Seeking the Death Penalty is Misguided Even when its for Racist Pieces of Shit

Good, its nice to see trash getting sorted where it belongs. Although this may make other trash have a notalltrash situation.

However, seeking the death penalty disturbs me. To what would be generously described as the high-minded version of myself, the death penalty is just a way to fill the void of grief with some feeling. It represents a dated eye for an eye sense of justice which mistakes vengeance for justice.

Justice is definitely about holding someone to account for their actions. But it also includes looking for the root of the problem, trying to do what you can for the wronged, and probably a bunch of other stuff I didn’t think about when writing this. I think we’ve barely started on the first two components but that’s a rant for another time.

So the obvious point in favor of the death penalty, is that how much more can an individual be held to beyond forfeiting their life? But then it asks, what about the possibility of redemption? I have my own thoughts on this question but who gives a fuck. I’m not interested in writing about those. To me its our willingness to continue using the death penalty despite its clear downsides.

My issues with the death penalty arise when we fuck up using it and just kill an innocent person or someone who we as a society deem was undeserving of death. There is no bringing the dead back. And in our never ending journey for justice, why the fuck would we throw ourselves backwards? There is of course the utilitarian angle.

A basic utilitarian angle would be: the death penalty’s deterrence effect has saved more people to offset the people that were wrongly killed. I tend to this its ineffective but lets say the jury is out on that. I find it unconvincing that this utilitarian analysis functions unless we have perfect information, which we do not. So I’d argue in favor of caution, that we don’t risk creating a wrong, especially when we can still hold pieces of trash to account.

Edit 1: Better picture at top

Edit 2: for terrible spelling