about protecting people (because it actively kills innocent people), it’s about killing people just to kill bad people.
Edit: I misunderstood what you were saying. But I would also say that while it would be great to improve the system for the initial trial, removing appeals would have the opposite effect and wouldn’t help the initial trial at all. However, if the initial trials are better, everything would still be cheaper regardless of the appeals because there’d be less people falsely imprisoned on death row.
Consider this: it costs more to keep an inmate on death row and execute them than it does to imprison them for life.
If what you like about the death penalty is the punishment aspect, it’s a greater punishment to hold someone in jail for life.
AND if we discover - as does happen a lot - that person is actually innocent, they can be released and still have some sort of life outside of prison. That’s not a great fate, but I would argue it’s much better than depriving them of their life only to find out later they were innocent.
The death penalty just doesn’t make much sense.
Isn’t the reason it costs more to keep someone on death row largely due to the appeals they get?
I’d much rather we spend more making sure we aren’t destroying the lives of innocent people than save money by not giving them as many chances to get an unjust sentence overturned. Which isn’t necessarily a pro-death penalty position, as it could also be a call to reform the appeals process for everyone else.
So the argument is, it costs so much to maintain the filter that tries to keep innocent people from being executed, so let’s make it cheaper by removing some of that filter.
It costs more to execute somebody than keep them in prison forever in order to make as sure as we can that a person is guilty before executing them, by allowing more appeals.
Suggesting the solution to that is fewer appeals is directly saying that it is better to kill more innocent people at a lower cost than it is to not kill anyone.
Also, that it’s worth killing innocent people as long as bad people die. Not to prevent them from committing further harm, but just to kill them.
I’m struggling to see the benefit in that cost/benefit analysis. It’s not about protecting people (because it actively kills innocent people), it’s about killing people just to kill bad people.
Edit: I misunderstood what you were saying. But I would also say that while it would be great to improve the system for the initial trial, removing appeals would have the opposite effect and wouldn’t help the initial trial at all. However, if the initial trials are better, everything would still be cheaper regardless of the appeals because there’d be less people falsely imprisoned on death row.