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Attempt at blogging my daily stream of consciousness and failing miserably. Will improve over time, hopefully.

Thoughts on the Death Penalty

chasewhiteside:

I think that someone could reasonably argue for the death penalty if everyone put to death in our system were truly a heinous, vicious murderer incapable of nonviolent coexistence. Of course, this isn’t the case.

Without extrapolating the many moral considerations that pertain, a fundamental problem with the death penalty is that our justice system is, like the humans who administer it, sloppy; prone to error and misjudgment; replete with megalomaniacs; measurably biased in its punishment of racial minorities and the poor, and—as we’re seeing tonight—not very good at self-correcting. At its best, justice in this country is incidentally incompetent; at its worst, it is systemically corrupt. Consider the high number of people on death row who have been exonerated by DNA evidence, for whom all other venues of recourse failed. For many cases, such evidence is unavailable.

While there are specific reforms that could—and should—be made to the conviction process, this sloppiness is in many ways understandable: governing structures, due to myriad political, economic, social, and human forces, are always imprecise. What isn’t understandable, what I find unwise and even terrifying, is that we would choose to empower such an imprecise system with the ability to put someone to death.

I implore you to read this piece of long-form journalism—all of it, I know it’s lengthy, but you’ll be a better person for having read it—so that you can understand my concerns out of the abstract.

Notes about this post from the Tumblr community:

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    Seriously, folks, follow...link and Chase’s advice - no better piece has ever been written...
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