"No one would break the law then"
Someone has sort-of signed this petition with the "name" of
"These get better. Right. Just off to turn myself in - nicked a biro from work and so must die."
Really, I'm not sure there's any more to say than that.
However, let's try. First problem I see relates to miscarriages of justice. Because these sometimes happen, you have to let people make appeals and things. When the punishment is loss of life, traditionally, more appeals are allowed. So capital punishment is expensive and time-consuming for the entire justice system. Having it for all crimes would cause chaos - unless you disallowed all the appeals and things, whereupon you're going to kill innocent people.
But perhaps you believe that everyone's guilty of something so everyone should die. That might work.
Then there's the fact that presumably no one would plead guilty to anything any more, because that way they might have a hope of living. I'm under the impression that this would lead to vast quantities of jury trials - so more expense and time-consuming-ness.
Then, of course, there's the fact that you'd end up killing almost everyone. I think my only law-breaking's been speeding, for which I've never been caught - though you may wish to include my occasionally pinching a bit of milk from a housemate. Still, it's probably true that you'd end up killing everyone. Which could get a bit complicated - once you were down to twelve people, you couldn't have a jury to find them guilty ...
I rather imagine that fewer people would be found guilty than currently. I don't think, if I were on a jury, I could bear to find someone guilty of ... well ... much, if the sentence was bound to be death. And I don't suppose I'm alone.
I'm not even sure it would stop me speeding, given that I usually do it either entirely by accident or on a motorway where there are hundreds of cars all of us going at 80mph.
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