Whatever you think of him, Christopher Hitchens made a very convincing argument against the death penalty designed to appeal to so-called “small government” conservatives: are you comfortable with the government having that level of control over you - even if you are innocent, the government theoretically reserves the right to take your life in the event you are convicted of a capital crime?
If there is no absolute right to life, the bases for all other rights crumble away.
I mean, by allowing police to carry arms (which is also the case in the UK of course) we’re already signing that right over to the government and its agents and we also quite happily allow governments the right to take the lives of foreign citizens by engaging in war and other types of military operations, so we already implicitly accept that the government has the power of life and death. I would’ve thought that the death penalty, at least in such heinous cases as the ones listed in this article, would actually be
less controversial than the two examples I’ve given above, given that an execution at least requires a trial and a conviction first.
