Murder and capital punishment

Capital punishment (CP) is not worthy of a civilized state, any more than murder is in a civil society. It is a barbaric and medieval practice. It does little more than satisfy the base instinct of revenge in the victims' advocates/relatives and an hyped-up, rubber-necking, second-hand public.

An "eye for an eye" logic is not justice, but simply the production of an unending cycle of violence. CP sends the message to society that death is a proper bookend for some criminal trial proceedings, i.e. that violence puts and end to violence. On the contrary, CP complements and augments violence within an already violent society. And, moreover, a society that embraces capital punishment is usually one that condones violence and warfare as a means to solving political disputes, internal and international.

I also question whether CP is a sound deterrent, not in the least because a of tangled judicial system which delays executions for so long and thus the process to convict is so costly, emotionally and economically. That is not to say swift justice capital-punishment-style would equate to a good deterrent. Because the people who commit such crimes are usually not of a mind to properly consider the consequences, or if they can and do, tend to gamble irrationally on a favorable outcome for themselves.

There is also the issue of people, mainly of color, being wrongly sentenced to death. The jury may offer a wrong verdict, or evidence may appear after the trial that proves the innocence of the defendant.

Finally, there is the racial issue, i.e. black people are overrepresented in wrongful convictions nearly four times the rate of their proportion of the population.

In short, I think CP should be replaced by commensurate forms of intense, but not cruel forced labor, for life with the possibility of parole, which gives back to society in ways that the punishment is commensurate to the crime.