Graham Scheduled to Die Personal Commentary6/22/2000; 7:02:49 PM This is out of the domain I've chosen for my 'blog... but I wanted to comment on the execution of a man, which if it went according to schedule was 8 minutes ago. (Update: Gary Graham has been executed.)Some Dave Winer said crystalized something about my feelings on the death penalty. Abstractly, I believe that it indeed has a place in the world. But I now think, concretely, that place is not here. We are a rich society. We're housing enough criminals for life already. We can afford to keep this guy in prison for life, whatever his crime may have been. Regardless of how certain we are that he committed these heinous crimes, we will never be 100%, and it will never be worth that small chance (probably bigger then we think!) of being wrong.When is it OK? When a society literally cannot afford a murderous criminal. A new settlement on an untamed frontier, a subsistence-level society that's barely making it, or (to be more fantastic) a long-term space ship on a trip taking generations. A murderer can't be allowed to take the rest of the society down with him (or possibly her).By no stretch of the imagination is America that poor. And any issue that causes a 5-4 split of the Supreme Court can hardly be said to inspire 100% in society that this is the right decision (oh, I know technically that decision isn't directly a vote of confidence in the trial, but it might as well be). It's worth the money to not be wrong.Better to let many guilty men go unexecuted then for one innocent man be executed, to co-opt a common phrase. While looking for a source on that quote I found this paper examining the history of that phrase, in particular the "guilty-to-innocent ratio"s that have been proposed by various people.(Update: I'm surprised this issue, so contentious in the off-line world, isn't getting more attention from this world. It seems like just the sort of story that would get a lot of emotional attention.)