Capital punishment is wrong for a set of reasons which outweigh, in my judgement, the set of reasons in favor of it. The two main reasons against it are:
1. The enormous injustice of executing an innocent man. Just look at how often today, after conviction for murder, it turns out that DNA evidence acquits people on death row.
2. The financial cost of executing people in our country is so high that it is not a sensible form of punishment. In effect, capital punishment punishes society more than it punishes the person who is executed.
Murderers do deserve to die. But we do not have the ability to detect murderers with 100% certainty. Until we do, point #1 above is germane.
The fact that other civilized nations have banned capital punishment means we should re-examine our thinking. Only a closed mind shuts itself off from others’ ideas. In other words, the fact that other civilized nations ban capital punishment should lead us to re-examine this issue; that does not mean that we will come out of this process with a different idea, but we should be open-minded.
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