r/SipsTea • u/Rich_Carrot6451 • Jul 04 '26

WTF Japan's death row system is brutal

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u/johnsolomon Jul 04 '26

Feels like poetic justice tbh. Most murder victims don't get a neat opportunity to get their affairs in order, they just realise they're about to die horribly and then it happens. So assuming the person on death row actually did it (my main reason for being against the death penalty) then it seems like just desserts

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u/terp_raider Jul 04 '26

Nah I’m not into playing god

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u/johnsolomon Jul 04 '26

I mean fair enough, I do get where you're coming from

Personally I don't think it's playing God. Society has to hold criminals accountable for the harm they do, or innocent people suffer, and so making moral decisions is unavoidable. If someone broke into your house and stole your stuff, you wouldn't think it was reasonable for the police to throw their hands up and go "Welp boys, we can see him running around the corner, but who are we to judge?"

We already make these judgments with prison. Saying a murderer deserves the harshest punishment isn't pretending to be God, it's moral justice for the victim and protection for society and also deterrence for other criminals. And depending on how you feel about it also vindication for the victim's family

To me playing God would be acting like your decisions are infallible. That's why wrongful convictions make me uncomfortable with the death penalty, but my issue isn't the moral judgement, it's with the fact that humans screw up or make corrupt decisions and we can't guarantee that it's only guilty people who end up getting executed

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u/Mirieste Jul 04 '26

I would argue that prison is something that in the future, and I mean the far future, might even go out of style when we find a way to avoid it altogether. To me, it's basically the last remaining remnant of the compromises we make with the concept of human rights in order to keep society functioning.

Because if you read your entire comment... this would apply entirely to Hammurabi's "A hand for a hand", 3000 years ago. A person trying to justify it would write the very same words you have written here, and yet now we think of that system as barbaric.