There exist far too many incidents of the criminal justice "system" convicting the wrong person for me to accept an irreversible and permanent sentence like the death penalty. The Innocence Project (you can google it) claims to have reversed 250 convictions. While I agree that government competence is an oxymoron, in the case of criminal prosecution, it is worse: cops and prosecutors are mission-aligned to "make the suspect fit the facts". And in most cases, the suspect is staking his very life on a defense that is indifferent to the outcome - it's not his attorney's neck on the line, and what does the defense counsel get paid for what will be months of effort, when the suspect is dirt-poor?
There exist far too many incidents of the criminal justice "system" convicting the wrong person for me to accept an irreversible and permanent sentence like the death penalty. The Innocence Project (you can google it) claims to have reversed 250 convictions. While I agree that government competence is an oxymoron, in the case of criminal prosecution, it is worse: cops and prosecutors are mission-aligned to "make the suspect fit the facts". And in most cases, the suspect is staking his very life on a defense that is indifferent to the outcome - it's not his attorney's neck on the line, and what does the defense counsel get paid for what will be months of effort, when the suspect is dirt-poor?
On top of all that, something like 98% of criminal cases get pled out, usually by leveraging the fear of a big sentence against a smaller one.