Paul GrahamVerified account

And rightly so! It doesn't fulfill any of the requirements of a good punishment - it is purely society exercising revenge. It's completely immoral.

That's not even mentioning the problems with it in term of unequal application depending on location, race, or wealth, miscarriages of justice, botched executions clearly being cruel and unusual punishment.

Ah shit. But where am I going to go to watch executions? I’ll have to live-stream Iraq and every some recent shootings in America. God bless America!!!!

The constant news stories about wrongful convictions should make the argument pretty obvious. Even if you're totally in favour of medieval retribution and revenge you should oppose the death penalty until we fix the system so that innocent people don't get put on death row.

Of course revenge is a pretty bad reason for punishing people. An eye for an eye makes the world go blind. Life sentences already achieve the goal of preventing the convict from committing further crimes, so killing them achieves nothing.