For those against the Death Penalty

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(07-03-2018, 10:11 AM)hollodero Wrote: Can I also answer, while being an European for once? I'm against the death penalty under all circumstances, and the reason is that I don't want the government to kill people without necessity. The life and death power is something I'd rather leave to fate than to some officials.

It seems like a bit of a slippery slope.
(Just like Americans tell me restricting free speech by excluding Nazis from that is a slippery slope. It probably isn't in both cases, but still... I don't want government or anyone to have the power to kill in cold blood. Executing criminals is killing in cold blood, isn't it?)

That Rubicon was long since crossed. We used drone strikes our own citizens already in 2011 without a trial. Heck, back in 1932, MacArthur led US cavalry and tanks on US soil to attack US WW1 veterans.

I can easily get behind the death penalty on some people, simply because we can't keep them in isolation for the rest of their life, and I think that there's some people out there so evil that they shouldn't be allowed to mingle and rub off on others. They are also the ones who are unquestionably and unequivocally guilty and evil. (Do we really need to question Dylan Roof's innocence, for example?) The key point is they still need to go through the legal system rather than extra-judicial. The length of time the system takes and the still occasional mistake does make me hesitate on full support for it, though.

Maybe as a compromise for no death penalty is we need some specific jails for people who got life with no parole for truly terrible shit. Maybe where everything in the jail is just a bit more awful than jail conditions are normally legally allowed to be?

Or we just take a small Alaskan island, probably in the West Aleutians. Wall it off, have some Coast Guard patrol the waters to sink anyone trying to enter or escape, and just drop the worst of the worst with some hoes and seeds on it to be left to their own devices. Like Alcatraz meets Escape from New York. Would save a lot of money.