I'm going to make my position on the death penalty abundantly clear right now; so, forgive my lack of brevity.
So, in a perfect world, rape and murder wouldn't exist. We clearly don't live in that world.
In a world of perfect knowledge I would say that any rapist should have his balls cut off and be allowed to bleed to death. We don't live in that world either.
Imagine if we had subjected Anthony Broadwater to such punishment. The fact that an innocent man spent sixteen years in prison and forty years on the sex offender registry should give us pause.
I see the ethical argument for the death penalty for the most egregious crimes. I used to passionately support it. I'm consistently finding cases that push against my absolute opposition to the death penalty. How can I oppose the execution of a person who raped and murdered a toddler when the evidence against him is clearly beyond a reasonable doubt? I agree that that person deserves to burn in Hell and we should send him there ASAP.
So, something that I've been saying for years and, forgive me for quoting myself, is, "The worst thing that can be done to you is also the worst thing that you can be falsely accused of doing to someone else."
There's an abundance of evidence that we're constantly getting convictions wrong. We're on the wrong side of Blackstone's Ratio. I would let ten murderers go free than take another Ledell Lee being murdered by the state with faulty evidence.
Still, as a simple utility, even in the case of the clearest evil being committed by an irredeemable person, why is the satisfaction of that person's execution worth the slightest possibility that we might kill an innocent person? Why is a person dying in prison not satisfying enough? Even if that's not satisfying enough, why is it worth risking the lives of innocent people to satisfy the desire to see the worst of us killed?
Philosophically, I regard the death penalty as being untenable. It's only morally defensible if people have perfect knowledge. If people ever had perfect knowledge, it's unlikely that we would ever need to execute anybody.
