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WillowOne's Positions

Death Penalty

My Positions

  1. The death penalty should not be enacted by the state where alternative means of social protection are available.
  2. I oppose the death penalty as unjust, irreversible, and ineffective.
  3. My opposition is not based on the sanctity of life, which I do not hold, but on the fallibility of the state and the function of punishment.

Clarification / Notes

  1. The central justification for punitive justice is protection: of individuals, of society, and of public order. Retribution, the idea that the guilty deserve to suffer regardless of any benefit, is an intuition I recognise but do not consider a legitimate basis for state action. See Freewill vs Determinism: if actions are determined, desert in the retributive sense is incoherent, and punishment can only be justified by what it achieves.
  2. If reliable alternatives exist (for example secure imprisonment) that fulfil the protective function, the moral rationale for capital punishment is substantially weakened. Every society that can afford a court can afford a prison.
  3. Execution is irreversible and susceptible to judicial error or systemic bias, introducing unacceptable ethical and legal risks. In the United States, 200 people sentenced to death since 1973 have subsequently been exonerated, which is roughly one exoneration for every eight executions. The number of innocent people executed is by definition unknown, but cases such as Cameron Todd Willingham (Texas, 2004) are well documented. In the UK, the executions of Timothy Evans (1950) and Derek Bentley (1953), both later pardoned, were among the cases that led to abolition in 1965.
  4. The death penalty is not an effective deterrent. States and countries with the death penalty do not have lower murder rates than comparable ones without it; the US states without it have consistently lower murder rates than those with it. Most murders are not calculated in a way that deterrence can reach.
  5. It is applied unequally. Whether a defendant is executed depends heavily on their race, their wealth, the quality of their lawyer, and the jurisdiction in which they were tried. A punishment that cannot be applied consistently should not be applied at all.
  6. The act of execution implicates the state, and by extension all citizens regardless of their individual beliefs, in the deliberate taking of human life. In a pluralistic society, this enforced complicity violates moral autonomy and undermines democratic legitimacy.
  7. Therefore, where effective non-lethal means of protection are available, the death penalty should not be employed.
  8. Theoretically, in a situation where a society is unable to reform, securely imprison, or effectively banish an individual, and where that individual is reasonably judged to pose a real and present threat to the lives of others, the death penalty might be considered the least bad option. This is a hypothetical about a society without functioning institutions, and does not describe any modern state.

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