Mercy vs. Irreversibility

Via Ry, Ta-Nehisi Coats slams the Texas death-penalty system:

Texas justice is essentially sorcery, and there will be people who say that we can perfect it, that we can close the loop-holes. They're wrong. The problem isn't with loopholes--it's with us. We are fallible.

This gives me a good opportunity to explain one of my biggest policy mind-changes: why I now oppose the death penalty, when I used to support it.

My support for the death penalty was based on my rejection of the most common argument against it - that it's cruel. To me, life in prison without the possibility of parole - the punishment most often put forward by anti-death-penalty activists as the alternative to execution - is a horror much worse than death. To be consigned to hellish bondage for your entire life, with zero hope of redemption or release, is a nightmare; it's just the death penalty plus extra years of misery. It is also pointless, for unless we want to punish people simply for retribution's sake, there's absolutely no social benefit to keeping someone alive in prison for decades. If I were the criminal, I would crave the mercy of death.

But of course, I was ignoring the possibility of executing the innocent, which was damn stupid of me. The problem with the death penalty is not that it's cruel, it's that it's irreversible. Executing one innocent man is a far greater crime than forcing 1000 serial killers to endure life in prison. And, as Coates points out, humans are fallible. We have executed the innocent, and we will again. The only solution is not to execute anyone.

Of course, conservatives probably disagree with me. They might say that the sense of closure that execution gives to the families of victims outweighs the lives of the few people who are mistakenly killed. I just don't identify with that perspective.