The Case of Troy Davis

[kandrathe]

Heiho,
Here I can't imagine another definition of 'efficiency' than the economic one.
So feel also addressed about the hacked-off hands. Cheap and effective. And of the same termination.

<edit>
on a second thought:
your connotation about the government may work for you, because it is an inside point of view. It doesn't work for me, because I'm against death penalty in any country. If I'd accept it for the US because the citizens there would trust their government about death sentences I'd have to accept it for every government. Because formally this is declared everywhere else. This tastes too much of 'it's ok when we're doing it'.
</edit>

You misunderstand. I'm saying that citizenry of any government should be hesitant to give over the power of life and death to a government. This would be doubly so in the US, since our basis of rights are bestowed upon us by Lockian natural law.

Or in other words, we have the inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of prosperity given to us by "our Creator", or for the atheists by the reasoned discovery of the laws governing natural events and then applying them to thinking about human action. Actions in accord with such natural law are morally correct. Those that go against such natural laws are morally wrong. The question then is when does a collection of people whether you call them a "government" or a "society" have the right to deny another human being (or any living creature for that matter) their right to life?

The argument for the death penalty would be that the person convicted is too dangerous to be allowed to commingle with "society", and so must be restrained or killed to protect "society". I'm not in support of that line of argument for the reasons I stated earlier; a) I don't want to give government that power, b) they often do a bad job convicting people on flimsy evidence, and c) the poor often do not get adequate representation in capital cases. I'm still thinking about what my position would be relating to non-citizens.

To answer your question about "hacking off hands"; The function of incarceration may be manifold, among the ideas are punishment, rehabilitation, justice, etc. Unless the person is serving a life sentence, a primary concern should be to prevent recidivism. To that end, hacking off a persons hands, besides the obvious cruelty, may prevent them from stealing, but it would also prevent them from being a useful member of society. Statistically, I'm not sure any studies would support that hacking off hands reduces crime. It is 100% clear though that death prevents recidivism.