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Comment by fitblipper | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused. Are you saying we shouldn't put resourced towards saving the criminals or catching them? After all, as you said, it is only a small % of total deaths.

Either way, it sounds like you have a very low opionion of the search for justice in society.

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I think the point is that innocent people die every day. By the time I’ve typed this out, some more have died. It may seem crass and heartless, but the number of innocent lives in the relatively small population of death row is many orders of magnitude lower than in many other populations such as victims of avoidable vehicular accidents. Yes, both issues can be attacked at the same time. But the purist anti capital punishment view is based on an emotional argument, “even a single innocent life taken by failed justice system is too many”, while fatal accidents are essentially wholesale slaughter, relatively speaking by the numbers.

I think "stop killing people" is easier in a practical sense than "cure cancer"; it's only due to the bloodlust that people feel the need to spend time advocating against it.

We shouldn't put resources in saving violent criminals. There is a reason why they are given death penalties in the first place.

Now you have just exposed the risk of them existing in this planet and doing more harm. Not to mention say 40 * $50,000 or $2 Million spent on keeping them alive

Justice doesn’t mean killing.

That is kind of my point. I was being sincere when I said I was confused by the person I replied to. It seems like they are advocating for less research into the negative/positive effects of the death penalty because those deaths are relatively few.

Alternatively they could be saying all the resources put towards catching murderers since the number of those they murdered are relatively few.

To be clear I'm strongly against the death penalty. OPs comment seemed to trivialize the deaths that happen as a cause of murderers or the actual killing of those murderers and I have an issue with that framing. I think putting resources towards understanding these things are resources well spent since they directly impact what society decides is justice.

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