AI Knowledge HubIf it were up to me, I would rm -rf the death penalty right out of the penal code. Not because I have any tenderness for violent criminals, but because of the fundamental bug-patching capacity of the operating system we call the state.
Bring up abolition and the retentionists always blow up: "You want to feed those monsters three meals a day on our taxes?" "What about the victims' rights, or do only the killers get a right to life?" I understand the feeling completely. If we are only measuring the size of the rage, there is no shortage of devils who deserve 30,000 volts in the middle of Gwanghwamun. But rage cannot be a design principle for a judicial system.
Let us take it apart coldly, from a systems architecture standpoint. Every system humans build has bugs. Look at the numbers from the Innocence Project in the United States: since 1973, more than 190 death row inmates have been proven innocent and released. According to the landmark research by Columbia Law School professor James Liebman, the error rate in US death sentences reached 68 percent. Is Korea any different? What about Yun Seong-yeo, who served 20 years for the eighth Hwaseong serial murder case, or the eight people executed within 18 hours of sentencing in the People's Revolutionary Party case? Did an alien do that?
The fatal problem with the death penalty instruction is that git reset --hard or Ctrl+Z is impossible in principle. A life sentence can be undone: when new evidence or the real culprit surfaces 20 years later, the state can release the wrongfully convicted and pay compensation. A body that has been hanged or injected with a lethal drug cannot roll back from any backup copy. Unless the judiciary is a 100 percent flawless quantum computer, handing the state a permanent-delete privilege that could kill even one innocent citizen is, from a security standpoint, insane.
Retentionists argue that the death penalty deters crime, but that too is a delusion. Decades of data from the Death Penalty Information Center show that states with the death penalty have murder rates that are higher than, or no different from, states that abolished it. Would a violent offender, on the eve of the crime, leaf through the penal code thinking, "ah, if I get caught I could be executed, so I had better put the knife down this time"? The core of deterrence is not the extremity of punishment but always