Who Can Really Say?

I'm in the middle of trying to get ready for vacation, and so I'm fiddling with the venerable Powerbook (Wall Street G3), which is essentially a 6 pound (or whatever) desktop. The battery's dead -- I'm done spending money on trying to make it work, and if my ship comes in with a cargo of dollars, my name lit up on the prow, I'm in the market for a $1200 - $1300 laptop. That said, I fiddled around with the G3 to make sure it's got my bookmarks, email addresses, etc. on it, and browsed a bit, coming up with something that's entirely off this topic. Now you know why I need a vacation.

Here's a reason in favor of capital punishment I hadn't thought of before. What do you do with the convicted murdered, already sentenced to life, who murders in prison? I don't think capital punishment is unconstitutional. One argument in favor of capital punishment is that it deters murders, but I don't think that's true and I think it's been pretty much proven to be not true. I'm not morally offended by the very idea of capital punishment either, but I am concerned about false positives, or conviction of the truly innocent. And while I value accurate guilty verdicts and appropriate sentences, I think our present system of essentially unlimited post-conviction appeals makes a mockery of the entire process.

And though the problem of what to do with convicted, sentenced-to-life killers doesn't seem to me to be the biggest issue in the mix, it does seem to be an argument in favor of at least one capital crime.