Forget about the hundreds and hundreds of cases (that we
know about) of prosecutorial misconduct that seem rampant in our legal system,
where prosecutors are found to have actively hid exculpatory evidence that
would have exonerated the suspect.
Forget about unreliable witnesses, and the occurrences of
dishonest police officers that plant evidence to make sure the guy they “know”
is guilty goes down for the crime.
Forget about the fact that some people are just cur-dogs
that deserve a bullet to the head and nothing more.
Forget all of that.
I’m just not sure that a government that I don’t trust to do
much of anything efficiently is a government that I should trust to have the
ability to kill the citizens of its nation competently and correctly.
I’m also not sure I like the implications of the
conversation that I had today where I pointed out the startlingly high rate of
exoneration of people on death row (and I wasn’t talking “walked on a
technicality, I was talking “fully innocent of all charges”) and the man, and
several more people around us, responded that they thought it was okay if we
occasionally executed an innocent man, because, hey, nobody’s perfect, and no
system will be right 100% of the time, and the death penalty is there for the
overall good of society. You have to
break an egg or two to make an omelet.
I suggested that if they felt so strongly about it being
necessary to execute an innocent person for the good of society and all, that
they should volunteer to be next. I
asked them all if they would feel the same way if they happened to be the
person caught up in the gears of the machine.
I asked them if they would be singing a happy tune in their heart as the
executioner stuck the needle into their arm, because, hey, “good of society”
and all.
And the answer is that no one would. It is perfectly simple and easy to suggest
that innocent people need to be occasionally executed for the good of society,
but much more difficult to suggest that you should be next, and I can not, for
the life of me, understand how that isn’t just fucking evil.
Can you?
I, for one, don’t want to be executed by the government for
something I didn’t do. Because of this,
I will not condone a system that would do exactly that to another man just
because it is convenient to me. And
until we have a system that never does execute any man for something he did not
do, I will stand in opposition to that system, forever. I don’t care what public good the death
penalty creates; it does not, nor will it ever, offset the harm that it causes
to the innocent men who have surely been denied their lives as a result of its
existence.
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