[lbo-talk] Dean: hang 'em high!

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Jun 18 13:48:35 PDT 2003


At 4:26 PM -0400 6/18/03, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>So if one does not object too much to the above listed acts of
>killing, why would one object to killing a criminal? The
>distinction between voluntary and involuntary death does not help
>much here, because (i) most of the killings listed above (except
>euthanasia) are not consented to by the killee and (ii) it is a two
>edge sword: a convicted murderer did not respect the will of the
>person he killed, why then we should respect his?

As human beings -- including jurors, witnesses, judges, prosecutors, detectives, defense attorneys, expert witnesses, etc. -- cannot avoid making errors, even in a hypothetically perfect society, there can and will be miscarriages of justice, including cases of individuals who had been convicted of murder but who turn out to be innocent later. Death penalties, once carried out, are irreversible, but other sentences -- including life imprisonment without parole -- can be ended or commuted to lesser sentences. The abolition of death penalty may be thought of as an insurance policy -- you insure against the possibility of killing innocents by mistake, the inevitable cost of insurance being the necessity to deprive the truly guilty of the right to be responsible for their crimes and punished accordingly. -- Yoshie

* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>



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