You quoted Russ on this, but it seems like you're responding to deckard's post. Am I correct in that interpretation?
I have to agree that I don't see how the time it takes to execute someone makes a difference to whether the death penalty is a deterrent. It would seem to me that anyone who finds an early death repugnant enough to want to avoid it would also not be likely to commit murder regardless of the penalty.
To begin with, it could only be a deterrent for premeditated murder, as only a premeditated act would involve enough time and thinking about the crime to consider all the consequences as well. Someone committing murder that is not premeditated is driven by emotion, not reasoning, so in that state of uncontrolled rage, nothing is going to act as a deterrent.
For someone who is going to commit a premeditated murder, I would tend to think the vast majority are psychopaths anyway. They don't have any sense of empathy, and their emotions are rather flat. For some, they believe they will never be caught, that they are smarter than everyone else, so the punishment isn't relevant, because they don't believe they'll ever face that punishment. For some, their thinking is so twisted that they've rationalized that their act is justified, that they are doing something right and good, whether its the voices in their head telling them that, or whatever, again, they have something very wrong with the way they think and view the world, and even if they consider the punishment, they think what they are doing is so right that it's worth the risk. And for the few who generally are rational, but have built up a true hatred for someone, perhaps the wife who is going to hire a hitman to take out her husband, they are already nervous just of the idea of getting caught at all. The difference between life imprisonment and the death penalty isn't really a big deal, either one is bad enough. If anything, someone who still has a shred of conscience and/or remorse may prefer death over the humiliation in front of their friends and loved ones that they have done something so horrible to spend life in prison. These are the people who are likely to be a suicide risk in prison, because they do empathize with the victim and the victim's family and understand the consequences of their action and are remorseful and feel guilty about it; of course these are the people who generally get life in prison rather than the death penalty, because they do show remorse at their trial.
What the death penalty appears to be, in my opinion, is a way to eliminate society's burden of treating or caring for people who have a mental illness we do not understand or have any idea of how to treat. Afterall, those who get the death penalty instead of a life sentence are the people who show no remorse for their actions, who have committed especially heinous acts, who cannot provide any reason that their victims could have been a real threat to them, only perceived as a possible threat due the distorted workings of their own minds, etc.
We call them psychopaths or sociopaths because we recognize there is something pathologically wrong with them that leads them to commit such acts. We have no idea what to do with them. We don't understand the nature of the illness, and we can't treat them without understanding what causes the illness. They remain a threat as long as the illness is untreated, and the illness is of a nature that even if they receive treatment, there is too much risk if they cease to remain compliant with their treatment (i.e., go off their meds), so it would be far to dangerous to release them even if their illness were treated. They remain even a risk while in prison, both to other prisoners and to wardens.
So, I don't buy the argument that the death penalty provides any deterrent that imprisonment doesn't already provide, nor do I believe it is really serving the purpose of punishment, because punishment implies we are trying shape behavior or teach a lesson to not do something again, and we really aren't doing that; these are not prisoners we expect to rehabilitate. Life in prison and the death penalty serve the same purpose, to remove someone from society who we recognize as highly dangerous to others and beyond our abilities to rehabilitate.
To me, the question or dilemma that follows from this is whether we, as a society, have an obligation to provide for the care of that person once we have identified them and isolated them from the general population, or is it morally acceptable to decide they are of no value to society, only a burden, and can be executed to eliminate that burden on society. Does the need to shunt resources from people who need them and can be productive members of society to paying for feeding and clothing, and hygiene, and shelter, and all of the security needed to keep someone imprisoned make it justifiable to eliminate that burden so those resources can go to more productive members of society? Our laws do make the provision that there are times when killing is justified, such as in self-defense. So, is this a justifiable exception as well, that killing is okay in the case of the death penalty if it's to remove someone from society who causes more harm than good? Or is it just another form of premeditated murder?
You'll note I haven't answered those questions. I won't. I don't know the answer. But, I raise the questions because my opinion is that those are the real questions, and issues of things like deterrence and punishment are nothing but a smokescreen that obscures the real ethical dilemma of how to handle murderers who cannot be released back into society.
.