A PARTY OF ASYMMETRIC ACCOUNTABILITY Get Involved · Donate
DPP THE DEATH PENALTY PARTY

Mercy for the powerless · Accountability for the powerful

ABOLITION BELOW.
ACCOUNTABILITY ABOVE.

The state has always reserved its ultimate punishment for the people least able to survive its machinery. We propose the exact inversion: abolition for everyone below — and the penalty turned upward, onto the betrayal of public trust above.

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I. The Founding Inversion

THE PENALTY SHOULD RISE WITH THE POWER, NOT FALL WITH IT.

Our primary and non-negotiable commitment is the abolition of capital punishment nationwide — for murder, for any violent crime, for everyone. The standard abolitionist case is correct: the penalty falls hardest on the poor, the badly defended, the marginal, and the occasionally innocent. The state that kills can never un-kill its mistakes.

We retain exactly one exception, and we build the rest of the party around defending its coherence: capital liability for the knowing, large-scale abuse of public office — corruption that loots the commons, and pollution that poisons populations for private gain. Deterrence fails for violent crime because violent crime is impulsive. The abuse of public trust is the paradigm of calculated crime — the one place a price can actually enter the calculation.

1 capital exception — and only one
0 executions for the powerless, ever
2 axioms, declared in the open
∞ good ideas, borrowed from every side

II. The Axiom, Declared

“There is no objective good. Value is located in lived experience — in what is suffered and enjoyed. Every such experience counts, and counts equally.”

These are choices, not proofs. We hold them in the open — and everything that follows, follows from them.

III & VI. Ends, Means & Merit

PROGRESSIVE IN OUR ENDS. ECLECTIC IN OUR MEANS.

Fixed Ends

The reduction of suffering, the widening of every person's real freedom, the equal standing of all. On the ends we do not negotiate and do not pretend to be neutral.

Open Means

A market mechanism, a deregulatory instrument, a conservative caution — adopted without tribal embarrassment the moment the evidence shows it best serves the ends.

Merit, Bounded

Merit governs how mechanisms are chosen and how officers rise. It does not govern who is owed dignity. That door stays shut.

IV. The Signature Statute

THE ONE EXCEPTION — AND THE FIREWALL AROUND IT.

The single exception is dangerous in exact proportion to its justice, and we say so first. A capital corruption statute is the most weaponizable law imaginable. It is legitimate only if the firewall is extraordinary. This is the central design problem of the entire party — not a footnote.

Scope — all three required

  • Public trust. The defendant held public office or public power. Private fraud, however large, is not in scope.
  • Knowledge. The harm was knowing and intentional, not negligent. The good-faith error is excluded.
  • Scale. The looting or poisoning reached mass harm. A gift is not a gallows.

The Firewall — none may proceed without

  • An independent special prosecutor, walled off from every officeholder and from the Party itself.
  • A supermajority jury at a standard set above "beyond a reasonable doubt."
  • A mandatory multi-year appeal that cannot be waived or accelerated.
  • An absolute bar on any sitting official initiating a capital case against a rival.

VII. The Method, Demonstrated

THE PURPOSE NEVER MOVES. THE TOOL IS CHOSEN ON MERIT.

Criminal Justice

Abolition, decarceration, and rehabilitation over retribution — equal consideration extends to the convicted.

Left end · Left means

The Commons & Pollution

Polycentric, Ostromite governance — neither nationalization nor pure market — with the capital backstop for knowing mass-poisoning.

Left end · Heterodox means

Climate

A Pigouvian carbon price returned to households as a flat dividend — a market instrument aimed at an egalitarian end.

Left end · Market means

Housing

Aggressive deregulation of supply — upzoning, dismantling exclusionary permitting — because access is best served by removing the state's hand.

Left end · Deregulatory means

V. The Canon

WE CITE ACROSS THE AISLE. A PARTY THAT ONLY QUOTES ITS OWN SIDE IS RECITING.

John Rawls

Justice as fairness — tested from behind the veil of ignorance.

Amartya Sen

Welfare as capability: real freedom to do and to be.

Elinor Ostrom

The commons, governed without collapsing into state or market.

Isaiah Berlin

Value pluralism — the goods genuinely conflict. The kludge is the feature.

Friedrich Hayek

The knowledge problem. We borrow the warning, not the politics.

Burke & Oakeshott

Institutional caution. Reform is not demolition.

James C. Scott

Seeing Like a State — held against our own worst instinct.

Hobbes & Retribution

Named honestly as the lineage the one statute draws from.

VIII. The Name

THE MISREADING IS THE MECHANISM.

Most people, on first contact, will read "The Death Penalty Party" as a party for execution. We chose the name anyway, with full knowledge of the cost. The double-take is the door, and the explanation is the conversion: no — the opposite. Abolition for all, and the penalty turned upward onto the powerful who betray the public. A name no one has to ask about teaches no one anything.