Death Penalty Article

[Mike Haven]

yes, David, your article is all very logical, but, unfortunately, politically, it's a non-starter in this emotive area

no government could risk damaging the legitimacy of the criminal justice system by openly admitting that the reason for not executing someone is that he might be innocent - at the same time implying that it's OK to send him to prison for life without parole

even in less 'life and death' areas of policy, like soft drug legalisation, logical though this is, most politicians won't dare even raise the possibility in public

if you want to campaign in the real world, better to go for abolition of the death penalty on moral and principled grounds: barbarity; 'cruel and unusual punishment'; etc

i know this seems a long way off in a mindlessly punitive country like the USA presently is, but abolition is something that has taken place in most other western democracies, and, one day, the USA will follow - indeed, executions were suspended for a period in the 1970s-1980s while your Supreme Court debated constitutional challenges to its use, so it's not completely off the radar

less ambitiously, you could argue for restricting execution only to the very most heinous cases

ruthless logic plus politics does not compute, i'm afraid