Death row shouldnt exist, abolish the death penalty
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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Absolutely.
Until the state can 100% guarantee a correct verdict every time, the state should not be delivering any punishments that cannot be undone in case of a miscarriage of justice. As long as there is any chance of an innocent person facing the punishment, no permanent and irreversible punishments should ever be used.
(And even then, there's a discussion to be had about whether the state should be in the business of killing people, even in an idealized world where you can be 100% sure they've got the right guy. But that's secondary to the unavoidable risk of doing it to an innocent person.)
It’s amazing that so many people I speak to don’t understand this. Too many Americans just think that if you’re on death row, you did some pretty serious shit that it shortwires their brain into not being even remotely skeptical of the US justice system
Many of us have been programmed since we were children to see arrested = horrible criminal. My parents will watch local news and spout horrible words at people who are announced detained for X or Y crime, despite them not even being convicted of anything yet. The law here is "Guilty unless proven innocent, and even then maybe still guilty if they feel like it".
My argument has always been practical, even if you accept that the state killing people is “ok”: it’s so expensive to litigate death row cases and keep inmates on death row that the extra “justice” isn’t worth it. Being in prison for life is a far greater deterrent anyway, so why fight this battle?
My republicans parents would just argue we shouldn’t let them litigate it after the verdict… in their mind can’t make appeals means less cost so everything is back to being perfectly ok
I can think of a few legitimate cases for death row.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Benito_Mussolini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae_and_Elena_Ceau%C8%99escu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_the_Romanov_family
and we can only hope for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_family
Mussolini was not tried in court, neither were the Romanovs. The Ceaușescus were summarily executed immediately after a brief show trial held by the fledgling provisional government in Romania shortly after the revolution.
None of these qualify as death sentence cases. When I think of capital punishment, I think of a strong state with a mature judiciary (whether fair or corrupt) which has a standing defined policy whereby the state is allowed to kill citizens and non-citizens alike.
The state should not have that power.
As long as the death penalty exists it will have an error rate. Abolishing the death penalty is about sparing the innocent a wrongful execution. The guilty can rot in prison for life, thats still a punishment, and anyone wrongfully incarcerated has a chance to be exonerated.
You can free an innocent person from prison, but you cant un-execute them.
There’s a man on death row in Texas, named Robert Roberson. He’s come days from execution at one point, and he’s VERY likely innocent. He was accused of killing his daughter through “shaken baby syndrome” and it was long since proven to be junk science.
He’s got a stay now and is awaiting a new trial.
If there’s ANY chance of executing someone innocent, it should be abolished, and because it’s brutal and has no place in this day and age.
the death penalty should exist exclusively for politicians using there position to entrench themselves in power
Anyone you think deserves capital punishment is come up paradoxically undeserving of the easy escape which is death. They should be forced to live long, miserable lives.
Cole pointed to a video of West’s 1993 examination of Haley, which was not shown to jurors at trial. In that recording, West can be seen taking a mold of Duncan’s teeth and grinding it into and across the girl’s body, seemingly creating bite marks where none previously existed. Referencing previous testimony from a defense expert, Cole wrote that “it was ‘scientifically indefensible’ to identify those marks as having been made by Duncan, and that the angles shown in the West Video were physically impossible for a human bite.”
West has previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique — in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks.
Seems a bit worst than junk science.
I saw a documentary about that guy. That mfer should be in prison.
Didn’t realize the courts, especially in Louisiana, believed in science anymore.