re: Serious question, death penalty?

I’m ok with getting rid of capital punishment if we make the penalty for murder (homicide other than self defense or accidental) a mandatory life sentence. Parole boards should be abolished. You do the crime then you do the FULL time. Judges should have no say as to the sentences. Prison sentences should set by the legislature with fixed terms (no ranges), and should be enforced immediately after the person’s guilt has been established.

Yep and oddly enough eye witness accounts are wrong more often than logic dictates.

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Since the 1990s, when DNA testing was first introduced, Innocence Project researchers have reported that 73 percent of the 239 convictions overturned through DNA testing were based on eyewitness testimony. One third of these overturned cases rested on the testimony of two or more mistaken eyewitnesses. 

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It would be a violation of due process. Some people think that they can ignore due process when it suits their whims. Other people have integrity.

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The problem is the long and documented history of corrupt police officers and prosecutors railroading innocent people.

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It's not even that. I mean that is horrible, but it's not even the largest part of the story. It's more so the fallible nature of humans and human institutions. Even if you assume the best of intentions, which can frequently be a stretch, humans are fallible and will make mistakes. "Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence."

When someone says that they support the death penalty as an institution what they are saying is that they think that a vengeful concept of justice is so important to them that they are willing to sacrifice innocent lives for it. Because it is inevitable and completely unavoidable, just from an observation of statistical inference, that such policy will inevitably kill innocent people if you even open the door to it in any way whatsoever.

The "only sure thing" people are ignoring the very point of the argument that mistakes inevitably occur even when people think they are completely sure. That's how we got in the position that we currently are in. People think they are already only doing sure things, and they are still fricking up in the most egregious way possible. They are irrationally following injustice with even greater injustice for nothing more than the sake of emotional satisfaction.

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That's why we use expensive proprietary drugs 

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frick all that...a mixture of heroin and bleach is cheap and would do just fine.