• a7h13f (edited 8 years ago)
    +10

    I think this is a great time for America as a country, to have a good long talk about the death penalty. We know that housing prisoners for life is still cheaper than executing them. We know that the death penalty doesn't deter crime. We know that innocent people have been killed as a result of our flawed system. Is this still a system we want to call justice?

    I'm by no means defending the actions of Dylann Roof or trying to suggest that he's not guilty. It's just that this tragic, needless, and senseless violence has provided an opportunity for us to question whether or not this particular punishment is just or appropriate.

    If you haven't seen it, and have a spare 12 minutes, please watch this John Oliver segment about the issue. Even if you disagree with it, I promise you'll be entertained.

    • CrazyDiamond
      +10

      It's not just the death penalty that needs to change. That's like a chunk of the iceberg that is our criminal justice system. I'm not normally cynical, I love a lot about our country, but our prisons and the volume of our prison system is scary and embarrassing.

      • Xeno
        +5

        +1

        I think a lot of these problems can be traced to the existence of private prisons. As long as we have entities that make profit off long sentences and more prisoners, we have a problem.

        • a7h13f
          +5

          For-profit prison is just an all-around terrible idea. The whole idea of prison is that it's supposed to provide rehabilitation for criminals that can reintegrate in society, and keep the others from hurting anyone else. A for-profit prison just doesn't fit with that image. Nor does retribution fit with the image of justice.

    • thraenthraen
      +5

      I am opposed to the death penalty in all cases, campaigned hard to repeal it in CA (barely failed), and do not want it for the Charleston terrorist, but I disagree that this specific case is a good time for debating it. Unless of course your only goal is to repeal the death penalty, in which case this is the perfect opportunity, as many see this man as a poor troubled boy who deserves a second chance (whilst not doing the same when it is an unarmed black person the same age). That, to me, is taking one step forward and two steps back. Why not instead frame the debate from the side of police violence and disproportionate criminalisation rates for black and brown communities and ask how we could expect that we could fairly administer the death penalty when we cannot even fairly deal with traffic and noise violations or nonviolent drug possession crimes? The Boston Marathon bombing killed six people, and the culprit was just recently given the death penalty for it (which, again, I disagree with because I am opposed to the death penalty in all cases). To immediately turn around after that and decide that this man, who killed more people, all of whom were black, deserves a seemingly lighter sentence is only feeding into the national narrative that white lives matter more than others, and that narrative is central to so many of the problems in the justice system.

      Again, I agree that the death penalty must be repealed. I disagree that the case of the Charleston terrorist attack is the right way to frame it. While I understand arguments that this terrorist would elicit more empathy and therefore be most effective for gathering opposition to the death penalty, I disagree on the grounds that doing so would exacerbate other problems in the justice system and indeed the country, namely systemic racism and white supremacy. The entire justice system needs reform, and focusing exclusively on the death penalty without regard to the rest of the systems seems misguided at best to me.

      • a7h13f
        +3

        I completely agree with you. I didn't at all mean to imply that the death penalty was the only problem in our justice system, nor did I mean to imply that we should focus on the death penalty in exclusion to other factors. Of course, police militarization, systematic racism, for-profit prisons, education, welfare, gun control, and mental health are all topics we should be mentioning, and I'm probably leaving out a few. My only point was that with such a high profile case, now is the time for having these discussions.