re death penalty was re political atheists in article vice ico tek com bobbe vice ico tek com robert beauchaine writes in article apr leland stanford edu rush leland stanford edu voelkerding writes if we worry about the one case in or more where an innocent man is convicted of something horrible enough to warrant the death penalty and hence put laws into place which make it virtually impossible to actually execute real criminals then the death penalty is not serving its original purpose it should either be changed or done away with i don t have numbers to back this up so take the following accordingly you use an off the cuff number of in innocent people sentenced to die as an acceptable loss for the benefit of capital punishment i d be very very surprised if the ratio were that low there have been approximately a dozen known cases of the execution of the innocent in the us since the turn of the century have we in that same period sentenced people to death accounting for those cases that we don t know the truth it seems reasonable to assume that twice that many innocent people have in fact been executed that would raise the number of death sentences metered out since to half a million for your acceptance ratio to hold i rather doubt that s the case the point of course is what is an acceptable loss in seems we re probably not doing even that well in in or should we perhaps find a better solution bob beauchaine bobbe vice ico tek com any suggestions as to what a better solution might be i realize the off hand nature of the numbers i used and i can t answer as to what an acceptable loss rate is however as i said in another post i despise the idea of supporting criminals for life it s the economics of the situation that concern me most the money spent feeding clothing housing and taking care of people who have demonstrated that they are unfit to live in society could go to a number of places all of which i and probably others would consider far more worthwhile and which would enrish the lives of all americans give people jobs give the homeless shelter any number of things clyde little girls like butterflies don t need a reason robert heinlein
