The Pharaoh wrote:United Massachusetts wrote:"If people have the right to live, then why is capital punishment a good idea? Life without parole also prevents such people from continuing to do harm. My question then--why is the death penalty neccesary?"
Your question seems logically quite reversed. At the point when the criminal justice system of a nation has deemed that a person has committed a crime (or multiple crimes) that deem the person such a safety concern that he or she will never, ever be allowed out prison again what is the point of continuing to keep that person alive? What value to anyone does this person provide that is worth such resources?
The audacity of this body to tell taxpayers that it must keep serial rapists and murderers alive for fifty years in a box, while many states and economic systems fail to keep innocent and good families fed is detestable. No grain should be wasted on a rapist. No meat wasted on a murderer. GA #9 appears to require that we give food and drink to prisoners, so that brings me to my impasse with this proposal.
The Pharaoh
This is a poor argument. If the argument is that it's unfair that criminals get to be fed and housed while law-abiding citizens languish in privation, it is basically arbitrary to draw the line at just murderers are rapists. If your ultimate concern is that criminals shouldn't get food and shelter until law-abiding citizens get them, then it doesn't make sense to fill prisons at all until the needs of the masses have been met. The logical conclusion of this argument is that keeping criminals in prisons — i.e., feeding and sheltering them — is not justified unless you can ensure the rest of your population has the resources it needs to survive. It doesn't make sense to say "it is not fair that people live in squalor while murderers get all the free prison gruel they want. Let's execute the murders," UNLESS executing the murderers will somehow help the people living in squalor. Somehow I doubt the only things standing between the abject poverty of the masses and prosperity are costs of plumbing and gruel for murders and rapists.