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Comment by perfTerm | Hacker News Reader

Good. The death penalty ensures a false incarceration can never be corrected, costs millions of tax payer dollars because of the long appeals processes, and shows no correlation with decreased crime rates (states with out the death penalty consistently have lower crime rates according to the FBI [0])

[0] - http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without-de...

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The family of the criminal also suffers. If my child was a murderer, I would grieve. If my child was consequently executed I would grieve even more. That's an incredible amount of pain for something I didn't do. After it's said and done, my child would feel no pain. My pain would last forever. I would honestly want to commit suicide over my failure as a parent.

There's also the opposite argument that it gives closure.

As a parent, there would be no closure in my child's death, no matter what they have done. I look at my 2 daughters and see the most beautiful girls I've ever laid eyes upon. For one of them to commit such a heinous crime would ruin me. For their death to be added on to that, life would mean nothing at all.

I think the parent meant closure for the family and friends of the victim, not of the murderer.

I meant everyone. The murderer is no longer suffering, and there's no longer looming uncertainty as the days tick down toward a date that keeps changing.

In certain circumstances death is easier to deal than almost-death.

But that's more of an argument to stop death row from being a quagmire, rather than a pro-death-penalty argument. I probably didn't put the comment in the most ideal place.

What I'm saying is that the often unconsidered third party is the parent of the executed. That's a pain that will never go away. Is it their fault their child murdered and was executed? No. Will it feel that way? Absolutely.

From my understanding, although they may want them dead, the parents of the victim would not benefit from the death of their child's murderer. My cousin was murdered 15 years ago. They would still be broken as they are now if my cousin's murderer was dead.

The point is there is nothing worse for a parent than losing their child. Nothing really makes it better. Not even time.

There's growing evidence[1] that the death penalty doesn't give survivors much closure.

[1] http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

Isn't that also true of other sentences? Presumably parents would feel pain and failure if their child was given a lengthy prison sentence as well.

They would but not quite the same as if their child dies.

These studies do show a deterrence effect with the death penalty. They're links to actual academic studies, not from a website that has an explicit agenda.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1018533

http://m.aler.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/2/344.short?rss=1...

I don't find the first reason very compelling, and I think your sentence is strong enough without it. All sentences have some degree of uncorrectability, and while capital punishment is clearly the most uncorrectable sentence, that would be expected given that it's the harshest sentence.

"... costs millions of tax payer dollars because of the long appeals processes ..."

I hear this as an argument against death penalty a lot, when it actually isn't. It doesn't say whether or not death penalty is right or wrong.

Maybe we should work to reduce the cost to allow swift death penalty when there's a clear reason for conviction.

You're going to have to supply some evidence to the contrary, because everything I've read is that it is very expensive to put someone to death.

Except that much of what makes the death penalty expensive, the lengthy appeals process, is to counteract the risk of a false conviction. You can't not pay that price unless you're willing to accept a higher false conviction rate and therefore more folks wrongfully killed by the state.

Can't say I'm a fan of that option.

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