Truck and Barter: Scott Peterson Gets Death

December 14, 2004

Scott Peterson Gets Death

By Kevin

I do not like the death penalty, even when applied to men like this, because I believe in minimizing the power of government.

I do not want the government to have the right (legitimate power) to kill a citizen for even heinous crimes, because of the potential for its killing the wrong person accidentally, or the intentional use against political enemies. Given my ethical predisposition, I am sympathetic to arguments that the death penalty costs more than incarceration for life.

And as it currently imposed in various states, I think the death penalty does cost more than it saves--in purely financial terms. However, the economic arguments that "the death penalty" costs more than "life in prison" usually rest on several very specious assumptions--the most important being that if the total cost of the death penalty is greater than its total benefit, then the costs of any and every execution are greater than its benefits.

But this is not necessarily so. It is most certainly not true that the cost and benefit of each and every particular execution are the same; because of protracted legal battles, some executions are more costly than the average. And because some defendants are younger and healthier than others, executing them will have greater benefits in reduced lifetime prison costs.

Hence, there may be some subset of executions with low costs and high benefits--which could be termed economically advantageous executions.

However, the policy debate is usually considered a yes-no question--you're either for execution as a rule or you're against it. But the universe of policy choices--overarching rules--is much wider than that. In addition to "yes" and "no", one could support "extremely selective execution"--a raising of the legal and economic bar exteremely high so that only the most depraved and absolutely guilty qualify for execution.

I've written about this before (but I can't remember where or when), after I had read most of the major studies linked to by anti-death penalty advocates demonstrating that total costs > total benefits. However, Google has no record of these comments, and they seem to have disappeared forever into the electronic void...

Posted at December 14, 2004 10:11 AM

Comments

How do you feel about the utility/pleasure people get from putting evil killers to death? Is pure revenge (often dressed up as so-called retributive justice) worth anything in weighing the pros and cons of capital punishment?

Comment by John Palmer at December 14, 2004 11:27 AM | Permalink

John,

[This is a simplistic answer, but all I have time for right now...]

As far as I know, nobody has developed a social process to measure and aggregate the relative values of compassion and revenge--at least not in a way that is "fair, unbiased, and reasonably close to the truth"--(Willford King).

Applying a "Calculus of Consent" analysis to such emotions is really, really hard. Hence, I don't think such emotions should be added into the legal rule deciding whether a man should be executed.

I want the crucial political decision to be one of rules, with the results of specific cases, in a sense, already decided by the merits and demerits of the case and crime. But these will all be evaluated by a metric already decided upon in the rules.

However, since we have today less and less separation of rules and individual cases, this analysis is almost moot...

[P.S. Can you tell I studied at GMU?]

Comment by Kevin Brancato at December 14, 2004 11:53 AM | Permalink