On the death penalty for Scott Peterson

I'm sure everyone is aware by now that is his sentence. These are the times that do try opponents of the death penalty. When my sister messaged me to tell me, I just replied, "Couldn't have happened to a nicer person."

Scott Peterson, if guilty, is probably a sociopath. It's hard to imagine how to punish a murderous sociopath properly with just jail, since he'll be sitting there the whole time thinking that it's just not fair that he has to go to jail when all he did was kill his wife because she was in the way and anyway she deserved it, etc. No conscience means no guilt means he doesn't have to sit there and "live with" the guilt over what he did, which many opponents say is probably a worse punishment for murderers than death. But if you can't make someone suffer guilt, then what can you make them suffer from? Well, you can scare the piss out of them and then kill them like they did to their victim, which is exactly what is appealing about the death penalty.

I am against the death penalty because I don't think it can be handed out fairly. For one thing, innocent people get sentenced to death all the time. In fact, there's reason to believe that a capital crime trial is more, not less likely, to result in a wrong sentence. A crime like this is so horrible, so gut-wrenching, that the jury is under a lot of pressure to put someone away for it. It just seems wrong not to convict, to leave it hanging in the air for everyone--yes, the killer is still on the loose. Scapegoating seems inevitable in some capital crime cases.

For instance, there's my comment that this couldn't have happened to a nicer person. I don't know for sure that Peterson killed his wife. He was, after all, convicted on circumstantial, if damning, evidence. I'd like to believe that I concluded that he is guilty through reason, but I can never know for sure. There's no way I can separate out my anger at the senselessness of the crime and my pity for poor Laci Peterson and my own fear that such a random act could be visited on me or my family from my reaction to the evidence. I imagine for the jury, who had to contemplate the visceral horror of this event day in and day out for the duration of the trial, had even less ability to separate their feelings from their rational examination of the evidence.

We cannot send innocent people to death, and if that means that we have to live with the fact that there will never be complete revenge on sick murderers like Peterson (probably) is, then so be it. I think there are still some death penalty opponents who deny that revenge should even be a factor in determining sentences, but I disagree. Exacting revenge for people's suffering is the only thing that we can prove the justice system does at all. Rehabilitation is a joke. If it were just about keeping dangerous people off the street, then we would release even heinous murderers once they became old and feeble instead of just letting them perish in prison. In fact, it might be easier to decriminalize victimless crimes like smoking pot if we admitted that prison exists mostly for punishment and revenge--there's no reason to punish someone so harshly for smoking pot, and we couldn't even say who we are exacting revenge on the behalf of.

It would also help establish the common ground between pro- and anti-death penalty people. I want the person who killed Laci Peterson to suffer an appalling and painful death just as surely as the pro-death penalty people. But I don't want an innocent person to die, and as there's no way to prove conclusively, ever, that we have the absolute truth about what happened in any case, we cannot afford to deal out the absolute punishment.