I have what I believe to be an adequate criteria for inflicting the death penalty:
1. A person has to commit and be convicted of, and sentenced for a (potentially) capital crime.
2. That person has to escape from their final prison.
3. That person must then commit, and be convicted of another capital crime (probably with some mitigating circumstances, like murders that are arguably part of the escape and evasion don't qualify for the death penalty, but escaping, then going out of your way to murder a civilian do).
For most bad crimes, life without parole is more than adequate. And if you escape and dedicate yourself to keeping your nose clean, then the worst you should face is an extended sentence. The death penalty should be reserved for people who pose such a proven, dire risk to society that the goal of the punishment is risk mitigation for society, not justice. Ted Bundy is the best real-world example I can think of.
Life imprisonment in many US prisons is actually worse than killing them quickly, because we believe we must spend a tech worker salary per prisoner per year to make sure they are stripped of dignity and comforts so as to make their imprisonments miserable. Imagine being put in a concrete cage with only dudes, you are literally regimented by force to someone else's early-morning schedule, it takes 3 hours of prison work to buy a bag of chips or make a 10 minute collect phone call to a loved one, your only escape is solitary confinement with nothing but your cloths, hands, and mind, and you are stuck in this building or others like it until you die.
Only politicians and judges should face that possibility, only because they wield the flaming sword of the state!
> to make sure they are stripped of dignity and comforts s
That's the point. You speak as if we do this mistakenly.
> Imagine being put in a concrete cage with only dudes, you are literally regimented by force to someone else's early-morning schedule,
Yes. I can imagine this. My imagination acts as a deterrent. I implore you to continue to urge others to imagine it, particularly those at risk of becoming criminals themselves.
You have sympathy for victims but offer none to offenders, who are often (but not always) victims themselves who have been failed previously.
If deterrance worked, why is the US so imprisoned today? The memes surrounding the tree of liberty did not spring up in a vaccuum, groups of men with power have a long sordid history of atrocities. Those men use magick (psychological trickery) to gain your consent to act on others by force, or the consent of others to act on you by force.
I am a pro- liberal gun ownership and pro- restricted state power kind of girl (especially re: "War on ___"): I have better chances of survival shooting back at criminals than goons in Fashi garb.
> 2. That person has to escape from their final prison.
Tangentially, in some Scandinavian (I believe?) countries, escaping from prison is not a punishable offense. To be clear, you will be looked for, and taken back to prison when found, but their legal system has ruled that the craving for freedom is a natural human urge, and that it's punishing human behavior to punish escapees for escaping.
That's explicitly why I called out crimes committed as part of the escape and evasion as a potential example of "subsequent crimes that don't qualify for the death penalty". There are too many valid mitigating circumstances to just blanket say "he's a convicted murder, and he escaped, now we get to kill him".
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that escape shouldn't be treated as a crime (one way to view crime is an explicit rejection of the idea that a government can or should dictate our actions, so in that light, trying to get out of a legal punishment is itself a rejection of that government's right to issue punishments). But certainly, if the only additional crime is the escape itself, then the death penalty is entirely unwarranted.
IIRC the reasoning mainly rests on the right to not have to assist the state in convicting and punishing you. Similar principle as the right to remain silent.
It would also be weird to punish people for a failing of the state.
To clarify, and especially in context of this article:
1. A person has to ~~commit and~~ be convicted of, and sentenced for a (potentially) capital crime. 2. That person has to escape from their final prison. 3. That person must then ~~commit, and~~ be convicted of another capital crime
Of course if a person remorselessly commits a capital crime it changes a lot of things. But one big problem is that justice system can't reliably always determine who committed the crime (or was it committed at all).
And a good criticism to my concept is that if a person is falsely convicted of one heinous crime, then escapes and is accused of some other heinous crime, the original conviction would likely be used as evidence towards motive and means.
I'm not sure of a good solution to that problem, although it would certainly shrink the number of executions of innocent people, it would not completely eliminate them.
Also, another case in which the death penalty could be warranted:
The person has confessed to the crime, does not recant their confession, and accepts (or even desires) the death penalty in lieu of lifetime imprisonment. (Yes, there are cases like this.)
Of course, this reads a bit more like suicide, and may not be necessary if we had appropriate "right-to-die" provisions in general (such that they also applied to prisoners). Maybe we should just give all such prisoners access to a seppuku knife once a year.
> Maybe we should just give all such prisoners access to a seppuku knife once a year.
Honestly, I don't understand the desire to make the death additionally torturous. If we must kill, just give people a gram of fentanyl. They'll enjoy the last few moments of their life, a grace that's traditionally afforded in the form of a last meal, and simply forget to breathe.
1. A person has to commit and be convicted of, and sentenced for a (potentially) capital crime. 2. That person has to escape from their final prison. 3. That person must then commit, and be convicted of another capital crime (probably with some mitigating circumstances, like murders that are arguably part of the escape and evasion don't qualify for the death penalty, but escaping, then going out of your way to murder a civilian do).
For most bad crimes, life without parole is more than adequate. And if you escape and dedicate yourself to keeping your nose clean, then the worst you should face is an extended sentence. The death penalty should be reserved for people who pose such a proven, dire risk to society that the goal of the punishment is risk mitigation for society, not justice. Ted Bundy is the best real-world example I can think of.