Why is 100% accuracy required? We don’t require that in other things. Driving certainly isn’t 100% safe and innocent people die. Yet we recognize that there is a trade off of accepting rare innocent deaths to gain the benefits of driving, including saving other lives. If rare innocents are executed in order to reduce murders through deterrence, is that an acceptable trade off? Then there are the innocent military members who were drafted. Some died even though they are innocent. Yet society recognizes that their deaths are a tragic loss that allows society as a whole to survive. Why are you more concerned with the innocent people killed on death row than the innocent soldiers or victims of driving deaths? 100% is the goal, not the required standard.
Ok, we don't require that in other things. However, we SHOULD require that in the death penalty. Consider 'Blackstone's ratio.." that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent should suffer..."
But hey. Blackstone was British. What did the US founding fathers say? Benjamin Franklin stepped it up a notch; better that a hundred guilty persons should go free than that one innocent should suffer.
Well, we can't be 100% sure that every person we convict of murder is actually guilty of it, but we can be sure that we don't ever execute an innocent person.
Which is why I support the death penalty ONLY when the accused as confessed AND there is plenty of forensic/physical evidence to prove guilt AND the accused actually requests death.
Well, that's one reason. The other one is that I think that life without the possibility of parole in a high security prison is nastier than the death penalty.
I mean, really....when one dies, whether one is a theist or not, that's the end of the 'worldly' punishment. It's over. There are some fates over which death is preferable, and I think....that a permanent banishment from human culture (warehoused in prison) would be one of those.