This is my John Galt speaking cartoon

[--Pete]

Hi,

If I break your physical body to save your immortal soul, is that a crime? Who gets to decide and on what basis?

Well, yes. You would have no proof you could or did accomplish the task of saving my immortal soul.

Yes, I do. I have the whole dogma of Catholicism and the infallibility of the pope. I know that god and demons and spirits exist. I know that we're here to win salvation or suffer eternal punishment. I am an extremely well educated fifteenth century man. How dare you judge me by the unholy morals of your time, a time when man has slipped from the grace of god.

There is now and never has been a moral or a legal code that is based on objective reason. Such a thing may not even be possible. Again -- do not judge the behavior of the people of the 15th century in the light of the knowledge, sensibilities, and prejudices of the 21st.

One might similarly profess that criminals are possessed by demons, and that only through sufficient torture would they be exorcised.

Isn't that what we do, anyway? The daemons of today are abusive parents, or a chemical imbalance, or a tumor in the brain, or cognitive dissonance, or ... We come up with a brazilian reasons why people "go wrong" (it's not PC to say "are scumbags" -- scumbags might be offended). Then we torture them (by giving them an all expenses paid at a state run hellhole) and exorcise them through the incantations of a shrink. Yeah, we really are way ahead of the people who dunked a woman to see if she was a witch.

Another problem during dark ages (and also still in some more backwards nations) was that the accused were assumed guilty, and needed to present proof of innocence.

If you check that out in detail, you'll find that the legal presumption of guilt or innocence makes little difference in the actual proceedings. Of much more importance is the prejudice of the court. "We'll give him a fair trial and then we'll hang him" was not, AFAIK, translated from the Arabic. Or French.

This is why the argument for the death penalty as justice also fails. It is murder by the State as justice for a similar crime. If the death penalty has merit, it is either in its harshness as a preventive warning, or as the extreme ultimate means to protect society against convicted monsters.

Déjà vu all over again I believe this is covered in book 4 of The Collected LL Rants and Ramblings -- the first (Mayan) edition to be published New Years Eve, 2012. Available in translation if there is a 2013.

I am for executing human shaped predators. We've done it for other species that had less fault.

I am against killing people under the present system of legality and chance. No system is perfect, but the USA's legal system is highly imperfect -- except as an example of the free market. You can buy "justice" if you've got the money.

Either we have capital punishment or we don't. Texas and the states that don't have it are closest to being consistent. The states that have it but don't use it or seldom use it are a large part of why it is inefficient as a deterrent.

If we are to have capital punishment as a deterrent, then it has to be public. Not much deterrence is needed by the people who read newspapers and watch the news. Those that don't will not be deterred by what they do not know.

And, if it is to be a deterrent, then it has to be nearly inevitable. You do such and such and you die -- no ifs, buts, or ands.

I've run the numbers before, but in any state that has a death penalty and seldom uses it, you are safer killing somebody than you are jaywalking. The occasional Greyhound Bus isn't much of a deterrent, either.

--Pete