[WS:] I am well aware of it, unfortunately. However, that does not preclude the popularity of the anti-statist narrative. Those things tend to be inconsistent - the same folks who support death penalty, oppose killing babies. George Lakoff extensively wrote about it in 'Moral Politics."
Marv: "The minority of liberals and others who want to abolish capital punishment most often cite as the reason for their objection that it is "morally wrong to take a life"
[WS:] Again I am well aware of it, but I do not always take explicitly stated reasons for their face value. More people die as a result of crime than as a result of death penalty, so if "not taking a life" was the central moral principle for these folks, they would be on the crime fighting front, no? But few of them are. I suspect that the main reason is that crime fighting is dominated by conservatives, which turns a lot of liberals off. I have a reason to believe that the main motivating factors is not the sanctity of life principle - which means that they should be anti-abortion as well - but rather different types of moral frameworks applied to politics - nurturing vs. punitive (see George Lakoff op cit. for more details.)
Marv: "the unacceptable risk of wrongful conviction - "
[WS:] That is the factor that I often quoted as a reason against death penalty, but upon reflection I do not think it is much of a factor as alleged. It is so, because it takes years to execute a person in this country, which gives a chance for overturning the original verdict. I'd go as far as saying that a better chance than overturning a prison verdict, because the finality of the death sentence provides a much stronger incentive to find exonerating circumstances than a prison sentence does. What is more, if the person who received a death sentence is exonerated after spending twenty years on a death row, this is basically no different than a person who received a 20 year sentence and was exonerated after he had served it. In both cases, people spent twenty years in jail and that is irreversible.
So while it is still possible that an executed person may be altogether innocent, a more likely scenario is not innocence but circumstances warranting severity of the sentence. It is the question whether a guilty person should serve a long jail term vs. a guilty person being executed after spending 20 or so years on the death row.
But in any case - the arguments against death penalty are serious and I take them very seriously. I am generally against it, albeit not absolutely. However, the whole issue has a rather low priority to me as not that many people are affected, and most of those who are are guilty of heinous crimes anyway. I would rather spend my effort on causes that can benefit greater numbers of people. -- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."