Comment Re:Reddit is a toxic cesspit (Score 2) 135
Apart from anything else, what happens if it turns out they're innocent? At least if someone is in prison, there's release and reparations from wrongful prosecution, conviction and imprisonment. If you kill someone and then find out later you got the wrong guy, not much you can do.
Beyond that there's a rather ancient legal principle that the punishment should fit the crime. While I want every child rapist severely punished, the fact is the child is still alive, and thus the principle is broken. If we can execute child rapists, are there are other non-lethal crimes that we should consider executing people for? How about rape of adults? How about defrauding old age pensioners? How about theft over a million dollars? How about theft of any kind?
You may say that's reductionist, but once you breach the principle, even for a notorious type of crime, you open the door for redefinition all the way down the line. And we've had legal systems where non-lethal acts, heck even non-violent acts were punishable by death. The Mosaic Code requires men who practice homosexual intercourse are to be killed, adulterers are to be killed, blasphemers, witches, rude children, death death death.
So while I can't say why you got permabanned on Reddit (or was it just a sub), which usually takes one helluva over the top post, your basic idea is incredibly problematic, and shifts punishment back across a legal principle that Cicero had established over a century before the birth of Christ. It means that a new principle (or an old one) involves the notoriety of a crime as the metric for punishment, and not the consequence. Consequence is at least to some degree objectively measurable; dump toxic goo into a stream, we can take a stab at what the damage over the short, medium and long term will be. Rape a child, and we can make some pretty good educated guesses as to what the short, medium and long term consequences for the child and their family will be. Execute people because you clutched your pearls exra-hard, and there is no line other than how upset you get by it.