| I totally get what Antoine is saying here. The injustice of executing someone who is later found to be innocent is a shattering idea for a society to accept, without counting the effect such a thing would have on the lives of those directly touched by it.
You would wish to avoid such injustices at all costs, of course. However, one such cost is that you are left with murderers who, in reality, live out a portion of their lives behind bars and who are then released back into society. For some, rehabilitation may have been possible, for others though, nothing has changed - they are still a person capable of murdering.
It has been suggested that execution for premeditated murder is no deterrent for some would-be murderers. On the other hand, I cannot believe for one moment that it would not be a deterrent for a large number of people. Execution would be a valuable tool in dissuading people contemplating murder, the sort of people for whom the possibility of 15 years imprisonment represents an acceptable risk compared to the potential benefit of "getting away with it". A counter-argument to this last point is "make life sentences mean life". However, you could end up incarcerating an innocent person for the rest of his life - if no evidence of his innocence comes to light, you have still taken his life away from him to an extent that rivals that of execution. If evidence comes to light, the innocent person walks free of prison - not unscathed by the experience. An innocent has escaped unjust execution, but you still do not have a valuable deterrent against murder.
In the end, you need to look at the matter as dispassionately as you possibly can. You have to balance to risk of injustice/miscarriage of justice where an innocent person is executed, against the injustice of a legal system that is not doing its utmost to protect innocent victims of murder. If you accept that execution is any form of deterrent, you must accept that it is an idea that deserves as least as much consideration as our fear of innocent people being executed.  |