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I was super in favor of capital punishment until we had to do an essay on a controversial topic in my senior year of high school and as I was researching for it I was like "wait a minute this actually sucks ass." Capital punishment kind of only "works" if your underlying assumption is that the justice system gets it right every time, which is not true at all. It also isn't even a good deterrent- it makes no difference on capital crime rates whether the death penalty is a possibility or not. So the only reason to have it is that your own sense of "justice" requires criminals to be killed, even if it doesn't actually help anything and even if it doesn't prevent more crimes. And again, that denies any possibility that the justice system ever gets things wrong and wrongfully convicts someone.
Oh I was way shittier than that when I was younger. I mean I assumed they got it right almost every time and the couple of exceptions would be caught by appeals and such and it was such a vanishingly small number of actually innocent people that would be killed that it was an acceptable number.
That was before I saw stuff like proof people were innocent and DAs still fighting against them being released. It never occurred to me that expecting everyone in the justice system to seek real justice was completely naive of me. Of course police wouldn't try to arrest someone they knew was innocent, and of course the DA wouldn't prosecute and if they were ever made aware of a mistake, of course they would correct that immediately.
Turns out the world is largely made up of folks who genuinely don't care if other people live or die or whether it's right or wrong, as long as it doesn't inconvenience them at all.