Who Can Really Say?

Why I need a vacation

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.

Posted by Peter at August 30, 2005 08:04 PM