Disharmony In My Head

This post by Mark Kleiman is a real piece of work.

It's hard to disagree with Mark that Missouri is screwed up, so lay that aside. My issue is with this style of argument from Mark's piece:

As it happens, I really don't have a dog in the capital-punishment fight. I would prefer, if executions are to be carried out, that they be as painless as possible. Death seems a sufficient penalty, without adding torment. I'm sorta-kinda in favor of execution if the alternative is really life in prison without parole. I'm agnostic about the net effect of executions, compared to long imprisonment, in deterring crime; whatever the sign of the result, at any practicable frequency of execution the total effect must be negligible compared to the homicide rate, so it seems to me the decision should be made on other grounds, and that debating it is mostly a distraction from the debate we ought to be having about how to control crime.

Well, yes, if you limit the debate to the mode of execution this is superficially a somewhat reasonable argument; but taking this tack, whether you have a dog in the hunt or not obscures the very real, and important, debate over judicial homicide.

Mark is againt life means life laws, and that's reasonable too. And, so, he's sorta in favor of the option that makes it absolute "dead certain" that you can never correct a mistake.

How noble of him.

Because, you know, debating that would detract from the far more important debate we should be having about how to control crime.

Just another in a long line of "why are you concerned about this when clearly this other thing is more important" arguments. There's always something more important, indeed how we control crime is probably not the world's single most important discussion and so there's little reason why we can't have that discussion at the same time we have the modes of execution discussion and the "shouldn't every state be like Wisconsin" discussion.

But, you know what to do. Give 'em what they want.