Executing someone who was innocent of the crime for which they were condemned is the ultimate moral crime, presuming it’s avoidable.  And it is 100% avoidable; life in Supermax (from which nobody has ever escaped) is both absolute and, when an error is inevitably discovered, reversible.

Of course there are cases like Heinrich and Dahmer that are easy slam dunks. It’s the difficult cases, with circumstantial evidence and lots of moving parts, that make it difficult. Ignore them at your peril.

Now, to be fair Walter obliquely alludes to this in his first point about government incompetence:

Why have government at all? If they can’t get anything right, why trust them with any of it? This is silly. If people are being wrongly convicted, let’s stop that! We don’t fix that problem by nerfing sentences.

Walter states this as an “if”.  It’s not.

And it’s not just about government incompetence; there’s human nature, and even the foibles of “settled science”  as well.  For example, it‘s a dead lock that Cameron Todd Willingham was executed wrongly for the arson murder of his two kids – not because government was incompetent, but because it very competently prosecuted Willingham based on science that turned out to be completely erroneous.   Everyone knew that Arson science was “settled” when Willingham was convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt”.  Today, everyone knows that the old science was complete twaddle.

Now – go through the records of people who were convicted based on “hair strand analysis”, which was considered as solid as DNA in the sixties through the eighties, and is regarded as little better than phrenology these days.

Think about it.

Given the emotional, financal, political and legal realities of death penalty cases – they’re extremely emotionally charged, evidence is frequently circumstantial, the political benefits of executing people are large, the public defender budgets are small – it is inevitable that corners will be cut.

Next, Walter commits what I consider “taking a moral shortcut” – the old “wouldn’t you rather be  dead than in jail if you’re innocent?” question, which you’ll note is only asked by people who aren’t facing the business end of a needle, rightly or wrongly:

How is it better for someone to be falsely convicted to a life sentence than to be falsely convicted to a death sentence?Either way, it’s a false conviction. Are we to regard the world as a better place because an innocent person might spend his life in prison rather than be executed? Is that really the standard?

Yes.  It is a standard, and a very good one.  The world is a better place, because an innocent person who might have been dead is still alive, still protesting his or her innocence, still has a chance to right the wrong against them – and all of us.

How about we focus on minimizing mistakes? How about we focus on making sound convictions?

Sure – let’s!

Except “mistakes”, incompetence, hubris, corruption, bad science, and just plain human error – are always with us.  Thinking we can just think them out of existence is magical thinking.  Appeals to magical thinking are appealing responses to ethical conundrums – like saying “how about we make cars perfectly safe before we build more roads”.  But innocent people have been, and inescapably still are, on death row today – because of bogus evidence (do you have any idea how many death sentences are based on evidence from jailhouse snitches looking for better deals?), or crummy defense, or unscrupulous prosecutors, or even good prosecutions in good faith based on evidence derived from science that turns out wrong, as in Willingham’s case.

So sure – let’s focus on making sound convictions.   But let’s not pretend that that’s an answer to mistaken executions, or that it’s a question that can be answered.

That seems like a much better plan than settling for a world where innocent people spend their remaining years in hell, and guilty people don’t get what they deserve.

Over 150 people have been released from death row in the past 43 years. Not given new trials – released from Death Row to the streets because they didn’t commit the crimes for which they were condemned.

I’ve heard of none of them bemoaning the fact that they’re alive rather than dead.

There are dozens of flimsy arguments against the death penalty, and many good arguments for it…

…and one argument against it.  And that argument is all it takes.