FediNSFW

makes me question my belief that the death penalty shouldn’t exist

Don't know if you're interested in my perspective but here it is anyway. Some people shouldn't ever be allowed to live in society again (Bundy, GSK, BTK) and the death penalty can be the most efficient and effective method of ensuring the they never do. In an ideal world where there is perfect justice the death penalty can be justified. We don't live in an ideal world. In practice governments execute a lot of innocent people. Governments also allow the death penalty to creep (if you can execute serial killers and mass murders then why not someone who's only killed one person, then why not people who tried but failed to kill someone, then chronic violent offenders, then chronic non violent offenders...) Governments don't apply the death penalty evenly or fairly, in particular race and socioeconomic status play a significant role in sentencing decisions. Governments view it as punishment which allows them to justify inhumane execution methods to themselves.

So, in my view, the death penalty can be morally justified but should never exist because governments can't be trusted with it.

Can't agree enough with you on that one!

Rapists absolutely deserve to be killed. In a revolution this would be done for certain. Unfortunately, governments run by Capitalists will not enforce this rule; even if they list out in a legal code that someone who sexually assaults a woman should be punished with death, rich financiers will find ways to fool people, or evade laws, or get light sentences.

The world of the bourgeoisie does not even spare children, forcing young girls of nine and ten into the sordid embraces of wealthy and depraved old men. In the capitalist countries there are brothels which specialise exclusively in very young girls. In this present post-war period every woman faces the possibility of unemployment. Unemployment hits women in particular, and causes an enormous increase in the army of “street women”. Hungry crowds of women seeking out the buyers of “white slaves” flood the evening streets of Berlin. Paris and the other civilised centres of the capitalist states. The trade in women’s flesh is conducted quite openly, which is not surprising when you consider that the whole bourgeois way of life is based on buying and selling.

-- Alexander Kollontai, Prostitution and ways of fighting it, 1921

I suppose I could set one up, probably in the next few days