From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Mon Nov 30 1998 - 10:16:33 MST
On Mon, Nov 30, 1998 at 11:02:00AM -0500, John Clark wrote:
>
> By the way, I have no problem with capital punishment (if it is painless)
I do.
I live in the UK. The UK abolished the death penalty about thirty years ago,
replacing it with mandatory life imprisonment (with sentences served averaging
over twenty years and some prisoners banged up for the rest of their life).
Over the past thirty years, something like 10-15% of all life sentences for
murder have been overturned as unsafe and unsound. Under the previous regime
these people would have been hanged.
However, the recidivism rate for murderers released on license from a life
sentence is vanishingly small -- less than 0.2%.
If the UK had retained hanging, something like 50-100 innocent people
would have been executed over the past 30 years, as compared to a much
smaller number of innocent people being murdered by recidivists released
on license. Conclusion: capital punishment kills more innocent people than
it saves, if your main criterion for penal efficacy is prevention. (We
can discount the deterrent argument -- studies as long ago as the 1860's
proved that it wasn't a factor in the British penal system.)
Of course, if you have a penal system that releases murderers imprisoned
for life on parole after six or seven years, you will get different figures
out of the other end. But a properly enforced life sentence seems to work
as a preventative without causing irreversible miscarriages of justice.
(If/when Alcor and friends can demonstrate the ability to revive
people who've been frozen, I will change my opinion on the death penalty;
but until someone comes up with a reversible implementation, I will object
on the fundamental basis that the administration of justice is not perfect
and it is in utilitarian terms better not to use the death penalty. I have
lesser objections -- based on the point that the death penalty is exercised
by the state, and I don't think the state should have the power of life or
death over its citizens, but that's an opinion, rather than an objection
based on hard numbers.)
-- Charlie
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