This is why I'm opposed to capital punishment

[pecunium]

It's not that per se, I have a fundamental problem with killing people.

It's that it can't be imposed fairly, and it can't be applied impartially, and it will never be decided without error. Add that, once the condemned has been killed the state has a negative incentive to pursue new information which might point to the innocence of the dead and a travesty is bound to happen.

Ponder this case for which the 5th Circuit granted a reprieve.

Larry Swearingen is scheduled to be executed in Texas on Tuesday for a murder that four pathologists say he could not have committed. He was in jail at the time of the murder for which he was convicted

The prosecutor, of course, avers no error could possibly have been committed.

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

We reached it some years ago, when Scalia (IIRC) wrote an opinion which said merely proving that someone else committed a crime (and locking them up) wasn't grounds to release the person now proven to have been not guilty (in fact completely innocent) of the crime for which they had been given huge (perhaps life) sentence.

Nope, 12 citizens, good and true, had been presented a case, and they ruled him guilty, and that trumped all. No error was committed, so the convicted were to remain convicted, and imprisoned.

Which is a major source of my deep, and abiding, loathing of the man. He is an utterly reprehensible excuse for a human being and a miserable excuse for a jurist.

[calcinations.livejournal.com]

That actually made me shiver in horror. What a despicable person, more suited to the 13th or 16th or 17th century. He would have fitted in fine in Scotland at the time they killed a student for blasphemy.