I mostly agree with you. Life without parole is a cruel and unusual form of capital punishment, and I suspect I’ll see the day the courts abolish it. I really loathe how much we try to dress up the death penalty and make it look civilized. Every time we’ve done this, we’ve only made it worse. The electric chair was worse than hanging or the firing squad. Lethal injection is worse than the chair. Solitary confinement for 23.5 hours a day at ADX is perhaps the most sadistic capital punishment that humans have ever invented. Even the Spanish Inquisition would think we’re monsters for that. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition to torture them for more than a day before they expired…

If it were up to me, the only death sentence would be a public hanging shortly after sentencing, that the prosecutor, judge, and all jurors must attend. They better be damn sure that the condemned did the crime, without even a reasonable doubt, and the punishment better fit the crime. If they can’t stomach the sentence they dished out, fine the hell out of them and/or disbar them, and that person’s sentence is now 25 to life.

Capital punishment is an ugly thing. If we’re gonna do it, stop hiding the ugliness of it. The State is killing a person. No amount of procedural nonsense can wash the blood off our hands.

But if we abolish life without parole on these constitutional grounds, it would be a severe miscarriage of justice to summarily execute them. Especially when you hear the stories of black people who received that sentence in Florida for a robbery because of some terrible analogy to baseball… They would either need a new trial to be condemned to death, or be made eligible for parole. And just because they’re eligible for parole doesn’t mean they’ll get it.