Thought about this while listening to a series about serial killers. But if the crime is proven and it was intense enough to warrant a death sentence why does it take years sometimes decades for them to finally get punished?
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Because there is a lengthy appeals process an individual is entitled to when they are sentenced to death. The state wants to be absolutely sure that an individual deserves to be executed before they execute. Once you pull that lever, you can’t undo it. So they’ll be extra cautious to the point of dragging it on for decades just so that there’s as close to unanimous agreement as possible that an execution is justified.
Because almost anything can be appealed.
There’s appeal from the defendant itself, and/or appeal from civil rights groups. Each of these process takes a lot of time, considering the backlog most judicial courts have. Then there are multiple levels of appeal. Depends which state or which prosecuting body. But it can reach all the way up to the supreme court. Each of these processes take months, if not years.
Add these all up and you find the answer why death row inmates spend a long time there (and also why the death penalty system is far more expensive than people think).
The state (our government) is supposed to only have the power that we (the people) allow it to have. By far, the greatest power we bestow upon the state is the ability to take our liberty, or even our very lives.
The state having this power affects our ability to continue to have influence over the government; you can’t stop the government from abusing its power if you are dead or in jail. So, with the power comes great responsibility.
We have set it up so that the only way we can keep the government from simply killing anyone it deems to be unfit for life is to have a legal bureaucracy (lots of procedures to follow), an adversarial system of justice under which innocence is presumed, and the ability to appeal to higher courts in order to correct errors made in the lower courts.
In the U.S., all capital offenses are automatically appealed. Before the sentence is carried out, we have to make sure that the state did not prevail for unjust reasons, e.g. not following the required procedures, juror misconduct, withheld evidence, incompetent lawyers, the judge’s misinterpretation of the law, not following precedents set in other cases, false/coerced confessions, etc.
The appeals process takes time. If we were to try to speed things up or bypass this process, we’d be giving a green light to the state to abuse its power. That’s what totalitarian states and banana republics do. We have to be better than that, *even if the person says they did it and that they want to die.* I mean, imagine if a confession meant execution could proceed … all the state would have to do is coerce a confession, or just make someone so depressed that they want to be killed.
Checks and balances.
The philosophy that it’s better 100 guilty go free than to punish 1 innocent.
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