Whose Pro Death?
there’s lots of complex stuff going on in the news right now, and I don’t want to deal with it. So instead I’m going to talk about something real simple. The death penalty.
I’m for the death penalty , but adamantly against how it exists right now.
The three year recidivism rates for someone who served time for a homicide being convicted of another is 1.2 percent, and the recidivism rate for a rapist who is released committing another rape in the three years after release from prison is 2.2 percent.
These numbers are small but significant. When you die that’s it. There’s no angel waiting to give you a hummer and play all your favorite songs on the harpsichord. Your fucking done, and because of this murder is the worst thing one person can do to another person because they are taking them out of the universe and making it so never in a billion trillion years will anyone ever speak to them again. That’s what it means to be dead. And one percent, I’m rounding down, of murderers who are let go within just three years will kill again. These are actually misleading stats because obviously these are only the murderers caught and convicted and because they only last for a three year period from the end of the prison term and would be higher if the studies I’d found had tracked for a longer period.
Two percent of rapists will be convicted of a second rape within three years of getting out of prison. Short of murdering someone, raping them is the next most terrible thing you can do to them. It ruins there self-image, makes them have to go to therapy for a while, probably messes up there sexual satisfaction for a good long time, makes them wonder if there was something wrong with them that attracted a rapist in the first place, ETC.
In my opinion if you committed one of these crimes, either rape or murder which was not manslaughter, then you shouldn’t be reading this in prison off a jail broken iPhone after lights out because you should have been killed about eighteen minutes after your last appeal finished.
Why? Well first as I said, no one comes back from the dead and killing is wrong because you are obliterating someone’s unique consciousness from the world and this worlds all we get. If it wasn’t self defense or a fight that got out of control, a prisoner should be killed for murdering for the reason already mentioned but also because he might kill again and that is grossly unfair to everyone involved. We should not give either rapists or murderers a second chance. Murder isn’t backhanding your girlfriend in the face after six beers because she won’t shut up about how the gutters need to be cleaned. It will not heal in three days and sorry won’t make it better.
Rape isn’t giving a girl, or guy for that matter, the creepy eye at the gas station its taking them and using them and then throwing them away like a dirty tissue when your done and is inexcusable for a host of reasons that I’m confident I do not need to enumerate.
Any chance that this person would get out of jail and then commit the same crime for a second time is intolerable. Rape and murder are not accidents, and if we assume people are responsible for there actions, then these two crimes are a large enough breach of the social contract that the only just response is death.
There are two good arguments for why the death penalty should not exist in any way shape or form. They just aren’t good enough to convince me it should be abolished. Here they are.
The first. We sometimes kill innocent people. Welcome to the world. In Iraq and Afghanistan I’m “bet my life” positive that at least a thousand innocent people have died for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time yet we’d never dream of saying a loss of innocent life has never been a good enough reason not to conduct a war, it is instead seen as a necessary price to pay for the goals of whatever causes a country to go to war.
With no death penalty it isn’t as though innocent people won’t be sentenced to life without parole. Ask them at eighty if the last fifty years in prison have been happy and fulfilling.
Prosecutors suck. Not all of them are noble and hardworking, some of them are racist and some of them want to get a lot of strong looking convictions so they can run for the state Senit in a couple more years, and some of them are incompetent. Similarly, sometimes defense lawyers suck, because they are incompetent or disinterested, and that, again, is the fault of the defense lawyer who half assed it and of the legal system which did not recognize that he was half assing it. Innocent people get screwed all the time. This should be avoided whenever possible, but its almost a rule of the world that every day something unfair happens to someone. So it goes. Doctors amputate the wrong leg or remove a piece of the brain from the wrong hemisphere or give the wrong medication, and yeah, every once in a while an innocent man goes to prison for murder or rape, and if he gets sentenced to death we kill him and that is tragic and the next time it happens we should use it as an incentive to conduct better trials, fire crappy prosecutors and always collect DNA evidence. But throwing a man in jail for something he did not do for the rest of his natural life is equally tragic and unjust but is the fault of our legal system and not the sentences that system hands out.
But whether or not we continue to use the death penalty has nothing to do with how affective we are at punishing those who truly have murdered or raped. The question to consider when asking oneself if one believes the death penalty should be practiced is if a murderer deserves to die for his crime. The thing that’s worse than our killing an innocent man for a crime he didn’t commit is letting thousands of convicted murderers out of jail because statistics show us that some of them murder again. If we killed them they wouldn’t do that.
The second argument for why the death penalty should be abolished is that it is not a deterrent. And of course its not a deterrent because its not enforced. Right now when you kill someone in this country you don’t even have to worry about getting the death penalty. Nothing like every murderer is killed by the state, it isn’t one in ten, it isn’t one in a hundred. From the perspective of the murderer, your luck has to be complete shit to be fighting a death sentence.
The only time you have to be concerned about getting lethal injection is when you get the average American housewife to change the channel from Jerry Springer to your trial coverage because at that point we’ll kill you.
And the reason we kill people in this country, the thing that gets you into the running for the death sentence is that the crime you committed brought home to everyone how crappy murder and or rape are because your crime was sensational compared to the average. Your crime had either more brutality than usual, or some interesting melodrama that people got involved in because you shot your best friend over a woman or through him off a skyscraper where he landed on a moving car and crushed a baby in its car seat, or you smothered eight kids with a pillow. It doesn’t matter that from the time at which I typed this to the time at which you read it eight children will have been killed individually, the point is that you killed them all at once and that’s more sad and so people want to know that you’ll be killed. They saw something violent that upset them more than the abstract understanding they have that people die all the time and they want vengeance. In these cases the death penalty is applied from an emotional place, because a murder or rape outraged the public and that is not justice, its a show, its making a statement with a single corpse and that is ghastly. Murder is always wrong even if the events of the crime are statistically tipicle. George Zimmerman killing a seventeen year old and some random guy killing someone his own age are the same thing. But we get more upset about the Zimmerman thing because its uncommon and because there are factors in the case that bring out more sympathy for his family than the family of a less photogenic victim. One murderer getting twenty years because his crime was tipicle and another being killed because his crime was not is hypocritical which is why I do not believe in our current system where only if you anger America do we kill you because what that says is some murders are worse than others because of who you killed or how you killed them.
Thus as the capital punishment in this country is practiced today, no, it does not deter murderers because they know as well as we all do that the death penalty in this country exists as a show or an emphatic statement, not as uniformly applied sentencing for specific crimes.
However, if everyone convicted of rape was led out onto the courthouse steps, chained up and then castrated, I am super positive the level of rape in this country would fall. We cannot do this because castration and then the public bleeding out are cruel and unusual punishment but my point is that if that became the new penalty for rape there would be less rape in this country.
Realistically, if the penalty for either rape or first degree murder was death by default and extenuating circumstances were what allowed someone to do either of those things and have a chance at continued life after conviction it would be a deterrent because you would be sure that if you killed someone and didn’t chop the body fine enough or throw it far enough into the ocean, you’d be killed.
The alternative which is our status quo is almost satirical. You can be living on less than ten grand a year and kill someone and then you can go to jail and cost tax payers thirty thousand dollars a year for the rest of your life. A murderer will have his life saved if someone tries to kill him in prison, and male on male rape is stopped if guards see it and all that type of thing. Life in prison sucks. I’ve watched enough Oz to know that. But what sucks more is the idea that violent criminals who have committed the worst crimes get to see a new sunrise every day and get to breathe the air and get to live there lives while the people they killed don’t, and while the people they raped have to piece there’s back together one painful day at a time.
I don’t think that’s justice. I think justice is a firing squad.
There are many things you shouldn’t face death for, which are all the crimes I haven’t mentioned. This isn’t the middle ages, you shouldn’t have your hand chopped off for trying to steal an apple or an Ipod, and you shouldn’t be whipped in the town square for some petty offense, but murder and rape aren’t petty and I have no compassion for those who are guilty of either.
You don’t accidentally rape someone and the type of murder I’m speaking about isn’t accidental or a crime of passion. They are the opposit of victimless crimes, they are malicious and then our country gives these people the gift of continued life which is what they took from others.
I’m sure after year ten in prison there are days that subjectively feel ok. But if you’ve killed someone there are no more days like that because that person has been scrubbed out. They aren’t looking down at anyone from heaven, they’re gone, won’t come back and the guy who the courts declared guilty has gone to jail and gotten more Jacked than Lou ferrigno.
I admit readily that the wounds rape leaves behind are less visible. It isn’t like you can look around and pick out the women who were raped last year because by that point they look normal, but rape is the second worst thing that’s done to people on a statistically significant basis. And there’s far too much rape in this country and I’m sure there would be less if we killed every man who was convicted of rape.
My point is no one should feel sympathy for these people. It isn’t like smoking cigarettes or drinking or stealing food to feed your kids, you don’t wake up and go, “Oh shit I raped that bitch or shot that guy,” you did it because you wanted to and our response should be to guaranty beyond a reasonable doubt that you’ll never do it again. And the way to do that is to kill you.
There is a common misperception that our prisons exist to rehabilitate criminals. If that were the case when you shot someone in the face you would go to prison for a year of extensive counseling and rehabilitation, you would not be sentenced to thirty years in prison. The idea that we are trying to make prisoners better people is fatius, if it were so people wouldn’t be scared of prison, they would view it the way we view something like rehab programs. Unpleasant if what you want is drugs, but not terrifying. We send people to prison to punish them, and there are crimes, such as second degree murder and assault and battery and breaking and entering where time in prison is the best punishment because the crime was either a crime of passion, you came home drunk and found your wife in bed with another man and in a moment of rage you shot him, crimes where no one was killed, such as robbery, or a crime where someone was hurt but not killed, assault. These crimes do not signify that you are evil.
Evil is a word we run away from these days, but rape and premeditated murder are generally crimes that indicate that what you wanted to do was either end someone or inflict yourself upon them blotting out there freedom of action in the process. In these cases death should be the presumed punishment if a verdict of guilty is returned both to protect society and to punish the person who committed the crime.
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