[HN Gopher] The real reason to end the death penalty
___________________________________________________________________
The real reason to end the death penalty
Author : tosh
Score : 205 points
Date : 2021-04-22 09:40 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| more_corn wrote:
| "wrongful murder convictions are very common"
| throwaway932234 wrote:
| I seriously think the ability to end one's life "if sentenced to
| life in prison" is the ethical, humane, and moral thing to allow
| for everyone. We're starting to allow euthanasia for intolerable
| suffering from medical conditions. Well, I assert that people
| being isolated from society for a severe crime because of their
| "ill mindset" is identical to severe illnesses and where they may
| suffer intolerable psychological pain from the isolation of a
| life sentence. I seriously see no downsides to allowing
| euthanasia as a choice for persons with life sentences. Only
| thing it possibly takes away is a feeling of vengeance the
| victims may have and if they personally dislike the idea of a
| person that harmed them being able to die early.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| That's an amazingly slippery slope if I ever saw one:
|
| "We've eliminated the death penalty because we are so
| enlightened. But now that we've sentenced you to life in
| prison, every morning with breakfast, we offer a side of poison
| just in case you would like to exercise your right to check out
| of this hell hole.
|
| No pressure. Just being helpful."
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Can't wait for cutting edge prisons which AB test changes to
| diet, schedule, and accommodations to maximize prisoner self
| terminations.
|
| All within the bounds of strict adherence to ethics
| regulations of course.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| "Responsibly saving your tax dollars one assisted suicide
| at a time."
| throwaway932234 wrote:
| That's the most ridiculous response I didn't expect to read
| towards my comment. Of course, all precautions should be
| similar to the existing process of having euthanasia. No
| coercion or manipulation present while the decision comes
| from the person, and a doctor or nurse trained in euthanasia
| would be doing the evaluation(s) of the person requesting it.
| Currently, people are receiving euthanasia for intolerable
| medical conditions and without anyone finding slippery slope
| imaginary scenarios that people write as fears.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I'm pro right to die and not sure how I feel about the
| death penalty, but the minute you say "We are going to
| sentence you to decades of torture and kindly help you
| escape that by offering some version of euthanasia" you are
| really doing some major head fuckery that actively
| encourages people to commit suicide.
|
| People in prison sometimes already commit suicide, in spite
| of it being hard to do.
| throwaway932234 wrote:
| The reason it isn't such a "major head fuckery" for me
| personally, is because I don't believe in free will and I
| think everything is predetermined. So, someone that has
| an "ill mindset" where they commit a crime worthy of
| being forever isolated from the general public, is in the
| sense very ill psychologically and comparable to someone
| suffering from a mental illness. The psychological pain
| that someone will suffer from forever by the isolation
| result because of their ill mindset that made them
| isolated should allow euthanasia like other countries
| allow someone with a psychological illness with
| intolerable suffering the choice to escape the
| intolerable pain. Anyway to me that's a kinder world than
| being stuck in pain until death and when it wasn't their
| choice to develop an ill mindset; similar to all other
| people with illnesses that are privileged to be able to
| decide for themselves if euthanasia is the right thing
| for them personally. Committing suicide without medical
| help can be terrifying and statistically more favourable
| to fail where brain damage could likely prevent further
| attempts.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Among other things: You are assuming they are actually
| guilty. The very article under discussion shows that
| innocent people go to jail.
|
| There's a whole lot more I don't agree with here, but it
| seems unlikely to be a fruitful discussion.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| (not the person you're replying to) I can't deny there are
| ethical problems, but on a very personal level I strongly
| agree with GP's premise: if I was sentenced to life
| imprisonment, I would consider it so intolerable I would want
| to kill myself (especially true in specific countries with
| notoriously unpleasant or corrupt prison systems). I'm
| honestly not sure how that should square with potential
| ethical problems of prison euthanasia but I feel compelled to
| point out that it's a real desire that deserves
| consideration, just like normal euthanasia. Similar problems
| exist with regular euthanasia and they tend to be mitigated
| with policies like waiting periods, redundant consent, and
| minimum requirements.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's atypically sloppy of Graham to throw out the 4% number
| without mentioning that it's just one estimate of a hard to
| ascertain number. One survey puts it much lower:
| https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&con...
|
| > This Article challenges the seemingly developing conventional
| wisdom that the error rate in America's criminal justice system
| is 1% or even higher. In fact, looking at the best available and
| current data, a conservative estimate of the error rate is
| somewhere close to the 0.027% posited by Justice Scalia.
| goldcd wrote:
| The thing I find distasteful is the 'sanitization' of execution.
| I've got some ideas on how to spice it up:
|
| Brushing away of the wrongful executions as a price of justice.
| Hold a monthly lottery of the population, with the random
| 'winner' being executed. Out of a population of millions you
| wouldn't even notice, but would send a message to the world that
| you were OK with the cost.
|
| Secondly. Repercussions for those that assisted in wrongful
| convictions. Your prosecutor withheld evidence of your innocence?
| Police dropped evidence into your pocket? Try them for attempted
| murder. Boggles my mind at the lack of repercussions that seem to
| come out of these cases.
|
| Finally I think you should be executed by your peers, in the same
| way as we tried you. At your conviction lottery is held of the
| population and winner is your executioner. They're given a
| gun/syringe/whatever and they're pointed at the prisoner. Oh, and
| I'd like this televised - maybe as part of the superbowl show.
| "Here's Charlene from Ohio, she's just celebrated her sweet-
| sixteenth, likes horses and reading and has selected a crossbow"
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| >Hold a monthly lottery of the population, ...
|
| The point you're making is that living in society each day is a
| ticket in lottery where we could be falsely accused of a crime,
| falsely convicted, and unjustly punished. That's horrific all
| around, a death penalty is a factor but not even the biggest.
| On the contrary, if we need a death penality to make someone
| like your audience care about that horror of punishing innocent
| people then perhaps there is a beneficial purpose? Maybe
| executions make people care about bad things done in their name
| in the name of justice?
|
| >Police dropped evidence into your pocket? Try them for
| attempted murder.
|
| Yes, naturally. Some archaic pockets of government do this,
| sort of! What comes to mind is a specific public officer in my
| state who is _personally_ responsible by law for breaches of
| privacy in her office. Consequences like that focus the mind!
| So much so, in fact, that those consequences come to dominate
| the public officer 's thinking. I don't disagree, but forget
| 'defund the police'-- you're going to need a _lot_ more police
| to enforce the modern criminal code at the current level of
| enforcement if police are threatened with death for misplacing
| their notes , memories and paperwork.
|
| >At your conviction lottery is held of the population and
| winner is your executioner.
|
| Again, the result here would be that some people would be
| assigned an executioner who would show them mercy. This too has
| analogues in our modern systems. In some parts of the world the
| victim's family can stop an execution if they feel the victim
| has been adequately avenged-- not a bad result! In the US
| context governors-- arguably the people responsible for these
| killings-- can and frequently do commute sentences out of
| compassion or lack of clarity about the crime.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The minimum penalty for fabrication of evidence by police
| officers should be 3x the maximum penalty for having
| committed the actual offense.
| goldcd wrote:
| I think my more concise post would be that "law and order"
| (unlike practically any other issue) is thought of by the
| majority as "something that happens to other people". It's
| not. They think it's fair. It's not.
|
| Example in the UK is that we used to have "Legal Aid" - if
| you were accused of something (and were of modest means) the
| government would pay a modest amount for a laywer to
| represent you. Wasn't a cheap system in absolute terms, but
| as a proportion of government expenditure was tiny. Over the
| years successive governments of all sides have gutted the
| system - and media delights in planted stories like
| "Insurance companies scammed" and "Terrorist receives money".
| Basically, "We're giving money to criminals and we should
| stop."
|
| _Nobody_ considers the flip side - "Can you pay for a legal
| defence if the Police knock on your door tomorrow?"
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > _Nobody_ considers the flip side
|
| Society would do well to learn the Original Position
| Fallacy:
|
| https://matthewmcateer.me/blog/original-position-fallacy/
| blobster wrote:
| Most of the examples of innocents being convicted are from before
| the invention of DNA forensics. The problem is the criminal
| justice system which too easily gives the death penalty. We could
| easily reduce the probability of conviction innocents from 4% to
| one in a trillion by enforcing a set of requirements:
|
| - Must have DNA evidence - Must have audio and video evidence -
| Must have fingerprints - Must have at least 2 witnesses
|
| There are plenty of cases that satisfy these conditions
| (terrorist attacks being one of them).
| oconnor663 wrote:
| > When they find a suspect, they want to believe he's guilty, and
| ignore or even destroy evidence suggesting otherwise...This
| circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with the
| death penalty.
|
| There's a more charitable way to reach the same conclusion.
| Experienced cops must see dozens or hundreds of cases over their
| careers, where guys who "obviously did it" get off on
| technicalities or random chance. (This is an official TV Trope
| for a reason.) Even if we grant that that instinct is actually
| unreliable and often wrong, that's still a huge number of real
| cases where the "system didn't work". From an outsider
| perspective, of course, we tolerate that as a tradeoff to avoid
| convicting innocent people. But from an insider perspective, it's
| natural to come to see The System as an adversary, and to see
| your job as working around and compensating for that Failed
| System.
|
| This is a problem, and it absolutely ruins a lot of innocent
| people's lives, and there are clearly ways we could address it on
| the margins. But at the same time, it might not be a central
| problem that we solve directly and completely. Rather, we could
| acknowledge that, to some extent, it's an expected component of a
| deliberately adversarial system. A lot of legal mechanisms work
| this way. My defense attorney's job isn't to be a perfectly
| objective arbiter of whether I should be in jail. Rather, their
| job is to make the best (most overwhelmingly biased) argument
| possible that I shouldn't be, and we leave it to the prosecutor
| (and their presumably opposite biases) to argue that I should.
| There are reasonable limits to this, and you can get disbarred
| for violating them, but for the most part everyone's biases are
| acknowledged and expected. That's not entirely true of policing,
| but it's part of the truth. Juries of our peers exist because we
| know it's not realistic to make the police or the judiciary
| solely responsible for fairness and justice. We can understand
| this as a normal part of human nature and system design, without
| necessarily taking a position on whether it represents
| "incompetence" or "dishonesty".
|
| So...why nitpick these words to death like this? Because there's
| a symmetry here. When one group is calling another incompetent,
| it's a sure bet that the second group is calling the first
| clueless. And it goes without saying that both groups consider
| the other dishonest. Each side retreats to its bubble, and
| progress is impossible. The rhetorical habits that break this
| cycle are super important.
| saagarjha wrote:
| This is the obvious reason, but of course there are many more:
| executions are quite expensive, they don't seem to actually deter
| crime, they're fundamentally pessimistic ("this person will never
| be useful to society"). Plus, they're kind of unnecessarily
| cruel: if we wanted to execute people painlessly we could just
| pump a room full of nitrogen and let the person drift off into
| unconsciousness and death relatively quickly and silently. But
| for whatever reason we don't do this, instead opting for
| spectacles of shooting the person or zapping them or injecting
| slow paralytics into their veins. My personal guess is that
| people like to watch for some sort of catharsis which a silent
| death doesn't give them, but of course I'm not necessarily in a
| position to judge this well.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| > opting for spectacles
|
| All while insisting on the humanness of those sweet
| pharmaceuticals.
| sneak wrote:
| I have a personal theory that the correlation between the
| popularity of religious fundamentalism and the presence of
| popular support for the death penalty in southern US states has
| a common underlying cause.
|
| There seems to be a certain draw of the Sodom and Gomorrah
| treatment in some people that draws a straight line from modern
| day human culture in those places directly back to ancient
| desert folktales through all these thousands of years. Perhaps
| it is the belief that actions undertaken in the here-and-now
| aren't ultimately that important, a sort of cosmic nihilism
| with regards to the physical reality we live in.
|
| We still have so, so far to go.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > this person will never be useful to society
|
| I'm against the death penalty, but, since the alternative is
| most likely life in prison, this is very probably true for
| rightfully convicted.
|
| > My personal guess is that people like to watch for some sort
| of catharsis which a silent death doesn't give them, but of
| course I'm not necessarily in a position to judge this well.
|
| There's a very interesting documentary called "how to kill a
| human being". In it, Michael Portillo explores more humane ways
| to execute prisoners, but at the end his method is rejected by
| proponents as the do not want these people to die painless. So
| you're probably not wrong.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I haven't been to prison so I don't know how practical what
| I'm about to say actually is, but it seems like it's still
| possible to contribute to society while in prison. e.g.
| working in the library and helping someone with a shorter
| term get their GED, or even activism (like how Tookie
| Williams tried to end the cycle of gang violence that had put
| him on death row and got half a dozen Nobel Prize nominations
| before his execution)
| computerex wrote:
| I agree with the premise of this article, but there is a deeper
| issue at hand, how we decide who is guilty. Simply abolishing the
| death penalty isn't enough, there is a greater reform needed to
| reduce wrongful convictions.
|
| At the end of the day if a man is wrongfully convicted, spending
| life in prison is hardly much better than the death penalty.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Here's a simple question: "would you trust a random politician
| with the life of your loved one if said loved one's life stood
| between the politician and greater political ambitions?"
|
| If your answer is yes, then by all means, support the death
| penalty.
|
| If you don't trust ambitious politicians, then you can't trust
| the process for selecting who is to be put to death by the state
| either, because DAs and AGs are politicians.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I heard another interesting thought experiment on this topic
| recently. It said there should be a referendum about whether to
| keep (or adopt) the death penalty, but the names of everyone
| who voted for allowing the death penalty would be recorded in a
| list.
|
| Then, whenever someone sentenced to death was later found to be
| innocent (or pardoned), a random name on the list of "Yes"
| voters would be picked to be killed in place of the innocent
| convict.
| bena wrote:
| I wouldn't do pardoned. That's a whole other bag of things. A
| guy could be completely guilty and get a posthumous pardon
| because of reasons.
| a-posteriori wrote:
| I enjoyed this thought experiment, but isn't it sort of a
| false equivalence argument?
|
| Wouldn't it make more sense as a thought experiment if only
| "Yes" voters could be executed only if and when convicted of
| a crime deserving of capital punishment?
| tchalla wrote:
| > This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue
| with the death penalty.
|
| First order thinking. There's a time to argue with first
| principles and there's a time to make arguments via "back door
| hacks" in the guise of amenability. Life and death may not be the
| best time to use "hacky" arguments because down the line there
| may be do more harm than good. Particularly, in common-law
| systems.
|
| Also,
|
| > When intellectuals talk about the death penalty,
|
| I see that intellectuals has been well normalised into a
| pejorative these days. What a time to live in!
| rswail wrote:
| I hate it. Imagine if the sentence was "When the poorly
| educated talk about the death penalty,"
|
| Trump was right about how he attracted his support.
| timeslip1523 wrote:
| It's been a pejorative since nietzsche!
| hi41 wrote:
| Prosecutors and police get promotions based on convictions. We
| need to change that.
| rswail wrote:
| The death penalty is immoral and unethical. The state should not
| have the power over the life of a person.
|
| However, the problem with removing the death penalty in the US is
| that it will not deal with the underlying systemic racism and the
| misaligned incentives of police and prosecution to "get a
| conviction".
|
| So yes, if the death penalty is removed, there is one less
| barbarism.
|
| However, for those who are not on death row, who are subject to
| the injustices, will there be the same pressure to investigate
| and exonorate the innocent?
|
| How do we ensure that the incentives for conviction do not
| supersede the incentives for solving the crime accurately?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| So your argument is that if we stop threatening the innocent
| with death that we won't care enough about their situation to
| work to exonerate them?
|
| I call bullshit.
| exporectomy wrote:
| > The state should not have the power over the life of a
| person.
|
| Then it can't do war and can't defend its existence as a state
| unless it's somehow a dependent state of some other state that
| does have power over the life of a person. Like some small
| Pacific island that's protected by more militarily well
| equipped allies.
| atemerev wrote:
| This only applies for a draft army, not for contract army or
| volunteers.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Plenty of states don't "do war" and aren't Pacific islands.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Scientific knowledge that connects brain injuries to violent
| crime is an even better reason to end the death penalty.
|
| Traumatic brain injury damages self-regulation and changes social
| behavior. Uninhibited or impulsive behavior, including problems
| controlling anger and unacceptable sexual behavior, leads to
| crime. The concept of insanity used in the US criminal system is
| based on science 130 years ago, combined with the religious
| concept of sin and soul. The thinking is that if a person knows
| what they do is wrong, they could choose to not do it is BS. With
| brain injury person can lose that ability.
|
| Damaged Brains and the Death Penalty
| https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/damaged-brains-and-the-...
|
| >In another study, of 14 juveniles sentenced to death, the
| researchers found that all had suffered head trauma, most in car
| accidents but many by beatings as well. 12 had suffered brutal
| physical abuse, 5 of those sodomized by relatives.
|
| Traumatic brain injury: a potential cause of violent crime?
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6171742/
|
| Traumatic Brain Injury in Prisons and Jails: An Unrecognized
| Problem
| https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/pdf/prisoner_tbi_pr...
|
| >According to jail and prison studies, 25-87% of inmates report
| having experienced a head injury or TBI 2-4 as compared to 8.5%
| in a general population reporting a history of TBI.
| nikbackm wrote:
| Even if there were no death penalty, spending 30+ years in prison
| while innocent does not seem like such a good deal either.
| riffraff wrote:
| but it is possible that the sentence gets revised before you fo
| 30 years in prison.
|
| If you've been killed already, that is not going to help you
| much.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Incarceration also is irreversible as each of our time is
| finite. It should concern us when we downplay the risk of
| false incarceration, it also is unacceptable.
| wojcikstefan wrote:
| Yes, it's still terrible. However, it's better than death
| (though I can imagine somebody arguing that "they'd rather die
| than rot in prison").
| spoonjim wrote:
| Sure, but death is worse, as evidenced by the vast majority of
| death row inmates who try to stall the process. Very few say
| "OK, just shoot me now."
| alexashka wrote:
| If they were given the option to send all the resources that
| get spent on them rotting in prison to a cause of their
| choosing - many of them would quickly choose a humane death.
|
| The ones that wouldn't, only care about themselves and should
| be treated accordingly.
| pydry wrote:
| It's not as uncommon as you'd think:
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90935&page=1
|
| >More death-row inmates have been volunteering for their
| executions: Between 1993 and 2002, 75 volunteered for death,
| compared to the 22 consensual executions between 1977 and
| 1992. (Gary Gilmore, the first prisoner put to death after
| the Supreme Court reinstituted capital punishment in 1976,
| "volunteered" for his execution in 1977 because he did not
| want to live the rest of his life on death row.)
|
| It's probably more an indictment of the torture they go
| through on death row than it is a signal that they all
| secretly have a death wish.
| spoonjim wrote:
| That's out of over 1,300 executions since 1976.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Arguments against the death penalty downplay how barbaric
| incarceration is in the first place. But ostracism and exile
| have their limits, and justice is an essential function of
| government ... so ... we have our current situation.
| Reimersholme wrote:
| Yeah. Hard to see how the same argument wouldn't apply to the
| prison system as a whole. We can be sure there are people
| imprisoned their whole lives wrongfully as well even without
| the death penalty - why is that acceptable?
|
| If the argument is that currently, the false positive rate is
| too high - then what would an acceptable false positive rate
| be?
| [deleted]
| fegu wrote:
| "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life.
| Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out
| death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
| - Fellowship of the ring (Tolkien)
| lurquer wrote:
| (Said shortly before Gandalf and the gang slaughtered a
| gazillion orcs, goblins, 'wild-men', and the like... still,
| though... it was a good line.)
| matkoniecz wrote:
| That were actively trying to murder them.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| They were fighting a war. How come it's only the bad guys
| that can be murderers in a war?
| lurquer wrote:
| Please...
|
| The gang of thugs possessed the Ring of Power, stolen from
| its rightful owner, and capable of killing millions; it's
| like a nuclear bomb!
|
| If some gang of trespassers snuck into your dwelling with a
| nuclear bomb, I think "shoot first, ask questions later"
| would be the order of the day.
|
| The only character that seemed to have his shit together
| was Sauron. Even Sauramon agreed the safest thing to do
| would be to peacefully return the ring to its rightful
| owner before anyone got hurt...
| spijdar wrote:
| Well, he said to "not be too eager". I don't believe there
| were many instances of Gandalf and the crew chosing to seek
| out death in bloodlust? I guess it's all subjective, since
| you could argue they could have gone more out of their way to
| avoid more deaths.
|
| That said, I don't believe Tolkien was ever totally
| comfortable with his treatment of orcs, he just never
| reconciled his morals and personal narratives with his desire
| to tell faerie tales and myths, where "evil goblins" are just
| part of the landscape. No sources for that, though, I just
| recall reading it somewhere, perhaps in his son's writings...
| lurquer wrote:
| In all seriousness, it's an odd feeling one gets when
| writing fiction. Is the author morally responsible for the
| actions of his characters? In reality, Gandalf isn't
| killing orcs... there are no orcs and there is no Gandalf
| and it's just a bunch of ink on a piece of paper.
|
| I write fiction occasionally. When wondering if it's
| 'moral' or 'ethical' for a character to do something
| repugnant, I often have to remind myself that none of it is
| real!
|
| The 'moral' issue -- if there is one -- I suppose pertains
| to the author deliberately holding an immoral character up
| as an example of good behavior in the 'real' world. Maybe
| even then there is no real moral issue...
| dudul wrote:
| This has nothing to do with being real or not. An author
| should write consistent characters. Characters who follow
| their own morale and ethic. An author is not their
| characters.
|
| Considering that an author is responsible for the morale
| of their characters is how we end up with boring Marie
| sues in media.
| pvarangot wrote:
| Those are the tortured bodies of creatures who's soul has
| already moved on. Or something like that, see also the Gollum
| arc.
|
| Tolkien fought in WW1 and it's easy to tell from his writing
| he was a very sensitive individual. There's not much in LOTR
| about killing but his notes and the Silmarillion do shed some
| light on his moral view on the matter of ending a life.
| riffraff wrote:
| I think saying "the real reason" is a mistake. It's a big reason,
| but the others are also good reasons.
|
| It is terrible that it affects innocents. It is also true that it
| is ineffective, counter-productive, and barbaric.
|
| It's sad we're still having this discussion when "On Crimes and
| Punishments"[0] was published four centuries ago and not much has
| substantially changed since.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Crimes_and_Punishments
| djoldman wrote:
| On the subject of deterrence:
|
| If someone commits a premeditated crime carrying a guideline
| sentence of {20 years in State A, vs 30 years in State B} do we
| really think that they're more likely to commit the crime in
| State A?
|
| It's my intuition that for the most part, people committing
| crimes aren't thinking about potential repercussions, much less
| measuring them.
|
| I mean is someone thinking "Oh, only 10 years? I'll do it. But
| not if it's 15."?
| abakker wrote:
| I think most people who commit crimes do not believe they will
| be caught. Most data shows sentencing shows no deterrence.
| Alternatively sometimes fines do more to deter than other
| penalties. A theory I remember from a college class on the
| topic were that sentences are so unevenly applied that many
| people reason that they won't actually get the max sentence.
| nickff wrote:
| The data I've seen agrees with you, but it's subject to
| survivor-ship bias, and I've never seen someone correct for
| that bias in a convincing way.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Most people who commit crimes aren't caught. Around 38% of
| murders remain unsolved.
|
| Most of those who are caught aren't brought to trial. For
| obvious reasons, prosecutors strongly prefer cases supported
| by very strong evidence.
|
| The corollary is there are a lot of murderers walking around
| unremarked and free - either caught and released for lack of
| evidence, or not caught at all.
|
| So it's unlikely the death penalty has much a deterrent
| effect. There would be a much stronger deterrent effect if
| there was some magic way to increase the catch rate which
| didn't also intrude on privacy or civil liberties.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| Deterrence is best accomplished by rapid, swift punishment of
| wrongdoing. So, enable victims to resist their criminal abusers
| with force. Allow police officers to beat thieves caught in the
| act. Make criminals pay immediately for their actions.
| mbesto wrote:
| What I learned from Criminology 101 in college was this:
|
| By far, the largest factor of deterrence was the likelihood of
| getting caught.
|
| So, people, do in fact rationalize "I'm definitely going to get
| caught and the consequences are bad, I won't do it".
|
| So, to your point, the punishment itself is largely a
| deterrence. I think because a rational human being simply
| cannot grok the differences in long term effects. This is
| already essentially proven in how people behave with money -
| i.e. people suck at long term saving without external forces
| nudging them to do so.
| mrweasel wrote:
| >By far, the largest factor of deterrence was the likelihood
| of getting caught.
|
| Does that mean it prevents people capable (mentally and
| morally) from committing a planned crime or is it in general?
| Because everything I've seen says most people who for
| instance attack others almost never consider the
| consequences.
| mbesto wrote:
| I don't know for sure but the general problem is that while
| certainty is almost nearly more effective it's also way
| less enforceable, meaning, it's much more difficult to
| enact laws that create more certainty of punishment:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)#Certain
| t...
| ixacto wrote:
| The death penalty should not be abolished because to some
| criminals in society the threat of force is the only thing
| they respect.
| jandrese wrote:
| They don't fear prison at all? It's not like the options
| are limited to killing them or letting them go.
| ixacto wrote:
| For some people prison is 3 meals a day and a place to
| sleep, paid with your tax dollars.
| StavrosK wrote:
| The data agrees with you, as far as I'm aware.
| im3w1l wrote:
| It's my belief that the sentence length affects crime rate
| indirectly by affecting the _collective unconscious_. For
| instance if you see someone who did his time talk about his
| life in retrospect on the telly that affects you. When you see
| the (lack of) wrinkles on his face, that affects you. When you
| uncle Joey misses your birthday bash because he is still in
| jail, that affects you etc.
| clairity wrote:
| no, our brains are overwhelmingly biased toward smallness
| (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 5) and the short-term (which is just a
| special case of the smallness bias)--a consequence of the
| evolutionary advantage of inferring potential danger from
| tiny sample sizes. once a phenomenon gets beyond our ability
| to relativistically comprehend, as in 10 or 30 years (i.e.,
| thousands of days), our brains can't effectively
| differentiate the consequences and treat them as essentially
| equal.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| There's no effect to the best of my knowledge. Long sentences
| appear to be a tool for gaining votes and wasting taxpayer
| resources rather than correcting behaviour.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180514-do-long-
| prison-s...
| im3w1l wrote:
| Go to the article they cite and you will see two things. 1.
| They claim that longer sentences do in fact work (but are
| subject to diminishing returns). 2. The evidence is weak
| and full of caveats. Like it's not like we have RCT running
| for generations. We have observational studies rife with
| problems. They understandably try to make the best of what
| they have, but frankly it's just not good enough.
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1745-913
| 3...
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| Yes, it's possible incarceration itself is a sham
| treatment for criminal behaviour.
|
| > One of the major justifications for the rise of mass
| incarceration in the United States is that placing
| offenders behind bars reduces recidivism by teaching them
| that "crime does not pay." This rationale is based on the
| view that custodial sanctions are uniquely painful and
| thus exact a higher cost than noncustodial sanctions. An
| alternative position, developed mainly by criminologists,
| is that imprisonment is not simply a "cost" but also a
| social experience that deepens illegal involvement. Using
| an evidence-based approach, we conclude that there is
| little evidence that prisons reduce recidivism and at
| least some evidence to suggest that they have a
| criminogenic effect. The policy implications of this
| finding are significant, for it means that beyond crime
| saved through incapacitation, the use of custodial
| sanctions may have the unanticipated consequence of
| making society less safe.
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003288551141
| 522...
| deanCommie wrote:
| It's a sensible belief, I have it too.
|
| It's not backed by the evidence, though.
|
| Harsher sentences do not decrease crime rates.
| tzs wrote:
| They don't seem to decrease crime rates in others, but how
| about crime rates for the people actually sentenced?
|
| Sentencing Alice to 20 years for some crime might not
| discourage Bob from doing the same crime, but it is at
| least going to stop Alice from doing that crime again for
| the next 20 years (assuming we are talking about a crime
| that Alice cannot do in prison).
| jjk166 wrote:
| Well by that logic, if you pre-emptively lock up both
| alice and bob you can avoid crime altogether.
|
| But we don't lock people up because we suspect they will
| commit a crime, we lock them up as a punishment for the
| crimes we can show beyond a reasonable doubt that they
| did commit.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| It's very difficult to calculate the sum of externalities
| introduced by long-term imprisonment. Crimes will be
| reduced at the public level as could _potentially_ be
| engaged in by the convicted, however:
|
| 1) The criminal is free to commit crimes against others
| in prison, which may further criminality in those
| individuals when they are released.
|
| 2) There is a burden on families, especially children of
| those incarcerated. The fostering system seems to result
| in a lot of future criminals.
|
| 3) The economic cost of a 20 year incarceration is
| probably about $50-100k per annum per prisoner in most
| first world countries. It's possible that this money
| being spent on programs to enable to impoverished to
| escape poverty or investment into programs or drugs to
| treat criminals would result in greater net reductions in
| crime to the public as compared to incarcerating a single
| individual.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| A lifetime sentence is a lifetime where you can learn and grow
| and better yourself personally and where freedom is always a
| (faint) possibility. You can try to break out of prison for the
| rest of your life. You can make friends and enemies. You can
| make plans, create routines, read, better yourself, live life
| (however constrained).
|
| The death sentence removes all of those, and that's why most
| people believe it is a good deterrence.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| On the contrary, the death penalty is vastly under-applied.
| Crimes deserving of the death penalty should be tried rapidly,
| within weeks, and the guilty party hanged no more than a month
| and a half, two months after their crime. I'm ok with up to a 10%
| false execution rate, after Blackstone's Ratio.
| de6u99er wrote:
| Here's my take on it:
|
| Capital punishment is applied to murderers. By killing the
| convict, you're basically committing the same crime you're
| punishing him for.
| Traster wrote:
| I want to preface what I'm about to say with: I'm against the
| death penalty. However, innocent people die every day, they're
| hit by cars, they're shot by police, they commit suicide. If your
| argument is that you want to save the lives of innocent poeple
| then you should be having a discussion about reducing the use of
| cars.
|
| If your argument isn't about the state's role, then what is the
| distinction between these things. 4% doesn't actually seem like a
| high rate to me and it's not a high percentage of a relatively
| small number in the first place.
| bena wrote:
| We have discussions about how to reduce the number of deaths by
| cars every day. Don't pretend we don't. We have discussions
| about suicide prevention. Cancer prevention and treatment.
| Healthy living, blah blah blah.
|
| Yes, the number of people who die from those things are still
| non-zero.
|
| But what you're suggesting is that we need to get those to zero
| before we address the death penalty. That's a false dichotomy.
|
| The death penalty is one are where we are making the deliberate
| choice to end someone's life. We can prevent that 4% rate
| simply by not making that choice. We can make that number zero
| and it would cost us practically nothing to do so.
|
| I am not impressed by your faux-concern for automobile deaths.
| Traster wrote:
| I'm not suggesting that we need to get those things to zero.
| I'm suggesting that's what PG is making the argument for. You
| can't have it both ways, you can't argue that the death
| penalty is a unique harm because of the innocent deaths
| whilst ignoring other innocent deaths. The death penalty is
| all about the state's role -that is the thing that
| distinguishes it from traffic deaths. If you really do
| subcribe to PG's argument then the answer is "Well, if that's
| the priority, the death penalty isn't bad compared to 1000
| other things". We're literally talking about more innocent
| people dying from car deaths in a day that from being
| sentenced to death in a year.
|
| What PG is doing here is making the argument for the death
| penalty weaker by arguing for it on the weakest possible
| basis.
|
| Oh and also, it's not 0 cost. It's probably a hugely
| expensive long and drawn out politial process to get rid of.
| For the pay off that's similar in scope to a moderate sized
| town lowering its speed limit. Not to mention the fact that
| these people who are sentenced to death incorrectly aren't
| being set free, they're likely still spending decades in
| prison.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I think death penalty should be abolished for all crimes except
| mass murder. There was a killer in Norway that murdered something
| close to 70 people 8 or 9 years ago. Thanks to maximum sentences
| in Norway being 18 years or so, the guy will be walking free in
| another 9 years time. I'm sorry, but some people just want to
| watch the world burn and those people should be put down.
| sneak wrote:
| This position is, from my viewpoint, indistinguishable from
| that of a mass murderer, as that is literally what you are
| calling for.
|
| By a strict logical interpretation, you might consider
| executing yourself as you have met your own stated criterion
| for being eligible for execution.
| JimBeans2131 wrote:
| By a strict logical interpretation, execution by death
| penalty is not murder. Dictionary definition of murder: "the
| _unlawful_ premeditated killing of one human being by
| another."
| sneak wrote:
| Violation of one's inalienable right to life (as written in
| the US declaration of independence, as well as the UN's
| universal declaration of human rights) is unlawful,
| regardless of any state legislation.
|
| States can't legislate you out of your human rights.
|
| One day the US federal courts will notice this error that
| they've made and fix the glitch.
|
| As Churchill famously said, "You can always count on
| Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried
| everything else."
| JimBeans2131 wrote:
| By that clown logic, any hostile forces can freely invade
| and conquer the United States, because it's universally
| illegal to kill human beings, including enemies.
| JimBeans2131 wrote:
| Someone who violates an innocent persons inalienable
| right to life, thereby forfeits their own right to life.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| No, it's not. Self defense is moral and justified. And some
| people are more dangerous alive than dead. Worse, some people
| develop a cult-of-personality and a following that they can
| even control or influence from jail. You telling me a mafia
| or gang leader or a former dictator guilty of genocide
| doesn't deserve the death penalty? Naive, to say the least.
| You know little of true evil, which does exist and no amount
| of corrective procedure will fix.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Self defense is moral and justified.
|
| To the extent that it is moral and justified, it does not
| extend to include intent to kill. To the extent intent to
| kill is present, it is not morally "self-defense", though
| it may still be within the scope that law does not punish
| when the other moral elements of self-defense are present
| (which is, itself, right and proper _despite_ allowing some
| immoral acts to go unpunished as criminal law should err on
| the side of nonpunishment and teasing out intent when the
| other elements of self-defense are present is more likely
| to result in the reverse error.)
| sneak wrote:
| Someone held securely in prison does not pose an imminent
| threat to you, and thus an argument from self-defense is
| void.
|
| The fact that you move on so deftly to the word "deserve"
| suggests that it's vengeance you seek.
|
| An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
| JimBeans2131 wrote:
| You are being disingenuous. A murderous psychopath is a
| danger to people. This is obvious and something that a
| five year old child can understand. Some people cross the
| line and forfeit their lives. The death penalty is
| absolutely justifiable unless you are a moral relativist,
| which is a logically inconsistent world view.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > Someone held securely in prison
|
| I already mentioned the cult-of-personality example above
| and you breezed over it. Gang leaders are fully capable
| of executing kills from jail. They have influence that
| extends beyond the 4 walls they're contained to. Some of
| them have access to a vast array of money and dangerous
| people who they can delegate to. They can also actively
| influence or harm other prisoners in jail.
|
| Treating true psychopaths with kid gloves won't make the
| world a better place.
| sneak wrote:
| If prisoners are able to lead criminal organizations
| whillst inside, that's very obviously a rather trivial-
| to-fix bug in the design of the jail, not a reason to
| murder someone for vengeance.
|
| We have more than adequate technology to keep such
| hopeless cases from harming themselves or others.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It's not trivial to fix without introducing mechanisms
| that are worse than death, such as isolated confinement
| and other forms of torture.
| sneak wrote:
| I believe that this is a false dichotomy that you
| present; I can think of several different solutions to
| this problem in seconds, none of which are what you
| describe.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| The issue isn't about finding if some specific person deserves
| the death penalty or not. There are people, like Anders
| Breivik, where their guilt is pretty dang obvious.
|
| But can you come up with some standard of evidence that would
| be 100% accurate in all cases? Real life tends to get
| complicated very quickly, and there have been people that have
| been executed on seemingly clear-cut evidence, only to be
| exonerated later (Timothy Evans comes to mind). When the cost
| of failure is so high, it's a safer move to just avoid the risk
| altogether.
| klelatti wrote:
| Anders Breivik.
|
| Simply not true that he will be walking free in 9 years time.
|
| > A sentence of permanent detention can be imposed if there is
| considerable danger of repetition. Permanent detention is not
| subject to any timeframe. However, the court always fixes a
| timeframe that may not exceed 21 years. When the timeframe
| expires the offender may be re-assessed. If the court concludes
| that there is still a danger of repetition the timeframe may be
| extended by up to five years at a time. There is no upper limit
| to the number of times that the court may extend the timeframe.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| That's a relief, but the guy should be put to death. It does
| no one any favors to keep stringing them along on an
| arbitrary indefinite attention. The victims have to be
| worried that he'll get let loose and strike again. The
| perpetrator is meanwhile tortured through indefinite
| extensions. Rarely, but sometimes the case such as Breivik
| presents itself for which, death is mercy to all involved.
| vinkelhake wrote:
| > the guy will be walking free in another 9 years time.
|
| This is not true. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, but
| his prison stay can be extended, indefinitely, as long as he is
| deemed a danger to society.
|
| I would be _extremely_ surprised if Breivik walks at the end of
| the 21 years.
| Per_Bothner wrote:
| "There was a killer in Norway that murdered something close to
| 70 people 8 or 9 years ago."
|
| Assuming you're talking about Breivik and the Utoya-massacre,
| that happened in 2011. And he is unlikely to ever "go free". He
| was sentenced to "containment" (sikring), which can extended
| indefinitely (and almost certainly will be).
| chrisco255 wrote:
| My argument is that the guy is a psychopath and should be put
| down. Not that his containment should be up for debate. He
| killed 70 people. 70.
| Eezee wrote:
| I have no idea why you would think that. The maximum sentence
| is 21 years, they much is true, but that doesn't mean he will
| be released. There will be extensive psychological evaluations
| and the sentence can be extended indefinitely if Breivik is
| still considered a danger to society.
|
| This seems honestly like something you would read on a far-
| right conspiracy website about what a liberal hellhole Europe
| is.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I'll do the psychological evaluation for you, free of charge:
| he killed 70 people, admitted to it, and admitted to
| premeditating it. He's a psychopath.
| risyachka wrote:
| Though I agree that in most cases death penalty should not be
| used, in some very specific but not rare cases - like mass
| shootings with dozens dead - where you have a lot of video and
| DNA evidence and dozens of witnesses - I just can't find a single
| argument against it. If I find any - I would gladly change my
| mind.
| [deleted]
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| It's as if you need guilt proven beyond reasonable doubt.
| king_magic wrote:
| I think spending the rest of your life in solitary in a
| supermax prison sounds like a fate much worse than death. I'd
| rather see that happen to a terrorist than the death penalty.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > If I find any - I would gladly change my mind.
|
| Then let me offer you this question to ponder: What benefit is
| there to adding another tally to the body count from a mass
| shooting, once the perpetrator has been taken into custody?
|
| Executing someone doesn't reduce the number of unnecessarily
| lost lives, it only increases it.
| tzs wrote:
| One possible benefit is that it might help provide closure
| for the people who lost friends and relatives in the mass
| shooting.
| slibhb wrote:
| The best objection to the death penalty is indeed that we can't
| be trusted to administer it.
|
| I disagree with a lot of comments in this thread. The death
| penalty is in fact the appropriate punishment for murderers. This
| is not true in order to deter crime or so that we can create a
| better society or any other similar rationalization. Justice, by
| which I mean reciprocity, is an end in itself. A crime should be
| punished proportionally and the only justification for punishment
| is guilt.
|
| A simple explanation of this theory of justice:
|
| > A great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out
| for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only
| retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty
| to the moral order to punish the criminal (Yosal Rogat).
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. If you
| start with "morally clueless" and end with Eichmann, god help
| us, that's pretty much guaranteed. We're trying for a very
| different sort of conversation here.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| slibhb wrote:
| I edited the post but frankly I don't see how "morally
| clueless" is more conducive to a flamewar than "barbaric"
| which appears all over this thread.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks, the edited version is better.
|
| Yes, other people are posting flamebait too.
| StavrosK wrote:
| > Justice, by which I mean reciprocity, is an end in itself.
|
| You misspelled "revenge" there.
| slibhb wrote:
| The distinction between revenge and justice is that justice
| is carried out by a disinterested third party.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| If the third party carrying out the "justice" is merely
| implementing the vengeful wishes of the most irrational
| party (i.e. the victim or their family) then I wouldn't say
| they are "disinterested" in any practical sense.
|
| Also, by the supposed logic of "restoring natural harmony",
| if someone kills your family, should you be allowed to kill
| theirs?
| [deleted]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I have two thoughts.
|
| First, yes, PG is right that we need to do something about
| wrongful convictions. If we do away with the death penalty and
| these people live the rest of their life in prison, but we don't
| kill them, that's... better, I guess? But it's still horrible,
| and it's still a problem that we need to fix. Just eliminating
| the death penalty doesn't fix the problem. If you make
| eliminating the death penalty a side effect of the campaign
| against wrongful convictions, that's fine. But if you make
| eliminating the death penalty the _fix_ , that's hopelessly
| inadequate.
|
| Second, the moral calculus gets awful. The usual question is, how
| many guilty people would you let go free to avoid putting one
| innocent person in prison? That shows the problem - false
| positives and false negatives are inversely related. But there's
| another issue, which is that some people who murder do so more
| than once. So, to avoid putting one innocent person in prison,
| how many innocent people are you willing to see die because of
| not-convicted murderers who repeat the crime? (If anyone has
| recidivism statistics on released murderers, I would welcome
| them.)
| [deleted]
| spoonjim wrote:
| I have very strong beliefs about the death penalty. I believe it
| is the only just punishment for murder; that ALL murderers should
| be executed; that anything less than execution is a grave
| miscarriage of justice for a crime that is so horrible the mind
| cannot even wrap around it. I also think that pain should be part
| of the death penalty... that a murderer doesn't deserve a quick
| and painless death but rather a healthy period of searing agony
| to experience the anguish that they themselves wrought on
| another.
|
| However I believe that there is too big a gulf between
| "murderers" and "people convicted of murderer"; that the crime of
| killing is so severe that doing it to an innocent person is a
| miscarriage of justice far graver than any underpunishment of
| murderers; and so I oppose the death penalty in all forms as a
| matter of law.
| monalmadmad wrote:
| > I believe it is the only just punishment for murder; that ALL
| murderers should be executed;
|
| That's such a twisted mind you have there.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Why does a murderer deserve another breath?
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post flamebait or take HN threads into generic
| ideological arguments. They are exceedingly repetitive and
| convince no one--they just get people activated and angry.
| This place is for _curious_ conversation.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cies wrote:
| Just lacked therapy. Murderer was a cop, and made a
| mistake. Murderer was provoked. Family of murderee forgives
| murderer. Murderee was merely an 3 months old embryo.
| Evidence not 100% conclusive. Murderer claims self defense.
|
| I can continue. The world is messy. Black white thinking
| will not do it justice.
|
| Not that I agree with these reasons in all circumstances. I
| just want to point out there are reasons to treat a
| murderer less harsh.
| anoncake wrote:
| They're human. Revenge has no place in civilized society.
| spoonjim wrote:
| "Revenge has no place in a civilized society" is just an
| opinion. Mine is different. I don't believe a society is
| civilized if it treats murderers with anything less than
| the most extreme vengeance.
| anoncake wrote:
| Then the world would be better off without you.
| spoonjim wrote:
| That may be, but I can tell you without whom the world
| would be MUCH better off: murderers.
| cies wrote:
| Which civilized society? In which baby Bush "finishes
| off" what papa Bush started?
| [deleted]
| anoncake wrote:
| What kind of argument is this? You're already barbarians
| so might as well be consistent?
| cies wrote:
| It's more like: I see a pattern.
| chki wrote:
| Because I care deeply about everybody - no matter what they
| have done. Because forgiveness and love are my core values,
| even if it doesn't usually show up in my day to day life.
| Because revenge is always bad. Torturing somebody no matter
| their crime would go fundamentally against those few things
| that I feel very deeply about - not that different from
| loving my family or caring about the longterm wellbeing of
| humanity.
|
| If that sounds irrational to you: That's because it is
| irrational. Whether we choose to end another persons life
| is fundamental in our understanding of life itself, which
| is highly subjective.
|
| But your belief that we should kill other humans is also
| irrational and subjective.
|
| Edit: Also this paragraph in your first answer
|
| >> I also think that pain should be part of the death
| penalty... that a murderer doesn't deserve a quick and
| painless death but rather a healthy period of searing agony
| to experience the anguish that they themselves wrought on
| another."
|
| is actually terrifying to me. Even reading it causes me
| some physical discomfort.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| What if your love and forgiveness allow a killer to
| strike again? I share similar values but I'm prepared to
| compromise on them if necessary. Even incarceration is a
| compromise. Values are ideals, not absolutes.
| chki wrote:
| I agree that incarceration is a necessary compromise and
| of course I don't want a killer to strike again.
| Forgiveness doesn't mean that I'm against all punishment.
| But I think that it means there always has to be a chance
| for somebody to change - no matter what they did. Even
| life sentences without any chance of parole should not be
| possible: if somebody is no longer a danger to society
| they should be allowed to return at some point.
| dang wrote:
| Whoa - going straight to personal attack like that is not
| allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel
| they are.
|
| Look at it this way: comments like what you posted here take
| the community further into hell war, which destroys the
| community. Even if you don't feel you owe the other commenter
| better, you definitely owe the community better if you're
| participating in it. The ecosystem is fragile--we all need to
| protect it. Setting it on fire because of how wrong you feel
| someone is is definitely not a good idea.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
| capableweb wrote:
| I can somehow understand that argument, "Eye for an eye" and
| all that, kind of makes sense.
|
| Later on is where things gets scary though, where even death
| is not enough and it needs to be agonized death!
|
| > I also think that pain should be part of the death penalty
| [...] rather a healthy period of searing agony
|
| It is beyond fucked up to not only wanting to execute people
| but also make sure they feel pain while doing so.
| wojcikstefan wrote:
| I'm happy with the conclusion you have reached, but boy is your
| first paragraph terrifying. It seems that you're conflating
| justice and accountability with revenge.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| What if they did the murder because of a brain tumor messing up
| their impulse control ability? Humans are just complicated
| machines that go wrong sometimes. I do however share your
| emotional position and it would make me feel better to see
| (actual) murderers get the death penalty.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Someone disabled to the point of having no compass for right
| and wrong would have what is legally known as "diminished
| mental capacity" and not be convicted of first degree murder.
|
| If you genuinely hallucinate that I am an attacking Pit Bull
| and kill me, you are not guilty of first degree murder and I
| would not want you executed.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| > "diminished mental capacity"
|
| As we learn more about neuroscience, every murderer will
| look like they have "diminished mental capacity". This
| legal construct is merely a statement of our ignorance to
| understand what's actually going on in their brain.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Sure, free will may not exist, but we don't have much of
| a civilization if we don't pretend that it does.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| The criminal justice system can still function without
| the false premise of free will and agency, and without
| the false premise that someone with a brain tumor
| magically has less agency than someone without a brain
| tumor but who has some more complicated and less
| understood problem with their brain.
|
| It can be premised on concepts such as rehabilitation
| (which I believe mostly can't happen with murderers),
| deterrence, creating a sense of fairness in society
| (which builds trust), protecting people from the
| murderer, and so on.
| svieira wrote:
| How do we choose to pretend free will exists?
| spoonjim wrote:
| By rewarding people who help others and punishing people
| who hurt others.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It might not go _that_ bad. But I suspect that as medical
| imaging hardware becomes better, we 'll eventually face a
| crisis point: we'll be forced to re-evaluate most of what
| we call "character traits" and reclassify them as
| neurochemistry quirks. This is an important distinction,
| because as a society, we tend to hold people responsible
| for their character, but not for bugs in their brain.
|
| We can already see some of this today. Many people that
| would've been shunned by society in the past as
| "unstable" and "crazy", can be fixed by giving them
| lithium. We know not to fault a person for what's just a
| bug in their hardware. Similarly, many people that
| _today_ are called "lazy" or "annoying", and blamed for
| their obviously flawed character, can be instantly fixed
| by low doses of stimulant medication. This is something
| most people didn't get a memo on yet.
|
| I find it highly likely that most homicides are also
| driven by fixable neurochemistry quirks, and that we'll
| learn to identify and fix them at some point, and we'll
| be appalled at the ease with which we jumped to killing
| people for having them.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| They're still a danger to society. If we start crossing into
| the metaphysical then we'd have to make excuses for
| peadophiles having 'messed up impulse control' too.
|
| But as another comment pointed out, we do account for this.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| > They're still a danger to society
|
| Which is one of the reasons why we have incarceration,
| which I believe is absolutely necessary in some form in a
| case where a person is a danger to others (whether or not
| it's "their fault").
|
| > we'd have to make excuses for peadophiles having 'messed
| up impulse control' too.
|
| It's not an excuse, it's more a description of reality. And
| it would apply to child abusers as well, as well as other
| criminals, yes.
|
| This isn't an argument against "punishing" these people.
| It's an argument for being clear about _why_ we are
| "punishing" them, to make sure it's not a revenge motive
| (which is a heavily biologically driven motive in itself)
| wanderingstan wrote:
| It's not metaphysical, there are documented cases of
| biological causes (tumor) causing pedophilia:
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2943-brain-tumour-
| cau...
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > They're still a danger to society.
|
| That's a different argument. The OP said it he'd like
| muderers to have a fate similar to their victims, basically
| as revenge. When executing someone for this reason, their
| guilt clearly does matter - someone who enjoys killing is
| far worse than someone with a medical condition. Whether
| their death is 'practical' is a different matter.
| bena wrote:
| Murder already has one of the lowest recidivism rates of
| crimes. Murderers typically don't murder again. And that's
| mostly because murder is a heat of the moment crime. Planned
| murders are fairly rare.
|
| If you seriously wanted to use the death penalty to deter
| crime, you'd do better executing people for smaller offenses.
| If you got executed for drunk driving rather than a fine, there
| would be less drunk driving.
|
| Not saying that's a good thing. But if you're looking to deter
| crime, executing murderers is not actually a good way to go
| about it.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Nothing about my opinion is based on the existence or non-
| existence of a deterrent effect.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Life imprisonment/confinement is arguably identical to the death
| penalty (since you are dead to society, the government kills you
| by outliving you, etc.).
|
| Since innocent people also get life imprisonment, one could argue
| that any punishment like this that could potentially harm
| innocent people should be outlawed.
| tosh wrote:
| > [...] capital punishment means killing innocent people
| heraclius wrote:
| > When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk
| about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take
| someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent,
| and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than
| others. But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not
| about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's
| ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on
| death row are innocent.
|
| It's not obvious whether Graham has read a reasonable cross-
| section of the literature on the death penalty and come to this
| conclusion (in which case some references might be in order) or
| whether he's just pulling this out of his arse. I'm not familiar
| with the literature, but a Google Scholar search brings up the
| following:
|
| > Although death penalty discourse has always been, and remains,
| multifaceted - encompassing morality, religion, cost, deterrence,
| theories of punishment, fairness, race, class, and human rights -
| we suggest that over the past decade innocence has emerged as
| perhaps the dominant issue in death penalty discourse with "an
| unprecedented effect on the debate about capital punishment"
| (Bandes 2008, 5; Baumgartner, De Boef, and Boydstun 2008, 157).
| This phenomenon has been referred to by such labels as the "age
| of innocence" (Rosen 2006, 237) or even an "innocence revolution"
| (Marshall 2004, 573; Steiker and Steiker 2005, 613). The
| abolitionist movement has embraced innocence as a new rhetorical
| asset in the death penalty debate, one with the potential to
| decisively shift the weight of public opinion in abolition's
| favor (Radelet and Borg 2000; Bedau 2004a; Acker 2009). "Unlike
| other challenges to the fairness of capital proceedings, which
| have failed to stimulate widespread public outrage," Marshall
| (2004) argues, "evidence of the system's propensity to factual
| error has the power to open closed minds and trigger
| reexamination of the costs and benefits of capital punishment"
| (579). Banner (2002) notes, "the prospect of killing an innocent
| person seemed to be the one thing that could cause people to
| rethink their support for capital punishment" (304). He goes on
| to suggest that "if any development had the potential to change"
| the popularity of the death penalty, "this was the one" (305).
| Thus, one scholar claims, "it is no exaggeration to say that
| wrongful convictions spurred . . . the most successful death
| penalty reform movement in our lifetime" (Bandes 2008, 4).
| Already, scholars claim that innocence "has produced a massive
| shift in the terms of the national death-penalty debate" (Hoffman
| 2005, 562), a shift "away from moral and procedural
| considerations, and toward the more substantive question of guilt
| and innocence" (Hall 2005, 373).
|
| (J.D. Aronson and S.A. Cole, "Science and the Death Penalty: DNA,
| Innocence, and the Debate over Capital Punishment in the United
| States", _Law & Social Inquiry_ 34.3 (2009), pp. 603-33,
| http://www.jstor.org/stable/40539373.)
|
| Perhaps it's somehow satisfying to Graham to make a wide sweep at
| 'intellectuals' whilst presenting a purportedly distinct argument
| without trying to determine whether it's been anticipated, but it
| strikes me as rather dishonest.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > divide pretty neatly along partisan and class lines
|
| In America. The rest of the civilised world decided on this a
| long time ago.
|
| It's not so much a "partisan and class" divide, it's "right-wing
| Americans vs the rest of Western Civilisation"
|
| Even right-wingers in the UK and Europe do not want to bring back
| capital punishment [0]
|
| [0] Obviously there are some wingnuts who do, but there's not to
| my knowledge a serious right-wing political party that has a
| policy of bringing back capital punishment. Corporal punishment,
| maybe.
| dang wrote:
| Please omit nationalistic flamebait and political swipes from
| your posts here. They just make things worse.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900759.
| [deleted]
| tompccs wrote:
| 49% of Brits would support the reintroduction of the death
| penalty. I suspect that the same is true across Europe and that
| you are living in a bubble. [0]
|
| [0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/should-the-
| dea...
| neilwilson wrote:
| Right up to the point where you explain what that means in
| practice.
|
| As ever with polls it depends how you frame the question.
| goldcd wrote:
| In shocking news the majority of people polled believed
| they should be paid more and be taxed less.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> As ever with polls it depends how you frame the
| question._
|
| Obligatory 'Yes, Prime Minister' clip:
| https://youtu.be/G0ZZJXw4MTA
| reedf1 wrote:
| And only recently this number dropped below 50%! Wow!
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| "for the murder of a child" - this isn't about the death
| penalty. This is a "won't someone please think about the
| children" dog whistle to the "murder all the pedos" brigade.
|
| Again, no-one is seriously suggesting bringing it back. My
| bubble is secure.
| [deleted]
| ruph123 wrote:
| > 49% of Brits would support the reintroduction of the death
| penalty
|
| ... for murdering a child. You forgot that part didn't you?
| If you pull up the poll if death penalty should be
| reintroduced for all murderers only 32% are in support [0].
|
| Please don't pick and choose sources to make an argument
| which wasn't even captured by the source. Also please don't
| extrapolate to other countries like that. Us Europeans left
| the death Penalty behind a long time ago. This is not a thing
| anymore.
|
| [0]: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/should-
| the-dea...
| viklove wrote:
| Us Americans left behind the death penalty as well, so you
| are being a bit nationalistic (racist?). The death penalty
| is against the law in nearly 1/2 of US states.
|
| Even in the states where it is "legal," many have not
| carried out the procedure in several decades. They simply
| reserve the right to do so in the case where a child is
| murdered.
|
| > The rest of the civilised world decided on this a long
| time ago.
|
| But please, go on continuing to believe Europeans are
| superior to the rest of the world. I remember that working
| out really well for you guys back in the 1930s.
| ruph123 wrote:
| > But please, go on continuing to believe Europeans are
| superior to the rest of the world. I remember that
| working out really well for you guys back in the 1930s.
|
| That is unnecessarily snarky. The comment I was replying
| to was suggesting that basically the UK and the other
| Europeans would happily welcome back the death penality.
| Which is not true. I only said that "we" - the strawman
| used by gp - left it behind and made no statement about
| other countries.
|
| You are the one getting all nationalistic.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this, no matter how provocative another
| comment was. The proper response is to flag it and ignore
| it--then the provocation fizzles out, as it should. The
| site guidelines put it this way: " _Don 't feed egregious
| comments by replying; flag them instead._" That's our
| euphemistic recoding of "Please don't feed the trolls."
|
| I realize this is not so easy when you belong to a group
| that's being put down, but we all need to build up our
| tolerance to that kind of thing, since the alternative is
| to have it dominate discussion and that would make
| everything worse.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ruph123 wrote:
| Understood, still learning.
| dang wrote:
| As are we all :)
| dang wrote:
| You've broken the site guidelines badly, even relative to
| the rest of this thread, with name-calling, flamebait and
| slurs. Would you please stop doing that? We ban accounts
| that post this way--it's destructive to everything this
| site is intended to be.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
| taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart,
| we'd be grateful.
| viklove wrote:
| Seems like I disagree with everything this site is
| intended to be.
|
| Can you please delete my account? I'm sick of this site
| and its biased, self-righteous mods. I even sent you an
| email and everything, just like you asked!
| maxerickson wrote:
| There's some variation inside the US. Michigan abolished the
| death penalty for all crimes other than treason in 1847 (It was
| abolished for treason in 1967, with no one having been
| executed).
| jeswin wrote:
| > In America. The rest of the civilised world decided on this a
| long time ago.
|
| You ended up calling half the world's population "uncivilized".
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| true. good point. poor choice of words. my apologies.
| saltmeister wrote:
| useless
| jpmattia wrote:
| To amplify Paul's point: The legal standard in all criminal
| trials is "Beyond a reasonable doubt":
|
| > _The standard that must be met by the prosecution 's evidence
| in a criminal prosecution: that no other logical explanation can
| be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the
| crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is
| innocent until proven guilty._
|
| And yet, DNA testing has exonerated many convicted in death-
| penalty cases where that standard should be applied with the most
| thought and care.
|
| I don't think there any conclusion other than: The system of
| trial-by-peers is flawed with a _measurable_ error rate. The
| judges failed, the juries failed and the prosecution failed;
| Innocent people have been put to death, while the real culprits
| have walked free.
|
| Putting people to death based on such a flawed system is
| unconscionable.
| rayiner wrote:
| What does "beyond a reasonable doubt" mean in probability
| terms? Most people say 90-95%, which suggests even Graham's 4%
| number (which is on the high end of such estimates, see: https:
| //dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&con...) is
| actually consistent with the system working as designed.
|
| Also, while you're thinking about that, what's your estimate of
| the probability that Derek Chauvin's negligence was the but for
| cause of George Floyd's death (and not some other factor
| mentioned by the defense expert in the case such as his health
| or drugs). Note that's a scientific question--but for causation
| is an element of the crime. It's not enough that what Chauvin
| did was reckless as to human life. His recklessness had to be
| the cause. Are you 99% certain of that?
| Aunche wrote:
| > Are you 99% certain of that?
|
| Chauvin's case was unique because the narrative of him being
| a murderer had already been broadcast across the entire
| country. While I'm not personally 99% sure of his guilt to
| second-degree murder, the jurors most likely were.
| jjeaff wrote:
| He was convicted of 2nd degree unintentional murder. Which,
| in Minnesota, one of the definitions is that you killed
| someone while committing a felony.
|
| So even if fully an accident, if you kill someone while
| robbing a store, that's going to be 2nd degree murder.
|
| And in the case of this trial, I assume the jury was simply
| convinced that kneeling on someone's neck for nearly 10
| minutes while they beg for mercy and then continuing to
| apply pressure for minutes after they pass out is a crime
| in and of itself, even if he had not died.
| sneak wrote:
| There is significant tradition in the criminal justice system
| for the error bias to be in the other direction (in theory,
| if not in practice):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
|
| I believe that to be "working as designed" we would see a lot
| more guilty people going free than innocent people being
| convicted.
| rayiner wrote:
| > I believe that to be "working as designed" we would see a
| lot more guilty people going free than innocent people
| being convicted
|
| How do you know that's not the case?
| sneak wrote:
| Conviction and plea bargain rates. Most (>90%) people who
| are charged (in the US) end up with either a guilty
| verdict or a guilty plea. IIRC even the ones that don't
| plead out are ~90% conviction rate, at least at the
| federal level.
|
| Doesn't jive at all with what we know of competence and
| bias levels observed in police and prosecutors in the US.
| rayiner wrote:
| Most people plead out because they're ridiculously
| guilty.
|
| I'm a crunchy hippie on criminal justice, but I've also
| seen these cases first hand working for an appellate
| judge. Prosecutors go after cases that are open and shut.
| You wouldn't believe how much evidence there is in a
| typical case that doesn't go to trial. They have the guy
| on CCTV with stolen goods in his car and cell phone
| records of fencing.
|
| Innocence Projects weed out hundreds of meritless
| requests for help for the relatively few meritorious
| cases they take.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Most people plead out because they're ridiculously
| guilty._
|
| Most people plead out because they can't afford expensive
| trials.
|
| It's also a rational choice when prosecutors promise that
| they'll throw the book at you if you go to trial, and
| it's often your word against the word of cops,
| prosecutors and the expensive expert witnesses they can
| afford to hire but you can't. Juries and judges tend to
| side with law enforcement because they're authority
| figures and valued members of the justice system, after
| all.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| I was on a jury for a trial where they had _crap_ on the
| kid accused of conspiracy to create meth.
|
| He drove an old high school friend, who he hadn't seen
| for years, to a park. He drove into a parking lot on the
| way and turned around "as if trying to avoid tails." He
| returned to the car and the undercover cop put the key
| back in his hand after putting ingredients in the car.
|
| AND...he was being accused of conspiracy (which raises
| the seriousness of the crime to a felony!) to create meth
| because...there were drug ingredients in the car and the
| keys were in his hand. He'd spent his time at the park
| napping on the grass with his hat over his head. Or, as
| the cops testified, "probably acting as a lookout."
|
| We of course said "not guilty." No one even wanted to
| argue. No idea why they thought they had a case.
|
| But the kid in this case was white. I could totally see a
| black kid deciding that accepting a "lesser plea" would
| have been preferable to taking a chance on a 95%+ white
| jury (was in a predominantly white area; I don't think
| there was a single black juror, though I wasn't keeping
| count).
| sneak wrote:
| > _Most people plead out because they're ridiculously
| guilty._
|
| I know many innocent people who plead out to avoid jail
| because they're looking at $250k in legal bills and a
| ~90% trial conviction rate. Juries, being amateurs, are
| not very good at avoiding bias, as they are completely
| untrained.
|
| I'm not so sure that plea bargain rates are indicative of
| guilt either way.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Yeah, and there are a lot of people who are most likely
| guilty who never even get charged. A prosecutor won't
| want to take up a case when he thinks the evidence is in
| the zone between "preponderance" and "beyond reasonable
| doubt".
| thinkindie wrote:
| try to tell the family of people in the 4% that the system is
| working as designed.
| mc32 wrote:
| Right, but you have to compare that to the alternatives
| that exist elsewhere. China, Japan, India, UK, Chile,
| Brazil, Indonesia and so on. You cannot compare against an
| ideal which does not exist in practice.
|
| I'm only speaking about conviction and not commenting on
| the appropriateness of death penalties.
| benjohnson wrote:
| It's not ideal. But if we don't have a working criminal
| justice system, victims will take the law into their own
| hands and their error rate will most likely be much worse.
| siva7 wrote:
| Will they? Doesn't seem to be the case in Europe. At
| least people there don't equal death penalty with a
| working justice system
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| There is zero evidence that the death penalty is useful
| for deterrence.
|
| Zero points for using a distraction from the argument at
| hand which is whether the death penalty is justified.
| impendia wrote:
| > What does "beyond a reasonable doubt" mean in probability
| terms?
|
| When serving as a juror in a criminal trial, I asked
| precisely this question of the judge.
|
| Her response was that the law does not prescribe a
| percentage.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Reasonable doubt means doubts that a person is guilty. In
| probability terms it can be interpreted as a state of belief
| in the guilt (or innocence) of the accused. PG's 4% number is
| offered as the frequency of wrongful convictions. The two
| concepts are not related.
|
| For example, if a body of jurors say that they are 95%
| certain that John Smith murdered Jane Brown, that does not
| mean that there is a 5% probability that John Smith did not
| commit the murder, or a 5% probability that he will be
| wrongfully convicted. The 95% number quantifies the belief of
| the jurors that John Smith is the murderer. 5% quantifies
| their belief that John Smith is not the murderer. Nothing in
| those numbers tells us anything about how often jurors are
| wrong- it only tells us how strongly they believe they are
| right.
|
| To know the frequency of wrongful convictions we must look at
| the frequency of exonerations. Whatever is the state of
| belief of jurors or judges etc during the trial where someone
| was convicted of a crime can't really inform us about the
| probability of their future exoneration.
| nojs wrote:
| I think most people interpret the task of assigning a
| percentage to their belief of something like this as
| equivalent to estimating the percentage of the time they
| are likely to be wrong. So to say the two are not related
| is not true.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Actually, Chauvin's actions did not have to be the only cause
| of death. Reckless actions only had to contribute in order
| for him to be guilty. The fact that there were drugs involved
| or other medical conditions merely establish that he may have
| been easier to kill than a healthier individual.
|
| You only need to be very sure that what Chauvin did was
| reckless and unreasonable and also very sure that had Chauvin
| not knelt on his neck for nearly 10 minutes, that Floyd
| wouldn't have died at that same moment anyway.
| exclusiv wrote:
| I don't know how you could replace the jurors but I think
| they're only as good as the rest of the system. I mean, if they
| don't get to hear or see certain evidence because it was deemed
| non-permissible or it was hidden or destroyed, they can't make
| a good decision. Not to mention at one point we had no DNA
| evidence. We relied on junk science with bite marks and shoe
| prints and other things.
|
| Although there are indeed issues with peers (and witnesses). I
| was in a large lecture hall some time ago and someone came in
| to do an staged purse snatch. You couldn't see the person's
| face and they were moving fast.
|
| When the class was shown a lineup to say who it was, most all
| agreed it was one of the suspects. When asked why, they said he
| was tall (he was much taller than the others in the lineup).
|
| And that was the whole point. People will try and identify
| based on little info and they make the incorrect assumption
| that the lineup they were presented with actually has the real
| perpetrator!
|
| So if you presented a lineup (maybe an impartial organization
| other than the police) and made it really clear to the
| witnesses that the perp may very well NOT be in the lineup, you
| would probably fix a lot of bad identifications. And you
| wouldn't have detectives trying to influence a decision. That
| would be a good start.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think the suggestion is that not having a death penalty
| reduces the harm of incorrect decisions
| spfzero wrote:
| I agree. Mistakes are going to happen at some rate, 4%
| seems realistic. At least if the wrongfully-convicted
| person is still alive in prison, they can be released and
| compensated. They may be able to bring a civil suit if
| there was sufficient malfeasance or incompetence. Some
| redress can happen.
|
| As well, once someone has been executed, interest in
| finding the truth goes away, and any chance to correct and
| improve the system based on that case's specifics is gone.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| > The system of trial-by-peers is flawed with a measurable
| error rate.
|
| I've been listening to the podcast Court Junkie (not to be
| confused with "Crime Junkie"; long story...), and this was my
| main takeaway as well.
|
| The podcast is great because it is almost entirely audio
| excerpts from actual murder trials, with some extra narration
| to tie it together. It made me realize my understanding of
| trial-by-jury was formulated almost entirely by television and
| other storytelling, and not be reality.
|
| What amazed me the most is how the winner seems to be biased
| toward whichever side can present the most compelling _story_.
| Not the most _realistic_ story or most _likely_ story, just the
| most interesting one.
| newacct583 wrote:
| To be clear: I don't think that anyone is surprised to see a 4%
| error rate here. No one ever really thought this system was
| perfect, and in point of fact perfect determination of
| innocence wasn't even a design goal of the jury system. The
| point to selecting juries from the public is to make it harder
| for a corrupt government to employ its own law enforcement
| apparatus corruptly. (Whether _that_ works is also an argument
| of some topicality right now...)
|
| But yeah: given that the error rate is in the 1-2 9's range, it
| seems like applying it to capital cases is a horrifying
| mistake. Imagine a medical device with only a 99% chance of not
| killing you.
| adriang133 wrote:
| And putting them in prison for multiple years, or even decades,
| is better ? Hardly.
|
| I think the point should be more: the justice system sucks and
| we should work very hard to make it better, instead of
| complaining about a particular consequence of it, that is
| ultimately irrelevant.
| ohazi wrote:
| That's a great whataboutism.
|
| None of your points are wrong, none of your _conclusions_ are
| wrong, yet your comment still derails and detracts from GP 's
| well stated point. Don't do this.
| Ottolay wrote:
| Highly recommend the book "The Sun Does Shine", by Anthony Ray
| Hinton. He was wrongfully convicted and spent 30 years on death
| row.
|
| One of the crazy parts of his story was how the state dug in its
| heels and did everything possible to prevent him from being
| acquitted, long after the new evidence was introduced.
| closeparen wrote:
| It seems to me that multi-decade prison terms are at least as
| severe as death. It doesn't seem _terrible_ as long as prisoners
| are able to kill themselves. But a life sentence in a prison with
| effective suicide prevention seems far harsher than a lethal
| injection next week.
| svieira wrote:
| But a life sentence in prison with a noose in it is humane?
| closeparen wrote:
| Once you've decided to throw someone's life away, keeping
| them around to experience their thrown-away life is not
| particularly kind, is the point.
| jandrese wrote:
| The problem with capital punishment is what do you do when you
| discover after the fact that the person was innocent?
|
| If the justice system were perfect there could be a case for
| execution in place of life sentences, but it has been shown
| time and time again that going free depends more on the quality
| of your lawyer than the facts of the case. Prosecutors will lie
| and fabricate evidence because the cops did a terrible job and
| they figure you must be guilty. Even if it's not of this
| particular crime you're just the criminal type and they'll be
| doing society a favor by locking you away.
|
| The system is highly classist and racist. It shouldn't be
| allowed to make such final decisions like killing someone. This
| makes it impossible to reverse the injustice in the future.
| kelp wrote:
| I'm glad this is being shared widely, because I agree with it.
|
| That said, I have to snark a little about it, because I was in
| high school, in the 90s, when I came to the same realization
| about why the death penalty is wrong. So this seems pretty
| obvious to me.
|
| Our justice system is not reliable enough to have the death
| penalty.
| alexashka wrote:
| Our roads and speed limits are not reliable enough to have
| cars.
|
| Pretty obvious we should abolish cars. Duh.
| outworlder wrote:
| Please stop and reflect a bit on your comparison. As a
| reminder, we are talking about the state intentionally taking
| human lives. Not accidents.
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| While made in jest and insincerely, your point is not
| entirely without merit. Technology has come a long way since
| the 1960's, and will come further still in the future. Self-
| driving cars may never be a reality, but other forms of
| transport could be invented and constructed which were never
| previously feasible.
| treis wrote:
| >So this seems pretty obvious to me
|
| If you extend the logic to other sentences they become
| similarly problematic. In other words, clearly it's bad to
| execute an innocent person. But it's also bad to imprison them
| for life, or 30 years or 20 years or 10 years and so on.
| There's no clear reason to draw the line at execution but not
| at life imprisonment.
| depaya wrote:
| You can at least let someone out of prison. You cannot undo
| execution.
| Bishop_ wrote:
| You can let someone go if you found out they were innocent.
| This is still bad that they serviced time in prison while
| innocent.
|
| However it is currently impossible to unkill someone, which
| makes executing someone for a crime they didn't commit
| significantly worse, this seems a reasonable place to draw a
| line to me.
| sneak wrote:
| Were our justice system provably 100% reliable, it would still
| be barbaric and uncivilized to execute human beings. pg is dead
| wrong on this one.
| buyx wrote:
| When I was in high school, in the 90s, I also vehemently
| opposed the death penalty. In English class, I'd be on the
| anti-death penalty side during debates (I'd be the only one).
| My country was in the process of abolishing the death penalty
| at the time, so it was a little more than just an academic
| proposition.
|
| When I hit my late 30s, my position changed entirely. It's hard
| to tell why. I now have no moral qualms about a society
| choosing to put to death people who are guilty of heinous and
| depraved acts against others.
|
| That said, I'm reading the March National Geographic, and the
| pictures of innocent men freed after being sentenced to death
| have given me pause. Given the apparent scope of prosecutorial
| misconduct (in the US, but it's likely to be worse in many
| other places), it's hard to entrust the state with this sort of
| responsibility, especially when there are alternatives that
| greatly reduce the threat to others, while avoiding the
| finality of capital punishment.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Part of the issue is that we divide the trial into (guilty or
| not) and (determine punishment if guilty). There's no 95%
| chance of guilty, go to jail and 100% chance of guilty, death
| penalty.
|
| But, ultimately, some people are going to go away forever.
| People like Manson are never going to get released. What's the
| big difference between the death penalty and life imprisonment
| with no parole that attenuates the error in the conviction
| process.
| slg wrote:
| >What's the big difference between the death penalty and life
| imprisonment with no parole that attenuates the error in the
| conviction process.
|
| You can't reverse the damage done by either sentence. However
| a sentence of life without parole is correctible as soon as a
| mistake is identified. Releasing an innocent person after
| taking 40 years of their life is awful, but it is better than
| realizing we killed an innocent person 25 years ago.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I question how often people are really released after 40
| years in prison. It happens, but it certainly doesn't
| happen frequently. In fact, it's so infrequent it seems any
| false release after a decade or more seems to pop up in
| national news.
|
| I feel like fictional accounts of long-delayed justice are
| more common than real ones.
|
| Either way a tragedy occurs, but I'm not sure how much our
| system should be informed by ultra-rare edge cases.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| I don't support the death penalty because as has been mentioned
| the justice system is unreliable.
|
| But I can understand why some people do when we see so many
| violent offenders released only to reoffend.
|
| If people are going to have faith in the justice system then a
| whole life tariff needs to be a reasonable possibility - the
| USA actually isn't so bad for this but over here in Europe we
| have far shorter sentences.
| aeternum wrote:
| But our justice system is reliable enough to lock people up for
| life just because there's a small chance we may find out they
| are innocent before they die in prison?
|
| There must be a better way.
| filoeleven wrote:
| Norway gave 21 years, their maximum sentence, plus "the
| possibility of one or more extensions for as long as he is
| deemed a danger to society" to Breivik for killing 69 people.
|
| This seems like a better way to go. He will be evaluated for
| extensions of his sentence periodically, and (showing my
| ignorance of their system here) I presume the panel will
| include medical professionals who are more equipped to gauge
| his mental health and danger to society than a judge would.
|
| A family member of mine was murdered in the 90s. I would
| advocate for the same treatment of the killer. Though I
| suppose I am still biased since it was unprovoked, and the
| killer would probably be judged a continual danger to
| society.
| aeternum wrote:
| I'd prefer we treat prisons as mini-societies. Only a
| minimal set of rules should be set and enforced by the
| guards. The majority of the rules should be voted on and
| enforced by the prisoners themselves.
|
| Guards would step in if things go awry, but in general
| there would be a strong incentive to cooperate and
| contribute as that would be the primary indicator that the
| prisoner is ready to be released and can contribute to
| society outside the prison.
|
| This should make prisons much more self-sufficient and less
| costly.
| otalp wrote:
| I mean, there are cases where you have clear video evidence of
| murder, or mass shootings where it's obvious who the killer was
| with 100 witnesses.
|
| If a proposal came to redefine the threshold for the death
| penalty from "beyond reasonable doubt" to "irrefutable" then
| the arguments here would not hold.
| clairity wrote:
| also, given the collective (non-)evidence, we should expect
| that the number of people who are irredeemably and imminently
| threatening, and therefore truly deserving of the death
| penalty, to be extraordinarily small, like 5 sigma, rather
| than 2-3 sigma, which seems to be the mental model implicit
| in our justice system.
|
| with such extraordinarily tiny incidence rates and an
| erroneous implicit mental model, it's no surprise that we
| misidentify the truly irredeemable so often. our implicit
| expectations simply get in the way of being impartial and
| objective.
| slg wrote:
| Video isn't truly irrefutable. Two people can look at the
| same video and draw different conclusions. You can see this
| anywhere from instant replay review in sports to some
| people's reactions to the Chauvin verdict.
| otalp wrote:
| I agree that video isn't de facto irrefutable, but there
| are several irrefutable cases involving video.
| iR5ugfXGAE wrote:
| Why stop there? Is 39 years behind bars for an innocent less
| ridiculous than killing them?
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Both are ridiculous, but only one can be somewhat rectified.
| Death is pretty final most of the time. (Some folks technically
| die, but are revived).
| Gauge_Irrahphe wrote:
| There should be people paid for proving a person innocent.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The uncomfortable truth is that these arguments assume that there
| is free will (which is a supernatural entity).
|
| If society converges on spontaneously destroying some human
| entities it deems a threat, it seems that this behavior arises
| from the chaos and can not be stopped (since it is found in every
| human society in past history).
|
| The alternative is to treat murders equivalent to the Bernie
| Madoffs of the world, which some people might find unjust.
| domador wrote:
| I think the main reason to end the death penalty is different:
| capital punishment is a very dangerous power for any nation to
| have over its inhabitants. Many of us are accustomed to living in
| stable democracies. Yet how easily and quickly could any of them
| become a totalitarian state or a reign of terror, where innocent
| people (especially activists and dissidents) are executed on
| false charges? Contemporary nations should not have the death
| penalty. If any nation legalizes it, that should serve as a
| canary to other nations that said nation is about to become an
| oppressive state with little appreciation for human rights.
|
| Just look at the death penalty historically, even not too long
| ago, and how it was used in many now "civilized" countries to
| kill people for minor crimes. Or look at the contemporary world,
| at the countries that use capital punishment and the crimes they
| prescribe it for (even assuming they were prescribing it justly.)
| Aren't these countries themselves a good argument that it's best
| to err on the side of not having capital punishment at all,
| anywhere?
|
| I think some criminals are truly awful and deserve to die for
| their heinous crimes. Yet it's simply too dangerous for any
| society to have the death penalty, even for these heinous crimes.
| As an intellectual, I'd be somewhat or very scared of living in
| any of the contemporary countries that have capital punishment
| (not to mention the ones that essentially allow street executions
| by the police. But that is another topic for another day...)
| gnicholas wrote:
| I'm surprised not to see any consideration of second-order
| effects. For example, if getting rid of the death penalty even
| slightly decreases the disincentive for committing crime, it's
| quite possible that more lives would be lost than saved.
|
| In any given year, there are relatively few executions in the US
| -- in recent years it has been around 25. [1] If we assume the 4%
| figure as correct, then every four years there is one innocent
| person who is executed.
|
| That is a terrible outcome. But it's quite possible that
| eliminating the death penalty completely would cause at least 2
| more deaths every four years.
|
| I'm not advocating for or against the death penalty -- just
| pointing out that if the goal is to minimize the death of
| innocent people, we might want to consider second-order effects.
| I will admit that state-sanctioned killing of innocent people
| seems worse than general killing of innocent people. At the same
| time, if the government makes a decision that it knows will
| result in a net increase in the number of innocent people killed,
| the fact that they're not sticking a needle into the arm of the
| innocent people who will die is somewhat less of a salient
| distinction.
|
| 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...
| rmorey wrote:
| https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/deterrence
| gnicholas wrote:
| I'm aware that there is not strong evidence of a global
| deterrent effect. However, if we are looking to offset
| something like 1 death every four years, the magnitude of a
| countervailing effect could be small enough to be lost in the
| 'noise' of the existing research studies, but still be larger
| than the .25 annual deaths that it's being measured against.
|
| I would also point out that looking at state-level
| differences in death penalty policies isn't as likely to pick
| up changes in attitudes among criminals. If the federal
| government outlawed the death penalty, there would be much
| broader awareness of the change (and therefore more
| likelihood of a change in criminal behavior).
| cjfd wrote:
| Go back to grade school and learn your percentages anew. You
| are treating them very badly.
| sremani wrote:
| Death penalty is Lindy.
|
| I am not interested in some esoteric academic ethics argument..
| in this, I want to hear, from people who lost loved ones - who
| are against Death penalty.
|
| Who endured and still endure the suffering of a losing loved
| ones. If we get an even split from this group of people, may be
| then only then I will consider the academic arguments.
| dang wrote:
| The article is all about not having an esoteric academic ethics
| argument, as its opening sentence makes clear. That's also what
| the word "real" means in the title.
| sremani wrote:
| The luxury of inexperience make things seem real. This is
| very evident when 'crime' is an intellectual exercise vs. you
| happen to be victim of it.
|
| Both are 'real' but one is more 'real' than the other.
| asperous wrote:
| I believe the "real reason" to end the death penalty is that it's
| so much more expensive the alternative [1]. If it doesn't deter
| crime, and doesn't save money, there's really no point.
|
| [1] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs
| tobr wrote:
| Sure, killing innocent people isn't great, but wasting tax
| money, that's where you have to draw the line!
| jandrese wrote:
| You'll move more state legislatures with money than innocent
| lives.
| cies wrote:
| This is very US-centric.
|
| > at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.
|
| I expect in Scandinavia these numbers are different. But they
| dont have death penalty.
|
| From the news I learn that US cops also kill innocent people in
| the street. And it's military wages illegal wars killing 100s of
| 1000s overseas. I think the US has a weird relation with
| violence. The death penalty and how it uses it is merely a
| symptom.
| dang wrote:
| This is a classic generic tangent of the sort the site
| guidelines ask people not to post to HN
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). You're
| changing the topic from a specific argument about death-penalty
| convictions to a generic, inflammatory point about how $country
| has a "weird relation" with $badness. This is how we get less
| interesting discussion, and also flamewar--in this case
| nationalistic flamewar, which we definitely do not want here.
|
| If anyone wants more explanation, I wrote a detailed post
| yesterday about a similar case:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894739
|
| Edit: not only that but you stoked the flamewar downthread with
| posts about regime changes and putdowns about "civilized
| society". This is what I'm talking about. Please don't.
|
| Edit 2: not only that but you did the same thing yesterday, and
| to judge by recent history it looks like your account has
| swerved into using HN primarily for political and ideological
| battle. Please don't--that's against the site guidelines
| because it destroys the curiosity this site is supposed to
| exist for. You're a good HN user so this should be easy to fix.
|
| If anyone's worried about us being biased in favor of $country
| --here's an example from yesterday that went exactly the other
| way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26892927. We couldn't
| care less what color the flames are--we just want to have an
| internet forum that doesn't suck. When people starting arguing
| about whose country isn't "civilized" or whose there should be
| a "bloody war" with, we have dangerously high levels of
| suckage.
| capableweb wrote:
| > This is very US-centric.
|
| Yeah, considering the US have a bunch of problems related to
| violence (mass shootings, overzealous police force, invading
| other countries left and right), it makes sense that other
| violent processes are also problematic in the same environment.
| I agree with you death penalty is merely a symptom of something
| else in the whole system of the country.
|
| Makes it extra weird when you consider how prude the US is when
| it comes to sexuality, while violence is something that is not
| only used as entertainment, but even many feel pride about.
| cies wrote:
| Also mingling in politics. US has been in the business of
| that for decades. The whole of Central and South America has
| had a couple of regime changes dictated by the US.
|
| Then Russia supposedly bought some Facebook ads or something
| for a US election years ago, and I still need to read about
| it in the news every week.
|
| Conclusion: US also has a huge double measurement problem.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > how prude the US is when it comes to sexuality
|
| This hasn't been true for decades.
| capableweb wrote:
| No? As far as I know, nipples are still "banned" on most US
| social media platforms, but only if they are female. Male
| nipples are fine. Then children are usually shielded from
| anything remotely sexual in both real-life and from media
| while violence seems to be fine even for the youngest.
| viklove wrote:
| Yes, because corporate policies are the best picture of
| the current state of American culture.
| bruceb wrote:
| The US isn't that prudish compared to many nations.
| piva00 wrote:
| Yeah but compared to similar nations in culture and wealth
| it's pretty much an outlier.
| ck425 wrote:
| My observation from the UK is that it's extremely
| polarised.
|
| When I visited Miami for work I couldn't believe how many
| scantily clad people just walked around and the stories you
| see in media from coastal liberal areas (fictional and non-
| fictional) seem just as, if not more, open to sexuality as
| the UK (who are more prudish than Europe in general).
|
| But in the otherhand there are large areas/groups dominated
| by conservative religious values who are hyper prudish.
| aaron695 wrote:
| This argument is garbage.
|
| Of course there will be miscarriages of justice and this has been
| talked about since the beginning. There is nothing new here.
|
| > 4% of people on death row are innocent.
|
| This is not true, but it's irrelevant anyway since what is the
| acceptable level? Since it's not mentioned, we have gotten
| nowhere in this blog post.
|
| If we get it very close to zero, is it then ok then? Is the
| single incidence of executing a guilty man ok? Because either
| that's what this blog implies or it's skipping the real issues.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| I don't see your counter argument here.
|
| The post is indeed arguing that "zero people killed by the
| government for crimes they did not commit" is more ok than
| "greater than zero people killed."
|
| This is a valid argument, drawing on the intuition that
| accidentally letting a guilty person escape death (even if we
| accept they deserve it) is a lesser evil than letting an
| innocent person die.
| aaron695 wrote:
| The government regularly lets people die. The government
| regularly lets innocent people die. The government regularly
| changes things that then changes who dies. A human life is
| only worth around $2,000,000 in the rich west like the US.
| People, inflate that a lot, but it's actually quite low.
|
| If the argument is it has to be 0.00 for direct action by the
| government that deliberately kills a person then say it.
| That's the end. It's not possible to get 0, don't bring in
| the fact it's 4% or x% or bring in case studies because
| that's just a changing goal post.
|
| The reason for the changing goal post is because people can't
| ask why is direct killing of innocent people different to
| allowing innocent people to die for amounts in the low
| millions. Which is a complex issue that's not talked about
| properly.
| beej71 wrote:
| A number of people I've talked to about this feel that the
| false positive rate is perfectly fine. That it's just the
| price we pay for justice overall.
| mrlala wrote:
| They are just fine with it until it happens to them.
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| >This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue
| with the death penalty.
|
| This is the real issue with almost every human endeavor,
| especially those that affect other people's lives. ( example
| politics, taxes)
| Blumfid wrote:
| I still don't think it is okay to end the life of another human
| being.
| svieira wrote:
| I too am pro-life
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Wrong accusation is definitely a problem, but ultimately I think
| people should be free to decide what kind of laws they want. The
| Machinery of Freedom describes a government-less system in which
| people voluntarily pay an insurance which defines what the law is
| and what happens when the law is broken. If people have different
| insurance companies, they can agree what law is going to prevail
| in which cases. If capital punishment were something desirable
| (which I don't think it is: the risk of being wrongfully accused
| outweighs the potential deterrent to other to kill me) some
| agencies could evolve to cater to this need.
|
| That said, I think there is an economic argument to be made
| against capital punishment.
|
| Killing someone is definitely a waste of human life and economic
| potential.
|
| Wouldn't it be better to have the sentenced man work for the rest
| of his life in prison and create value? You could potentially
| have a deal in which the prison organise the work, keep a portion
| of the profits to keep operating and pays the victim / victim's
| family for the crime they were subjected to.
|
| I think this is fantasy right now because the government is
| terribly inefficient in everything they do - but with a system of
| private prisons (another fantasy, given the current trend of
| increasing the government size, instead of reducing it), maybe
| someone would be able to turn a profit and make it work.
| _bohm wrote:
| > with a system of private prisons (another fantasy, given the
| current trend of increasing the government size, instead of
| reducing it), maybe someone would be able to turn a profit and
| make it work.
|
| Both prison labor and private prisons are absolutely a thing in
| the United States today. As I understand, prison labor is
| illegal in privately operated prisons. However, state-run
| prisons are allowed to use prison labor to manufacture goods
| and sell them to private entities for profit it many US
| jurisdictions.
|
| Many people find this practice objectionable because it creates
| a profit-based incentive for states to issue more prison
| sentences and to make them longer.
| [deleted]
| ur-whale wrote:
| > District attorneys want to be seen as effective and tough on
| crime, and in order to win convictions are willing to manipulate
| witnesses and withhold evidence. Court-appointed defense
| attorneys are overworked and often incompetent.
|
| I'll note that most of these problems are unique to the US
| justice system.
| bruceb wrote:
| Another solution is having a no doubt standard needed for the
| death penalty as opposed to a beyond a reasonable doubt standard.
|
| No doubt standard would require some set elements. DNA + visual
| recording + electronic records.
|
| I used to be anti death penalty but would be ok with it under a
| no doubt standard. Not for vengeance but simply society can spend
| the money on other things instead of spending money housing and
| feeding individuals who have caused such horrific pain on others.
| pydry wrote:
| Death row is pretty expensive, as is achieving a "no doubt
| standard". I don't think it would save as much money as you
| would think.
| Pelic4n wrote:
| I hope you realize that meeting that no doubt standard is going
| to cost a lot of money. The judiciary procedures for death
| penalty is extremely high, as are all the related costs for
| death rows & execution. In fact death penalty costs already
| more than life in prison: https://www.thebalance.com/comparing-
| the-costs-of-death-pena...
|
| And that's with the current error-prone system. Think of what
| it would take to ensure that your criteria are met.
|
| So costs is simply not an argument. In fact it's a pretty bad
| faith one regarding what happens with private prisons and the
| labor of inmates subjected to slavery (read the 13th amendment
| if you think slavery is universally abolished). The US wouldn't
| have the highest rate of incarceration in the world if it
| didn't make money somehow.
| bruceb wrote:
| A no doubt standard need not cost extra money. This is from
| evidence already collected.
|
| Costs would actually be reduced as can shorten the appeals
| process when a no doubt standard has been met.
|
| Mass murders who don't hide their killings would be one
| example. Costs no extra money to meet the no doubt standard.
| ck425 wrote:
| Can someone explain the logic behind District Attorney's being
| elected? I'm not from the US so don't understand the reasoning.
| Why are certain crimes prosecuted based on decisions of an
| elected official? That just seems obviously highly manipulatable
| to me.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The theory is that democracy allows the people to hold the DA
| accountable to the public good, vs an appointed DA who can use
| their power for political ends and is only accountable to the
| person that appoints them (who they can do favors for).
| klelatti wrote:
| I absolutely abhor the death penalty. I do find this reliance on
| a single rationale to stop the death penalty problematic though:
|
| - For many people I suspect that there is a combination of level
| of proof and severity of crime that would lead them to say the
| risk of erroneous conviction can be ignored.
|
| - Someone will say let's focus on improving the justice system to
| deal with the errors.
|
| I'd rather the burden of justification be the other way: what
| does the death penalty actually achieve, with a high burden of
| proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that as a policy it actually
| benefits society as a whole.
| kazinator wrote:
| The single rationale is perfectly fine.
|
| If we had a magic oracle which supplies us with the absolutely
| correct guilty or not guilty verdict, there would be no problem
| with the death penalty.
|
| > _what does the death penalty actually achieve_
|
| Rids the world of an instance of evil, efficiently and
| permanently.
|
| Vindicates victims.
| greedo wrote:
| Speaking as someone who has experienced a family member's
| murder, the death penalty would in no way "vindicate" anyone.
| kazinator wrote:
| I'm not sure what definition of "vindicate" you're working
| with, but when I use that word (in this specific context),
| it doesn't refer to anything like a complete restitution as
| if nothing had happened, which is obviously impossible.
| greedo wrote:
| I think you should reconsider the use of "vindicate"
| since none of the definitions I can find seem to apply at
| all. And your latest reply doesn't seem to clear up what
| you mean in your usage.
| Gauge_Irrahphe wrote:
| >Rids the world of an instance of evil, efficiently and
| permanently.
|
| That sounds like a motive for murder.
| kazinator wrote:
| For someone acting alone, deciding who and what is evil, it
| could well be. That's why the state and its courts need to
| control that instrument.
| klelatti wrote:
| You're reducing a human being to a single binary
| classification - evil or not evil - an assessment that
| ignores the circumstances of their life, mental state etc at
| a particular point in time.
|
| You're also saying that you're prepared to ignore the wider
| impact that the act of executing that individual has on
| society.
|
| On the apparent grounds that the dead victim is somehow
| vindicated (which I can only interpret as meaning that
| someone else feels that they have been vindicated).
| kazinator wrote:
| > _You 're reducing a human being to a single binary
| classification - evil or not evil_
|
| That is correct.
|
| > _You 're also saying that you're prepared to ignore the
| wider impact that the act of executing that individual has
| on society._
|
| That must specifically not be allowed to cloud our
| judgment. "Society" is word which refers to collection of
| people, the vast majority of whom have no connection to the
| case.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously
| committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to
| separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But
| the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of
| every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece
| of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line
| keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by
| exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough
| space for good to flourish. One and the same human being
| is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a
| totally different human being. At times he is close to
| being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name
| doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole
| lot, good and evil."
|
| -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
| kazinator wrote:
| If you invoke Solzhenitsyn this way in a capital
| punishment debate, it basically amounts to a _tu quoque_
| fallacy.
|
| Suppose I'm evil because I park in handicapped stalls.
|
| That doesn't mean I'm not in a moral position to send
| someone to hell who kidnaps and kills children.
| nefitty wrote:
| Whatever rationalizations people make, I think ultimately,
| a belief that some people are evil is what the death
| penalty hinges on. I don't believe in free will, thus I
| don't believe in moral culpability, this I don't believe in
| evil.
|
| From that vantage point it seems extremely barbaric to me
| to put anyone to death. They had no say in the
| circumstances that led up to who they became. I have
| similar feeling when I think of severely mentally disabled
| people being executed, which a lot of people probably share
| even if they do believe in free will.
| hn8788 wrote:
| If you think there's no free will, then how is it
| barbaric to execute people? No free will means the
| supporters of the death penalty didn't have a say in the
| circumstance that led to them supporting it, so there is
| no moral culpability to thinking some people should be
| executed. It's no more "barbaric" than thinking it's okay
| to kill rats and other pests for the good of society.
| kazinator wrote:
| OK, so you don't believe in "evil", but you believe in
| "barbaric".
|
| I believe that determinism and free will are entirely
| compatible. An algorithm has free will. More complicated
| algorithms have a more nuanced, richer free will. That's
| it.
|
| For instance, a coin-operated machine that gives you a
| bag of potato chips in exchange for a dollar has a form
| of free will. It does that because it wants to. It is
| just not capable of telling itself it wants to do
| anything else; it's a low grade form of free will
| encompassing a tiny number of states.
|
| (Killing evil is basically just terminating a buggy
| algorithm. If you don't like the baggage associated with
| "evil", maybe "defective" or "buggy" is better.)
|
| The question of free will and determinism is made
| complicated by the possibility that a deterministic free
| will (algorithm) operates in a world that isn't
| deterministic. Suppose that your mind is an algorithm
| which will make exactly the same decision for the same
| inputs (including, of course, its own state: that's one
| of the inputs). Even if you get your mind to be in
| exactly the same state as when a certain decision had
| been made, you also need the world to be in exactly the
| same state. Only then is the algorithmic mind guaranteed
| to think the same thing and make the decision.
|
| The world has so many states, and so does the mind, that
| the question of whether you are algorithmic or not makes
| practically no difference. Even if you are a FSM, your
| state space is so large, you will never be in the same
| state twice -- just due to the fact alone that you have
| life long memories that are are still accumulating, for
| one thing. And if you could rewind exactly a previous
| state, the surrounding world will not; and that has an
| even vaster state space.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This is why we leave judging to the judicial system, and
| don't hand it over to developers who will try to treat
| life or death decisions as an undergraduate algorithm
| design exercise.
| kazinator wrote:
| Right, so we instead hand matters over to people who do
| things like hide phone call records that would prove that
| someone should not be put on death row.
| [deleted]
| ludocode wrote:
| I agree. Some of the most violent criminals can't ever be re-
| integrated into society, so the only alternative is life
| imprisonment. I've seen many arguments that this is preferable
| to the death penalty because "We will accidentally execute some
| innocents", as Paul Graham's here, as well as "It costs more to
| execute someone due to the higher standard of proof required".
|
| In all such cases the corollary is "We can accept a lower
| standard of proof because we're not _actually_ killing them. We
| 're just locking them in a room forever and waiting until they
| die." I don't honestly see much difference between these
| outcomes. Why is one so morally superior to the other?
|
| There are much better arguments against the death penalty. One
| is that if the death penalty exists, it's much easier for the
| state to execute political dissidents. If the death penalty is
| abolished (and there are strong controls on extra-judicial
| killings, like police murdering civilians during arrests), it's
| much more difficult for the state to silence critics. Even if
| they are locked away in jail forever, they will still have a
| voice.
|
| Another good argument is that if the death penalty is a
| possibility it gives criminals nothing to lose which makes it
| more dangerous to apprehend them. If you want your police to be
| able to more peacefully arrest criminals, it makes sense to
| abolish the death penalty.
| Lukeas14 wrote:
| I agree that we shouldn't accept a lower standard of proof.
| However, life in prison isn't absolute in the same the death
| penalty is. There's always a small chance of the evidence
| changing and the justice system being able to rectify the
| mistake. There have been several convictions overturned
| because witnesses changed their story or were later found to
| be not credible, sometimes decades later. Once the death
| penalty is carried out, there's no going back.
| lreeves wrote:
| >I don't honestly see much difference between these outcomes.
| Why is one so morally superior to the other?
|
| One of them gives you your remaining lifetime for evidence to
| be found or overturned; one of them doesn't.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| > Some of the most violent criminals can't ever be re-
| integrated into society, so the only alternative is life
| imprisonment.
|
| I have to question this. Determining whether someone can be
| reintegrated into society cannot be determined during the
| sentencing process. I would rather prefer a Norway-like
| system where the max imprisonment time at the start is 21
| years. At the end of that initial time, 5 more years can be
| added on if the prisoner has not reformed. The process
| repeats until the prisoner is released or dies. A small
| percentage of people will still die in prison, but I wager
| that that percentage will be less than the percentage of life
| imprisonment sentences currently.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I struggle with arguments that criminals are calculating
| people who make decisions in their best interests. There are
| surely exceptions (say pickpockets or confidence tricksters)
| but I don't believe that things like typical sentencing have
| an effect on the impulsive decision making of a typical
| criminal (and I think policy should be targeted much more
| towards the typical criminal than the atypical one)
| tremon wrote:
| Maybe going against the grain here, but I'm not on principle
| opposed to the death penalty. There's lots of strong practical
| arguments to make, like the fallibility of the court system,
| but yes, I do believe that there are some crimes (of mass
| bodily harm) for a which a state could rightfully determine to
| forfeit someone's right to live. My sole moral objection to the
| death penalty is that no one should have "end someone's life"
| as his job description.
|
| However, my version of the world in which the death penalty
| would be admissible is a lot different from what we have now.
| In that version, a death sentence would never be executed on
| first conviction; the verdict would contain a suspended death
| sentence, more or less. After serving time, a criminal could be
| put to death only when convicted a second time for a similar
| offense. I'd also want to see the burden of proof reversed for
| that punishment: not only must the crime be proven in court
| (not by plea), but the government must show it provided
| adequate support and rehabilitation to avoid relapse.
|
| That would be the only world in which I would defend the use of
| capital punishment. I don't think I'll ever see it happen.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| >what does the death penalty actually achieve, with a high
| burden of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that as a policy it
| actually benefits society as a whole.
|
| I think the death penalty does deter people from committing
| certain crimes. But many many people don't. (for the record, I
| also believe in abolishing the death penalty where I live where
| many innocent people fall victim to it).
|
| The problem is this isn't something you can really prove with
| scientific evidence. You can't do a double blind trial in
| separate societies with and without the death penalty.
|
| Not every social policy can be proven before it is enacted.
| Life just doesn't work that way. Evidence isn't always
| available for every possible option.
| [deleted]
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _I 'd rather the burden of justification be the other way:
| what does the death penalty actually achieve, with a high
| burden of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that as a policy it
| actually benefits society as a whole._
|
| In the past: societal self-defence.
|
| Older prisons were not as secure, and so the risk of dangerous
| people escaping was high(er). If they got out they could do
| more harm to innocent people. This is less of an issue in
| modern developed countries which have pretty secure buildings
| now, especially for those classified as the most dangerous.
|
| This may be less true in other countries where prison you may
| hear about prison breaks, with or without external help:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazni_prison_escape
|
| * https://globalnews.ca/news/7740153/nigerian-inmates-freed-
| at...
|
| If you think there's little/no chance of reform, then keeping
| someone around that will likely strike again is asking for
| trouble.
|
| See also David Oderberg's book _Applied Ethics_.
| whatever1 wrote:
| From a practical aspect a lot of benefits for death penalties:
| 1) Low cost. No need for jails and their associated costs 2)
| Great scaling. You can kill as many as you want, but you cannot
| build a jail every day 3) Safe. People don't come back to
| repeat their mistakes. 4) It's the only language that many
| criminals speak and understand.
|
| The downsides are of a moral nature and twofold:
|
| 1) We should not punish innocent people. As societies we
| consider this as a huge and irrecoverable loss (What if we
| executed Einstein). 2) The state should not have the right to
| take the lives of its citizens. (Literally numerous examples
| from history why this can end up really bad)
| azemetre wrote:
| The death penalty is extremely expensive ($1.26 million is
| the median [1]) and not low costs at all, where do you find
| it being cheap? I'm assuming you're referring to the United
| States?
|
| [1] https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-
| penalt....
| whatever1 wrote:
| Can be done for free if you are a good demagogue.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_drug_war#Early_m
| o...
| gwd wrote:
| If the US us worried about cost, maybe they could stop
| throwing people in jail for non-violent drug charges --
| particularly marijuana? That would reduce our prison cost a
| heck of a lot more than executing murderers, even if
| execution _was_ much cheaper than lifetime imprisonment
| (which as others have pointed out, it 's almost certainly
| not).
| mrweasel wrote:
| As much as I dislike the idea of a government killing someone
| for a crime, the cost and potential elimination of future
| trouble with an individual is tempting.
|
| Assuming that we absolutely know that someone is guilt
| (ignoring how that would happen), it doesn't need to take
| years and millions of dollars to simply shoot someone.
|
| Then there are the people who are not only a financial burden
| on society, they are actively making it worse, much worse.
| Sometimes we just sit back an wonder why even spend resources
| keep this person terrible person imprisoned for decades.
| People who have killed, raped or tortured and been in and out
| of jail multiple times, no we really need to keep them
| around?
|
| Regardless of how much we may hate the idea of the death
| penalty, there is some cold, brutal logic to simply shooting
| someone.
| gnulinux wrote:
| > Sometimes we just sit back an wonder why even spend
| resources keep this person terrible person imprisoned for
| decades.
|
| Because they're a human. Humans are capable of change. And
| killing a human "because it's expensive" is a barbaric
| mindset.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| > Assuming that we absolutely know that someone is guilt
| (ignoring how that would happen), it doesn't need to take
| years and millions of dollars to simply shoot someone.
|
| The years and the millions of dollars are spent
| establishing your premise.
| qwytw wrote:
| Is there there, though? It might justify someone's
| perverted sense of justice but that's about it. There are
| many other people who might be considering not contributing
| anything to the society, but they haven't yet done anything
| egregious enough to warrant a death penalty, following this
| logic it's only logical to "just shot" them as well.
| spawarotti wrote:
| I've heard the "1) Low Cost" is false. [1]. Mainly because it
| takes time and effort to actually execute someone, to give
| plenty of time to find evidence exonerating them. That delay
| and proceedings end up being way more expensive than just
| letting them live.
|
| Re 2): Again from [1], I've heard executions are actually
| quite expensive. Thus, it doesn't scale well.
|
| Re 3): It doesn't make me feel safe if somebody can frame me
| and get me killed. It makes me feel safer knowing I have time
| to prove my innocence.
|
| Re 4): I am very skeptical of this claim. Any solid evidence
| for this being true? Anecdotal evidence shows the opposite.
| Most criminals don't have good long-term thinking skills, so
| they won't recognize the tradeoff between 40 years in prison
| and death, and use that to not commit a crime.
|
| [1] John Oliver on death penalty:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kye2oX-b39E
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Arguably the USA should be granting all those same levels
| of appeal to someone NOT sentenced to death too.
|
| If 4% on death row are innocent, despite all the extra
| appeals and proceedings we grant them, how many people
| serving life are innocent?
|
| The idea that America is imprisoning innocents left and
| right but it's fine because at least they're not being
| executed is twisted to me. I would marginally prefer being
| alive to being imprisoned for life, but the latter is
| pretty terrible too.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'm anti-death-penalty because I like small government.
| Unfortunately, almost everyone who says they like small
| government likes the death penalty. Weird company to keep.
| raldi wrote:
| If this had been written by anyone but pg, the headline would've
| been changed to "A Reason to End the Death Penalty" :D
| dang wrote:
| If we did that, commenters would complain "yet again, the HN
| moderators completely change the meaning of a title with their
| arbitrary and aggressive editing. It's infuriating." And in
| this case they'd be right, because in this case the definite
| article and the word "real" are essential--the article's
| argument doesn't really exist without them.
| raldi wrote:
| I know you can't please everyone. Hope you didn't mind the
| ribbing. ;)
| teddyh wrote:
| I think that you got that backwards. What 'raldi' was trying
| to say that it's _good_ that you didn't edit the title, but
| implied that it's sad that it was merely because it was pg
| who wrote the post that the title was left unaltered.
| dang wrote:
| I bow in apology to raldi.
| twodave wrote:
| Is there a point where it becomes necessary to end the life of
| another person?
|
| Maybe. Maybe if the person is obviously committed to harming
| others and refuses all attempts at reform. How do you know when
| someone is past helping? Anyway, there just aren't very many
| people who match this description.
|
| As a Christian against the death penalty I find myself often in a
| very unexpected minority. Many Christians I know and grew up
| around are very pro-death-penalty, to the point of being
| religious about it. But even Jesus declined to carry out capital
| punishment when given the opportunity to (and if anyone had the
| right, it would be him).
| sneak wrote:
| > _Is there a point where it becomes necessary to end the life
| of another person? Maybe. Maybe if the person is obviously
| committed to harming others and refuses all attempts at
| reform._
|
| Even in that instance, I can't imagine it ever being
| _necessary_ to end their life. We have more than sufficient
| technology and resources to sustain such a hopeless case in a
| state in which they, and everyone else, are safe from harm.
|
| Taking a life simply because it's inconvenient to go to the
| lengths to secure someone from harming others for the short
| time that is a natural human lifespan is... befuddling. It's
| such a simple and tiny expense in the grand scheme of things,
| and such a deep and dark cliff off which to jump to save a few
| pennies.
| steve76 wrote:
| Dear Paul Graham: You're rich! You live far far away from the
| consequences of your activism. I don't!
|
| House the murderers you release on me, in your own home, and then
| we'll talk.
|
| PS: IT'S A NIGHTMARE
| Zababa wrote:
| > But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about
| whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to
| kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row
| are innocent.
|
| I think we should also quantify how many people are victims of
| recidivism. You could make the exact same argument but instead of
| protecting innocent people wrongly on the death row , you would
| argue to protect innocent people victims of recidivists
| murderers.
|
| I've found a bit of data [0] from an article [1] which has 3
| homicide among 92 paroled homicide offenders. That's a bit more
| than 3% which is not far from 4%. The data here is of "lower
| quality" (there's less people on a shorter timeframe) than the
| one quoted in the article [2]. However, that same article
| estimates a 4.1% false conviction rate but adds:
|
| > The most charged question in this area is different: How many
| innocent defendants have been put to death (6)? We cannot
| estimate that number directly but we believe it is comparatively
| low. If the rate were the same as our estimate for false death
| sentences, the number of innocents executed in the United States
| in the past 35 y would be more than 50 (20). We do not believe
| that has happened.
|
| So the article doesnt' support "at least 4% of people on the
| death row are innocent".
|
| [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Types-of-Recidivism-
| Amon...
|
| [1]:
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259809249_Criminal_...
|
| [2]: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7230
| bena wrote:
| The problem with the death penalty is that it's a game that
| allows for no mistakes. Because the penalty is final, you can
| never apply that penalty to the wrong people.
|
| You need to be 100% sure that you are about to execute the right
| person for the right reason every single time.
|
| And there are very few cases where we can be that sure of
| something.
| wideareanetwork wrote:
| I think no other justification is needed to end the death penalty
| than "it's inhuman and barbaric".
|
| Even discussing other factors arguments and considerations
| dilutes the core point that's it's straight up wrong unethical
| and inhuman to murder others in the name of the law.
|
| Paul Graham has a valid point, but if you say "it's wrong cause
| it's inaccurate", implies it's right if it's accurate. And it's
| not... the death penalty is wrong no matter be it accurate or
| inaccurate.
| harshreality wrote:
| Improper or mistaken convictions, where reasonable oversight
| would have detected the error, are barbaric. If you want
| barbarism, you can find plenty in the way the criminal justice
| system is run for _all_ offenders.
|
| Prison is inhumane and barbaric, and has the opposite of the
| intended effect most of the time. Many ex-cons have become
| hardened criminals through their time on the inside, and even
| for those who haven't and want to reintegrate productively, the
| outside world does its best to prevent reintegration.
|
| How many innocent people are killed in prison, not by the
| state, or have their lives ruined? You can say as long as
| they're alive there's hope they'll achieve something and be
| happy, but statistically those prospects are dimmer every year
| they spend inside.
|
| The only remaining good thing prison does is keep bad people
| from causing problems in society for some number of years.
| Which is the same thing the death penalty does.
|
| I don't know if the most productive way to use political
| capital to reform the criminal justice system is to abolish the
| death penalty. Unjustified state-sanctioned death might be
| terrible, but so are things like the drug war which probably do
| more aggregate harm. In an ideal world we'd get rid of prisons
| somehow, too.
|
| In addition to ending the drug war and trying to fix
| neighborhoods that have been broken by it, fixing misaligned
| incentives for prosecution and law enforcement to prosecute
| cases would have a massive impact, far greater than any
| squabbles about the death penalty. Too often the prosecutors
| and law enforcement have desire to convict someone, and the
| defendant is the best chance they have, so they go ahead. More
| neutrality has to be introduced somehow. Judges being allowed
| to direct questions to witnesses might be a place to start.
| ufo wrote:
| The alternative also being barbaric doesn't make the death
| penalty less barbaric.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I would rather be killed than spend even 20 years in
| prison. Technically I might live another 20 years, but I
| would be very near EOL at that age. Could I get the choice?
| ufo wrote:
| If the only argument in favor of the death penalty is
| that the prison system is inhumane, to the point that
| someone would rather die than go through it, the answer
| to that should be to make the prison system more humane.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Death isn't categorically inhumane. There are many
| circumstances in life that I would choose death over
| survival. It's barbaric for you to force me, against my
| will, to keep going through such things.
| [deleted]
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| There are better prison systems in the world than the
| barbaric ones in America.
| DiffEq wrote:
| In-human; what does this mean? It has been a human condition
| throughout all ages to kill each other. So by basic observation
| one could easily conclude it is human to kill each other.
| Fortunately what has developed over the ages is a framework or
| legal system for reasons to do so as apposed to just the whim
| of one individual.
| tompccs wrote:
| I don't mean to pick on you specifically, but this sort of
| remark is why the left and intellectuals more widely fail at
| winning politically. Rather than use arguments that are
| amenable even to people who disagree on the fundamentals, you
| would rather retain the moral high-ground by refusing even to
| debate on their terms, thereby failing to actually influence
| policy (in this case a matter of life and death).
|
| If the death penalty debate were framed more around "innocent
| people get killed" and less around more nebulous value-
| judgement based arguments (which, though valid, divide pretty
| neatly along partisan and class lines), perhaps the death
| penalty in the US would have gone long ago.
| [deleted]
| wideareanetwork wrote:
| I'm not trying to win an argument, just stating what I
| believe.
| escape_goat wrote:
| That's fair enough, but he's pointing out the consequences
| of your beliefs. The crux of the objection is that you
| position yourself in opposition to the discussion of any
| other justification for abolishing the death penalty; it is
| not that the death penalty must be abolished, but that it
| must be abolished for a specific correct reason. This
| presents a relationship between the death penalty and your
| beliefs where it seems to your audience that you wish to
| abolish the death penalty not due to any urgency regarding
| its consequences, but because of your insistence on
| imposing your will on others.
| tompccs wrote:
| > Even discussing other factors arguments and
| considerations dilutes the core point...
|
| Fair enough, I understand that those are your beliefs (they
| are mine too) but you'd be surprised how poorly they hold
| up in the real world against the testimonies of victims of
| some truly horrific crimes.
|
| But from the sound of it you would prefer to weaken the
| case for abolishing the death penalty for the sake of
| making a more general point around the sanctity of life
| that, in the long run, will achieve...what exactly?
| reedf1 wrote:
| An argument is what it will boil down to because there will
| be a group of people who don't believe that it is "inhuman
| and barbaric". For the record - I agree with you, but I
| also recognize there are people who do not agree with us.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| That means you are more interested in stating what you
| believe than winning an argument that will save innocent
| lives?
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's not really what "justification" is. I go through
| life assuming that only my mother and other loved ones care
| what I believe as such. Other people care about the
| arguments that I can make, with a bonus if I can make them
| using premises that they already accept.
| tchalla wrote:
| Let's assume the "innocent people get killed" argument
| abolishes death penalty today. What are the second-order
| effects of that argument which can be detrimental to the
| society that you can think of?
| fighterpilot wrote:
| I'm curious, what do you think those would be?
| mattmanser wrote:
| Well, none, we have plenty of evidence that there's none.
| Almost all the countries that have implemented it have
| lower homicide rates than the US. Usually significantly
| lower.
|
| Obviously there's probably also various other reasons for
| that too, like they usually also have heavily restricted
| gun ownership, but there's certainly no evidence that
| abolishing the death penalty has adverse effects.
| olivierduval wrote:
| Actually, the counter-argument is "innocent people get
| killed by already convincted murderer that went out of
| jail"...
|
| ECONOMICS: Another counter-argument is "the society pay for
| the whole life of the jailed murderer, so it's a cost paid
| by the society for something that broke society laws"
|
| And then another argument is "a murderer may prefer to be
| killed than to be kept in jail for the rest of his life".
|
| Actually, there's a whole philosophical debate around all
| this: what is the role of the sanction ? Is it revenge from
| breaking society laws ? Is it revenge from the victim ? Can
| someone that broke society laws (even in murder case) be
| changed by the jail time and come back to the society as a
| good citizen or are some crimes the mark that this people
| are forever lost to the society ?
|
| I'm against the death penalty. I'm french so we don't have
| it since 1980. And we don't really have "forever jail":
| it's 20 years I think and can even be shortened if prisoner
| show in jail that he's ready to come back to society
| (except if it would be a trouble for the society). As a
| consequence, there's from time to time a convicted
| criminal, out of jail after a reduced time, that kill/rape
| someone again. And each time, there's a public discussion
| about this...
| orwin wrote:
| > And we don't really have "forever jail": it's 20 years
| I think and can even be shortened if prisoner show in
| jail that he's ready to come back to society (except if
| it would be a trouble for the society).
|
| 20 year is the maximum required in case of non-
| premeditated murder (or manslaughter on minor i think).
|
| In some cases (murder of a minor, group manslaughter of a
| state agent, premeditated murder of a state agent and one
| other case i can't remember), the criminal can be given
| "incompressible" perpetuity. After a minimum of 30 year,
| on a judge decision (often because the murderer is dying
| or very, very old), the "incompressible" part can get
| shafted.
|
| Also death penalty is expensive. More than keeping
| prisonners locked up.
| rswail wrote:
| This "debate" has been over in all other nations that the US
| likes to be compared for years.
|
| It is similar to the "tough on crime" incarceration "debate"
| in the US, where perverse incentives and political expediency
| has led to the US being the highest-per-capita incarcerator
| in the world.
|
| Framing the death penalty debate around "innocent people get
| killed" will not change the partisan/class perceptions.
|
| The US criminal justice system requires root-and-branch
| reform, starting with issues around policing, cash bail,
| school-to-prison pipelines, and unfair drug and "victimless"
| crimes.
|
| Australia has been going through a similar debate and is at a
| similar point, without the death penalty, but dealing with
| the systemic racism and other class related issues.
| xdennis wrote:
| Just because it's banned doesn't mean the debate is over: h
| ttps://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BytxHbenQyQ/V_O2hw4mUXI/AAAAAAAA8
| ...
|
| Some western countries have respectably high numbers:
| France 50%, UK 48%, Holland 42%.
|
| Not that the USA wants to be compared to us, but here in
| Romania it's at 91% and we still don't have it. (I suspect
| that romantic notions of Vlad the Impaler's time has
| something to do with the percentage.)
| adrian_b wrote:
| I suspect that the very high percentage from Romania has
| much less to do with Vlad the Impaler than with the fact
| that there are still a large number of people alive who
| remember the unusual circumstances in which the death
| penalty was abolished in Romania.
|
| In Romania, the death penalty was not abolished by any
| democratic institution and that action was not preceded
| by any public debate.
|
| The gang who seized power in 1989 in Romania abolished
| the death penalty immediately after killing the dictator
| Ceausescu to remove the competition, because absolutely
| everybody expected that many other people who had
| important positions in the Communist must be also
| executed immediately, because only that would have been
| consistent with the messages spread by the new power in
| the previous days.
|
| However, the people who had seized the power could not
| kill any other from the Communist leadership, because
| those were their friends, family or accomplices, so they
| used the surprise trick of promptly abolishing the death
| penalty.
|
| This unexpected action was the moment when many people
| woke up from the euphoria after the supposed fall of the
| Communism and they began to suspect that the people
| composing the new power might not be who they claim to
| be, but it was already too late.
|
| The immediate abolition of the death penalty in Romania
| had its desired effect, of transforming the former
| powerful communists into rich capitalists owning what had
| previously been called "the wealth belonging to all the
| people", so it is still strongly resented by many who
| remember those events.
|
| So Romania is a very special case, which explains the
| unusually high percentage of support for the death
| penalty.
| jcims wrote:
| >Framing the death penalty debate around "innocent people
| get killed" will not change the partisan/class perceptions.
|
| I don't agree. All of these moral castigations about it
| being 'inhumane' or 'barbaric' don't strike me as rational
| or compelling in the least. I think the idea is humane in
| the context of those impacted by the crimes in question and
| I don't see how putting a person in a box for the remainder
| of their life is qualitatively any less barbaric.
|
| I don't know where pg lands politically but I'd say I'm
| probably right of center on the American spectrum and for
| me there are only two persuasive arguments that we should
| abolish the death penalty. One is that we make mistakes in
| who gets it, per TFA, and the other is that it's difficult
| to concretely describe the qualifications of who should get
| it, risking expansion at the whim of the populace. In other
| words I absolutely believe there are just executions, I'm
| just not entirely sure we can create a system to do it
| justly.
| qwytw wrote:
| How about that it's significantly more expensive on
| average to execute a prisoner (due to the extensive
| appeal processes) than to imprison him for life? I would
| assume that should be a very compelling argument in
| favour of abolishing the death penalty for somebody who
| is "right of center".
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > In other words I absolutely believe there are just
| executions
|
| I think that is the GP,s point: the real problem is to
| convince you otherwise.
| ectopod wrote:
| Why? If he (or she) believes or can be convinced that the
| death penalty should be abolished, why do you care if
| they also believe that some of the executions that
| already happened were just?
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| 1) because it implies that one day they might be it
| favour of bringing them back with the right technology
| etc
|
| 2) because you want to convince people of important moral
| principles. I don't want you to not beat your wife
| because you'll get caught, but because it's inherently
| wrong.
| jcims wrote:
| Certainly fodder for ongoing discussion but I think it's
| important to prioritize goals.
|
| Alignment on public policy decisions allows for more
| degrees of freedom in underlying philosophical
| differences than attempts to align on the philosophical
| primitives themselves. It also achieves an immediate
| goal.
|
| Plus if you are engaging in conversation in a good faith
| attempt to understand and be understood, you have to
| allow for the case that your views are moderated or
| changed as well.
|
| (The distance you feel from that right now is
| approximately the same I feel in the opposite direction.)
| jcims wrote:
| Exactly.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| I don't know. Even the constitution acknowledges the
| possibility of truths that are 'self-evident'.
|
| I remember when the Guantanamo torture scandals emerged in
| the 2000s, how various political actors attempted to say
| 'Let's not get hot under the collar about this - let's put
| it on the table and talk it through.'
|
| For me, there are some things that just don't warrant
| debate, and encompass such deep-seated truths about
| humanity that putting them up for debate is a repulsive and
| disingenuous act, as outlined in 'A Modest Proposal' . I
| agree with the parent poster that this is one of those
| cases.
|
| EDIT: This was supposed to be a response to the parent
| comment of the one it got attached to (for some reason).
| rmcpherson wrote:
| "We hold these truths to be self evident..." is from the
| Declaration of Independence. It does not appear in the
| Constitution.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Doesn't matter. The Supreme Court's interpretation of the
| Constitution is not limited to the words of the document.
| The Constitution itself is derived from a history of law,
| letters, and intent that predate the very concept of the
| United States.
| lurquer wrote:
| > For me, there are some things that just don't warrant
| debate, and encompass such deep-seated truths about
| humanity that putting them up for debate is a repulsive
| and disingenuous act,
|
| The authors of the Declaration of Independence would
| perhaps agree.
|
| But, keep in mind that stance -- as they will knew --
| would result in the 'disagreement' being resolved by
| force and war.
|
| Consequently, it's wise to really give some thought to
| whether an issue is 'self-evident.' I personally do not
| think capital punishment is such an issue; that is, I
| acknowledge there are good arguments on both sides.
|
| (Are there good arguments on both sides regarding whether
| some people -- like King George -- are inherently and
| divinely superior to others by virtue of their lineage?
| That's a different matter... I would have fallen into the
| 'self-evidently' absurd camp on that one.)
| mattmanser wrote:
| It isn't really over, even now it pops its head up now and
| again. There's probably more people who believe in it than
| you realize.
|
| For example in the UK 58% of people believe that the death
| penalty should be allowed for some crimes (e.g. terrorist
| attacks). Only 32% oppose it (presumably with 10%
| undecided):
|
| https://yougov.co.uk/topics/legal/articles-
| reports/2019/10/0...
|
| So far from being the majority view, often anti-death
| penalty stance is the minority view but the political elite
| suppress it.
|
| Let that really sink in, most of the comments here are very
| wrong in thinking the debate is over, with twice as many of
| the public still supporting it in a country where it's been
| abolished for over 50 years. Always remember to fight
| against capital punishment, the deal is not done.
|
| I believe they do this as they understand the nuance better
| and realize that overall it causes more problems than it
| solves, so don't want to open that can of worms once it's
| shut. Looking back in history there's also significant
| political fallout every time someone is found innocent
| after their execution. Some hard-right politicians will
| band it around for easy points with their base, plus
| obviously the wider public too for more extreme crimes.
| bjourne wrote:
| Not disagreeing with your stats, but it seems that the
| long-term trend is decreasing support for the death
| penalty in the UK: https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media-
| centre/archived-press-rel...
| im3w1l wrote:
| I could believe that there is a minority that is strongly
| opposed and a majority that weakly supports it. So that
| if you weigh it by passion, net sentiment is against it.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Very much agreed. The left and intellectuals have won the
| debate in most (all?) of the west and the US policies are
| widely considered barbaric, inhumane and corrupt. The
| current state of affairs in the US is unfortunately a
| testament to the US society.
|
| Having said that, the US is quite a specific case and the
| truth is that the current approach of the left doesn't seem
| to work there. Progress is being made, but as an outsider,
| there seems to be too much partisanship on both sides. Too
| much us versus them. There is as much derogatory and
| hostile attitude in the left leaning forums as the right
| leaning ones, with a small sliver of moderates who get lost
| in the noise.
|
| I can't claim to have a solution to this. The US seems to
| be a feudal society at this point, where a large portion of
| the serfs are actively undermining efforts to lift them
| from their serfdom, and a large portion of the liberators
| consider the serfs uneducated peasants who refuse to accept
| what's good for them. They are both led by a political
| elite whose incentives are to maintain (even entrench) the
| status quo because it gives them an easily manipulated
| voter base and a clear enemy to rally against.
| viklove wrote:
| The only flaw I see in your analysis is that you seem to
| believe Europe is better off in any way. Feudalism is
| making a resurgence all over the west.
| btilly wrote:
| _The US criminal justice system requires root-and-branch
| reform, starting with issues around policing, cash bail,
| school-to-prison pipelines, and unfair drug and
| "victimless" crimes._
|
| I'd put our abusive plea bargaining system in there.
|
| Sadly the rest of the world is moving towards that bad
| idea, rather than away. :-(
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > you would rather retain the moral high-ground by refusing
| even to debate on their terms
|
| Everyone has a moral high-ground that isn't debatable.
|
| The right does this as well for it's issues such as abortion.
|
| Left or Right, everyone thinks there is some moral high
| ground that's not debatable. Everyone has some line that they
| don't think should be crossed.
| mettamage wrote:
| Sure, from a persuasion point of view I agree. But from a
| "trying to understand another human" point of view, I'd
| recommend you to read the Wikipedia page on ethics [1]. My
| own education on the topic: a course in college (as a
| business student) and watching some of the Harvard lectures
| on ethics [0]. IMO ethics courses teaches people to gain a
| more fine-grained vocabulary on explaining their own
| positions and understanding other's positions.
|
| GP clearly uses a deontological line of thinking on this
| matter. Something that GP considers to be "inhuman and
| barbaric" invokes a line of thinking in where he/she believes
| one ought to not do a certain action, because it simply _is_
| wrong.
|
| I'm not the best at explaining deontological ethics, nor are
| the people who think like this. My point is: a lot of thought
| has gone into the types of statements that GP makes, and IMO
| it's worth thinking about.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics
| ehnto wrote:
| The trap you are both falling into is the thought that
| political discussions centre around trying to understand
| the other persons point of view. It is almost always the
| other way around, one person trying to persuade an
| unwilling party that they are wrong. So as the poster said,
| as right as you are, you would still lose the political
| argument if that was how you tried to argue for your view.
|
| You can be correct all day long and change nothing, or you
| can be persuasive and meet them in their thought bubble to
| coerce them toward aligning with your views. You can't just
| pop their world view with statements of fact, because they
| may very well think your fact is wrong. In this case not
| everyone believes the death penalty is immoral, so if your
| only argument is "the death penalty is immoral" you will
| change nothing.
| r00fus wrote:
| Persuasion in the current bipolar political environment
| is way overrated.
|
| You're not going to persuade a Q follower or BLM
| protester about the opposing viewpoint.
|
| Polemics in this realm are far more effective.
| true_religion wrote:
| It's all good and well to try and persuade someone, but
| like the GP sometimes I like to simply state my
| ideological viewpoint. The problem with narrowly arguing
| based on someone else's ideals, is that any agreement
| isn't a true meeting of the minds.
|
| For example people, once tried to end the deal then
| penalty by talking about to pain involved in hanging.
| Proponents agreed and eventually came up with the
| electric chair, then lethal injection. No pain, no
| problem right?
|
| If we talk about innocents killed, proponents will add
| stricter guidelines, and allow for more appeals, or even
| say that the crime must have been videotaped in front of
| a crowd of witnesses. We might end up with a death
| penalty that applies to the likes of Derek Chauvin alone,
| but it'll still be a death penalty.
| snakeboy wrote:
| That's called a compromise, right? Reducing the pain
| involved and increasing the burden of proof required are
| both concrete, positive reforms, even if it doesn't
| completely resolve the issue.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Let's just kill _fewer_ innocent people and it 's fine
| right? Why won't you compromise with us?!
| snakeboy wrote:
| You can laugh all you want, but killing fewer innocent
| people is in fact a good thing. If you can't see the
| value in that, then politics is not for you :)
|
| I think we should celebrate that kind of incremental
| progress so long as it's not progress towards some kind
| of inescapable local minimum. And even in that case, it
| just becomes more complicated, not obviously wrong
| either.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Reducing the number of innocent deaths is an improvement.
| It doesn't feel like it's worth patting yourself on the
| back over reducing the number of unnecessary deaths cause
| when the process itself should be eliminated. I reject
| the idea that "politics" means negotiating over how much
| completely unnecessary human suffering is acceptable
| because we have to compromise with the people who want
| humans to suffer for one reason or another. Not every
| issue has two sides. Sometimes people and ideas and
| practices are simply wrong.
| snakeboy wrote:
| > Sometimes people and ideas and practices are simply
| wrong.
|
| Of course, and I agree with you on this particular issue.
| All I mean is that if we can act today to chip away at
| the problem rather than just talking about the ideals,
| that's good, and in a democracy, that's what we accept as
| we work towards the ideal.
|
| > It doesn't feel like it's worth patting yourself on the
| back over reducing the number of unnecessary deaths cause
| when the process itself should be eliminated.
|
| Life's too short, I'm happy to celebrate progress. I'm
| proud to see the end of it in my home state of Virginia
| this year, even if it's not nationally outlawed.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| "You're a bad person if you disagree with me" is a great
| way to never get what you want. It's not _simply_ stating
| your position, it 's anti-persuasion whether you want it
| to be or not.
| philwelch wrote:
| That's kind of the point.
|
| Saying "you're a bad person if you disagree with me"
| draws a line in the sand that precludes civil
| disagreement and picks a fight. Most people like to avoid
| conflict, and any possible counterargument to "you're a
| bad person" inevitably comes across as defensive.
|
| In other words, the tactic is to bully the opposition
| into shutting up. And it works very well.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Sounds like we're in agreement that it's a tactic to shut
| the opposition up while ensuring we keep killing people
| indefinitely.
| ehnto wrote:
| I do agree with you, I think we're also kind of
| discussing two separate points. Of course just stating
| how you truly feel is perfectly fine, I don't disagree
| with that at all. A meeting of the minds as you put it
| requires people are candid, agreement and compromise
| isn't really required for that kind of discussion.
|
| Additionally we're also discussing whether or not that
| approach can be effective at bringing in good policy, and
| I think that's often not the case. A hard stance with a
| binary argument is just very difficult to work with, you
| end up giving the opponent no opportunity to compromise
| and so they don't, you end up with no policy being
| written and things don't change.
|
| Policy making is very intentionally an attempt to make a
| vast array of different views from across a nation
| coalesce into something that can be made into law, so it
| requires compromise.
| pydry wrote:
| I don't think anybody really supports/opposes the death
| penalty because of a rational analysis of facts and
| statistics. It's usually an emotive decision - the notion
| that "revenge must be taken" or that "life is sacrosanct".
| These are pretty core parts of people's identity and it is
| hard for them to let go.
|
| Either way, stories (e.g. miscarriages of justice by an
| uncaring state) are likely a more effective way to convince
| in this controversy, not statistics:
|
| https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/02/23/why-is-it-so-hard-to-
| pe...
| ufo wrote:
| Framing this as a left vs right issue is an USA-centric way
| to frame the question. Consider how the US is basically the
| only country in the american continent that still goes ahead
| with capital punishment. Most other countries in the
| continent, from all kinds of political orientations, have
| either banned capital punishment outright or haven't executed
| anyone in more than a decade.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| Even in the US, "left vs right" on the death penalty is an
| oversimplification. A pretty good summary can be found
| here: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-
| research/religious-st... ... Anecdotally, as a religious
| person, I'd say that most Catholics I know either oppose
| the death penalty or would want it to be much more limited
| than it is now.
| klyrs wrote:
| I once had a surreal conversation with a Jehovah's
| Witness priest who was proselytizing on my campus. It was
| around the time of the Iraq war, and he opened with
| something like "if killing is wrong, why do we have the
| death penalty." I managed to use Saddam Hussein's alleged
| human rights violations as a rhetorical lever to justify
| the killing of one to prevent the killing of many. As a
| supporter of neither the death penalty nor the war on
| Iraq, I've never walked away from a victory with so much
| regret
| Y_Y wrote:
| Referring to "the American continent" is a very South
| American thing to do. I think in the US they consider
| themselves to be sharing a continent with just Mexico and
| Canada.
|
| Furthermore I think you don't go far enough. Around the
| world, abolishing the death penalty seems to be a mark of
| high development, apart from Japan (and arguably China and
| India) there aren't any highly developed nations that are
| still killing people.
| [deleted]
| qwytw wrote:
| Stretching the definition of "high development" here a
| bit (but since you're considering China and India)
| Belarus still has the death penalty (they were executing
| at least 1 almost every year until 2020).
| antman wrote:
| Society, businesses and families fail when there is no ground
| truth, right or wrong, historical knowledge and are based on
| the most recent FUD or feelgoodery.
|
| Arguments and negotiations need to have common grounds on how
| thing are interpreted. Else the most immoral person
| flourishes.
|
| Me following this US debate from the other side of the world
| I mostly see it framed as "the innocent people getting
| killed" and not the "immoral to kill" debate as per this
| article. I don's see it getting anywhere.
| watwut wrote:
| The left is getting more votes and it seems like leftist
| ideas do well in polls. So when it comes to ability to
| convince people about issues, they actually do well.
|
| Also, I don't really see equivalent expectation routinely
| placed on right - they are not expected to proactively make
| compromises on their own heads before they even state
| position.
| Blumfid wrote:
| I don't want to kill someone. I don't know if or why a person
| became a murderer.
|
| It could be their upbringing which should be the
| responsibility of the society and clearly the society failed.
|
| It could be a medical issue. A biological one.
|
| It could be that the murderer did nothing wrong in their
| worldview.
|
| We have to understand this as a society. We have to teach it
| if people don't understand it.
| samatman wrote:
| That's fine, just understand that your moral intuition
| isn't universal.
|
| If there were some device (which doesn't exist and maybe
| can't) which simply lights up with perfect accuracy when
| pointed at someone who tortured someone before murdering
| them, I would support instant execution of that person by
| firing squad.
|
| I'm not willing to accept a 4% error rate however. I'm not
| sure how low it would have to go, but it's lower than it
| plausibly can.
|
| This isn't some kind of lack of "understanding" on my part,
| and you're not going to "teach" me to feel the same way
| about this issue as you do. We have different values. So
| you'll have to content yourself with my being on the same
| side of the policy question for different reasons.
| jjk166 wrote:
| I don't know how anyone can acknowledge that moral
| intuitions aren't universal while simultaneously
| believing their moral intuition can be used to justify
| the death penalty.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Why do you think that the left and intellectuals 'more widely
| fail at winning politically'?
|
| I'm not even sure what that is intended to mean -
| specifically the bit about intellectuals.
| heyparkerj wrote:
| I think it would be fair to interpret that as "failing to
| change as many minds as they could"
| posterboy wrote:
| > arguments that are amenable even to people who disagree on
| the fundamentals
|
| Now I'm not sure what you think fundamental, but I am pretty
| sure that "murder" is a something the other side understands.
|
| The irony in this is iron clad. It is also hyperbole, because
| this is an internet comment, not a political debate.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| Countries regularly kill others in the name of international
| laws about the preservation of peace and security. This has
| been the case since at least the Second World War, when many
| countries allied together to crush the Nazis and Imperial
| Japan. This was wholesale killing on a global scale for the
| sake of preventing certain states from doing more of their own
| vast killing while breaking many international norms,
| agreements and laws. Much of it was unjust, yes, but would you
| argue that an absolutist stance of it being wrong to kill
| others in the name of the law justified doing nothing while
| these ruthless empires conquered more territory and enslaved
| millions more people into a slow death?
|
| Or how about self defense? If a person is protecting their
| lawful rights, home, property and family and in the process
| must kill an aggressor to do these things, should they just not
| do so out of a certain absolute ethical posture about the
| wrongness of killing other human beings? Just to clarify where
| your own fundamental posture on killing in the name of the law
| this draws some lines or exceptions.
| donatj wrote:
| I think there is a somewhat reasonable argument that a
| punishment should mirror the crime, and any less than inhuman
| and barbaric to the _inhuman and barbaric_ lacks actual
| justice?
|
| I'm not saying I agree, I don't personally support the death
| sentence, but if you're actually interested in changing peoples
| minds it's good to know where they're coming from, and why they
| may not find your argument compelling.
|
| I personally find the posts argument far more compelling.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| People themselves choose death over long prison sentences
| [1]. Which is less humane is a matter of perspective.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
| _hl_ wrote:
| I'm not from the US, so my knowledge on the death penalty is
| quite limited. But I clicked on a link posted below listing
| executions in Texas, and I was shocked to see that the most
| recent execution was last year for a crime committed back in
| _1993_. Why?? You 've already locked the guy up for almost
| three decades, what possible benefit is there to executing
| him now?
|
| I get that he ruined (well, ended) someones life, but what
| does society gain from ruining his life in turn, to the point
| of what feels like mental torture: Being locked up for such a
| long time, all the while knowing that you will eventually
| just be executed.
| csense wrote:
| The death penalty used to be much faster. But through a
| series of laws and court rulings starting in the 1970's,
| they decided that the case has to go through a super long
| sequence of appeals and court proceedings, with the intent
| of making doubly triply extra sure we're not executing
| innocent people.
| piva00 wrote:
| > but what does society gain from ruining his life in turn,
| to the point of what feels like mental torture: Being
| locked up for such a long time, all the while knowing that
| you will eventually just be executed.
|
| From what I gather on Americans' comments about this over
| the years it's mostly about "not spending taxpayer money"
| to house, feed and take care of criminals that received a
| death penalty.
|
| I don't know how true this argument can be given all the
| costs over decades associated with a death penalty judgment
| (appeals, preparation for death row, maintaining death
| rows, etc.)
|
| Quick edit after reading the thread a bit more, an example
| of what I mentioned:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900987
| pseudo0 wrote:
| It's the result of a decades-long lawfare campaign by anti-
| death penalty activists. The more protracted and expensive
| it is to carry out the death penalty, the easier it is to
| argue for abolishing it on the practical grounds of cost
| rather than convincing Americans of the ethical case. A
| rather messed up byproduct of this is cases like the one
| you highlight, where the convicted person is left on death
| row for decades as they make hail-mary appeals.
| [deleted]
| hedberg10 wrote:
| You can never 'match' the crime. Even if you go justicing
| around 'an eye for an eye' style, the perp will always have
| taken the initiative. You can never get that back. Everything
| you do is just a reaction.
|
| That is what makes crime so heinous.
|
| So your focus should be prevention at any cost first and
| foremost, then justice as prevention (= rehabilitation) as
| well. Murdering a murderer is pretty solid prevention though,
| I give you that.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > You can never get that back. Everything you do is just a
| reaction.
|
| Yes, but you can try. I can see why the loved ones of a
| murdered person feel someone is 'getting away' when he is
| still alive. Killing them feels much more like payback.
|
| I don't that this does reasonably make sense, but I can
| understand where they are coming from.
| greedo wrote:
| As the loved one of a murdered person, I can speak to
| this. Nothing will bring back my loved one. Nothing. Gone
| forever. A hole left unfilled for eternity. Executing her
| killer won't bring her back. It won't help anyone "heal"
| or "find solace" or any other words that politicians use.
| hedberg10 wrote:
| > Killing them feels much more like payback
|
| I'm sure many find that it didn't feel like it at all,
| because of my argumentation. Payback will always be
| incomplete. It can never be paid in full.
|
| Even if you kill someone over and over again (some Sci-Fi
| comes to mind), the perp always took the first step and
| elevated his role in society unjustly.
| true_religion wrote:
| Lack of punishment can lead to more crime if people lose
| faith in the system. To take it to an extreme, if murder
| were punished with only a fine then victim families would
| just hire assassins to kill off a murderer if they feel
| the fine doesn't suffice.
| [deleted]
| neilwilson wrote:
| Moreover life imprisonment is far more of a punishment. The
| individual has to get up every day and contemplate what they
| have done - with no way to end that other than the passage of
| time and the hope of commutation.
|
| If you're from a part of the world where the death penalty was
| consigned to history decades ago, it's quite astonishing that a
| supposedly civilised nation would defend it.
|
| The USA has some odd hangups.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| This comment is internally inconsistent-- favoring a more
| barbaric penalty of life incarceration does not mean a nation
| has a higher morality.
| gher-shyu3i wrote:
| It's not inhumane nor barbaric (appease to emotions fallacy).
| It has to be applied correctly however. When someone kills
| someone else on purpose and with determinism, they have forfeit
| their right to live. It's quite simple.
|
| Of course, the application of the death penalty in the US is
| very wrong. Other cultures have solved this issue a long time
| ago.
| Vhano wrote:
| inhuman and barbaric why? You sound intelligent so go on: why
| is it inhuman?
| NoKnowledge wrote:
| That's simply a logical fallacy: P => Q does not imply (not P)
| => (not Q). Here: "If it is inaccurate, then it is wrong" does
| not imply "If it is accurate, then it is right."
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > I think no other justification is needed to end the death
| penalty than "it's inhuman and barbaric".
|
| Thing is, most of the time, people who are subject to the death
| penalty are there because they did "inhuman and barbaric" acts.
|
| It is kind of like the paradox of tolerance. For society to
| prosper, you need to punish inhuman and barbaric acts, or at
| least isolate people who do that from society. However, such
| punishment is likely inhuman and barbaric at least on some
| level. Limiting a persons freedom of movement and interaction
| is inhuman and barbaric.
|
| In addition, by not having the death penalty, you are
| subjecting others to have to deal with the person who did the
| inhuman and barbaric acts, whether other inmates or guards.
|
| I am of the opinion that there are some acts that are so
| heinous that a person should never be a part of human society
| again. In that case, rather than prolonged human isolation,
| which is actually barbaric in and of itself, I think it is
| actually more humane to end their life. It does not have to
| gruesome or painful, no more than euthanizing a beloved pet
| with a terminal condition has to be gruesome. But some acts are
| incompatible with ever being a member of human society in any
| form.
|
| Edit:
|
| In addition, there are a lot of stuff that could be considered
| inhuman and barbaric but we do them for what we think as the
| good of society.
|
| Spaying and neutering your pet sounds inhuman and barbaric.
|
| Modern surgery, especially cancer surgery where they remove
| large margins of apparently healthy looking tissue, could be
| considered inhuman and barbaric.
|
| In the Middle Ages, dissecting dead human bodies was considered
| inhuman and barbaric.
|
| So the fact that a person sees something as inhuman and
| barbaric really is not overwhelming evidence if something
| should be done.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| simonh wrote:
| I think the state legitimately reserves for itself the right to
| resort to lethal force. National defence and effective policing
| can require violence when necessary.
|
| The key issue for me is necessity. It is not necessary to
| execute criminals, even murderers. I do have sympathy for the
| view that murderers deserve death, maybe many of them do, but
| then you get into drawing lines between cases that deserve
| death and ones that don't. Is the evidence in this case good
| enough to kill, but this one the evidence is only good enough
| to incarcerate. It politicises the judicial and criminal
| justice system. So I oppose the death penalty not because it's
| barbaric or morally wrong per se, but because it introduces
| moral hazard that compromises the system.
|
| We can see this in the US where prosecutors fight tooth and
| nail to preserve convictions and ensure convicts get executed
| largely in order to protect the system of executions from the
| embarrassment of death row inmates getting exonerated.
| Defending the system becomes more important than serving
| justice.
|
| As a Brit I think politicisation is the thing that concerns me
| most about the US justice system. Elected prosecutors, elected
| judges, the politicisation of executions I described above. I
| don't know what it's like in other countries, but comparatively
| speaking all that just isn't a thing over here at all.
| Political debate on criminal justice is focused on laws and the
| administration of policing. That's really about it. It's not
| like we don't have miscarriages of justice, our system is far
| from perfect but it's mainly sees as being independent and
| professionalised.
| umvi wrote:
| What if the criminal is extremely wealthy and powerful and
| can continue to exert his influence even from within prison
| (and possibly have a corrupting influence on prison guards)?
| This actually happens with cartel heads and crime syndicate
| leaders...
| simonh wrote:
| Most such criminals are likely to be imprisoned for crimes
| other than murder, so you're going to have the problem
| anyway. Better to address the actual issue rather than use
| it as an excuse.
| hntroll666 wrote:
| > barbaric
|
| Sorry, but that's exactly the kind of world we live in. The
| world simply _is_ barbaric no matter what we would prefer. When
| people mess up a little bit, we put them through a process
| that, despite its massive inadequacy, is intended to
| rehabilitate them so that they can return to society. The death
| penalty is for when someone commits a crime so severe that they
| _cannot ever_ return to society. If you are not able to think
| of this kind of situation, I suggest you may not be very
| familiar with the details of truly horrendous crimes. If we don
| 't have the death penalty, we end up in the strange position of
| housing and feeding and providing medical care for the most
| harmful people in society at the expense of their victims.
| raverbashing wrote:
| This right here
|
| I think arguing for its abolition on the basis of "the system
| is bad" is completely valid
|
| > familiar with the details of truly horrendous crimes
|
| And this still happens. And I agree, society is sometimes too
| tolerant with people who have no business in being in it
| (which, true, is a much smaller percentage of people on death
| row)
|
| But don't expect the legal system to try to improve how many
| innocents they convict.
| piva00 wrote:
| With this type of argument you attack one of the central
| tenets of human rights where every human life, no matter
| what, is worth the same. The moment you define that there are
| certain crimes where a human life is not the same as other
| human lives, no matter the reason, you move away from this
| core tenet.
|
| It's all a matter if you believe in that core piece of
| universal human rights or not.
| gher-shyu3i wrote:
| > one of the central tenets of human rights where every
| human life, no matter what, is worth the same.
|
| You have to define who made up this right. Not everyone
| will agree. Most people will have boundaries on that _no
| matter what_ all human lives are the same. Killing someone
| else on purpose breaks that boundary.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Its way way way more complex than that. One point is that you
| have life imprisonment without parole - the same effect of
| people not coming back to society is achieved. Another one is
| expense - death row costs AFAIK are higher than life
| imprisonment, so the harmed society pays even more.
|
| As for truly horrible crimes (which is something else to each
| of us), there are also tons of different views - do we want
| to be in society that is above emotional vengeful reactions,
| and more about compassionate loving ones? Ie like all good
| christians/muslims/etc are supposed to be according to their
| holiest books? You have to start somewhere if you even want
| to get there. You have to be morally strong to act in smart
| and compassionate way if you want to claim progress of
| mankind in this area. And so on.
|
| I don't have a clear position on this myself and not stating
| some higher moral ground, since there are many pros and cons
| on both sides and quick emotional reaction to some murderous
| pedophile is as expected. But I am 100% certain that this
| very topic reveals a lot about mankind and us humans in our
| progression to be a better species, compared to primitive
| uneducated masses of the past. Or regression, its up to us.
| greedo wrote:
| I think you're sadly mistaken that there's any intent to
| rehabilitate people "who mess up a little bit." Our criminal
| justice system is an emotional retributive system.
| Rehabilitation gets perhaps 1% of the attention it should,
| and is far outweighed by the inherent brutality of the entire
| system.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That is not a helpful argument. It certainly is inhuman and
| barbaric, but is it less inhuman and barbaric than the
| alternatives?
|
| Criminals sentenced to death are supposed to be a danger to
| society so great that the only solution is to eliminate them.
| So, typical trolley problem: is it better to kill a criminal or
| let him go, potentially resulting in the death or several more
| innocent victims. Prison for life is another option, but is
| permanently restraining someone and endangering guards and
| other inmates a good alternative?
|
| So yes, other justifications are needed. And the article gives
| one.
| spuz wrote:
| If the only reason we sentence people to death were because
| it is more humane than putting them in prison for life, then
| it would be given as an option to the prisoner. I don't know
| of any case of someone sentenced to life in prison who argued
| they would rather be put to death.
|
| Edit: I've now done some research and found some death-row-
| inmates do express a preference for a death sentence:
|
| https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2012/09/25/why-death-row-
| inmates-...
|
| https://www.quora.com/Is-prison-crueller-than-the-death-
| pena...
|
| http://www.bu.edu/pilj/files/2015/09/17-2SmithArticle.pdf
| elisbce wrote:
| It's inhuman and barbaric to sentence criminals to death
| penalty (usually very quick less painful), and yet, the usually
| much worse criminal acts (cold-blood torturing, mass murdering,
| beheadings, etc.) that they ACTUALLY conducted on other
| completely innocent human beings are just not inhuman and
| barbaric and unethical enough for you to the point that you
| think it is not even worth discussing and a no-brainer to
| forgive. This is why the crimes are on the rise in this world,
| and justice is not being enforced by law due to the
| hypocritical "empathy" for the real criminals.
| [deleted]
| Causality1 wrote:
| That's a philosophical point. In most areas of legal justice,
| the penalty exacted for transgressions far exceeds the damages.
| That is to say, the man who steals a hundred dollars or who
| punches someone in the face loses far more value from his life
| as punishment than he caused someone else to lose. A life for a
| life is a rather mild punishment compared to the rest of the
| justice system, especially considering the death penalty is
| typically meted out for multiple brutal murders, often preceded
| by torture and rape. A just world would have these monsters
| subjected to the same nightmare to which they treated the
| innocent.
|
| However, I agree with Paul. The fact that anyone not guilty of
| the crime is executed is unacceptable, to say nothing of the
| startlingly bad accuracy of the system in practice.
| tzs wrote:
| Doesn't that exact same argument work as well when applied to
| jailing people? It's wrong if _I_ kidnap someone and keep them
| confined for years in a small room, so how can it not be wrong
| for the state to do it in the name of the law?
| bluecalm wrote:
| This argument is useless because what inhuman and barbaric my
| means depends on your belief system. Abortion is inhuman and
| barbaric to significant % of the population and death penalty
| isn't. They use murder argument as well. Of course death
| penalty is not murder nor is abortion if you're honest about
| what the word means but here we are with those absolute
| statements about ethics.
|
| If we just use this argument and don't try to establish general
| principles we end up with a pointless shouting contest.
|
| For once I think the death penalty is at least worth
| considering from the utilitarian point of view (in our current
| system the consensus is that it's cheaper to keep someone in
| prison for life though but it might change in the future) as
| well as from revenge/restitution point of view as a lot of
| people strongly think someone doing deliberate great harm
| deserves to be killed.
|
| One way or another it's not simple from either ethical nor
| practical point of view. Personally I consider death penalty as
| desirable penalty for some crimes but I would never vote for it
| as I have no faith in our politicians being able to implement
| it in a fair way and flawed justice system not to abuse it.
| User23 wrote:
| Opposition to abortion and capital punishment is pretty basic
| moral reasoning and really not challenging. The premise is
| killing innocent human beings is wrong. In the case of
| abortion the innocence of the person being killed is assured.
| In the case of capital punishment that's not necessarily
| true, but since we can't truly know for certain the convict
| isn't innocent we ought to err on the side of caution to
| avoid the possibility of killing an innocent person.
|
| It's odd to me how controversial both issues are when the
| moral reasoning required is so easy. Taking any other
| position requires denying the premise that it's wrong to
| destroy innocent human life. One can, but accepting that has
| some very nasty consequences.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Ouch: things are not so clear-cut. What happens on a small
| ship?
| bruceb wrote:
| Simply put we have better ways to spend money than housing
| people for 30 years who have inflicted horrific pain on
| society.
|
| I dont want to work to house, guard, and feed them.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > I dont want to work to house, guard, and feed them.
|
| There have been some political leaders in the past who have
| said the same about the disabled.
|
| If we give our government the power to premeditatedly kill
| people merely to reduce the costs to taxpayers, we are
| stepping down a very dark path.
| ppp_qqq wrote:
| I think the article misses the point of the main argument for the
| death penalty. The main argument is not whether it acts as a
| deterrent, or if it harms/benefits a group over another. Maybe
| these are the arguments thrown in public discussions.
|
| But the central argument for death penalty is whether it is
| _just_ to punish a person by death, if they commit a certain
| crime, or if it is _just_ to imprison them. It is not a question
| of what benefits society, but whether it is a form of justice.
| Those who advocate for generally believe that punishment is not
| primitively a method for fixing behavior, though that might or
| might not occur. Instead, it is a form of intentionally
| inflecting damage/pain for justice[1].
|
| But the article is right on that in practice, there are important
| and significant difficulties in carrying out the death penalty.
| But those who advocate for death penalty would say that it is
| unjust to not punish people by death when they commit certain
| crimes.
|
| [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-retributive/
| n4r9 wrote:
| I can't be the only one that finds this argument lacking. If
| justice is not good for society, why bother?
| sneak wrote:
| I could not disagree with this position more than I do.
|
| The police in the US are largely incompetent, it's true.
| Prosecutors and police regularly get things wrong, and what's
| worse yet is that it is often willfully so. They've far too much
| power, and the whole system needs to be overhauled, because it's
| rotten to the core.
|
| That said: inaccuracy is not why the state should not murder
| people. Even if the system were replaced and could somehow become
| and remain provably 100% accurate, executing human beings is an
| abhorrent sentence.
|
| There are certain inalienable rights that every human must
| attempt to preserve for every other human. Chiefly among them are
| a freedom from torture and freedom from being murdered by other
| human beings.
|
| All other considerations are secondary. The moment we start
| treating human beings like objects and simply snuffing them out
| in response to perceived or adjudicated crimes, we become as a
| society no better than the common criminal. The fact that we have
| _codified premeditated murder into law_ in some insane act of
| mental gymnastics will possibly be the thing that our so-called
| "civilization" will be judged most harshly upon come the verdict
| of history.
|
| We have no claim to humanity or civilization whatsoever so long
| as we smite the life from living, thinking brothers and sisters
| at will, which is what a society having capital punishment has
| chosen to do with their system of law.
|
| We hold these truths to be self-evident.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Of possible interest, Texas records death row inmates last words
| before execution. You can read them all here:
|
| https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/death_row/dr_executed_offenders.h...
|
| My favorite is Delbert Teague, Jr. who quoted the oath of the
| Knights of Solamnia from Dragonlance.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| I clicked on 15 and they're all very positive in tone.
| Surprised.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I found a couple that were a bit less positive, but most do
| seem to appear remorseful to some extent. None seemed to be
| particularly extreme, though-I wonder if those are sanitized
| to some extent.
| riffraff wrote:
| check https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/death_row/dr_info/tignergera
| ldlas...
|
| > Yes. My last statement. I was wrongfully convicted of this
| crime against Michael Watkins and James Williams on 10th
| Street on August 31, 1993. I got convicted on a false
| confession because I never admitted to it, but my lawyer did
| not put this out to the jury. I did not kill those drug
| dealers. I send love to my family and friends; my east side
| family and friends. I am being real with the real. That's all
| that counts in my heart. I will see you later. That's it.
| rswail wrote:
| Texas has institutionalized a barbaric entertainment around
| death row prisoners, with things like "last meals" and "last
| words".
|
| It's disgusting.
| capableweb wrote:
| Or, a bit more charitable interpretation is that they are
| trying to inject a bit humanity in a otherwise very inhumane
| process.
|
| For the record, I'm not for death penalty at all.
| vs2 wrote:
| I really wish I hadn't open this link. So much grief and wasted
| lives.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| This is a great read!
|
| Simple crawling of all the statements:
| Promise.all([...$$('a[href$="last.html"]')].map(aa =>
| fetch(aa.href).then(a => a.text()).then(a =>
| a.replace(/(\n|\r|<[^->] _> | )/g, '').match(/Last
| Statement:(._?)<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->/)).then(a =>
| [aa.href, a && a[1].trim()]))).then(a =>
| console.log(JSON.stringify(a)))
| rvieira wrote:
| That hit hard. At the risk of sounding like a cliche softy,
| those statements made really sad, and then even sadder when I
| thought that all[0] of them must have also commited terrible
| crimes and caused suffering to so many people.
|
| [0] - Well, at least 96% according to the OP.
| baybal2 wrote:
| I, as a 15 year old kid, was detained as a suspect in an armed
| robbery, and murder case for a few days. Of course the case never
| went anywhere, and that's why I can speak with you now.
| Fortunately, a complete bullshit FIR, and CCTV records made the
| case to look too silly even for a Russian criminal system.
|
| Every time I see an immigration officer at the border raising his
| eyebrows in disbelief, I instantly understand that he took a look
| on my criminal file.
|
| For me, the cruel tradition of Russian police to literally grab
| the first bystander they come upon near the crime scene to draw
| as a suspect did cost months of my life spent on legal paperwork,
| and an immigration nightmare.
|
| Russian citizens have no ability to have anything struck from
| their file, even if those lucky got a rarest %0.8 acquittal. For
| most unlucky people, even if the case doesn't go anywhere, they
| will never get the clear acquittal record, but instead have
| something like "case struck on procedural grounds" in their file.
|
| Getting wrongly accused is very easy. Just be the first person to
| be seen near the crime scene.
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