That's the title of Nick Gillespie's post at Reason's Hit and Run blog. It's subtitled, "The Libertarian Case Against Capital Punishment."
Another week, another botched killing under the legal euphemism of capital punishment. After macabre screw-ups in Oklahoma and Ohio, it was Arizona’s turn last week, when double-murderer Joseph Rudolph Wood III took about two hours to die. The specific problem this time around was an apparently unreliable “cocktail” of the drugs used in the lethal injection process.
But let’s face it: There’s no good way to kill a person, even one as completely unsympathetic as Wood (he killed his ex-girlfriend and her father, shooting them at point-blank range). As a libertarian, I’m not surprised that the state is so incompetent that it can’t even kill people efficiently. But I’m far more outraged by the idea that anyone anywhere seriously thinks the death penalty passes for good politics or sane policy. It’s expensive, ineffective, and most of all, deeply offensive to ideals of truly limited government.
His full column, "Why the Death Penalty Needs to Die," is at the Daily Beast.
So the death penalty wastes money, has no effect on murder rates, and is sometimes tossed at innocent people. Those three reasons are more than enough to end it once and for all.
Earlier coverage of the Libertarian and conservative case for repeal begins at the link.
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