On Justifiable Murder

This recent Casey Anthony case has forced legal and political minds everywhere to ask many questions, but my question is something that's been asked time and time again; however, this time I will try to answer it in a way that I have never heard it answered. Is murder ever justified?

In my experience, and in the minds of any normal person, murder can only be justified if it is done to avenge another person's death. So, to answer the ethics of murder, we must either defend or criticize this position. Can a man murder another man in hopes to avenge another man's death.

According to the American Legal System in its current stage of evolution, such a case is justifiable, that is, if the Avenger is the establishment, the State. To "commit" such a murder as an individual is still considered murder. If the many Hollywood murder/detective movies don't prove this, consider the recent Motorcycle gang murder trial in New York. The stabber had killed his victim, who was none other than the cold-blooded killer of his mate. All other things put aside, according to the jury, the man, the stabber, put on trial was not on the right side of the balance and proclaimed him as guilty in the first degree. Now, this man is now on death row.

So, the moral of this story: our legal system apparently does not sanction vengeance. This way, the reason for Capital Punishment is not something in relevance to such an idea. It makes very little sense. Rather, the most reasonable purpose for the Institution is to minimize prisoners and "save" the taxpayer's dollar.

Thus, we come at an overpass: (1) are the taxpayers' money saved and (2) are there any philosophical criticisms against the institution, that is Capital Punishment, that outweighs this purpose.

To answer the first question, we must go into statistical detail, but the answer to the second question allows us to question the material savings with a more moral standing. In other words, the immaterial effects outweigh any sort of material discount. The simple reason for this is because there are far too many immaterial irregularities that exceed the sole purpose of Capital Punishment that exists today: to reduce the number of prisoners, to fight the formidable recession that has, especially in the past decade, dug our nation into a economic death pit; however, a simple paradox exists within the Institution of Capital Punishment that greatly reduces its legitimacy.

Within our current system, the taxpayers are the ones who sponsor any method of death, be it hanging, lethal injection or even the Chair. So, if this Institution murders a convict who is in all reality innocent of the crimes he is alleged to have committed, and in its enormous longevity, such an abomination has bound to have happened, if not many more, at least once. Therefore, by the definition presented by any Penal Code, it is the responsibility of the System itself to murder the taxpayers for having sponsored the killing of an innocent Man, as in to have committed murder.

So, this coupled with our "Revenge" example, paints a rather gruesome picture as, not only how the immaterial can outweigh the material, but, more importantly, how Capital Punishment is not an example of good justice, but of a sort of Systematic killing, by which the condition of death is not racial or otherwise discriminatory, but rather one that is based on one allegation and trial by jury, one by chance. As contradictory as it may seem, this chance in of itself provides for a condition which makes Capital Punishment very systematic, and when this word, "systematic," is coupled with murder, the worse kind of crime is created, the same one that was frowned upon by the Allies in the 1940s. This is the new Holocaust. There is no sound reason, or rather one that outweighs the immaterial counterexamples, for Capital Punishment; thus, it must be done without. After all, there is no such thing as "Justifiable Murder."