__________________________________________________ WE SHOULDN'T EXECUTE ALL PARTIES TO A SUPREME COURT VERDICT. Dylan Holmes __________________________________________________ 2021/Nov/4 When the Supreme Court of the United States arrives at a decision, we should not execute the plaintiff and the defendant as a matter of course. That much is clear. It's a bad idea to have the state kill anyone, first off---they never have the moral authority to do it, so it sets a bad precedent. Yes, a policy of killing all involved parties post-verdict would cut down on frivolous lawsuits. (Not even the winner gets out alive!) And the high cost would probably promote a kind of transcendent dedication and have knock-on effects for the lower courts as well. But it's a bad idea. It's especially bad when you imagine what happens when a person goes up against, say, a state (Miranda v. Arizona) or a corporation (Zeran v. America Online). A person presents a clear target for execution. An organization does not. Does the company pick a scapegoat from among its interns? Does the state sacrifice its chief executive? Maybe the court decides who dies? There's a thorny procedural question of who's up for the chopping block. Yet regardless of who ultimately dies for the organization, somehow the organization seems to have avoided paying its own ultimate price. A human being who brings a case has to personally die for it. A corporation has to sacrifice some representative? Ridiculous. Should we exact the blood price from organizations some other way? No, it's not clear a corporation could pay /anything/ equivalent to a human life. You could execute dozens of human representatives from that organization---maybe even every last person involved in it---and still the company itself would not have paid what a person pays when they die. Not even the total dissolution of a company is equivalent to the death of a person, not by a long shot. People are fragile in a way that corporations and states are not. Their existence is finite and sacred. You can destroy a person's time. You can throw their bodies into darkness. You can wound their souls or heal them. You can disarray their lives. When a person loses money, that person may be unable to eat. I think a company can never pay a fine the way a person can. No, we should not execute Supreme Court parties after every verdict. Sometimes people stand in court against organizations. There would be no fair way to do it.