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Almost completely wrong





Why Conservatives Should Oppose the Death Penalty



So if the government should not have the power to prevent you from adding a room to your landmark house, why should it have the power to kill your neighbor? Without addressing the morality of capital punishment, is it not utterly contradictory for a conservative to espouse a government of limited power, but one that can also kill Americans?
Because almost everyone would agree that defense is The One area where they want to see government in action. This argument is silly on its face, because the opposition to "big government" does not translate as an opposition to government, which is where the author's argument would appear to lead.



Worse, out is trotted the standard line that innocent people have not only been sentenced to death, they've actually been executed. How many? The author states that between 1905 and 1987, twenty. Or, to actually quote, the assertion of one study is that "at least 20 innocent people had been put to death since 1905." The study was published in 1987.



I think it's fair to say that a great many more people have been murdered. I believe a case could be made that a far greater number if killers have never been caught, let alone faced any punishment. But that's neither here nor there, because the real question to be asked is how many more people die because a convicted killer is allowed to live?



My favorite case remains Arthur Shawcross of New York State. He was convicted of kidnapping, raping, and killing two young children (early teens, one boy, one girl) and sentenced to 25 to life, NY State not having the death penalty at the time. After service 12 years of that sentence, he was released on parole. Some time after that, he was arrested again, this time for the murder of at least 11 prostitutes in upper NY State. "At least" because they suspect there were more, but only found 11 bodies.



He was sentenced to 250 years. A summary of Shawcross and such can be found here.



Keeping this one murderer alive cost 11 women their lives. An interesting research project would be to calculate how many other such stories there have been since 1905.



And those are the cold numbers (the cold equations, as Tom Godwin put it). They're not the way to determine the validity of the death penalty, but they are certainly a start.

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