Ev­ery once in a while, some­thing aw­ful hap­pen­s. And then some­one will say "the peo­ple who do that should get the death penal­ty". In­vari­ably, that is a stupid ar­gu­men­t.

Let's start by dis­pos­ing of the ob­vi­ous low blow: "if it hap­pened to your son, you would ask for their death too". To which the ob­vi­ous an­swer is, of course I would. And I would be push­ing for a stupid so­lu­tion to the prob­lem.

If some­thing re­al­ly, re­al­ly bad hap­pened to my son, I would be suf­fer­ing, and in a state of vi­o­lent emo­tion and dis­tress. If I told you to jump off a bridge, would you? I guess not, be­cause you would no­tice I am at the edge of mad­ness and just told you that be­cause I am feel­ing that way.

Well, the same is true about a vic­tim's rel­a­tives (or the vic­tim him­self) ask­ing for a spe­cif­ic pun­ish­men­t: it's a re­quest born from pain and suf­fer­ing. And as a so­ci­ety, we should not de­cide our ac­tions based on te pro­pos­als of the ones al­most in­sane with grief. Be­cause we want to take the ac­tion that is bet­ter for so­ci­ety, not for a spe­cif­ic mem­ber of it. So, for­get about that ap­peal to sen­ti­men­t, be­cause while com­plete­ly un­der­stand­able, it is stupid, be­cause those griev­ing are al­lowed to be stupid.

An­oth­er failed ar­gu­ment for the death penal­ty is that it dis­cour­ages fu­ture crime. This has been shown not to be the case, be­cause sim­i­lar coun­tries or states with and with­out death penal­ty show no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence on crime rates.

I sus­pect this is be­cause in many cas­es the crim­i­nal does­n't in­tend to ac­tu­al­ly com­mit the part of the crime that brings the death sen­tence (mur­der when rob­bing? The crim­i­nal want­ed to rob, not to mur­der) or he just would do it any­way (it's not as if child rapists ex­pect to have a nice time when cap­tured. They just do it as­sum­ing they won't get caugh­t, or de­cide it's worth it any­way).

And of course, the main rea­son why the death penal­ty is a bad idea is that it would be ap­plied by pub­lic em­ploy­ees. Do you trust the gov­ern­ment to de­cide how much to charge you in tax­es? No, you do it your­self, with an ac­coun­tan­t, and tell them how much to take. Do you ex­pect the po­lice to find a wal­let you dropped on the street? Do you trust the gov­ern­men­t's mail with re­al­ly im­por­tant pack­ages? Are you con­fi­dent about the gov­ern­ment fig­ur­ing out all en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues? Well, then why would you trust them to kill any­one they de­cide is a re­al­ly, re­al­ly bad guy?

The gov­ern­ment is a great idea for things noone else wants to do (high­ways), or things noone else should be do­ing (law en­force­men­t) but even in those cas­es you must al­low for them pro­vid­ing a crap­py ser­vice, and care­ful­ly use your in­put to lim­it what they can do.

The al­ter­na­tive is to as­sume that the gov­ern­ment has a huge ca­pa­bil­i­ty and com­pe­tence but has just de­cid­ed not to show it, which is per­haps the most amaz­ing part of most con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

The US gov­ern­ment can't kill Cas­tro, but can kill Kennedy. A gov­ern­ment can't keep the trains run­ning, but can fake a moon land­ing. And so on, and so forth.

I once read a book where they de­scribed an in­ter­est­ing sci­ence: Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry The­o­ry. It's the sci­ence of study­ing what con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries peo­ple be­lieve in, to get in­sight in­to what they ac­tu­al­ly be­lieve. If you are in favour of the death penal­ty, then you be­lieve law en­force­ment does­n't make mis­takes, or that killing a few ran­dom peo­ple ev­ery now and then (be­cause they make mis­takes) is not a prob­lem. If the first, you are stupid, if the sec­ond, you are evil.