"As long as you have capital punishment there is no guarantee that innocent people won't be put to death"
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The line points to a simple but unanswerable reality: a justice system run by humans cannot promise infallibility, and an irreversible punishment magnifies each error into a tragedy. Every stage of a criminal case presents opportunities for mistake or misconduct, from flawed eyewitness identifications and coerced confessions to unreliable forensics, tunnel vision by investigators, and the uneven quality of defense counsel. Appeals and procedural safeguards reduce the risk but cannot extirpate it. If the penalty is death, any residual error carries the most final consequence.
That logic reframes the death penalty debate around acceptable risk rather than abstract moral desert. It shifts the burden to supporters to accept, explicitly, that the state will sometimes kill the wrong person, and to argue that the perceived benefits of executions outweigh that certainty. For centuries, legal traditions have expressed the opposite intuition, captured in Blackstone’s ratio that it is better for many guilty to go free than for one innocent to suffer. Capital punishment asks society to invert that risk tolerance for the sake of retribution, deterrence, or closure.
Modern evidence has only sharpened the point. DNA testing has exonerated scores of people who were once thought beyond doubt, including individuals who spent years on death row. High-profile reversals and investigative reporting have uncovered patterns of error that are systemic rather than incidental. The experience of states that declared moratoriums or ultimately abolished the death penalty after multiple exonerations underscores how empirical reality undercuts the hope of perfect procedures.
There is also a democratic dimension: the more trust is placed in punitive power, the more humility is required about human limits. The line resists technocratic optimism by insisting on a baseline truth about probability. If the error rate cannot be reduced to zero, the moral question becomes stark. How much accidental bloodshed is society willing to authorize in its own name?
That logic reframes the death penalty debate around acceptable risk rather than abstract moral desert. It shifts the burden to supporters to accept, explicitly, that the state will sometimes kill the wrong person, and to argue that the perceived benefits of executions outweigh that certainty. For centuries, legal traditions have expressed the opposite intuition, captured in Blackstone’s ratio that it is better for many guilty to go free than for one innocent to suffer. Capital punishment asks society to invert that risk tolerance for the sake of retribution, deterrence, or closure.
Modern evidence has only sharpened the point. DNA testing has exonerated scores of people who were once thought beyond doubt, including individuals who spent years on death row. High-profile reversals and investigative reporting have uncovered patterns of error that are systemic rather than incidental. The experience of states that declared moratoriums or ultimately abolished the death penalty after multiple exonerations underscores how empirical reality undercuts the hope of perfect procedures.
There is also a democratic dimension: the more trust is placed in punitive power, the more humility is required about human limits. The line resists technocratic optimism by insisting on a baseline truth about probability. If the error rate cannot be reduced to zero, the moral question becomes stark. How much accidental bloodshed is society willing to authorize in its own name?
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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