...is that our society produces way too many heinous villains who truly deserve it.  The primary purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the innocent from predations by the guilty.  However, euphemisms on the subject abound.  In California, the prisons are run by the Department of Corrections.  Correct what?  When a crime is committed, the bell has already been rung.  Even the word penitentiary infers that it's a place to go to express sorrow, not a secure warehouse for lawbreakers.

The main reason people commit crimes is that they think they can get away with them.  Moral people can see such opportunities as well — but they choose not to try.  Hence deterrence is of particular importance and is the reason police drive around on patrol...well, at least they used to.  The neo-Marxist criminal-huggers in our midst, however, blame the inequities resulting from rapacious capitalism for forcing otherwise virtuous people into stealing just for their own survival. 

Writers of crime fiction have tended to emphasize the intelligence of their villains, like Sherlock Holmes's arch-nemesis, Professor James Moriarty.  Most criminals, however, are not all that bright.  Once, while dealing with a police officer over a stolen license plate, I heard her radio chatter describe a daylight break-in being called in by people across the street who were watching the event through their window while eating breakfast.  "What were they thinking, committing a burglary in plain sight?" I asked her.  She told me that the perps probably just woke up, realized they needed to get some food, and went out to steal some stuff just to help them get that done.  I then realized that many criminals wind up being simply harvested by the officers of the law.

Meanwhile, back to capital punishment.  Criminal-huggers emphasize the "cruel and unusual" clause in the Constitution — even though the normal form of capital punishment at the time of the founding was hanging.  A poignant story from the Revolutionary War involves a captured British spy named John Andre.  As a major in the British army, he was entitled to face a firing squad — but Washington had him hanged instead.  Thus ended the friendship between Washington and Alexander Hamilton.

Manual beheading was "improved" with the invention of the guillotine.  French surgeon Antoine Louis pursued the introduction of the device as a means to behead with less trauma.  Hanging was less grotesque, although not always as certain.  Hangings followed the Nuremberg trials after World War 2.  Some of the Nazi big shots beat the executioner by committing suicide, and one of the condemned failed to succumb.  The curtain was drawn and reopened on a lifeless body.  The executioner, who just happened to be Jewish, admitted to strangling the person.

A most interesting capital punishment story has a lot to do with science.  Direct current (DC) cannot be transformed up into higher voltage, and Edison was totally committed to DC.  As a result, there had to be numerous local generating stations because resistance in the wires limited how far electricity could travel.  Alternating current is now the normal way electricity is generated, because it can be transmitted over great distances at really high voltage with minimal line loss.  To defend his obsolete commitment to DC, Edison built the first electric chair and donated it to the state of New York to prove how dangerous AC was (because the voltage could be made really high).

The best argument against capital punishment has to do with its ultimate finality.  Justice isn't perfect, and juries make mistakes.  But taking 20 years out of somebody's life is also irreversible.  It used to be that some crimes other than murder were also punishable by death.  In particular, rape was a capital crime in some states, especially in the South.  Juries, however, often refused to convict in spite of overwhelming evidence of guilt, when the punishment was so disproportionately harsh, especially when the victim was alive and sort of well and was able to testify in court.

The new plague of soft-on-crime prosecutors rely on human fallibility to prop up their efforts to keep evildoers on the street.  The inevitable increase in crime is starting to dominate urban politics, much to the displeasure of the inner-city political establishment.  Organized and pervasive retail theft, whack-job murder rampages, human-trafficking, etc. are all grabbing the public's attention.

Bottom line: incarceration is very expensive.  Execution used to help give the taxpayers a break.  Nowadays, the appeals process has blurred the distinction between the two.  U.S. population statistics show that persons over 65 years of age constitute 17.3% of the total.  Meanwhile, 24% of the death row population is over 60.  Obviously, government-sanctioned killing of condemned criminals is particularly unpleasant.  But the reality of what they did in order to be condemned is even uglier. 

To conclude, I quote former attorney and possible inventor of the musical comedy, W.S. Gilbert, from perhaps his most famous work, The Mikado:

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time —
To let the punishment fit the crime —
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment!

Image via Picryl.