June 27, 2008

Problems With Giving the Death Penalty to Child Rapists

I've got to say that I agree with Matt Yglesias that as a matter of crime control policy, punishing child rapists with execution seems to be a bad idea if you actually want to save the lives of children. Additionally, it's bizarre (if completely understandable in our puritanical, sex-obsessed culture) that our laws would treat that as the worse thing that can be done to a child. Worse can be done, and often those that do such things get relatively little short sentences.

Posted by armand at June 27, 2008 03:40 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Law and the Courts


Comments

I have never understood how people can believe that lethal injection is a worse punishment than spending 40 years with a hammer making big rocks into little rocks. Unless they are counting on an afterlife in which the dead criminal roasts in perpetuity - which, I suppose a bunch of them are - the punishment is swift and the suffering brief. Now, I'm also not going to argue that the point of incarceration is to inflict suffering (rather than removing the anti-social from circulation or what-have-you), but for those who would are into revenge, really, death is getting off easy compared to a lifetime of hard labor.

Posted by: binky at June 27, 2008 04:18 PM | PERMALINK
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