| Improper or mistaken convictions, where reasonable oversight would have detected the error, are barbaric. If you want barbarism, you can find plenty in the way the criminal justice system is run for all offenders. Prison is inhumane and barbaric, and has the opposite of the intended effect most of the time. Many ex-cons have become hardened criminals through their time on the inside, and even for those who haven't and want to reintegrate productively, the outside world does its best to prevent reintegration. How many innocent people are killed in prison, not by the state, or have their lives ruined? You can say as long as they're alive there's hope they'll achieve something and be happy, but statistically those prospects are dimmer every year they spend inside. The only remaining good thing prison does is keep bad people from causing problems in society for some number of years. Which is the same thing the death penalty does. I don't know if the most productive way to use political capital to reform the criminal justice system is to abolish the death penalty. Unjustified state-sanctioned death might be terrible, but so are things like the drug war which probably do more aggregate harm. In an ideal world we'd get rid of prisons somehow, too. In addition to ending the drug war and trying to fix neighborhoods that have been broken by it, fixing misaligned incentives for prosecution and law enforcement to prosecute cases would have a massive impact, far greater than any squabbles about the death penalty. Too often the prosecutors and law enforcement have desire to convict someone, and the defendant is the best chance they have, so they go ahead. More neutrality has to be introduced somehow. Judges being allowed to direct questions to witnesses might be a place to start. |