Ryan Dallion makes his case by opposing a supposed misrepresentation with a much more blatant one, namely the assertion that all people who are strictly against the death penalty have compassion for murderers, but not for their victims.
- The existence of compassion for murderers does not imply the absence of compassion for their victims.
- Compassion for murderers is not misplaced, despide all the cheap emotional potshots used in the above writeup. The point is that those who consider people like McVeigh to be monsters and only want them to be removed don't understand that people are not born as murderers. There are reasons why they become murderers. Understanding these reasons is the only way to prevent people from becoming murderers in the first place, instead of doomed-to-fail attempts of scaring them away from it. This is what people like Ms. Wobbekind want to do.
- In fact, disproportionally many perpetrators of violent crimes were themselves victims of abuse in their childhood.
- There is at least one argument against the death penalty that does not rely on compassion:
Most societies consider taking a life to be the ultimate crime. It is simply inconsistent for such a society to sanction the same action under any circumstances.
It sets a bad example.
self defence is a logical exception because it assumes that the life of the defender is threatened and it is better that the life of an innocent be spared at the cost of an attacker than the other way round. However, the death penalty is not self defence because the murder has already happened and will not be reversed, and the murderer cannot commit another murder if imprisoned properly.