There are still crimes where the punishment should be a short rope and a tall tree. Forty years of a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, and three squares a day is insane.
Death is irreversible. Imprisonment is not. Unfortunately, US criminal system routinely imprisons innocents (and in other countries I'm sure it is not much different). E.g. check out Innocence Project[1]. Criminal justice system is rife with errors, malfunctions and abuse. For imprisonment and fines, one can at least fix an error after the fact. One does not get back years spent in prison, but at least they can get free and maybe also compensated for it somehow. But if the person is dead, you can not fix it.
I was for a long time of the opinion that there are crimes deserving death penalty, and I still kind of think so. But - I am no longer sure the US government, and most of other governments, can be trusted with this power. They are too broken and dysfunctional to be able to wield it justly. As such, it is better to not have it at all.
Yes and No, I'd sooner my taxes pay to keep someone away from society who needs to be than pay to execute them even if it costs more, I'd sooner living that society even if it costs more.
Fortunately where I am the death penalty is a settled issue.
Honest question, why is putting someone in a box for the rest of their life more morally acceptable than killing them? I personally find life imprisonment to be far more horrifying than death.
I understand the concerns around the death penalty, namely the possibility of a wrongful conviction with the inability to appeal once the sentence is carried out. But just comparing the punishments, why is one morally better than the other?
My price-sensitive futurist perspective would rather we pay the one time $30k price for a basic cryonics suspension than outright kill them or keep them locked up for life. (Caveats that it would then be seen as cruel not to suspend terminally ill patients, old people, and so on, so the sudden increase in cryonics demand would surely improve the methods and decrease the cost...) But in the Current Year and Current World locking them up for life is strictly better than just killing them, because I think that sometime within the next 50 years we have at bare minimum a decent shot at finding out how to drastically expand lifetimes (perhaps de facto immortality) and additionally alter a person's self in subtle ways that still constitutes a continuation of identity, and then we can directly rehabilitate. (Somewhat like Demolition Man, except done right. ;)) I also think the major powers can squeeze by and last that long, specifically no entering of a new dark age even if say the US split up or even if the several social order crises currently underway made some big dents. Without the possibility of living forever with a non-dangerous mind, I actually don't see much reason to prefer life in prison over death, I see a big reason (cost) to prefer death, and if I was sentenced any time prior to the early 1900s I'd ask for the guillotine instead.
