[258] in libertarians
Death Penalty
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vernon Imrich)
Tue Sep 27 00:28:05 1994
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 94 00:25:05 -0400
From: vimrich@flying-cloud.mit.edu (Vernon Imrich)
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU
I'm interested in what other's think about the Death Penalty. The
LP's position is silent.
My reasoning is simple. The same state that gives money to drug users
calling their addiction "a hardship," that offers both tobacco subsidies
and a tax on tobacco to fund anti-smoking campaigns at the same time,
that sends marijuana growers to prision for longer terms than the average
murderer, and routinely paroles dangerous people "on accident," simply
cannot be trusted with life and death decisions about ANYTHING. If you
ever sit on a jury, you'll see how completely precarious (should I say
arbitrary?) a given verdict can be, even on the simplest of disputes.
BTW, if people are interested, I've got a taped 1 hour episode of A&E's
"American Justice" called "The Wrong Man." The show details many cases
of people wrongly convicted, all of them for murder, rape, and/or other
serious crimes. At least two ot these won appeals AND WERE THEN
CONVICTED AGAIN before the evidence came to light to set them free.
(Police, and prosecutors fought even harder the next time around to
preserve the sense that they "had not made a mistake.") The show
"conservatively" estimated the number of wrongful convictions as several
thousands per year, nationwide. It is very anti-government, anti-system,
and often quite moving. I'd love to show it, if anyone is interested.
I have no other objection to the death penalty. The ineptitude of
government, and the criminal justice system is enough. I still remember
reading about a month or so ago about a forensic chemist in NY state
who'd been "fudging" results for something like 15 years on lab tests
to make the prosecutions go ahead. He claimed to be a bio major, chem
minor in college with good marks. Turned out he'd been a C student
in biology and only taken a few classes in chemistry ever. Add to that
altered evidence, gung ho cops, and public pressure on DA's and you've
got a recipe for disaster. Anyone see "The Oxbow Incident?"
Vernon
