Quill
Junior Member
Personally, I don't think the question is whether the person in question deserves to die – the question is who has the right to kill them. The answer, to me, is nobody. No one has the right to take another's life – that's the whole reason why they were there in the first place. Someone who killed a serial killer with premeditation and not in self-defense, provided they're not an agent of the government, would still be on trial, regardless of how amoral their victim was. The government should not have the right to take anyone's life. Many cases are known in which a suspect's innocence was proven, via logic or genetics, after their death or their death sentence. A single case would suffice to prove that the judicial system is not reliable enough to place someone's life or death into its hands. If we allow the government to take the life of its own citizens, there's the danger of a slippery slope; should the country fall into extremism or anarchy, the government would have legal precedent to killing the convicted. I think that's giving them too much power – speaking both legally and morally.
Just in response to this, I'd like to add that "ancient" and "time-honored" principles are rarely applicable to modern times, and just because they're old has zero effect on how "good" or "right" they are, legally or morally. For the longest time, discrimination against Jews was an "ancient" and "time-honored" principle in many Christian nations. In certain cultures, infanticide was a socially acceptable practice spanning centuries. Throughout multiple global societies, both oppressing women and the practice of slavery were just as, if not far more, "ancient" and "time-honored" than the death penalty. All the examples I just cited are proof that people in archaic times were, on average, much more discriminatory and unobservant of human rights than they are in developed countries today. The age of a custom, ideal or method is not related to its sanctity.
