 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of Libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our topic for today's episode is the death penalty. Joining us to discuss it is Ben Jones with Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, a project of Equal Justice USA. Ben is also pursuing a PhD in political science at Yale University. Typically in this country we think of conservatives as pro-death penalty, but your group seeks to convince conservatives specifically that they should oppose the death penalty. Why is that? Over the recent years and decades, across the country, conservatives, liberals, everyone in between have really been rethinking the death penalty. And there have been a number of problems in how it's been applied. Most notably, you've had innocent people sent to death row, later found innocent. Some executions go forward despite strong doubts over whether the person was guilty. And I think these factors have led people to really reconsider this issue, and especially among conservatives. So we've had some very high-profile conservatives come out against the death penalty, folks like Richard Bigary, Ron Paul, Brett Bozell, and others. And I think there are several factors that are really driving conservatives to look at this issue again. One is the death penalty is a government program, and like a lot of government programs, there are problems with it and mistakes are made. The thing with the death penalty is that it's a punishment that's irrevocable. So if you make a mistake, there's no way to go back and fix it, and I think that has a lot of people concerned. Also, you look at the death penalty, it's incredibly costly. Study after study keeps coming out and showing that it costs millions and more than the alternative of life in prison without parole. And given the fact that there's not much evidence that it's keeping us safe for or lowering crime rates, that's leading a lot of fiscal conservatives to question whether or not it's really worth the price tag to keep the death penalty in place. And I think, lastly and importantly, a lot of people come at this from a pro-life perspective. And one thing about the death penalty is no one wants to see an innocent life put at risk. And if we have a system that makes mistakes and that time and time again has put innocent life at risk, that leads a lot of people to question the program too. Do we have an idea? Historically, the support on either both the left and the right, if I remember correctly, has been really high for the death penalty in America. Has that been on a distinct downward trend? And maybe on the left, they used to be over 50% mostly for support of the death penalty. Are they still above 50%? You have seen views on the death penalty change pretty significantly in the past couple of decades. We peaked in the 90s, 80%. We're supportive of the death penalty that's taking everyone together. And since then, people have learned about DNA. All these wrongful convictions have come out. And you've seen support for the death penalty drop by about 20 percentage points in the past few decades, which is significant. Furthermore, I think what's really telling about polls on the death penalty is that when you ask people for the crime of murder, do you favor the death penalty or life in prison without parole? When people have that option, support for the death penalty drops even lower, you find it's around people are pretty evenly split in terms of whether they favor the death penalty or life in prison without parole. And what that shows is that when people know that there is an alternative that can keep dangerous folks locked up, keep society secure, they're much more willing to let go of the death penalty. With regards to the question of how it breaks down by political leanings or political party, it is true that you find that generally people on the left are more against the death penalty. I think the most recent Gallup poll actually had it at 50 or below 50% for folks on the left. But I think as more and more conservatives take a new look at this issue, you're going to see support among conservatives drop too. And what was really interesting, there was a poll that came out recently, and it was looking at views among Christians on the death penalty. And what it found was that there was a very sharp generational gap in terms of younger Christians were much less likely to support the death penalty than their parents. And I think you're seeing that more and more there's a generational gap. And just from interacting with folks, working with young Republicans, young pro-life groups, you're seeing among young people a much greater willingness to let go of the death penalty and be supportive of repealing it and replacing it with life in prison without parole. And some states too have also recently changed some of those policies, correct? Yeah, there have been six states in the past six years that have repealed the death penalty and replaced it with life in prison without parole. Through popular measures or mostly state legislators? Mostly state legislators. So I believe five of those states, it was through the legislature. In one of those states, it was the courts. In New York, the court struck down the death penalty is unconstitutional. There was an effort in the legislature to bring it back, but that failed. Your argument so far against the death penalty have been kind of about how it can go wrong in the sense that it can cost a lot of money. It can put innocent people away. But I'm wondering if there's still opposition to it, even if those sorts of problems either are off the table or are minimized. So if we could somehow guarantee that we weren't going to kill innocents or- Too much better, yeah. That would there, is the death penalty contrary to justice as well? Or is it just that we can't do it well enough from a cost or from a accuracy standpoint to overcome these other secondary concerns? People come at this issue from a lot of different perspectives. And I think a lot of people are just, they're fed up with the system. And they also realize what's at risk. We've had the death penalty for centuries and for centuries we've had problems with it. And what's at stake is a potentially innocent life if you make a mistake. So when people see the track record, see everything that has gone wrong and they see what hangs in the balance, people are saying, we need to really step back and not go forward with this. You do see, other people do approach this from a moral perspective. And there's been an interesting debate about this, especially within the Catholic Church, which has done a lot of thinking on this issue. And John Paul II, Pope John Paul II was very vocal in his opposition to the death penalty. And you see that manifests itself in the catechism also, where what the teaching of the Church says is that if there are bloodless means available to keep society secure, then you should not resort to the death penalty. And the idea that if there are alternative ways to keep society secure without executing someone, we should resort to those first, I think, has a lot of appeal to people. Because it's quite a step to, it's one thing to kill someone in self-defense, but once you've rendered them defenseless, should we take that extra step than executing them? And there are a lot of issues that come with that. If we want to have executions, then we have to train people to be executioners. And we found that that also can be very difficult on folks who are charged to carry out executions, especially when things go awry. You a little while back wrote an article for Libertarianism.org, focusing specifically on libertarians and why they should not support the death penalty. And much of that article looked at an argument Murray Rothbard makes in his book The Ethics of Liberty, which you called perhaps the classic libertarian defense of the death penalty. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about Rothbard's argument. Sure. He bases his defense on the death penalty on the principal portionality. So basically, if someone commits a crime, violates somebody else's rights, then their rights can be deprived to the same extent. And going off that principle, Rothbard then says that the only crime that could merit the death penalty is the crime of murder, because only if you've taken someone's life could you have your life taken from you. Now, one move he makes, which I think a lot of people will be sympathetic to, is that when deciding whether or not someone receives the death penalty, he leaves that decision in the hands of the victims. And that has intuitive appeal, because I think a lot of people are frustrated in the current criminal justice system where sometimes victims are ignored and their needs aren't met or addressed. So he says it's up to the victims to decide whether or not to respond with an execution. And for the crime of murder, they could ask for less, they could ask for restitution, they could forgive the person, not ask for any punishment, or they could ask for the death penalty. Now, there's one complication with the crime of murder, because when there's a murder, the actual victim directly affected is dead, and they're not able to respond. So the way that Rothbard addresses that is he says that people could put in their wills, they could designate someone in their family to make that decision for them, or they could put explicitly, if I'm murdered, I'd like the death penalty or I would not like the death penalty. There's also a somewhat curious wrinkle in his argument too, something that we really don't see today. He says that if there is a murder, the victims, like the victim's family, should have the right to enact justice or vengeance on their own, however you look at it. So if someone in your family is murdered, the family members could, if they believe they know who committed the murder, they could actually go and have that person killed on their own. If they do that, they could have to come to court if the other family argues that, in fact, they killed the wrong person. So there'll be an incentive not to do that, but he still wants to leave that option open to victim's families. Now none of that seems to solve any problem about procedure or whether or not you can obtain these convictions with enough confidence that you could actually kill someone if he's just purely arguing that it is possible that some group of people can proportionally call for the death of someone who wronged them, but then figuring out who that person is through just processes seems to be not accounted in Rothbard's version of that. Yeah, that was one of my biggest concerns with his argument. And I think, especially in recent years, as we have learned more about wrongful convictions and the many different things that can go wrong. The number is now at about 140, isn't it? Yeah, 143 individuals since 1973 in the U.S. have been sentenced to death and then new evidence came out that exonerated them. And there are other cases where executions have gone forward and there are doubts about whether or not the person was guilty. So those are just death row cases. There have been many more exonerations beyond just the folks that have been on death row. And presumably there's a lot of people on death row who no one's going to look at the evidence. No one's trying. But they're executed anyway, so that wrongful death number is probably much, much higher than 140. And that's one of the problems in figuring out, people often ask, how many people have been wrongfully executed? It's a difficult question to answer. And one of the main reasons why is that if an execution goes forward and there are concerns about whether the person was actually guilty, there's not much incentive for the state to actually investigate and figure out what happened in that case. For instance, there was a crime, a murder in Texas, a guy named Cameron Todd Willingham. And he was convicted of killing his three children in an alleged arson fire. It turns out, since his original conviction, arson science has advanced dramatically and basically the whole case against him fell apart. There was a commission set up to look into that case, but the state of Texas really put the brakes on that. And which isn't surprisingly, the state really doesn't want to admit when it's made such a mistake like that, if it does happen, it's usually decades later rather than years later. That seems to bring in another interesting fact here, that we talked about Rothbard's thing, which he doesn't really talk about the politics of it, just the feasibility of restitution system and allowing for someone else's death. But if we bring in politics in the situation and talk about the politics of the death penalty, and whether or not these state agents have good enough incentives to rectify any mistakes, to pursue innocence, and a lot of times it doesn't seem like they do. Yeah, I think when you look at these cases, you can easily sort of come to the conclusion that all these government actors are corrupt. And I think a lot of them do their job well and should not be faulted, but it only takes a few bad apples and you can end up with a spectacular mistake. And one case I discuss in the article is the case of John Thompson. And you read through the details in that case, and it's... I actually did some work on that case. Oh, okay, yeah. And like you read about, so basically what happened in this case, there was a sculpatory evidence at trial, which the prosecutor suppressed, didn't allow to come out. And some very key evidence like blood at the crime scene that would have shown that he couldn't have been the perpetrator. But you read that one of the prosecutors in that case, he got diagnosed with a terminal illness. And he felt really guilty about what he did. He told one of the other prosecutors in the office that this evidence was suppressed. But that prosecutor kept his mouth, didn't spill the beans to anybody. And Thompson, meanwhile, is getting pretty close to his execution. He's like a month away. Things are looking very bleak. They hire a private investigator who's finally able to dig out this evidence. But to have the knowledge that this person on death row is innocent, but not be willing to share that, I mean, that just, it's shocking and very troubling. Yeah, the issue in that case was whether or not he had the malfeasance. I mean, Thompson was eventually let off, but whether or not the practices of the prosecuting attorneys were enough to be a policy or practice, not just a single iteration of a person doing something wrong, but whether if he was going to sue the state, it was a policy or practice of the entire department that they constantly made these mistakes. Because that's the rule that they have for liability. And the only way you can get recovery in that situation, which is part of the problem, if they don't have very high standards of liability, they may not try their hardest or do something like this. Exactly. And I don't know where you come down on the case, but when you look at what was going on in the New Orleans DA's office. It's unbelievable, yeah. It was repeated Brady violations that's withholding the sculptor evidence, numerous cases overturned. And I think Thompson had a pretty good case that there was repeated abuses that merited compensation. It also raised another interesting fact about the level of damages because it seemed like one thing the Supreme Court was doing in that case was saying that he was awarded $14 million, which would have been nearly the entire budget of this parish. And so they had these practical concerns about whether or not you could pay out the entire budget of a local parish if you misconvicted someone. Which it seems to me that if you can't do that, then maybe that's a really good reason you shouldn't put people on death row. If you couldn't even make them whole if you messed up, right? Right. How many people each year are executed in this country? Recently it's been in the low 40s. It got up to close to 100 in the late 90s, but it's been going down. Well, because I'm curious about the public reaction to these stories that we tell, like the 140 individuals who we know were innocent and put to death and the story of John Thompson, like these are really kind of terrifying stories. I mean, these are stories of like you're an innocent person and your government, which is this enormously powerful thing, comes and tells you you're guilty, locks you up, and then I mean, if you're innocent, it effectively murders you. But we don't seem, there doesn't seem to be the sense of kind of widespread outrage at that sort of government action in the way that like when you have the memo about the drones. Or Bridgegate. Chris Christie, Bridgegate. The presidents allowed to kind of kill people without due process. But don't keep in traffic going into New York City. The Edward Snowden revelations of the widespread spine, like these are also really awful things the government's doing, but the government killing innocent Americans in fairly large numbers, why do you think we're just not, there doesn't seem to be the kind of ongoing widespread public outrage about that? Well, as I said earlier, I do believe that there is more concern about the process and I think that's good to see. You mean you seem public support for the death penalty go down, executions go down, death sentences go down, more states get rid of it. So I think the trends are going in a positive direction and I think that has a lot to do with these cases of innocence coming to light. I think the reason that you don't see the same level of engagement from the public as you might for NSA or even Bridgegate stuff is that this is an issue that it's hard for people to connect with sometimes because people that are sentenced to death row is a very small part of the population. And a lot of times people feel that they can distance themselves that, you know, oh, I would never, you know, I would never end up on death row. I couldn't be wrongfully convicted. And you even hear people sometimes, well, if they weren't guilty of the murder, they must have been guilty of something. They deserve to be there for something. And I think that's why it's so important for people that have been wrongfully convicted to be sharing their stories because, you know, when they are able to engage the public and talk to them, people are shocked and you see a lot of, a lot of minds change because you have folks like Kirk Bloodsworth. He was wrongfully sentenced to death in Maryland. This guy was a former Marine, no criminal record at all. Yet you still had faulty eyewitness identification in this case that ended, and he ended up on death row. And, you know, at the time of the trial, he was vilified in the media, you know, he killed a child. They thought he was just an awful human being who needed to be executed right away. Fortunately, he was able to get DNA testing in this case and be fully exonerated. And, you know, now he's, you know, working across the country to try to end the system. So are there widespread kind of disparities in who receives the death penalty, like socioeconomically or racially? Yeah, I mean, throughout the death penalty's history, there have been disparities in how it's applied. 1972 is a key date. That's when the death penalty was struck down as unconstitutional in the Furman v. Georgia decision. And then it was brought back in 1976. Pre-1972, the disparities were very stark, and it's really hard to deny that. So for instance, before that decision, in some places in the country, you could still be executed for the crime of rape. And you look at the period 1930 to 1967, 450 people were executed for the crime of rape. In 90% of those cases, it was a black individual convicted for raping a white woman. So basically, this penalty was reserved for black individuals who were, you know, charged with raping white women. You also find that, you know, in the south, in the hundred years after the Civil War, 80% of the individuals who were executed were black. The, I mean, the disparities and the racism in the system is very hard to deny. After 1976, states tried to rewrite their death penalty laws to provide more guidance to juries to try to eliminate some of this bias which riddled the system pre-1972. The problem is they really didn't fix the system, and you see these disparities come up in other ways. So specifically what you find is that when the victim is white, prosecutors are more likely to seek the death penalty than when the victim is black or Latino. So you look at, in the executions that have taken place since 1976, in 77% of those cases, the victim is white. If you look at all the murders during that time period, the victim is white at a much lower rate, around 50%. And so, you know, this really raises concerns about the system where, you know, it seems that, you know, certain murders are treated differently than other murders. You also find, I mean, socioeconomic status does make a difference if someone has high-powered attorneys. A lot of times prosecutors will just decide, you know, we're not even going to seek the death penalty, it's not even worth it. So we've talked a lot about the problems inherent with figuring this out, but some listeners might be thinking, well, even though there are some problems, you always can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, but there's a huge deterrence factor here, right? You know that something gets a death penalty. I know that if they made jaywalking death penalty tomorrow, I would never jaywalk again. So isn't that something we'd be getting benefit out of? Maybe even at the expense of a few innocent lives, but we try our best and maybe don't do it right. But there are also innocents out there whose crimes are not committed against them because people fear the death penalty. Well, for the jaywalking example, if you knew that you would get life in prison without parole for jaywalking, that probably would also be a pretty big incentive not to jaywalk. Yeah, well, it might be right on the edge there. Now, I'm not advocating life in prison without parole for jaywalking by any means, but when answering that question, what we have to look at is not whether or not the death penalty is a deterrent. It is a punishment and just by itself, yes, it can be a deterrent. The real question is, is it a deterrent over and above the alternative of life in prison without parole? Good point. When you look at that, there's really not much evidence out there that it is reducing murder rates, reducing crime. You can look at broad statistics, you look at states with the death penalty, those that don't have it, states with the death penalty have higher murder rates on average than states that don't. Obviously, there are a lot of different factors that figure into crime rates so that by itself doesn't make the argument. But when you talk to criminologists, you talk to police chiefs, you also talk to the public at large, time and time again, majorities of all those groups say the death penalty is not a deterrent over and above life in prison without parole. And if we are really concerned about preventing violence, lowering crime, we have to ask ourselves, is it worth spending all these millions of dollars on the death penalty that really has zero impact on murder rates? Or should we use that money in other ways that actually have some proven track record of being effective? Well, or someone might say that, well, we said that there have only been 40 people killed. So you have a pretty low probability of getting the death penalty. And even if you get it, people know that you'll spend 20 or 30 years on death row, which means that it's less deterrent because you might be 40 years old, so that might be about your expected lifespan anyway. So what if we just upped the death penalty and lowered the amount of appeal so we could just get two years or just kill you immediately? That seems like that would raise the amount of deterrence factor. There may be a point there. I mean, if we were executing lots and lots of people, there's a chance it could have a more deterrent effect. I don't know. The only way you can do that is running an experiment and it's going to be hard to get funding for that. But one thing that is pretty certain that if we started executing people at much higher rates, we'd be making a lot more mistakes. One thing about deterrence is that for punishment to have any sort of deterrent value, it has to be swift and also certain. And the death penalty is neither of those. The reason why is because we've had all these mistakes. The courts have said you have to go through a super due process in capital cases before you can carry out an execution. And what we find is that in states that do sentence more people to death, do carry out more executions, we find more mistakes in those cases. Florida is one example. Florida leads the nation in death row exonerations with 24 since 1973. Wow. What's shocking is that if you had that track record, you would think the response is maybe we should get rid of this system or try to do more to keep the wrong people from ending up on death row. Instead, they passed a bill last year to speed up the appeals process to try to execute people faster. Given their track record, I'm very troubled to think what the results may be down the road. A lot of these stories are told of people being wrongfully convicted or the disparities between say the races in terms of who receives the death penalty seem to speak to a level of corruption going on. Like the prosecutors intentionally withholding evidence or knowingly giving the death penalty to certain groups more than others. And I'm wondering does the death penalty in particular exacerbate that sort of corruption? Do we see say more of that sort of stuff if prosecutors can get the death penalty than if they can only get life in prison? There are two factors to consider that may lead to that result. One is certain very high profile murder cases often present a lot of pressure to find somebody to define who did it to be able to get a conviction. And if the community is demanding that there be some sort of response, sometimes you may find folks in law enforcement rush the process, narrow in on someone they think committed the crime and get tunnel vision. And so that's one thing to keep in mind about capital cases because you always hear the argument, well we need the death penalty for the worst of the worst and the most heinous murders. I have a problem with that argument because tell any murder victims family member that they're lost wasn't the worst of the worst or the most heinous. I think it's very hard to say that to anybody. But if you keep the death penalty as used in these very high profile crimes, that's often times when there's the most pressure to find somebody and mistakes can result from that. Another thing to keep in mind is sometimes the death penalty is justified on the grounds that we need it to get plea deals. So prosecutors can threaten the death penalty to get somebody to plead to something less. And the problem with using the death penalty as a stick in plea negotiations is that sometimes people are scared and they'll confess to a crime they didn't even commit. And I think that's a very important, you know, we've had cases like this, Beatrice Six in Nebraska. They were wrongfully convicted of a murder that they didn't commit. Threatened with the death penalty ended up confessing and then years later finally shown innocent. So I think that's, we need to be very careful about using the death penalty in that manner. Yeah, a lot of people who haven't read a lot of these cases and don't have a sort of lawyer's mindset on this would be shocked how often that actually happens. But another one that I find surprising, which I'm sure you have something to say is the level of eyewitness convictions that lead to, that is usually good enough evidence in many cases to lead to a death penalty conviction. And eyewitness testimony is actually not that good, is it? Yeah, it's, we're learning more and more about the mistakes that can be made and oftentimes honest mistakes. I mean, there's no bad intentions there. It's just people identify the wrong person. One case that is particularly telling is the one of Jennifer Thompson Canino. And she was a college student in, believe it's North Carolina, and she was raped. And she was a straight A student. And she made sure to study the face of the perpetrator because she wanted to send him away and make sure he never got out. She identified who she believed to be the killer was seen as the best possible witness you could have on the stand. Find out the years later, you know, there's DNA testing done and she had, you know, misidentified the actual perpetrator of the crime. It's actually an amazing story. They, they reconciled and are now friends. But that's, I think that story really shows the mistakes that can be made with eyewitness testimony. You know, one of the more surprising things I thought in your article on libertarianism.org, which we'll link in the show notes, but you talk about the costs too. I think a lot of people would say, well, this costs less than keeping him in prison for 40 years or 50 years and putting him up with cable TV and everything, but it doesn't seem to be accurate. The main reason for that is that lawyers are more expensive than prison guards. When prosecutors decide to seek the death penalty, they set in motion a legal process that's more drawn out. You're going to have more attorneys, more investigators, more preparation before the trial even starts. And this is all because we've made mistakes in the past and the courts have said you need superdue process in capital cases before you can execute someone. So just at the trial stage itself, and what's unique about capital cases is you have two separate phases. You have one phase to find out is the person innocent or are they guilty? Then you have a whole separate phase where the jury is presented with mitigating and aggravating factors and they have to decide whether or not to give the person the death penalty or life in prison without parole. So just at the trial stage itself, a capital case often costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars more than a non-capital case. So you spend all that money up front and that's really hard to make up regardless of how long the person ends up sitting in jail. But then after the conviction, the person usually sits on death row for quite a long period of time, which is expensive because it's a higher security setting. Plus you're going through the appeals in capital cases, those cost more money. Then by the end of the process, it's millions of dollars more than if you just would have gone with life in prison without parole as the sentence. And you said also there are some municipalities who've been had to raise taxes for that, which is a very big libertarian no-no, right? Yeah, I live in Kansas and we had a hearing on a bill to repeal the death penalty a few weeks ago and the chair of the Libertarian Party testified for the bill and he's from Osage County here in Kansas and they had to do that. There was a capital case and they had to raise taxes and he was not very happy about that. I wanted to ask about American relation to the rest of the world on this issue because one of the things that we hear is you see these lists of, you know, that it's America and then these other countries are the ones with the death penalty and that America is one of the very few developed nations with the death penalty still. I'm just curious if you have insights into why that is, like what is it about America that makes us, even if the trend lines are drifting away from support for the death penalty, what makes us still support it much more than... Almost anyone else except for maybe North Korea and Cuba or other regimes like that. It's hard to say that this has been a subject of a lot of debate. When you look, when the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972, it looked like the U.S. was in line with a lot of the rest of the world because you had Britain, France, some other... Canada all striking down the death penalty around the same time. You look back at the U.S.'s history, the first English-speaking territory to ever get rid of the death penalty was the state of Michigan. So there's actually quite a long history in America of having some suspicion of the death penalty. But, you know, what happened after 1972 is that crime rates started to rise and I don't think that had any connection with the death penalty, but some people went ahead and made that connection. And then it became... Every politician, regardless of which party you were in, felt the need to run on a pro-death penalty platform to show that you're tough on crime. And the public, you know, responded to that at least in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. You're not seeing that the same way today. For most people, it's not their top priority issue. And you're not seeing it win elections like it did in the past. But once that became ingrained in the political landscape here in the U.S., it became a very entrenched practice, which was very difficult to undo. That's why what's happened in the last six years with six states ending the death penalty is historic and is such a sharp contrast to what happened in the preceding decades. And you also have sort of the disturbing trend, which you see occasionally just with loud mouths, I guess, of people championing the death penalty and how we're not like the rest of the world, like we kill them quick down here in Texas type of stuff, which doesn't seem to be at least very heartening. Yeah, yeah. I've always had a real problem with using the death penalty as a way to win political points. Because reducing crime is a very complicated issue, and there's a lot of different factors that go into it. And politicians basically started, you know, I don't want to think about that problem. I'll just say I'm against the death penalty and try to get people to vote for me in that way. And, you know, if we want to be serious about reducing crime, then there's a lot of different things to consider, and we shouldn't just take a shortcut by saying we're against the death penalty, which does very little to reduce crime. What sort of things, just out of curiosity, should we consider if we're looking at reducing crime? That is a good question, one I don't have all the answers to. But I think, you know, it's interesting what the folks down at Right on Crime are doing. They, you know, they've put out some interesting stuff, and they got started in Texas. You had, you know, this constant push to build more prisons in the state of Texas. And finally, some people were like, hey, this is pretty costly, and this is quite a burden on taxpayers. Maybe we should look for a different way to respond. And, you know, focusing more on, you know, especially for nonviolent offenders, having treatment programs, instead of just sticking them in jail, and sometimes they come out worse than when they went in. You know, looking for ways, you know, realizing that most people that get in the criminal justice system and, you know, are in prison, at some point they're going to be coming out, and be very aware of that fact, and, you know, if they need treatment, getting folks that, so that when they come out they don't reoffend. Yeah, and of course, crime has been going down a precipitous rate since the early 90s, really, and people are all scratching their heads about why. And there's a lot of weird, interesting to very far out there theories. There's a recent paper about maybe it's lead in the air. The amount of lead has reduced violent tendencies. But yeah, everyone's scratching their heads. The crime problem is very hard to figure out. So we have to ask you the big question, the one I think everyone would be thinking about, as all discussions eventually have to end up, what about Hitler? I mean, if we're going to oppose the death penalty, would you still oppose it for Hitler or some incredibly cruel person with everything on video and no one doubts that they did this? Is that a concern you have or something we should be addressing? I mean, we're against the death penalty in all cases, and whether it's Hitler or serial murder domestically, people commit awful crimes, and unfortunately that's been the case throughout the history of humanity. The problem is once you leave the door open for the death penalty, we're just going to have it for the worst of the worst. You end up making mistakes and innocent people get caught up in the process. I also think too, I mean you often find this, especially at the state level, you have a particularly notorious murderer and they get sentenced to death. After they get sentenced to death, news stations are rushing to get interviews with them. Every time there's appeal, they're back in the media. And I think a lot of times if we just life in prison without parole, lock them up and forget about them. That's it. They're not going to get the same level of media attention that you often find in capital cases. We're running out of time, so I wanted to ask you just where do you see the debate right now and where do you see things going? We're at a very interesting point in the country at the moment on this issue because you're seeing a number of states reject the death penalty, get rid of it, replace it with life in prison without parole, more states considering going down that path. And then you're also seeing a smaller group of states really digging in their heels and trying to hang onto this practice as it becomes more and more difficult to carry out. There have been a number of problems recently with corrections departments having problems getting the drugs necessary for executions. So you've seen some somewhat strange bills in Virginia. There's a proposal to bring back the electric chair in Missouri. There's been a proposal to bring back the firing squad. Some states are really trying to speed up the appeals process despite having a very long history of making mistakes in capital cases. Disturbing. Yeah, and so it will be very interesting to see what happens in those states. I'm concerned that as they really dig in their heels, you may see some more spectacular mistakes going forward. I hope it doesn't happen and I hope we're actually able to stop it everywhere. But that's a real concern. I think as that happens more and more, people are going to keep turning away from the death penalty and eventually it go away entirely. But that is one worry is these states that are really digging in their heels, what could potentially result from the policies that they're pushing. And your organization is working hard on this issue, correct? Yeah, so we work, it's conservatives concerned about the death penalty and online that's conservativesconcerned.org. We're on Facebook and Twitter. Definitely keep folks up to date on updates on what's going on, ways you can get involved in your own state on this issue. If you have any questions or comments about today's episode, you can find me on Twitter at arossp, that's A-R-O-S-S-P. And you can find me on Twitter at tcburris, t-c-b-u-r-r-u-s. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org in the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.