Quote:
Originally Posted by archimedes11
Now I haven't looked at stats comparing this, but I suspect that there isn't a significant difference in rates of violent crime between, say, states that have the death penalty and those that don't, implying that the presence of the death penalty in fact does not serve as a serious deterrent to violent crime (if someone could show me reputable stats to the contrary I would obviously be more inclined to abandon that argument).
Using the correlation between fictitious stats to imply causation is not convincing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by archimedes11
Not to mention, of course, that criminals sentenced to death are not a lesser financial burden on the public purse because a death sentence provokes an automatic appeal in the courts because when you're gonna put someone to death, you better be sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that the evidence merits such a punishment, and that requires a long and considered judicial process that consumes a vast amount of financial resources -- more so than simply locking the person away for the rest of their life. And that's without even mentioning that death row prisoners aren't put to death until decades after their sentencing, meaning that someone sentenced to life in prison in many cases may only spend a marginally longer amount of time in prison that someone who's put to death after 20 years in prison.
That is no argument against the death penalty itself. Only against inefficient execution (no pun intended).
