LOL, you really need to read Lewis’ “Humanitarian Theory.” You are committing exactly the absurdities he talks about.

And my, you ARE condescending.

He is a fine example of someone not naive.

Let’s look at the death penalty in the context of Bennets

The “human-built and human-run criminal justice system – (how could it) ever be capable of rendering just punishment other than by sheer coincidence.”

“The Death Penalty: More Protection for Innocents”
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/07/05/the-death-penalty-more-protection-for-innocents.aspx

“A Death Penalty Red Herring: The Inanity and Hypocrisy of Perfection”, Lester Jackson Ph.D.,
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=102909A

“The Innocent Executed: Deception & Death Penalty Opponents”
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/10/08/the-innocent-executed-deception–death-penalty-opponents–draft.aspx

The 130 (now 139) death row “innocents” scam
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/03/04/fact-checking-issues-on-innocence-and-the-death-penalty.aspx

“Cameron Todd Willingham: Another Media Meltdown”, A Collection of Articles
http://homicidesurvivors.com/categories/Cameron%20Todd%20Willingham.aspx

1. A psychopath is, by definition, sick. A sickness does not necessarily remove legal culpability. We all know that.

2. Murderers come from good families and bad ones. About 99.9% of all of those who come from disfunctional families do not commit capital murder. The abuse excuse can be credible and can be non credible. We all know that.

3. If we don’t see the material aggravating factors, it doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means we’re not omniscient.

4. We have specifically taken the decison making away from the victims and placed it into a system of legal justice. About 80% of US citizens, overwhelemingly not murder vicitm survivors, support the death penalty for some crimes. They find the death penalty just and appropriate for some crimes, the same foundation for all sanctions.

To the extent your argument about the fallibility of our human criminal justice system applies not only to the death penalty but also to the doubtfulness of its capability to ever render “just punishment” (by which I assume you refer to “retribution”), I’d say that same fallibility applies equally to its capability to ever render sentences that appropriately and proportionately deter, reform, or incapacitate. That same fallibility applies not only to the death penalty but also to prison sentences. Apart from the important fact that an execution once carried out can never be undone (which is why I think that the standard of proof of guilt to impose the death penalty should be beyond any “shadow of a doubt”), and acknowledging that there is a qualitative difference between a death sentence and a life sentence, a prison sentence takes life just as surely as a death sentence. There are some who would rather die than spend the rest of their life or even a significant number of years in prison, as the occasional suicide of a person facing prison attests, and I can’t say that such a preference is completely devoid of reason.

While death is from the human perspective horrible, and human life should never be taken as frivolously as the State takes it in its wars, death is not the worst that can befall a man, as it eventually befalls all of us.

With regard to your points about the psychopath being by definition sick, and there always being mitigating factors, the same could be said of every criminal to a greater or lesser degree. (And I suppose that you are not opposed in general to there being consequences for genuinely criminal actions.) I am actually sympathetic to this view. I did my undergraduate thesis in philosophy on “the metaphysical nature and cause of moral evil.” Basically, for evil to be truly evil, the evil-doer must know and understand what is truly good and yet choose not to do it. But his choice not to do it suggests that he didn’t in fact understand and wasn’t convinced in his own mind that what was good was truly good. There is a paradox here which defies reason and explanation and suggests that moral evil truly is a sickness. It supports Socrates’ notion that “sin is ignorance.”

Some want to take account of this plausible psychological understanding of crime by treating it as a sickness and protecting the public to the extent necessary by quarantining in prisons the criminals who suffer from this sickness. Hence the focus on deterrence, reform, and incapacitation. But as C.S. Lewis points out, such purposes when divorced from desert are almost by definition unmoored from justice.

I can certainly empathize with criminals, being something of a criminal myself, as we all are. I agree with Socrates, who said that he would rather suffer evil than do evil, and that the man who does evil is more to be pitied than the man who suffers evil. But how to treat this sickness, this willingness to harm others in order to “benefit” ourselves? As barbaric and medieval as it may sound, I think there is something to Lewis’ understanding of retribution as “want[ing] the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else.” A psychopath is a narcissist who has no empathy and no regard for others. If anything can teach a psychopathic murderer/torturer like BTK the error of his ways and develop in him the seeds of a conscience, perhaps it’s the knowledge that on a certain day and at a certain time his own life will be terminated, just as he himself terminated (albeit far less humanely and with far more suffering) the lives of fellow human beings for his own sadistic pleasure.

“They render all punishment unjust”? No, they recognize that there will inevitably be injustices in a human system, and they seek to minimize them.

I see a few problems, just off the top of my head, with your theoretical death-deserving murderer:

1. A psychopath is, by definition, sick. If a person’s disease makes him kill, how can you say that he deserves to die for his actions?
2. There are always material mitigating factors. The mentally healthy person, brought up in a household that is neither abusive nor neglectful, without brain injury, doesn’t wind up murdering anyone.
3. If we don’t see the material mitigating factors, it doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means we’re not omniscient.
4. To the family of the victim, every killer might look deserving of death. That’s not the measure we use, and shouldn’t be.