"Might Sneed have lied to save his own skin? Reasonable doubt? Nothing is more likely."
And nothing more need be said. I don't understand how it seems impossible to force into people's heads the two notions that the burden of guilt lay with the prosecution and that guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt.
I upvoted this mainly because I think it's healthy that people consider the ethics by which they and their fellow citizens live. But generally speaking, this is a stupid reason not to kill someone.
The DA basically told this guy point-blank that if you don't want to die, take this deal. If you do want to die, don't take the deal.
He chose not to take the deal.
Is there a chance that "good sense" could have prevailed, and that by some fluke, some part of the system wouldn't work, and so he would be saved from the death penalty? Maybe. But if he had taken the deal, he would definitely not have died.
This guy chose to play russian roulette with a six-shooter with five bullets in it and lost. And this is the reason we shouldn't kill people? Because a guy who can't do the basic math of "which choice is more likely to end in my death" chose poorly?
No. The guy should have taken the deal. Much like the rest of the people on the planet who choose to take huge risks with their life, he's going to lose out on this bet. And that has nothing to do with why we should stop the state from killing people.
Our system of justice is based on laws and rules. They can't be broken arbitrarily, which is why innocent people are put to death. Not because we're mean. Not because we're stupid. We make the rules, and we have to enforce them. In this case, one of our rules is, if you do X, you die.
So, if you don't believe in killing innocent people, by all means, get rid of that rule. But don't tell me we should get rid of the rule because the rules weren't perfect.
If he's innocent, he chose to not go to jail for life for a crime he didn't commit. People shouldn't have to accept unjust punishment to avoid other people's ignorance/laziness/incompetence/half-assedness.
So, if I'm innocent, I should take a plea bargain (which, let's not forget, involves me standing up before God and everyone and saying, "yes, I did it," so that I can spend the rest of my life in a maximum security penitentiary, so that I can avoid being put to death? Not sure I agree with your logic there.
That wasn't the choice given. It was "Accept this deal for life in prison" or "Have faith that your innocence will prevail in the court of law and you will be exonerated."
If I, an innocent man, was given that choice... I would probably try it out in court. I would assume my innocence would prevent the court from convicting me.
Are you saying that every person charged with a capital offense should instantly take a plea deal for life in prison? Because that's what your flow chart is suggesting.
You can opine in harsh language about whether or not this guy made the "smart" choice all you want, but why is our "justice" system forcing this man to make such an unfair choice in the first place?
The justice system isn't for only doing what is just at all times, it is for enforcing the consequences of laws.
The point of a law is simply to put down the rules by which order is maintained, and that order is dictated by the morality of the majority of people who hold power in government. The justice system merely upholds the law set down and doles out what the law defines as a 'just' punishment or judgment.
A law can say literally anything, like, "Black people may not marry White people", or "Women may not vote", "Gay people may not get married", etc. Or they can say things like "At an intersection, the left-most lane may turn left onto the street it intersects with, but not the right-most lane." It can say anything; it doesn't have to do with "fairness" and "justice", it has to do with maintaining order.
The laws, once put down, are enforced, as long as they remain laws. The results of those laws being enforced will only stop once the laws are abolished (and even then, sometimes the states just like to keep going with 'em even if they've been abolished anyway).
We can't just selectively enforce or not enforce laws. Then there would be no point to the law. Then literally any local government official, judge, court, president, etc could abuse the rights of citizens or allow people to go free simply because they felt like it. And that's not in the public interest.
Therefore, laws which are deemed to be unfair or unjust must be amended or abolished. But - and this is the important part - they must simply be made by decree by will of the representatives of the public, and must not always meet a measurement of justice or fairness. Not only because there are plenty of laws which simply define what the proper procedures of daily life are, but because we'd literally never get any laws passed if we had to have a philosophical discussion about the potential pros and cons of the impact of the law on justice as a general idea.
So why are they forcing him to make an unfair choice? Laws aren't designed to be fair. Only the consequence of the law can be fair, according to that law. In this case, if you ask a guy if he wants to live, and he says, "No", is it fair to give him death, assuming he was of sound mind and body and understood the consequences of his decision?
"We can't just selectively enforce or not enforce laws."
No one is suggesting the DA pick and choose which laws to enforce.
The point is that there appears to be reasonable doubt that he committed the crime and therefore, according to the very laws you demand be enforced, should be acquitted.
Even if there were reasonable doubt, which, if you look into the case, has not yet been established, if there were though, then this would be a miscarriage of justice.
Still not a reason to abolish the death penalty.
Is it immoral? Yes. Impossible to reverse once enforced? Definitely. The government screwed up this one case so the law should be abolished completely? Nope.
Omg you are proposing such a hugely distorted justice system.
The punishment for making a bad decision on a deal presented to you should not be death. If your crime deserves the maximum sentence, and you are in subway helpful to the criminal justice system, then maybe you deserve a pass. However, if you didn't commit the crime, or if there is reasonable doubt as to whether you did, I don't care if you mooned the DA when they offered a plea bargain: you shouldn't get killed.
That's not arbitrary justice. That's just justice. You can't justify punishing innocent people.
Now, the nice thing about other punishments is, in the case where justice if misapplied, you can try to make up for it later. With the death penalty, that option isn't available to you, which is one of many reasons people question whether it at all makes sense.
It's increasingly seems that the powers of prosecutors are deployed in arbitrary and unjust ways: either overreaching (as in the case of Aaron Swartz or Xiaoxing Xi) or non-prosecution of police brutality or corporate crime (just changing now that the statute of limitations run out on those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis)
It's not clear what can be done about it, other than occasionally writing a check to the ACLU to help limit the damage. Any ideas?
Keep in mind that you're survey of examples is likely biased by what makes a good story... and journalists have become very good at figuring out which cases will make a good story.
It's a problem that there is enough material to keep the stories coming, but let's not conclude that the stories we read about represent the bulk of the justice system's operations.
Agreed. "Fixing criminal justice," is a vague if noble goal. I think it's pretty clear at this point however that the standard of evidence is too low. And out of the humility wrought by the awareness of our own fallibility, perhaps we should stray from punishments as final as death.
The fact that the egregious examples exist is proof enough of the insanity and incompetence that's permitted by the justice system. The appeals processes seems too restrictive to allow for proper review in many cases. Just because a system has existed for a long time doesn't mean it's ideal in any way.
The murder of Meredith Kercher is another prominent example in another country. All evidence pointed to one murderer, who was duly convicted. And then the state decided to spend years prosecuting two innocent people based on some odd behavior and not the slightest shred of credible physical evidence. They're just lucky they finally got a sane judge at the highest level.
> The fact that the egregious examples exist is proof enough of the insanity and incompetence that's permitted by the justice system.
It's more like proof of the law of large numbers.
> The appeals processes seems too restrictive to allow for proper review in many cases.
Appeals processes should be restrictive, otherwise the time and expense of the trial itself are essentially squandered. That said, I have no doubt that at least in some, and possibly many systems, it's over the line.
> Just because a system has existed for a long time doesn't mean it's ideal in any way.
I hope you didn't think I suggested anything to the contrary.
Even if the awful cases are a tiny percentage of all cases (which I don't believe is the case considering how common plea bargain extortion is), it is still a huge problem that is quickly eroding confidence in the justice system.
I think he meant (and I'm also curious) what we could individually do that would have a tangible difference. Not what could a large swathe of people in the US do collectively, which is a different question.
Steve Cooley -- and I believe he would agree with this characterization -- is enthusiastically for the death penalty in the right circumstances, and campaigned against Prop 34. In his own words [1]
There are some offenses that demand the ultimate sentence. We’ve got
individuals down in Los Angeles — for example, the Grim Sleeper case which
is pending — this gentleman killed 23 young women, in the most cruel,
inhumane way. Life without possibility of parole is not the appropriate
sentence for somebody who slaughters so many of his fellow citizens. Cop
killers, baby killers, serial killers — they deserve the death penalty. In
my county, we only seek the death penalty in 11 percent of the
special-circumstance cases, and they are well-selected and well-deserving of
the death penalty.
Kamala Harris is not a shining light, but she took no public position on Prop 34, and while she has supported a state appeal to defend the constitutionality of the death penalty [2], as sf da, she stated she would never charge the death penalty [3].
So the contrast is a full supporter on one hand, and someone who, at minimum, is conflicted about the use of the death penalty and widely acknowledges the racial disparity in its application.
I would call that a real difference, though in case it isn't clear, I would support banning the death penalty on both humane/equality and financial grounds.
NB: Prop 34 would have banned the death penalty in California. It lost by a couple percent [4]
Prosecutors have almost absolute immunity. A prosecutor can intentionally cheat the system, get a conviction, put a person in jail, and if caught, there is no lawsuit that can be filed against them and it's almost impossible to get them disbarred.
There are incentives to cheat; as long as there are no ramifications for it, it will continue.
I honestly think the only thing that could ever change it is if some vigilante with nothing to lose started bringing the same flavor of extreme justice to the doorsteps of the people passing it out - fear of potential ramifications will very quickly change behavior.
Consider that the behavior that is changed is that of everybody but the prosecutor: taxes go to personal security and maybe their staff, increased controls and inconveniences for those sharing space with them, like at the courthouse, and increased penalties for behavior not previously considered to be threatening. That is, the person acting with nothing to lose, "at all costs," may be misunderestimating where those costs will be borne.
That would cause change, but in the opposite direction. People would rally around judges and prosecutors and you'd see fewer people questioning the status quo. It would be a disaster.
Both proposals have been purely theoretical. I can provide three practical historical examples of turning it up to 11:
1) abortion clinic bombing changed nothing; if anything it helped raise funds (you'd almost think they were false flag operations? Is there anything that helped the pro choice cause more than the bombings?)
2) the War on drugs has ruined uncountable lives, certainly far more than drugs have ruined, none the less neither the fear of drugs or the more realistic fear of the war on drugs keeps people sober, business has always been booming.
3) the war on black men has gotten about 1/3 of them involved in the criminal justice system. The result? None, no change. They haven't become refugees, their culture has changed as little as possible under the circumstances, no serious rebellion...
In those three examples taking normal level actions and turning them up to 11 has either been utterly ineffective or counterproductive. I'd have to say the tsotha theoretical model fits observed reality better, although I admit further research could find observations overturning that... although I don't expect it.
Those aren't bad analogies, but I wouldn't consider them good.
1) The public and perhaps even many scholars are split on abortion - I personally don't think there's a clear cut "correct" answer.
2) I wouldn't expect people to quit. Drugs are fun, most are relatively harmless, using them is not immoral, and you most likely won't get caught.
3) Similar to #2, and much of the issues here are a direct result of #2
Turning it up to 11 (great expression btw) to be effective should be used only when there is obvious wrongdoing, when innocent people are clearly being railroaded by people who either know the person is innocent, or made no effort to determine innocence (which, let's not forget, is the job they are being paid very handsomely to perform). I'm not sure if this particular case is a valid example example for turning it up to 11, but there are certainly plenty. I think this would be effective, and I believe there would be widespread public support with sufficient communication.
>fear of potential ramifications will very quickly change behavior.
Considering that fear of ramifications has proven entirely ineffective in preventing certain kinds of behavior in other aspects of the justice system, I don't think this would be as effective as you might think
Seems like the real issue is that Oklahoma is not giving the guy a fair trial. While the finality of the death penalty makes it (or at least makes it seem) worse, it would/could be just as unfair to throw the guy in jail for life without giving him his due process.
There will always be mistakes and wrongful processes in any kind of system, the difference between death penalty and life sentence is the finality of the former: there is also some very small chance that you can be proven innocent a few years down the road (we're all taking about extremes here).
I agree based on what i know, India is the best when it comes to giving chance to the folks to trial multiple times. And while high courts (highest in states) can give sentence that could be overturned in supreme court. Can he not apply to USA supreme court or equivalent of that?
"When the order delaying the execution for two weeks came down, Glossip was so close to his scheduled execution time that he had already been served his final meal (which included chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, fish and chips and a strawberry malt).
In addition to their requests to the Oklahoma court, Glossip’s attorneys had also asked Gov. Mary Fallin (R) to stay the execution, arguing that the lethal injection should be halted due to new evidence. However, Fallin denied these requests, and she said her office determined that none of the evidence presented by Glossip’s attorneys changed her mind.
“After carefully reviewing the facts of this case multiple times, I see no reason to cast doubt on the guilty verdict reached by the jury or to delay Glossip’s sentence of death,” she said in a statement earlier this month. Fallin also said her office would respect the appeals court’s decision."
The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are.
It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences.
See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win?
If you want a burger, a high, an orgasm or a conviction, you generally will get it at some price that's ultimately...above market.
How much more prone to excess is someone in the heat of a moment? How unlike the event does its moment by moment reconstruction during a trial appear? The mismatch has always struck me as unjust. As people judging an event whose experience they haven't had and haven't attempted to recreate. Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform.
An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation.
Any shade of grey zooming out from that seems too hard for any government system to decide well. I hear people say things in passing like "he only got 20 years". 20 years is a huge and devastating amount of time, as is one year. As we've ramped up the time on these sentences and made it an all or nothing proposition. Unfortunately, I don't think 20 years will do it if 1 year hasn't and I don't think death will do it if 20 years hasn't.
Regarding Richard Glossip. I don't know him or his case. I don't know the victim and while they won't return, there's a debt owed that I don't know how to pay. I want Richard Glossip to live. I don't think taking another life will pay the debt of the first. What I want most of all is for someone to tell me how to pay that debt.
"If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation."
Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children. They're usually in situations people would rather ignore. They're desperate. They want attention and they get it at some price that's ultimately... above market.
>Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children.
eric_the_read's comment notwithstanding, people subjected to extreme circumstances in their childhood years are less likely to be rehabilitated, not more.
The argument is that someone willing to shoot up a school for attention is beyond rehabilitation. His age is irrelevant to someone making that claim, and possibly argues in his favor.
The attention we're talking about here isn't narcissistic supply. It's basic interpersonal human concern. Shooting up a school because you're being systematically starved of your basic human needs isn't nearly as bad as you just made is sound. Otherwise I never contended with anything else you said. I do think they deserve a chance at rehabilitation but also that they're less likely to attain it.
I'm just pointing out that your argument isn't very effective. I actually agree with you, but someone taking the position that school shooters aren't rehabilitable isn't going to care whether or not they're minors. Their argument supersedes notions of maturity.
You're not refuting an argument I made. Read it again. I was simply trying to highlight the point at which we might actually have some meaningful effect on the problem. Hint: punishment is irrelevant.
Your point about 20 years vs 1 is really important. Sentences have gotten so long for relatively harmless crimes that benchmarking becomes distorted. If anyone thinks about all the tings they will do in the next 3 years, then compare that to losing 20 years it can help show how long of a sentence that is.
* in USA. The average jail time in France is less than 2 years. French people are often surprised of the length of the penalties in countries which seem similarly western, such as Luxembourg.
Oh boy... I would not use France as a counter-example.
Jail time is low in France because our jails are full. Any sentence below two years is automatically deferred to probation, which means that a large number of crimes are de facto not punished.
A quick google search will reveal a disturbing trend of violent crimes that don't result in jail time for this reason.
France has the opposite problem, and it's no better.
I find it good. So magistrates are constrained by capacity. Of course I'd prefer they don't fill up French prisons at 125%.
If we build more prisons, we'll fill them up. US is now famously known for having more people in jail than Stalin's gulags [1]. I quite appreciate France's leniency with penalties, because I'm not sure 3 months or 3 years is really different, apart from further distorting the social network of the inmate.
Your point is well-taken and I agree insofar as the solution is not to build more prisons.
My point is simply that not punishing people isn't a viable solution, either. France has the same problem as the US (too many people incarcerated) and an equally bad solution (stop incarcerating altogether).
"Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform."
How do you justify the statement that a jury is the best idea that we have? Germany has the concept of Schöffe, and some believe this offers results that stick closer to the law than the jury system:
While any government of mortal human flesh must inevitably have some flaws, the jury system seems especially bad at overcoming popular prejudice. In the USA, "a jury of one's peers" has often meant a mostly white (or all white) jury judging a black person, a circumstance that has given the USA many hundreds of famous miscarriages of justice.
The system that grew out of English Common Law, and which dominates England, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, is not the only system known to liberal Western societies. The English system is unique in the authority it gives to juries. Most of the Continental judicial systems either lack juries or have juries whose goal is constrained relative to the English system.
A review of the legal traditions in liberal Western nations reveals a lot of good ideas, many of which are probably superior to the jury system.
The purpose of a jury isn't necessarily to make the best, most legally correct decision. The purpose of a jury is to put the people in control of the state.
One could argue, perhaps from the experience of China, that elections aren't the most effective means of choosing political leaders. But this misses the point of elections.
The bigger issue is that these things are hard to test and noone is willing to run the tests. In theory the US has a good setup for a state to decide to do some testing but politics make it impossible (and there's a decent ethical argument for either side that is far from simple). I mean think about the reactions if some politician would say "we need to see if our courts are as good as they can be, I propose we get rid of the jury system and replace it with X to see if X is superior"
1) That's UNAMERICAN. Courts and jury is the way god intended it to be.
2) Lol crackpot.
3) What if X turns out to be worse, sucks for the people who got trials like this during that time.
4) Lol crackpot.
Experimentation for political systems, judiciary infrastructure and the like is a really hard problem and I think de facto impossible. I applaud everyone who tries no matter how crazy it seems (seasteading) but at the end of the day I think there is no such thing as radical political entrepreneurship.
I think it's unfortunate but I also can't envision how (rapid) experimentation cycles could be transfered to such systems.
Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time. In all the common law countries you list, this is basically unheard of, at least in the last 400 years.
Our common law system has evolved to be resilient against many different things, rather than being designed to maximize efficiency of a few things. It is certainly not perfect, there is no doubt of that. Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.
Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder. The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries. That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.
> Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time.
Some civil law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years. Some common law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years (e.g.: English revolution, detainment of Americans with Japenese ancestry during World War 2).
> Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.
Except when it doesn’t serve the common interests very well by, for example, maintaining the legality of slavery well past the point it was abolished in many (civil and common law) countries and by taking another 100 years to reconsider the whole apartheid thing. In comparison, the civil law countries in Scandinavia seem to have faired quite well on the civil rights front and it was also civil, not common, law countries that drove the spearhead for women’s suffrage.
> Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder.
Ah, yes, the famous French common law system based not at all on the Code Napoleon and the equally famous Soviet common law system.
> The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries.
Again, the English revolution comes to mind. Or that whole debacle where slavery was only abolished after a bloody civil war in the 1860s! Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland weren’t exactly hotspots of instability either. And to be honest, I am not sure that Quebec has seen many more fascist dictators than the rest of Canada, something that would be implied by its civil law nature?
> That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.
The main idea behind the jury system is to provide a further check upon the power of government. Unless there is a system which does a better job of that, then, from the point of view of liberal government, there is no point in reviewing it.
We put the people we're genuinely afraid of in extralegal holding facilities instead. (Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.)
Also involuntary commitment facilities. While there is some truly deranged people out there, psychology has a long history of being abused to remove individuals by giving them false labels of mental disorders (or otherwise vastly overstating any disorders the person does have).
I honestly question if GP is being sarcastic because this is a thing acknowledged by the US government, they wont even release some prisoners from gitmo that they acknowledge are innocent of crimes.
We do have prisons where we keep people without trial.
We don't, as far as I know, have entire prisons where we hold people without trial because they 'know secrets' and we are afraid they might tell them. In fact, I don't know of a single instance of this, outside of people who agreed to keep some secret but then changed their mind (snowden).
>>Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.
> An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation.
I think that you here implicitly assume that there is overwhelming evidence of who is the author of the crime. For example, all of these: Many survivors testimonies (be careful, they are not so reliable in practice), many videos of the massacre were the face of the attacked is clearly visible, a perfect matching of the ADN in few blood spots, fingerprint in the weapons, gunpowder marks in the hands, he/she is detained in situ while trying to kill more people, ...
An eye for an eye creates bad incentives. If the state is going to kill as punishment for some crime, rationally a criminal should go for broke once that line is crossed. In the worst case, they'll be killed by police. Trapping someone just dissuades them from surrender.
That same logic goes for anybody who has already earned the maximum possible punishment for their crime. If there was no death penalty, and kidnapping+rape earned you life without parole, why not kill the victim too? That way you have a better chance of getting away with it.
My uncle who's a pastor gave me an interesting perspective on this phrase. Before Solomon it was common practice to escalate a transgression. So a theft begets a retaliatory murder, begets a retaliatory massacre. This adage is not as much about seeking equality in punishment, as much as a brake to limit escalation. "An eye for an eye and no more."
This is not Solomon's phrase, it's Hammurabi's - it originated a thousand years before Solomon in Babylonian law. It also exists in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (i.e. the books of Moses), which preceded Solomon. Pastor needs to study his Bible better...
Yeah, I'm kind of undecided. I can imagine the death penalty being appropriate for the really egregious crimes. However, I just don't trust governments to carry it out correctly.
Obviously pg's writings are favorites of the community here, but if you look back through the history of HN you'll find that right from the beginning there were selected political stories that were on topic.
In general, human testimony is one of the weakest forms of evidence we have. People, even when they don't have incentive to lie, have horrible memories! It should barely be admissible, let alone for first degree murder, especially in cases like this where the witness is being bribed for his testimony.
Means: he knew the person who committed the physical attack and had influence over this person
Motive: the victim was accusing him of embezzling $6000
Opportunity: plenty
Proof defendant actually acted on the motive: he attempted to hide the body from discovery, helped hide the victims car, contributed to a conspiracy to cut the body up and dissolve it in acid, split the money from the victim's wallet with the other man involved, and made sure that cleaning staff that he managed were reassigned so that they would not find the body. None of this is in dispute!
Wow I'm surprised that we're only talking about $6000. Maybe this is a privileged reaction, but in USA is that sum worth all the trouble of even a "successful" murder, let alone the calamity this turned out to be? Morality helps morons more than it helps rational people. A rational person would realize that a disagreement over $6000 will be much less hassle over the long term than a murder conspiracy. Someone to whom that is not obvious, and who also lacks enough moral sense not to murder in such a situation, really is a threat to the public. Maybe we shouldn't kill him, and maybe a long prison sentence isn't the best answer, but at the very least the public ought to be warned that this guy is completely irrational and might decide to murder for no good reason at all.
I encourage everybody to read up on the horrors of how the death penalty functions in practice. Especially in combination with the plea-bargain system, that effectively robs > 95% of suspects from their constitutional right to a fair trial.
Finally -- and I know this is only a minor point in comparison -- it's worth noting that pg doesn't have anything to gain by writing this, and people who stick their neck out by writing about political issues inevitably get shouted at. Soon enough publishing anything stops being worth the aggravation. So credit goes to pg for standing up and speaking out, when it's all too easy to be silent.
> I encourage everybody to read up on the horrors of how the death penalty functions in practice. Especially in combination with the plea-bargain system, that effectively robs > 95% of suspects from their constitutional right to a fair trial.
What do you mean by "in combination with," here? If you mean that the death penalty is used to convince people to plead guilty, I'm with you. But if you're saying that a large number of people who are sentenced to death were pressured into pleading guilty, then I am skeptical, since it is unclear what the defendant is receiving in exchange for the plea. (Usually it is a lighter sentence...)
I read his post as the death penalty can be a bludgeon that prosecuting attorneys will wield to get many more plea bargains from people accused of serious crimes. Pleading out to lesser offenses still with decades in prison is a much different calculation for the accused if the alternative is a trial with a death penalty vs. a trial with another decade or two on the end.
Plea bargains are a very core corruption of our justice system and should be outright banned in every shape and form. Everyone who has ever accepted a plea should have all punishments immediately ended (and any penalties accrued while in prison just for a plea), but prosecutors would be allowed to bring trials up against anyone freed to sentence them to their time served (the overload in cases would force them to prioritize on only the worse offenders who probably did do it while those who were forced to take a plea on dubious grounds would be ignored and left to live their lives). And this would include compensation for all those who have been imprisoned over a plea deal.
In short, every plea deal should be considered a grave injustice that needs to be corrected.
It's a real life Prisoners Dilemma, it turns out--plead guilty and finger this other guy we have in Holding Cell B, you get life in prison and he gets the death penalty.
The crazy thing is that although salient, of all the ways the US government kills innocent people, the death penalty probably has one of the lowest total body counts.
At least in comparison with wars of aggression, foreign coups, the war on drugs, subsidizing cars, subsidizing fossil fuels, subsidizing tobacco, weak pharma regulation, promoting antibiotics in food, cop shootings, fast food subsidies (via corn), not implementing cap & trade to combat climate change, privatized health insurance, trade embargoes, promoting harmful nutrition guidelines, lack of food safety standards/inspection, lack of any required safety testing for new chemicals, etc.
It seems almost pointless to even have a formal death penalty when law enforcement officers are given effective blanket immunity against homicide charges.
It is interesting to look at the graph at the top of the article, though. Why do justifiable homicides for police and private citizens track each other almost identically? I can't think of any explanation.
According to: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/us-police-kil... the number of police homicides have also been under reported, historically. It appears (if the Guardian's reporting is correct) that some states don't even report at all some years.
But let's assume that there are 15,000 homicides per year by non-police and that 1000 of them are deemed justifiable homicides (double the reported ones to account for under reporting). That's about 7% of homicides that are justifiable.
In the second link, it says that 19 out of 547 were killed by police after they were taken into custody. 31 were killed by tasers. 119 were killed while unarmed. What percentage of these killings were justifiable?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/police-rarely-criminally-charged... claims 41 police officers were charged for shootings in a 7 year period. That is about 5.86 per year. The original link claimed about 87% of killings were shootings, so let's assume that police are charged with killing linearly and we get about 7 officers charged per year. I think it is telling that I can't find the success rate of prosecution anywhere :-P
So if we assume all 7 officers were found guilty, that means we get 540 out of 547 killings to be justified, or 98.7%.
So the average citizen has an upper bound of somewhere around 7% of having a homicide found to be justified, while the police have a lower bound of around 98% of having a homicide to be found justified. This despite the fact that 3.5% of police homicides happen after the suspect is in custody, 5.7% happen as a result of the suspect being hit with a taser, and 21.8% of the suspects are unarmed.
While I wouldn't say this is a case for "blanket immunity", I have to say that the numbers do not seem reasonable to me. Especially if 20 people are killed by police while in custody and there is not an expectation that a charge will be laid in any of the 20 cases, that does not seem reasonable at all given that at least 93% of civilian homicides are deemed not-justifiable.
But even more worrying is the sorry state of affairs for the reporting of this data (if the newspapers I browsed while doing my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct). If they don't have better reporting, I don't know how anyone is supposed to scrutinize it.
Anyway, I hope someone found this interesting. Apologies if I made any math mistakes along the way.
One thing to consider is that this case (and the 4%) figure refer to those who've been sentenced to death, where the standards for prosecution and sentencing are the absolute highest. It would only be natural to suspect that this figure is even greater the less the sentence/crime.
Until we carefully scrutinize the incentives facing the judicial system as a whole (and see how unbalanced it is), this is bound to be the norm.
Appalled that people are killed legally based only on a criminal's word. Also appalled that we still have the death penalty in some countries, these are pretty much all backwards countries with the outliers of US and Japan; it's a litmus test for humans rights imho.
Singapore has the death penalty. Taiwan has the death penalty. Singapore is probably the most advanced economy in the world. one of Taiwan's main exports is computer engineering R&D for most of the hardware in your PC (as the hardware itself is now manufactured and assembled in China)
Taiwan has nationalised health care - score 1 for Taiwan over the US.
I consider any country implementing the death penalty to be a cultural backwater. Many parts of the US are basically the definition of a cultural backwater anyway.
I'm sure there are some critiques that can be raised as to methodology, but just as a point of conversation you may be interested in the World Happiness Report, on which none of those countries rate higher than the US.
A solution is to build a platform that crowdsources such cases to raise awareness AND a call for action. The community would need to be unbelievable but it's not at all impossible. Once there are 100,000 signatures on any petition under 30 days, the White House guarantees a response. There are many great communities with more than 100,000 active users. Why not?
Do you intend to suggest that Ahmed should have gone to jail, and that the teachers, administrators, cops, and prosecutors who tried to send him there were somehow wronged by the "Internet mob"?
Absolutely not. Sending a kid to jail because he brought a clock to school is silly.
However, a kid who bought a clock from the 80s, than repackaged it in a pencil box claiming it his 'invention', and put a timer on it making it beep in class, who was then evasive when answering questions, on the day after 9/11 anniversary, definitely deserves some suspicion.
What I object to is the praise he's gotten, from Obama to Zuckerberg. Without even one look at the facts of the situation.
Vice released a special last night about mass incarceration related to non-violent drug crimes. It included President Obama visiting a federal prison and interviews with Former Atty. Gen. Eric Holder.
I don't always agree with the content / viewpoints that Vice puts out, but this was one of the most well made and powerful documentaries I've seen in a while. I'd like to think that President Obama's reactions were genuine and that things might slowly start to change in the US.
A "genuine" president would have issued hundreds of thousands of pardons for drug "crimes" by this point in his presidency. Obama is just another politician.
Andrew Johnson pardoned everyone who fought for the Confederacy, other than Jeff Davis and a few other bigwigs. Sure, armed insurrection is a less serious crime than getting high, but I think the precedent stands.
Strictly speaking however "precedent" doesn't apply to pardons since they are a power specifically granted the president by Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution. Precedents are important in courts, so if e.g. the Supreme Court had previously ruled that pardoning pot smokers is unconstitutional then that precedent would be relevant. My impression is that the courts don't want to touch pardons, which is only right, since the point of putting them in the Constitution was to give the executive the ability to rein in the vindictiveness of the legislative and judicial branches. I expect that if Congress passed a law attempting to restrict the use of pardons, even the most conservative jurist would toss that shit right out of court.
I live in a country with a terrible human rights record. Yet, since 1991, it never had a death penalty applied. [1] You might get sentenced to a death penalty (on extreme cases), but it's not applied. The law still legalise it but there is some pressure to remove it currently.
I find the news that 1) a death penalty is about to take place in the U.S, 2) hastily and 3) with little evidence really shocking, disturbing and unacceptable in a country which is supposed to be at the front of defending human rights.
The US is most certainly not at the forefront of defending human rights if by that you mean actual action to stop abuses rather than mere lip service. Our prison system is an atrocious human rights disaster. Our justice system is effectively non-existent and almost 100% based on forced plea bargains (this case being an unusual exception that actually went to trial). Guantanamo Bay. Abu Ghraib. And that's just in the last decade. If you look at reality, you'll see that the US is full of human rights abuses, almost all preventable. And as far as the prison system, well it's by far the worst in the world.
I'd like to examine the perverse incentives behind prosecutors going for the throat. Wouldn't this problem effectively disappear if prosecutors were ranked on "wisdom" and "mercy" instead of how badly (and cheaply) they crush someone who makes even the smallest mistake through a plea deal?
PG, thanks for writing about this and bringing both this case and the death penalty to readers' attention.
Richard Glossip's case is similar in many ways to Troy Davis[1]. You may recognize that name--in 2011, when he was executed, he was the world's most famous death row inmate. Like Glossip, Troy Davis had no physical evidence against him. His conviction (of murdering a police officer) was based primarily on 9 eyewitness testimonies. SEVEN of those eyewitnesses recanted or altered their testimonies, many citing police coercion or intimidation. Ten new witnesses came forward saying one of the two non-recanting witnesses, Sylvester Coles, confessed to the murder.
A few days before he was executed, ONE MILLION people signed a petition to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. Despite this, and the many doubts in his case, Troy Davis was executed on September 21, 2011.
I was close friends with Troy--I first visited him on death row in 2008 (when I was 15), and spent the next three years visiting him, corresponding with him, and talking to him on the phone. Troy was so well-known because his case epitomized everything that is wrong with the American justice system and the death penalty--racial bias (he was a black man accused of killing a white cop in 1980s Georgia), an overzealous DA with a history of prosecutorial misconduct, police coercion and witness tampering, the execution of innocents (over a dozen death row inmates have been exonerated since he was executed in 2011...how many innocents were executed in that time?) and a justice system so rigid and brittle that it would not even commute his sentence to life imprisonment, despite even a federal judge admitting Troy had shown at least a "minimal" level of doubt in his case.
In 2012, I raised 11k on Kickstarter to write a book on my relationship with Troy Davis called Remain Free[2]. It talks about many of the ugly aspects of his life on death row and of the legal corruption in his case that he (and I) couldn't publicly talk about while he was still alive. Since the book is built on hundreds of recorded conversations, in person visits, and letters with Troy, you really get a sense of who he was as a person and the kind of toll two decades on death row takes on him and his family.
If you'd like a copy, you can order it on Amazon[3] or through http://remainfree.com. All profits go to the Innocence Project [4], a non-profit that works to free wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing. Alternatively, email me (gautamnarula[at]gmail.com) a screenshot of a $10 donation to the Innocence Project, and I'll send you the e-book for free. Donate $20 to the Innocence Project, and I'll send you a physical copy for just the cost of shipping ($3 in the US).
I support the death penalty, but I believe all executions should be carried out Ned Stark style. As in, if you are the Governor, and can commute the sentence, then you should be there and actually carry out the execution. If you can save a person's life, you owe it to them and society to bear the responsibility of not commuting the sentence and see what death looks like.
Why put the governor on the hook, but not the majority of Americans who support the death penalty? If tomorrow 75% of Americans disagreed with the death penalty, it would be abolished.
It's not your politicians who are keeping the death penalty, it is your citizens.
This is a pretty reasonable suggestion. The jury that sentences a convict to death has to actually carry out the sentence. I suspect that the number of strong supporters of the death penalty will drop dramatically when faced with having to perform the sentence with their own hands.
I sat voir dire for the trial of an accused child molester. I'm sure at least some of the venom displayed that morning was cynical, in order to get out of serving on the jury. Significant numbers of people, however, didn't strike me as intelligent enough to be cynical. So, I would say there are some crimes that would have no shortage of jurors willing to swing the ax themselves.
If you think about it, death vs life in prison is pretty imbalanced. On one hand, you can either die immediately and escape from it all (that being the case), while on the other hand you're stuck in a cell for the rest of your life, living with your thoughts, away from the rest of society. Personally, if I had to choose, I would choose death, since it's quick and easy, and I won't have to suffer through my own thoughts on a day to day basis.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadAs pg very well says, you cannot have human lives depend on other human's lack of rigor, stupidity and incompetence
And nothing more need be said. I don't understand how it seems impossible to force into people's heads the two notions that the burden of guilt lay with the prosecution and that guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt.
The DA basically told this guy point-blank that if you don't want to die, take this deal. If you do want to die, don't take the deal.
He chose not to take the deal.
Is there a chance that "good sense" could have prevailed, and that by some fluke, some part of the system wouldn't work, and so he would be saved from the death penalty? Maybe. But if he had taken the deal, he would definitely not have died.
This guy chose to play russian roulette with a six-shooter with five bullets in it and lost. And this is the reason we shouldn't kill people? Because a guy who can't do the basic math of "which choice is more likely to end in my death" chose poorly?
No. The guy should have taken the deal. Much like the rest of the people on the planet who choose to take huge risks with their life, he's going to lose out on this bet. And that has nothing to do with why we should stop the state from killing people.
Our system of justice is based on laws and rules. They can't be broken arbitrarily, which is why innocent people are put to death. Not because we're mean. Not because we're stupid. We make the rules, and we have to enforce them. In this case, one of our rules is, if you do X, you die.
So, if you don't believe in killing innocent people, by all means, get rid of that rule. But don't tell me we should get rid of the rule because the rules weren't perfect.
2. Telling someone that I intend to kill them, means that is would be stupid to not kill them?
did you do it?
Y -> address "do you want to die" question
N -> "I don't deserve to either die or spend my life in prison" -> rely on the justice system to do the right thing
If I, an innocent man, was given that choice... I would probably try it out in court. I would assume my innocence would prevent the court from convicting me.
Are you saying that every person charged with a capital offense should instantly take a plea deal for life in prison? Because that's what your flow chart is suggesting.
If so, then that's seriously messed up.
The point of a law is simply to put down the rules by which order is maintained, and that order is dictated by the morality of the majority of people who hold power in government. The justice system merely upholds the law set down and doles out what the law defines as a 'just' punishment or judgment.
A law can say literally anything, like, "Black people may not marry White people", or "Women may not vote", "Gay people may not get married", etc. Or they can say things like "At an intersection, the left-most lane may turn left onto the street it intersects with, but not the right-most lane." It can say anything; it doesn't have to do with "fairness" and "justice", it has to do with maintaining order.
The laws, once put down, are enforced, as long as they remain laws. The results of those laws being enforced will only stop once the laws are abolished (and even then, sometimes the states just like to keep going with 'em even if they've been abolished anyway).
We can't just selectively enforce or not enforce laws. Then there would be no point to the law. Then literally any local government official, judge, court, president, etc could abuse the rights of citizens or allow people to go free simply because they felt like it. And that's not in the public interest.
Therefore, laws which are deemed to be unfair or unjust must be amended or abolished. But - and this is the important part - they must simply be made by decree by will of the representatives of the public, and must not always meet a measurement of justice or fairness. Not only because there are plenty of laws which simply define what the proper procedures of daily life are, but because we'd literally never get any laws passed if we had to have a philosophical discussion about the potential pros and cons of the impact of the law on justice as a general idea.
So why are they forcing him to make an unfair choice? Laws aren't designed to be fair. Only the consequence of the law can be fair, according to that law. In this case, if you ask a guy if he wants to live, and he says, "No", is it fair to give him death, assuming he was of sound mind and body and understood the consequences of his decision?
Yeah.
No one is suggesting the DA pick and choose which laws to enforce.
The point is that there appears to be reasonable doubt that he committed the crime and therefore, according to the very laws you demand be enforced, should be acquitted.
Still not a reason to abolish the death penalty.
Is it immoral? Yes. Impossible to reverse once enforced? Definitely. The government screwed up this one case so the law should be abolished completely? Nope.
The punishment for making a bad decision on a deal presented to you should not be death. If your crime deserves the maximum sentence, and you are in subway helpful to the criminal justice system, then maybe you deserve a pass. However, if you didn't commit the crime, or if there is reasonable doubt as to whether you did, I don't care if you mooned the DA when they offered a plea bargain: you shouldn't get killed.
That's not arbitrary justice. That's just justice. You can't justify punishing innocent people.
Now, the nice thing about other punishments is, in the case where justice if misapplied, you can try to make up for it later. With the death penalty, that option isn't available to you, which is one of many reasons people question whether it at all makes sense.
Missed the autocorrect foo. Sorry.
It's not clear what can be done about it, other than occasionally writing a check to the ACLU to help limit the damage. Any ideas?
It's a problem that there is enough material to keep the stories coming, but let's not conclude that the stories we read about represent the bulk of the justice system's operations.
The murder of Meredith Kercher is another prominent example in another country. All evidence pointed to one murderer, who was duly convicted. And then the state decided to spend years prosecuting two innocent people based on some odd behavior and not the slightest shred of credible physical evidence. They're just lucky they finally got a sane judge at the highest level.
It's more like proof of the law of large numbers.
> The appeals processes seems too restrictive to allow for proper review in many cases.
Appeals processes should be restrictive, otherwise the time and expense of the trial itself are essentially squandered. That said, I have no doubt that at least in some, and possibly many systems, it's over the line.
> Just because a system has existed for a long time doesn't mean it's ideal in any way.
I hope you didn't think I suggested anything to the contrary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Attorney_General_el...
Far more than 0.01% of elections have narrow margins of victory, particularly less well known ones like attorneys.
So the contrast is a full supporter on one hand, and someone who, at minimum, is conflicted about the use of the death penalty and widely acknowledges the racial disparity in its application.
I would call that a real difference, though in case it isn't clear, I would support banning the death penalty on both humane/equality and financial grounds.
NB: Prop 34 would have banned the death penalty in California. It lost by a couple percent [4]
[1] http://blogs.kqed.org/election2012/2012/10/11/two-district-a...
[2] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-death-penalt...
[3] http://ballotpedia.org/Kamala_D._Harris
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_34_(201...
There are incentives to cheat; as long as there are no ramifications for it, it will continue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqChMa4GV3w
1) abortion clinic bombing changed nothing; if anything it helped raise funds (you'd almost think they were false flag operations? Is there anything that helped the pro choice cause more than the bombings?)
2) the War on drugs has ruined uncountable lives, certainly far more than drugs have ruined, none the less neither the fear of drugs or the more realistic fear of the war on drugs keeps people sober, business has always been booming.
3) the war on black men has gotten about 1/3 of them involved in the criminal justice system. The result? None, no change. They haven't become refugees, their culture has changed as little as possible under the circumstances, no serious rebellion...
In those three examples taking normal level actions and turning them up to 11 has either been utterly ineffective or counterproductive. I'd have to say the tsotha theoretical model fits observed reality better, although I admit further research could find observations overturning that... although I don't expect it.
1) The public and perhaps even many scholars are split on abortion - I personally don't think there's a clear cut "correct" answer.
2) I wouldn't expect people to quit. Drugs are fun, most are relatively harmless, using them is not immoral, and you most likely won't get caught.
3) Similar to #2, and much of the issues here are a direct result of #2
Turning it up to 11 (great expression btw) to be effective should be used only when there is obvious wrongdoing, when innocent people are clearly being railroaded by people who either know the person is innocent, or made no effort to determine innocence (which, let's not forget, is the job they are being paid very handsomely to perform). I'm not sure if this particular case is a valid example example for turning it up to 11, but there are certainly plenty. I think this would be effective, and I believe there would be widespread public support with sufficient communication.
Considering that fear of ramifications has proven entirely ineffective in preventing certain kinds of behavior in other aspects of the justice system, I don't think this would be as effective as you might think
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/09/2...
"When the order delaying the execution for two weeks came down, Glossip was so close to his scheduled execution time that he had already been served his final meal (which included chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, fish and chips and a strawberry malt).
In addition to their requests to the Oklahoma court, Glossip’s attorneys had also asked Gov. Mary Fallin (R) to stay the execution, arguing that the lethal injection should be halted due to new evidence. However, Fallin denied these requests, and she said her office determined that none of the evidence presented by Glossip’s attorneys changed her mind.
“After carefully reviewing the facts of this case multiple times, I see no reason to cast doubt on the guilty verdict reached by the jury or to delay Glossip’s sentence of death,” she said in a statement earlier this month. Fallin also said her office would respect the appeals court’s decision."
The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are.
It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences.
See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win?
If you want a burger, a high, an orgasm or a conviction, you generally will get it at some price that's ultimately...above market.
How much more prone to excess is someone in the heat of a moment? How unlike the event does its moment by moment reconstruction during a trial appear? The mismatch has always struck me as unjust. As people judging an event whose experience they haven't had and haven't attempted to recreate. Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform.
An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation.
Any shade of grey zooming out from that seems too hard for any government system to decide well. I hear people say things in passing like "he only got 20 years". 20 years is a huge and devastating amount of time, as is one year. As we've ramped up the time on these sentences and made it an all or nothing proposition. Unfortunately, I don't think 20 years will do it if 1 year hasn't and I don't think death will do it if 20 years hasn't.
Regarding Richard Glossip. I don't know him or his case. I don't know the victim and while they won't return, there's a debt owed that I don't know how to pay. I want Richard Glossip to live. I don't think taking another life will pay the debt of the first. What I want most of all is for someone to tell me how to pay that debt.
Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children. They're usually in situations people would rather ignore. They're desperate. They want attention and they get it at some price that's ultimately... above market.
eric_the_read's comment notwithstanding, people subjected to extreme circumstances in their childhood years are less likely to be rehabilitated, not more.
The argument is that someone willing to shoot up a school for attention is beyond rehabilitation. His age is irrelevant to someone making that claim, and possibly argues in his favor.
Jail time is low in France because our jails are full. Any sentence below two years is automatically deferred to probation, which means that a large number of crimes are de facto not punished.
A quick google search will reveal a disturbing trend of violent crimes that don't result in jail time for this reason.
France has the opposite problem, and it's no better.
I find it good. So magistrates are constrained by capacity. Of course I'd prefer they don't fill up French prisons at 125%.
If we build more prisons, we'll fill them up. US is now famously known for having more people in jail than Stalin's gulags [1]. I quite appreciate France's leniency with penalties, because I'm not sure 3 months or 3 years is really different, apart from further distorting the social network of the inmate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
My point is simply that not punishing people isn't a viable solution, either. France has the same problem as the US (too many people incarcerated) and an equally bad solution (stop incarcerating altogether).
"Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform."
How do you justify the statement that a jury is the best idea that we have? Germany has the concept of Schöffe, and some believe this offers results that stick closer to the law than the jury system:
http://www.britannica.com/topic/Schoffe
While any government of mortal human flesh must inevitably have some flaws, the jury system seems especially bad at overcoming popular prejudice. In the USA, "a jury of one's peers" has often meant a mostly white (or all white) jury judging a black person, a circumstance that has given the USA many hundreds of famous miscarriages of justice.
The system that grew out of English Common Law, and which dominates England, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, is not the only system known to liberal Western societies. The English system is unique in the authority it gives to juries. Most of the Continental judicial systems either lack juries or have juries whose goal is constrained relative to the English system.
A review of the legal traditions in liberal Western nations reveals a lot of good ideas, many of which are probably superior to the jury system.
One could argue, perhaps from the experience of China, that elections aren't the most effective means of choosing political leaders. But this misses the point of elections.
1) That's UNAMERICAN. Courts and jury is the way god intended it to be.
2) Lol crackpot.
3) What if X turns out to be worse, sucks for the people who got trials like this during that time.
4) Lol crackpot.
Experimentation for political systems, judiciary infrastructure and the like is a really hard problem and I think de facto impossible. I applaud everyone who tries no matter how crazy it seems (seasteading) but at the end of the day I think there is no such thing as radical political entrepreneurship. I think it's unfortunate but I also can't envision how (rapid) experimentation cycles could be transfered to such systems.
Our common law system has evolved to be resilient against many different things, rather than being designed to maximize efficiency of a few things. It is certainly not perfect, there is no doubt of that. Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.
Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder. The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries. That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.
Some civil law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years. Some common law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years (e.g.: English revolution, detainment of Americans with Japenese ancestry during World War 2).
> Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.
Except when it doesn’t serve the common interests very well by, for example, maintaining the legality of slavery well past the point it was abolished in many (civil and common law) countries and by taking another 100 years to reconsider the whole apartheid thing. In comparison, the civil law countries in Scandinavia seem to have faired quite well on the civil rights front and it was also civil, not common, law countries that drove the spearhead for women’s suffrage.
> Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder.
Ah, yes, the famous French common law system based not at all on the Code Napoleon and the equally famous Soviet common law system.
> The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries.
Again, the English revolution comes to mind. Or that whole debacle where slavery was only abolished after a bloody civil war in the 1860s! Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland weren’t exactly hotspots of instability either. And to be honest, I am not sure that Quebec has seen many more fascist dictators than the rest of Canada, something that would be implied by its civil law nature?
> That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.
Except, of course, when you can.
And dont forget CIA blacksites!
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-poland-cia-blacksi...
Bush admits to secret prisons(wikipedia sources are your friend): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5321606.stm http://web.archive.org/web/20060906193917/http://www.cnn.com...
We don't, as far as I know, have entire prisons where we hold people without trial because they 'know secrets' and we are afraid they might tell them. In fact, I don't know of a single instance of this, outside of people who agreed to keep some secret but then changed their mind (snowden).
>>Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.
I think that you here implicitly assume that there is overwhelming evidence of who is the author of the crime. For example, all of these: Many survivors testimonies (be careful, they are not so reliable in practice), many videos of the massacre were the face of the attacked is clearly visible, a perfect matching of the ADN in few blood spots, fingerprint in the weapons, gunpowder marks in the hands, he/she is detained in situ while trying to kill more people, ...
Does this case has overwhelming evidence?
Please read the rest of the post before commenting. It's possible to believe all of these things at once:
(i) An eye for an eye is useful and works.
(ii) Glossip should not be in jail, and even less so, killed.
(ii) pg is correct in his reasoning for why US should not have the death penalty.
My uncle who's a pastor gave me an interesting perspective on this phrase. Before Solomon it was common practice to escalate a transgression. So a theft begets a retaliatory murder, begets a retaliatory massacre. This adage is not as much about seeking equality in punishment, as much as a brake to limit escalation. "An eye for an eye and no more."
Obviously pg's writings are favorites of the community here, but if you look back through the history of HN you'll find that right from the beginning there were selected political stories that were on topic.
Is there a precise criterion? Nope. But as pg once said, note those words most and probably. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426.
In this case:
Means: he knew the person who committed the physical attack and had influence over this person
Motive: the victim was accusing him of embezzling $6000
Opportunity: plenty
Proof defendant actually acted on the motive: he attempted to hide the body from discovery, helped hide the victims car, contributed to a conspiracy to cut the body up and dissolve it in acid, split the money from the victim's wallet with the other man involved, and made sure that cleaning staff that he managed were reassigned so that they would not find the body. None of this is in dispute!
This is by itself enough to convict him.
Finally -- and I know this is only a minor point in comparison -- it's worth noting that pg doesn't have anything to gain by writing this, and people who stick their neck out by writing about political issues inevitably get shouted at. Soon enough publishing anything stops being worth the aggravation. So credit goes to pg for standing up and speaking out, when it's all too easy to be silent.
What do you mean by "in combination with," here? If you mean that the death penalty is used to convince people to plead guilty, I'm with you. But if you're saying that a large number of people who are sentenced to death were pressured into pleading guilty, then I am skeptical, since it is unclear what the defendant is receiving in exchange for the plea. (Usually it is a lighter sentence...)
In short, every plea deal should be considered a grave injustice that needs to be corrected.
Of course, it will never happen.
At least in comparison with wars of aggression, foreign coups, the war on drugs, subsidizing cars, subsidizing fossil fuels, subsidizing tobacco, weak pharma regulation, promoting antibiotics in food, cop shootings, fast food subsidies (via corn), not implementing cap & trade to combat climate change, privatized health insurance, trade embargoes, promoting harmful nutrition guidelines, lack of food safety standards/inspection, lack of any required safety testing for new chemicals, etc.
It is interesting to look at the graph at the top of the article, though. Why do justifiable homicides for police and private citizens track each other almost identically? I can't think of any explanation.
According to: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/us-police-kil... the number of police homicides have also been under reported, historically. It appears (if the Guardian's reporting is correct) that some states don't even report at all some years.
But let's assume that there are 15,000 homicides per year by non-police and that 1000 of them are deemed justifiable homicides (double the reported ones to account for under reporting). That's about 7% of homicides that are justifiable.
In the second link, it says that 19 out of 547 were killed by police after they were taken into custody. 31 were killed by tasers. 119 were killed while unarmed. What percentage of these killings were justifiable?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/police-rarely-criminally-charged... claims 41 police officers were charged for shootings in a 7 year period. That is about 5.86 per year. The original link claimed about 87% of killings were shootings, so let's assume that police are charged with killing linearly and we get about 7 officers charged per year. I think it is telling that I can't find the success rate of prosecution anywhere :-P
So if we assume all 7 officers were found guilty, that means we get 540 out of 547 killings to be justified, or 98.7%.
So the average citizen has an upper bound of somewhere around 7% of having a homicide found to be justified, while the police have a lower bound of around 98% of having a homicide to be found justified. This despite the fact that 3.5% of police homicides happen after the suspect is in custody, 5.7% happen as a result of the suspect being hit with a taser, and 21.8% of the suspects are unarmed.
While I wouldn't say this is a case for "blanket immunity", I have to say that the numbers do not seem reasonable to me. Especially if 20 people are killed by police while in custody and there is not an expectation that a charge will be laid in any of the 20 cases, that does not seem reasonable at all given that at least 93% of civilian homicides are deemed not-justifiable.
But even more worrying is the sorry state of affairs for the reporting of this data (if the newspapers I browsed while doing my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct). If they don't have better reporting, I don't know how anyone is supposed to scrutinize it.
Anyway, I hope someone found this interesting. Apologies if I made any math mistakes along the way.
Until we carefully scrutinize the incentives facing the judicial system as a whole (and see how unbalanced it is), this is bound to be the norm.
Singapore has the death penalty. Taiwan has the death penalty. Singapore is probably the most advanced economy in the world. one of Taiwan's main exports is computer engineering R&D for most of the hardware in your PC (as the hardware itself is now manufactured and assembled in China)
Taiwan has nationalised health care - score 1 for Taiwan over the US.
I consider any country implementing the death penalty to be a cultural backwater. Many parts of the US are basically the definition of a cultural backwater anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
'Cause that would be silly...
What I object to is the praise he's gotten, from Obama to Zuckerberg. Without even one look at the facts of the situation.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjWSW94-P3Y
Article: https://news.vice.com/article/president-obama-heads-to-priso...
I find the news that 1) a death penalty is about to take place in the U.S, 2) hastily and 3) with little evidence really shocking, disturbing and unacceptable in a country which is supposed to be at the front of defending human rights.
1: http://www.deathpenaltyworldwide.org/country-search-post.cfm...
The level of corruption/manipulation/etc. in some of these death row cases is very frightening.
Richard Glossip's case is similar in many ways to Troy Davis[1]. You may recognize that name--in 2011, when he was executed, he was the world's most famous death row inmate. Like Glossip, Troy Davis had no physical evidence against him. His conviction (of murdering a police officer) was based primarily on 9 eyewitness testimonies. SEVEN of those eyewitnesses recanted or altered their testimonies, many citing police coercion or intimidation. Ten new witnesses came forward saying one of the two non-recanting witnesses, Sylvester Coles, confessed to the murder.
A few days before he was executed, ONE MILLION people signed a petition to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. Despite this, and the many doubts in his case, Troy Davis was executed on September 21, 2011.
I was close friends with Troy--I first visited him on death row in 2008 (when I was 15), and spent the next three years visiting him, corresponding with him, and talking to him on the phone. Troy was so well-known because his case epitomized everything that is wrong with the American justice system and the death penalty--racial bias (he was a black man accused of killing a white cop in 1980s Georgia), an overzealous DA with a history of prosecutorial misconduct, police coercion and witness tampering, the execution of innocents (over a dozen death row inmates have been exonerated since he was executed in 2011...how many innocents were executed in that time?) and a justice system so rigid and brittle that it would not even commute his sentence to life imprisonment, despite even a federal judge admitting Troy had shown at least a "minimal" level of doubt in his case.
Troy's last words, recorded minutes before he was executed, are haunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98dlGv0k2MM
In 2012, I raised 11k on Kickstarter to write a book on my relationship with Troy Davis called Remain Free[2]. It talks about many of the ugly aspects of his life on death row and of the legal corruption in his case that he (and I) couldn't publicly talk about while he was still alive. Since the book is built on hundreds of recorded conversations, in person visits, and letters with Troy, you really get a sense of who he was as a person and the kind of toll two decades on death row takes on him and his family.
If you'd like a copy, you can order it on Amazon[3] or through http://remainfree.com. All profits go to the Innocence Project [4], a non-profit that works to free wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing. Alternatively, email me (gautamnarula[at]gmail.com) a screenshot of a $10 donation to the Innocence Project, and I'll send you the e-book for free. Donate $20 to the Innocence Project, and I'll send you a physical copy for just the cost of shipping ($3 in the US).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Davis
[2] http://remainfree.com
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Remain-Free-Memoir-Gautam-Narula/dp/09...
[4] http://innocenceproject.org
It's not your politicians who are keeping the death penalty, it is your citizens.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JYWVYLY
I was incredibly eye-opening how common this kind of thing is. It makes me sick.