The Death Penalty

People love to take sides in everything, ranging from politics, to religion, to social issues.

And one of these stances is about the death penalty.

Some people know it from true crime shows, other people live in countries where it is legal. Some people support it, while some people are against it.

I am one of the people that are against it, but I would like to breakdown my thought process, because it’s valid with every concept we treat as a duality, not only this one.

First, I ask myself which side I am on. This is instinctual, it’s a pre-reasoning phase. My instinct tells me I am against it.

Then, I ask myself why am I against it. This is the reasoning phase. The answer is because I see the Death Penalty as killing, and I don’t condone killing (nobody sane would). Normally, the initial reasoning phase tells you if your instinct was correct. If the initial reasoning aligns with your instinct, then it was.

Now the reasoning takes two intermediary paths.

Path One (The Argument): If the Death Penalty is killing, then the Death Penalty is morally wrong. This is the argument that settles me in the group of people who are against it. I have my argument now, and this stance is what I am defending.

Path Two (The Counter Argument): Is killing morally right in any given context or is it wrong every time? Killing is morally right if it’s for sustenance (like animals kill other animals in nature to eat, or like a farmer sacrifices his chicken and pigs) or in self-defense (in a life-or-death situation, when your hand is forced to defend yourself or a loved one).

The role of part two is to give me a perspective of why other people would support the opposite stance of the concept I am defending or opposing. In this case, it is to understand why other people support the Death Penalty.

You will say: “But this Counter Argument doesn’t work, because the Death Penalty kills not for sustenance or self defense, but for the sake of removing one individual from the society, so that he won’t kill again. So it’s a different scenario altogether.”

Well, it’s not. When you look at it with Counter Argument glasses, the Death Penalty is self-defense. It’s the self-defense of the society against individuals that cause it unimaginable harm.

The problem with it, though, is that this self-defense is not executed by the society, but by the one individual who carries the sentence. The one who presses the button on the electric chair or who pushes the needle with the syringe in.

So the society, in its perfidy, condemns collectively, but puts this entire weight of the actual killing on the shoulders of one person.

If you kill a killer the number of killers in the world remains the same. Unless you are Dexter Morgan, I guess.

So the Death Penalty is not only killing, but an endless loop of it.

And even if the self-defense counter argument would be valid, by, let’s say, having the executioner’s job replaced by AI (yes, I just went there), to avoid making humans into killers, there’s also the fact that no justice system in the world is foolproof.

I’ve seen documented cases of innocent people being put to death and then exonerated post-mortem, not to mention many people who spent their lives in prison and were cleared when it was already too little and too late.

We need to face the truth: No manmade system is perfect, and as long as imperfect systems exist, imperfect results do too.

And we can’t afford to condemn innocent people.

Therefore, I am against the Death Penalty and I still stand my ground, because given all implications, this is the correct stance. This is the conclusion of the reasoning process.

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” - William Blackstone