Still think Texas has never executed anyone who was innocent?

I have misgivings about state-sanctioned killing, but you can't honestly believe that an issue of LIFE and DEATH can be debated free of emotion. Hell, your post is dripping with emotion.

 

An imprisoned man can be released. A dead man cannot be restored to life.

 

That wasn't my question. My question was how many innocent people do you think is an acceptable number to imprison for life to ensure that 100 guilty men are imprisoned for life?

 

There is no good answer to that question. Of course no innocent person should be sentenced to life in prison but the possibility of correcting the wrong conviction at least exists with a life sentence.

 

Your question became irrelevant to the topic the moment HC pointed out the massive flaw in the comparison.

 

I'm not comparing the act. I'm comparing the logic. The two statements are logically equivalent.

Regardless, let's change the comparison to address your concern.

Statement 1: If you support the death penalty, then you have to be OK with the idea that someone died for a crime he didn't commit.

Statement 2: If you support a justified declaration of war, then you have to be OK with the idea that some civilians died as a result of justified declarations of for incursions they did not commit.

Or...

Statement 3: If you supported American entry into World War II as a penalty for the Japanese's military's attack on Pearl Harbor, then you had to be OK with the idea that hundreds of thousand of Japanese civilians died for an attack they did not commit.

All of the statements in question take the following form:

P1: If you support Penalty X, then you have to be OK with all deaths that occur as a result of Penalty X

 

Those comparisons make more sense. My issue was with the specific comparison you made. HC demonstrated exactly why it does not work.

Going to war and executing a person are two very different things. Carrying out an executiion or keeping that person in prison for life are both possible options for the same situation. One allows for a correction if the wrong person is convicted. The other does not.

 

Everything doesn't have to be logically consistent with everything else.

Putting someone to death theoretically should be the result of a lengthy legal deliberation process, but in reality is a process sent through an obviously flawed system that the death penalty provides no leeway to improve upon to the benefit of those who have been wronged.

You're comparing that to another legal process that the U.S. doesn't even go through anymore. When was the last time we formally "declared war?" Even if we did, "war" is a far different animal than an individual criminal case. Collateral damage is part and parcel of almost any combat operation, for any of a thousand different reasons.

To logically compare war to the death penalty, your statement would have to look like, "if you support the death penalty, you must also support innocent people being murdered by the criminal subject to it."

 

I'm confused. Don't you mean to say "If you're not OK with the death penalty, that must mean you're OK with innocent people being murdered by those criminals who would have been subject to it"?

 

No. Not when trying to compare it to collateral damage in a war.

Maybe a more apt comparison is that, if you support a war effort, you must then be ok with later learning it was started on false pretenses.

At any rate, it demonstrates the kind of ideological purity and logical consistency that's simply incompatible with a world as complex as ours.

 

The comparison doesn't seem all that difficult to me: Innocent people being executed are analogous to non-combatants being killed. The main difference is that innocents being executed are killed by the home team.

 

One is a built-in cost of waging war.

The other is a systemic failure.

I also object to the idea that an innocent person being put to death is comparable to an innocent person being jailed for life. Or that if I support A, I HAVE to support B.