A reader quotes another:
"OK, so some 6'5'' dude that looks like a pro wrestler rapes and kills 10 men with his bare hands. Because capital punishment is now abolished, he is sentenced to life in prison and put in a cell with YOU." OK, so with the death penalty this dude is in a cell with someone like Cameron Todd Willingham for twenty-five years while their appeals are working their way through the system. Better? How?
Another writes:
To your reader who expressed concern regarding what to do with lifers who act out in prison; two words: Solitary Confinement. For the rest of their lives.
Another:
The scenario described is one of the reasons for different security levels in the prison system. Non-violent offenders are separated from violent ones, and the most violent end up in maximum security prisons in solitary confinement. Death row inmates spend years in prison and are placed in solitary confinement for the same reason the violent inmate sentenced to life in prison ends up in solitary. But however unjust solitary confinement would be for someone wrongly convicted, it will always have the chance for a meaningful exoneration, unlike the death penalty.
Another:
What's more humane about imprisoning a human being for their lifetime instead of killing them? This has always baffled me.
If a savage dog got off the leash and killed a human being, would it be more humane to lock the dog in a tiny cage, feed it an adequate amount of food and water to survive, just so it could die of natural causes in ten or twenty years? I say no; killing the dog prevents much more misery than allowing it to live. Yet we act more humanely towards human beings when we lock them away for decades (often with periods of solitary confinement) and allow their lives to waste to nothing? It has always struck me as more humane to execute a criminal who is guilty of a monstrous crime than imprison them for life.
Balko insists the opposite is true. Another reader:
Your reader holds the old, long-disproved fallacy that the death penalty somehow has a particular deterrent effect on crime. The death penalty simply does not give pause to someone who is already sociopathic enough to commit the heinous crimes the reader cites. If it did, we should have seen a decrease in death sentences in states like Texas and Louisiana since the penalty was reinstated, which we demonstrably have not.
Rather, the channeled blood lust of society as a whole, meted out on the (not always) most heinous offenders feeds on its own self-righteous pleasure in taking back the imagined power over life and death, of which these offenders have made us suspect and fearful. The lex talonis serves to restore the psychological vulnerability of society in the face of murderers, but it certainly does not prevent murder. Wilkinson correctly identifies the real issues that drive the debate, which are the desire for vengeance for victim's families and society as a whole.
We can have a conversation over whether such a desire is appropriate, but let's drop the deterrence bullshit. Besides, such a gruesome scenario does not remove the moral hazard of the death penalty, under which an innocent person could so easily be sentenced to a wrongful death. Troy Davis's execution is an excellent example because, even if he may have been "probably guilty," "probably" just isn't good enough to justify such a punishment. No one should be allowed to make the deterrent argument for the death penalty without offering some studies to back it up.
Update from a reader along those lines:
Is there even a modicum of evidence that a dozen states that haven't had the death penalty since 1976 or earlier have higher rates of prison murder? Not according to numerous studies (pdf) that find no increase in murder among lifers in states that have no penalty.
The Dish 