More Death Penalty Debate Coverage

Both Sentencing Law & Policy and Crime & Consequences have posts about states seeking to apply the death penalty to non-homicide crimes, including sex crimes.  From SL&P:

Of course, serious students of the death penalty realize that proposals to expand the death penalty are all about symbolic politics, not serious policy-making.  Tennessee, for example, has executed only two murders in the last 30 years, and the constitutionality of the death penalty for child molesters is uncertain.  Nevertheless, these realities do not diminish the power of pro-death-penalty rhetoric for legislators.

And from Kent Scheidegger at Crime & Consequences:

Finally, there is the horrifically bad idea of a death penalty for sex crimes in which the victim survives. I do not dispute that anyone who would rape a child deserves death as a matter of just deserts, but for the child's sake we must maintain a differential in punishment between rape and rape-murder. A rapist has a powerful incentive to kill the victim to reduce his chance of capture and conviction. We need to give him a powerful incentive not to. That is why rape-murder should be capital and rape alone should not, no matter how heinous.

As I've noted before, I agree with the main thrust of both posts.

Comments

[jvarisco]

Do you really think someone who rapes a child expects to get caught? It's not as if any sentence they get would actually let them out for quite a while.

It also seems that the proportionality standard we are using is flawed. The punishment should be based on the perpetrator, not the victim. From his point of view, which is a worse crime? Murder is not that hard; people do it every day in video games, and it generally happens pretty fast. That is not the case for rape, which requires continued harm over a relatively extended period. Rapists are much worse criminals than murderers; if they had any morals at all, they would not have been able to do it. Thus it makes sense to give them the worst punishment we have.

[anon]

ivarisco, then do as Kent Scheidegger suggests and go kill a rapist if you feel that strongly about it.

[George]

To all the nuts out there,

Don't really kill anyone. That looks like satire to me.