Transcript
Alabama suffocated a man to death in a gas chamber tonight after starving him so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit as they did it. And this was deemed perfectly legal by multiple courts in the vaunted American legal system.
That’s what happens when you value institutions over people.
Link for more info: https://www.reuters.com/legal/alabama-prepares-carry-out-first-execution-by-nitrogen-asphyxiation-2024-01-25/
Then it’s still a bad idea because of the literal cost to taxpayers.
Life in prison is $70,000 per year (paid by taxpayers, of course).
The legal battle around the death penalty is around $1.12 million, also paid around taxpayers
https://www.cato.org/blog/financial-implications-death-penalty
That’s 14 times more expensive.
There are tons of things I would see the state spend money on rather than literally killing people. In the case of this, maybe mental health help for the victims.
Well one way to lower it is to settle law around the death penalty it seems. And they attribute part of the cost to battling chemical manufacturers, which could be moot with how cheap and easy it is to acquire nitrogen or even carbon monoxide.
Also if it’s 70,000 a year to house an inmate… if an inmate is jailed for 20 years before death, total cost is 1.4 million. If an inmate is jailed at 20 and lives for another 60 years, that’s 4.2 million.
So taking out a very young inmate would theoretically save the state about 3 million if they live until a natural age. Ted Kaczynski lived until 81 and absolutely deserved death.
Or you could just not kill people.
From amnesty USA. https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost/
And he did die. Does that not satisfy you?
Kidding, but it’s not a matter of deserves. It’s about the states power in relation to their citizens. The state shouldn’t have the power over life and death, because power corrupts. Cases like this: https://innocenceproject.org/melissa-lucio-9-facts-innocent-woman-facing-execution/
The poor woman was interrogated for 5 hours straight by police into confessing her “crime”, while pregnant with twins, after which she was sentenced to death (still alive btw, lawsuits still ongoing and sucking up taxpayer money, even 13 years later.). One of the influential things in her death was the District Attorney who was attempting to be reelected on a “tough on crime” platform.
Of course, you made an argument about “what if we require really, really hard evidence”… but what evidence is greater than a confession? What if evidence is fudged? There can never be a guarantee, and we should design our systems to account for human error… or malice.
Prison should be a place to rehabilitate people first, and a place to remove dangerous people from society second. Not a political platform, like the death penalty is so often.
The death penalty is the ultimate form of virtue signaling. An expensive way to remove someone from society, when life in prison would have the same effects, relatively. Everybody dies eventually, no need to waste money on killing people early when we could be spending money on keeping people alive.