It's a compelling rationale for the US certainly, but I'd argue that it's orthogonal to the important reforms to stop convicting innocent people of crimes.
Examples of things America could do to improve on that, unrelated to executing people:
- Forbid cops from lying when interviewing suspects. A fraction of people when confronted with bullshit accusations will shrug in resignation and let it wash over them. But many more get confused. If the cops seem sure I threatened a farm owner with a gun, then I guess maybe I did? They have CCTV footage after all, they say the tyre tracks are like fingerprints, nobody else in the world could have left those tracks...
- Abolish cash bail. Either people are too dangerous to let loose, too likely to flee, or they're not. If anything being rich makes you more able to flee than poor people. But cash bail makes people choose false confessions because it's cheaper, which is not only unjust it creates a perverse incentive to accuse poor people of crimes they didn't do.
> it's orthogonal to the important reforms to stop convicting innocent people of crimes
This is a good ideal. But in practice unachievable.
Realizing that, we should have mechanisms for double checking our work, correcting mistakes when found, implementing procedures to prevent it from happening again and minimizing the degree to which irreversible consequences are dealt.
But I'm not talking about setting the unachievable as the requirement, I'm talking about doing these really easy trivial reforms to take a step towards this ideal.
It's the difference between "We can't entirely rule out insect fragments in flour" and "I reckon we ought not to let 'em dump diseased livestock in the flour silo".
Americans think it's normal that their police get to lie to suspects. I guess this is cheaper than teaching them literally anything about interrogation, but it means all interviews are worthless by a reasonable person's standard. And yet because this is legal, and not only legal it's normal, the US courts will accept this as somehow evidence. Not evidence that the police are corrupt and incompetent, but evidence that the person being interviewed is guilty!
Examples of things America could do to improve on that, unrelated to executing people:
- Forbid cops from lying when interviewing suspects. A fraction of people when confronted with bullshit accusations will shrug in resignation and let it wash over them. But many more get confused. If the cops seem sure I threatened a farm owner with a gun, then I guess maybe I did? They have CCTV footage after all, they say the tyre tracks are like fingerprints, nobody else in the world could have left those tracks...
- Abolish cash bail. Either people are too dangerous to let loose, too likely to flee, or they're not. If anything being rich makes you more able to flee than poor people. But cash bail makes people choose false confessions because it's cheaper, which is not only unjust it creates a perverse incentive to accuse poor people of crimes they didn't do.