Death penalty, for or against?
Many states have laws on the books that effect, compensating the wrongly imprisoned $50,000-80,000 per year of incarceration (Texas, surprisingly, is at the higher end). Of course, prosecutors try to wiggle out of paying this by blocking the complete exoneration sometimes required to collect, an action for which I'd happily apply the death penalty personally.
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“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
-- Robert Anton Wilson
This.
There are several groups who will appeal any death penalty case just on principle. Most all of them are absolutely frivolous and not only needlessly delay the process, but it adds a ton of cost that need no be there.
By their works?
It is true that humans do not have God's capacity for forgiveness, but shouldn't we at least aspire for it?
Many states have laws on the books that effect, compensating the wrongly imprisoned $50,000-80,000 per year of incarceration (Texas, surprisingly, is at the higher end). Of course, prosecutors try to wiggle out of paying this by blocking the complete exoneration sometimes required to collect, an action for which I'd happily apply the death penalty personally.
I don't think that's enough, personally. They should get the wage of the highest paid state employee for the length of their incarceration, and then a comfortable wage for life.
(Assuming a very long sentence here, 20 years or so. For 10 years I think that's fair, but for life rather than 10 years. For two years, it's probably fair)
It seems that most of the extra costs are incurred before the conviction, not during appeals:
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issu ... nalty-cost
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 546AASeozS
So it's not an inherent cost of execution, but of the process those jurisdictions choose to put around it. The defendant probably has little choice in this. Again, I don't know much about the process, so perhaps it is all necessary and useful, but I suspect it was more likely added for political reasons. That is, legislators knew that far from everyone is comfortable with the death penalty, so they "wrapped" it in all this extra process to make it more palatable. Perhaps they themselves weren't as comfortable with executing people as they said. This is all based on the assumption that death is the worst thing that can possibly happen to a person, which I find ludicrous, considering that it happens to every single person.
Yes, you can pay financial compensation to the wrongly-imprisoned, but how much is enough? As a thought experiment, consider how much money you would take to go to prison for a year. What about for 20 years? In addition to the actual prison time consider all the indirect damage (psychological, career, social, relationship, etc.) and the compensation of $80,000 per year seems laughable.
OK, saying that to kill someone is kinder may have been over-generalising. I still think that's true in some cases, but probably not in all. My basic point is that the cost of a wrongful conviction is huge even without death penalty and the death penalty doesn't necessarily increase it much, if at all.
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