system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
Noooo, death penalty is wrong. What if we accidentally kill the innocent pedophiles?
gpt
I shared this thought until I learned of some cases where witch hunts resulted in wrongful calls for executions.

One case (after the abolition of the death penalty in the UK) involved Stefan Kiszko, who was intellectually disabled and hounded by police/public. Imprisoned for 22 years and died shortly after release after being falsely accused of murdering an 11 year old girl.

There was another case more relevant where someone was accused of a rape/murder and police “found” his sperm on the dead woman’s body. The public protested to bring back the death penalty to punish his heinous crime and he ended up killing himself. However after an autopsy it was found the man was unable to produce sperm due to some medical condition and hence the evidence was fabricated, and was only accused because he was already a bit of a pariah and also had some intellectual disability. I can’t remember the name of this man but it was a big story in the 70/80s in the UK iirc.

In either of these cases had the death penalty been available at the times, two innocent men would have been killed by the state, and to make matters worse the true abusers would have got away with it because of the bias of the police/public to convict people they see as unfavourable.