The death penalty is one of those issues by which people tend to measure your moral character, rather than listen to your arguments. If you favor the death penalty, you’re a terrible person. If you oppose it in all cases — even if you favor the most draconian loss of liberty for the most minor of infractions — you’re a good person. I disagree. I oppose the death penalty in general, not because I’m just such a good person, but because I think that it is a terrible power to entrust to anyone, because it is a penalty for which no compensation can be offered if it was carried out in mistake, and because I’d rather not live in a country where the government feels empowered to kill people.
There are arguments (generally of a consequentialist sort) that could lead me to a different conclusion. For example, if one could show that the death penalty for murder, combined with powerful safeguards against wrongful conviction, would save a sufficient number of innocent lives, well, I think I’d be for it. Buyt I’m not convinced at present. At the same time, some of the arguments often advanced against the death penalty are pretty unconvincing. One argument often offered up by people who come to the same conclusion I reach but in which I put little stock is that “no one ever deserves to be killed.” This case is one in which it is hard to imagine anyone concluding that Abdullah Shah did not deserve to be killed, even if he should not have been. So I’m against the death penalty in general, but I’ll shed no tears for a man who “was found guilty of killing one of his wives by pouring boiling water over her body” and who “earned the nickname Zardad’s Dog for attacks on travellers along the road between Jalalabad and Kabul in the 1990s.”