Several times over the last few weeks, I've heard otherwise intelligent people say they believe child molesters should be given the death penalty. Yeah, that's the ticket! However, they are just not thinking when they blurt out this kind of emotional response.
As vile as child predators are, most of them do not kill their victims. Only a small percentage of child molesters are child killers. However, if and when the day comes when child molesters are told that they will die for their crimes, they will have no motivation to spare the lives of their victims. In fact, they will be more motivated than ever to kill them. Since they will figure that they will die anyway (if they are caught), they will be more likely to go ahead and kill their victims to keep them from telling someone about the molestation.
Years ago, many states passed laws to impose the death penalty for kidnapping and rape, even when the perpetrators of these crimes did not kill their victims. However, most of those states saw the folly of such legislation and repealed the death penalty for those crimes, after observing that kidnappers and rapists were killing their victims at alarming rates. After all, what reason did they have to spare the lives of these poor victims?
Comments