Firstly, I acknowledge and deeply respect your reservation with regard to the Death Penalty. There are a few Ideas I would like to share with you that might cause you to reconsider. 1) There are crimes that simply cannot be punished enough for their crimes. They are a drain on the economy. A great example is Paul Gadd, (Gary Glitter) That man has raped and ruined children for decades and we go out to work to pay for that.
2) The purpose of the death penalty, eventually is to be the cautionary tale. People who are considering, rape, child rape, or murder may be swayed away from their chosen action. So it is a preventative threat.
3)It is not a punishment, it is simply a measure put in place for those who are so reprihensible that we cannot do anything with them except for whole life term prison sentences.
4) It restores the sanctity of human life. I know how ridiculous this sounds but please bear with me. In the Bible at the end of the story of Noah God makes a covenant to never again drown the entire planet but he charges us with taking the life of those who commit murder as they have refused the sanctity of life. If you actually look at the statistics for the increase of violent crimes and murder since we ended capitol punishment in the UK, you can watch a steady erosion in the value of a life and in truth, prison does seem to be an improvement of conditions for some of the people committing these crimes. The death penalty as I said, is the cautionary tale. We can leak horror stories of āGetting it wrongā So the nation feels like the price for their crime is an agonising death. Violent crime drops and the death penalty need not be employed nearly as often as you might think.
5) I would create a brand new police force, separate from the police and the CPS. Their job, is to prove, beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant didnāt commit the capitol crime and that proof, if there is any, should form part of the defence before the case is reviewed in the highest court of the land before a jury of working citizens and before the sentence of death penalty is put online for a referendum where there needs to be a 60% vote for the death penalty before the injection or SAS/SBS firing squad.
I would argue that with these types of safety precautions in place and with it being agreed to by 3 separate bodies, i) The Jury, ii) The Judge, who must have a power of veto so they can throw out the case provided that they can provide a legal reason why, iii) A national vote with a need for 60% or more. In this instance obviously every capitol case must be televised and the days findings be summarised on the daily news.
If we were to put these protections in place and guarantee that only 100% guilty criminals face the axe, I think it could actually prove to be a very useful tool of law. It may also improve psychological and neurological study as people with a distaste for the death penalty will be forced to research alternative ways. There must be a way of removing character traits and memories for both the criminal and the victims. but that is decades away yet.
