Is there any other option?

Back in the day, they could just send criminals to Australia.

Yes but only if the evidence is overwhelming like a video for example.

You can't bank on video always being foolproof nowadays.

Exactly. I'm not sure how proponents of this think it would work. Are we going to have "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt", and then "guilty really, really beyond a reasonable doubt"?

The article suggested that rapists of children 12 and under would be eligible for the death penalty. I am not for it or against it but it would probably work similarly to murderers and the death penalty. Sometimes the court and jury decide life and sometimes they decide death.

Yeah, I should have clarified that I meant how it would work when you consider wrongful convictions. When people suggest it should just be for cases when it's clear cut, overwhelming evidence, etc., I don't think that really makes sense. There is no way around wrongful convictions IMO - either you think that executing child rapists is important enough that you're willing to pay the price of some people being wrongfully executed, or you're not. You're correct in that "it would probably work similarly to murderers and the death penalty", and that sometimes leads to wrongful executions.

I think...I....Just...agreed...with you!

It'll happen now and then.

I believe the death penalty is appropriate for a lot of crimes, if we can get it right 100% of the time. The problem is we can't. Even one person executed every 20 years is too much. Having a punishment of life without parole isn't too much of compromise to avoid having any innocent people die.

In a perfect world where innocent people are never convicted, what is the benefit of the state executing it's own citizens, rather than just confining them?

Morally I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty. One of the Ten commandments is "Thou shalt not Kill". And yet as a society we are all killing people when they are executed. And yes I know there is a separation of Church and State. Just pointing out that all of the pro-life religious zealots in the US are not really.

I think we should be better than the murderers.

If a person rapes a child I don't think they should ever be allowed out of prison for any reason whatsoever. If a person is convicted I get that it may not always be correct and I do think it is important for people to have the chance to undo the outcome if in fact they are innocent.

Having said all of that in personal experience I was a passenger in a taxi cab in NYC when a guy who was driving a stolen car at about 60 mph slammed into my cab which was stopped at a red light and another cab going the other way at the same red light, veered right and went head on into a tree. As he was being wheeled to an ambulance on a stretcher I was about to ask a police officer how he was doing when I realized I didn't care if he lived or died. Not sure if it was motivated by anger or just I don't care if bad people live or die.

So as much as I don't believe in the death penalty there is a part of me that just doesn't care (because yes innocent people will be killed but in the end a whole lot more very very bad people will be killed and perhaps a lot of rapes and murders would be prevented. Maybe a lot more than the deaths of the innocent)

Also there is a part of me that wishes that every single person who commits rape is killed in the act which because they are committing a federal crime would mean that the person who killed them is innocent of murder. That would be because so few rapists actually end up in prison (like 1% to 3%) and those that do somehow either get really light sentences or when they get out after however many years, commit more rapes. So I actually care more about unknown people who would be raped in the future than the life of a rapist.

There's a philosophic argument to be made that confining anyone is cruel and that if an offense reaches that point then executing them is more humane.*

Seriously, I think that for some crimes the appropriate punishment is execution. I understand the argument that it is never appropriate. But like I said, if we can't be 100% sure of guilt 100% of the time then capital punishment should be off the table. And being humans, we can never be that sure.


*OK, maybe not a philosophy book, but I think I got that from "Stranger In A Strange Land".

There's the third option of making the conditions of confinement more humane than execution.

It's not the conditions of the confinement, it's the taking away someones liberty. A gilded cage is still a cage. (Heinlein was a radical libertarian.)

Fine, we could leave it up to the inmates to decide. I'm fine with assisted suicide but not murder.

It would save the cost of operating the prisons and cause less suffering to the guilty person.

(I realize that currently death sentences are appealed so many times that they cost the government a ton of money, but that should be changed).

If I were wrongfully convicted of a capital crime, I would prefer to be quickly executed than imprisoned for years with the slight hope that maybe some evidence proving my innocence would turn up.

I would bet the majority of people executed were innocent.

Curious why you think that

Because everything anyone in the US does is bad. Duh!

And your personal preference should be applied to everyone?

No, but it should be an option, and everyone always assumes the opposite. Even when guilty and convicted criminals have stated that they want to be executed, it still somehow takes years for it to happen, if ever.

The criteria should be the same as for a conviction with no execution?

It is true that it's a ridiculous county.