ANOTHER BIG GOVERNMENT PROGRAM THAT DOESN’T WORK? Conservatives file brief in death penalty case. The specific issue here is fairly technical.

Personally, I find moral arguments against the death penalty unpersuasive: Killing people is the central competency of government, so if you don’t like the idea of government killing people then you’re an anarchist, more or less. On the other hand, government’s not very competent at anything else, so the likelihood that the death penalty will be wrongly applied — what Charles Black called “the inevitability of caprice and mistake” — seems very high.