fairfaxmensch Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Try, for example, an article published in the
> decidedly liberal Stanford Law Review
> co-written by the decidedly liberal Cass Sunstein,
> which concludes that in light of
> the best evidence currently available, "capital
> punishment has a strong claim to
> being not merely morally permissible, but morally
> obligatory—above all from the
>
>
http://lawreview.stanford.edu/content/vol58/issue3
> /sunstein1.pdf
Good article - they actually put forth an interesting argument for those for and against capital punishment.
Quote
...
The foundation for our argument is a significant body of recent evidence
that capital punishment may well have a deterrent effect, possibly a quite
powerful one.9 A leading national study suggests that each execution prevents
some eighteen murders, on average.10 If the current evidence is even roughly
correct—a question to which we shall return—then a refusal to impose capital
punishment will effectively condemn numerous innocent people to death.
States that choose life imprisonment, when they might choose capital
punishment, are ensuring the deaths of a large number of innocent people.11 On
moral grounds, a choice that effectively condemns large numbers of people to
death seems objectionable to say the least. For those who are inclined to be
skeptical of capital punishment for moral reasons—a group that includes one of
the current authors—the task is to consider the possibility that the failure to
impose capital punishment is, prima facie and all things considered, a serious
moral wrong.
...
If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future? - William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University