About the risk of being pardoned by a malicious state, it's true... But the other way could also be true that a malicious state can execute people who don't deserve to be executed, like Snowden... Perhaps a compromise is to make particularly heinous crimes unpardonable? That would be a decent alternative to the death penalty, and it would be very difficult to repeal such a law.

As for escaping prison, it's already rare that someone escapes from it. The solution is making better high security prisons for the most violent and dangerous criminals. I think it's definitely possible to make escaping so difficult and dangerous that it wouldn't be a problem. Make a prison on an island or an old oil rig, implants to track the prisoner's location (a fancier version of the anti-theft tags in clothing stores), random X-rays to check they don't have anything hidden in their bodies. All of these are definitely better than executing someone, though personally I think that maximum security prison breaks are already so rare it wouldn't be worth it.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee -4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Remember that people did escape from Alcatraz. And Devil's Island, IIRC. Never underestimate the ingenuity of prisoners that really, really don't want to be prisoners.

I think that the death penalty should be used in extremely limited cases, cases where there's not even a shadow of a doubt about guilt, and where the person has committed multiple heinous crimes spanning a period of time (say, >1 year). So a simple mass murderer wouldn't be eligible, but a serial child rapist would be. You'd also need to have forensic evidence that at a minimum cleared the Daubert standard, and you'd have to exclude forensic evidence that relied on standards that hadn't been published and peer-reviewed. So DNA and fingerprints would be in, but forensic bite impression analysis would be very definitely out.

I think the evidentiary bar should be extremely high for death penalty cases. I think that it's currently mostly applied to people that don't have enough money to get better legal counsel.

I would also say that convicted people should be able to request the death penalty rather than life without parole. I can't speak for anyone else, but if I had the choice between decades in prison, or being summarily executed, I'd take execution.

[–] MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 months ago

Yes, people do escape, but it's extremely rare. I'm far more worried about the state having the legal power to execute someone than an individual escaping from prison.

Also, giving the prisoner the choice to either be executed or imprisoned for life would give an incentive for the operators of the prisons to treat their prisoners even worse so prisoners would choose to be executed.