Note that this would only end it for crimes that fall under the state's jurisdiction. For things like transporting people across state lines to kill them or using a weapon of mass destruction in a manner detrimental to interstate commerce, the death penalty could still apply on a federal level.
IMO I cannot fathom being sure enough of anything to without doub deem someone unredeemable. To the extent that people are unredeemable is to the extent I think our rehabilitation system is failing.
States should not allow two propositions that contradict each other to be put up for vote simultaneously. They are generally confusing and almost always favor the status quo at the expense of most citizens who don't have time to understand the nuances of each prop/issue/initiative/ammendment.
California already removed the death penalty in 1972 then later reinstated it. This resulted in killers like Charles Mason being relieved from execution and denying many victim's family member from obtaining a measure of justice they wanted.
Since being reinstated only 13 people have been executed. And none in the past 10 years.
I think one of the best takes on this issue was a quote from a death penalty critic in the documentary film "Deadline". He said, "We all agree that we should have a system that kills John Wayne Gacy but there is no way to create a system that kills only John Wayne Gacy."
Meaning that, there are certain cases where we are 100% certain of a persons guilt and can mostly agree that that person should die but how do we ensure a death penalty is used exlusively in those cases?
Also on the theme of false confessions and how broken the US justice system is, I strongly recommend watching the "Paradise Lost" series of documentaries.[1][2]
> This resulted in killers like Charles Mason being relieved from execution and denying many victim's family member from obtaining a measure of justice they wanted.
I weigh that measure of justice as less meaningful than the potential execution of innocents.
That's hardly comparable. In 1972 the supreme court decided that the death penalty laws _of the time_ were unconstitutional. The death penalty was almost immediately restored by public vote, with some modifications (switching from hanging to lethal injection, changing the appeals process, etc.)
The will of the people is the ultimate mandate in a democracy. In 1972 this mandate was for the death penalty. We'll see next week whether the mandate has changed.
Actually I think the above statement is correct. If the U.S. was a pure democracy, the will of the people would be ultimate. As a constitutional republic, the constitution is ultimate, and in the U.S.'s particular implementation of the republic, the will of the people would mandate a law, and the supreme court would determine if that law comports with the constitution or not.
Your argument seems to contradict itself. The death penalty is necessary for justice, but at the same time we should be OK with having it because it hasn't been used in a decade?
I don't believe it. Bringing up Charles Manson and using loaded language to describe his avoidance of it clearly makes an argument for the death penalty.
It is a fact that Charles Mason was relieved from execution. Just like it is a fact that because of the court rulings around 1972 he became eligible for parole.
Charles Manson and other 106 inmates on death row in 1972 were all convicted killers who were relieved from the death penalty.
Many victim's family members were upset by the courts decision.
> This resulted in killers like Charles Mason being relieved from execution and denying many victim's family member from obtaining a measure of justice they wanted.
That qualifies more as 'revenge' than as 'justice'.
The whole idea of a punitive system is broken at the foundation. Jail is not there to remove people from the pool (though in some cases that is a happy side effect), it is there to rehabilitate. In extreme cases this means people will never be released. But executing them makes 'us' just as bad as 'them'.
It should be there to rehabilitate, because (EDIT: in large part, there are other reasons) ultimately the vast majority of the incarcerated will be released back into society.
Unfortunately, the US has long since decided that punishment is the purpose, that these people are getting what they deserve. It's a very frustrating culture to be surrounded by.
And even if you don't accept that, just consider: most crimes aren't murder. They don't get people sent away for life, but for a period of 1-a few years.
They will be released back into society. If we do not rehabilitate them, we can expect recidivism from either failing to counter the errant impulses, exposure to similar or worse criminal elements while incarcerated, or failure to reenter society (due to ostracism, failure to adapt to changes, lack of social structure like family and friends). We are literally creating the problem by failing to rehabilitate criminals, and instead focusing on "punishing" them.
There is much to unpack in this topic, but I'll just point out that the idea that its purpose must be singular, one of punishment or rehabilitation, is a false dichotomy.
Justice is supposed to measured and balancing for society as a whole, meted out by an impartial judge and jury of peers.
Revenge is completely subjective and ruled by emotional responses by the aggrieved party. It's almost always going to be more destructive disproportionate than it needs to be.
The last people that should decide the fate of those who have harmed them are the victims. That just leads to pure chaos.
I could decide that if someone threatened my life that I would achieve justice by circumventing law enforcement and the justice system by murdering the person in question plus their whole family, whether they meant it or not. I could state reasons of personal/family honour and whatever other bullshit would justify those actions in my mind. That doesn't make it right, or just. It makes it a response borne of unchecked emotion.
You might say that is okay, but it would quickly lead to pure anarchy if we all followed that ideal. That's why we have a justice system in place that doesn't (or tries not to) focus on revenge.
This resulted in killers like Charles Mason being relieved from execution and denying many victim's family member from obtaining a measure of justice they wanted.
And thus the state protects the convicted from the vengeful desires of the victim's family members and doles out the justice the community has deemed appropriate. Just because the victims pay the state to "string 'em up!" instead of doing it themselves doesn't mean it's not mob justice.
If by community you mean a few government elite, and some judges, then yes. If you mean the population of the state, a large majority at the time supported the death penalty, which why it was reinstated by popular vote soon after.
The population of the state simultaneously wanted the death penalty and to follow the Constitution. One role that the population of the state gave to judges is to referee these conflicting desires.
Not only did Californians vote to reinstate the death penalty, they then voted to impeach the justices of the State Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice, who actively blocked its use after it became law again. So I don't think there is much argument that the courts were just implementing the will of the people.
The people didn't want contradictory things, they wanted the death penalty, and they wanted the courts to implement it. The court wasn't caught in the middle, it was just composed of judges with opinions out of alignment with the general population.
Think of a constitution as guardrails about democracies, the constitution nails a couple of very basic rules down hard and leaves room for interpretation and variation. It's a good principle, the constitution guarantees long term stability and the 'basics', the parliaments/congresses/whatever the local variation is called deal with day-to-day variance.
So 'the people' will want both, depending on whether they have the long or the short term view and those two views can and do contradict at times.
People want the constitution in the way they want to interpret it, and they want judges who believe what they believe. There is no contradiction. It is naive to think of judges as some sort of objective arbiter, they are effectively political appointees sent to push an agenda.
> they then voted to impeach the justices of the State Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice, who actively blocked its use after it became law again
nobody was impeached. It was a normal judicial retention election.
Why can't people speak in honest terms? What you mean isn't justice, but revenge. Killing a killer will not undo the damage they have done. It will not bring a life back.
If people require revenge for emotionally healing then that is because society has promoted this as justice.
I've never heard of victims desiring death for killers in my home country, but we are not so big on revenge and don't.
The American justice system frequently paints a trial as some sort of game, where the victims family score more points in the competition for every year extra the perpetrator gets in prison.
What about helping victims in meaningful ways instead? They might need mental health care, time of from work, economic support etc. America tend to do little in this regard.
It reminds me of the conservative desire to ban abortion, but unwillingness to actually help a family in a difficult situation giving birth to a child. Instead of making it easier to have a child so people themselves will chose to keep it, instead they want to intimidate parents to keep it threatening with prison and fines.
It is a fundamentally negative and cynical perspective on humanity. I guess that is what you get when people follow a faith which teaches that people are only good because the fear eternal punishment in hell.
> It reminds me of the conservative desire to ban abortion, but unwillingness to actually help a family in a difficult situation giving birth to a child. Instead of making it easier to have a child so people themselves will chose to keep it, instead they want to intimidate parents to keep it threatening with prison and fines.
Where did you get this idea, that pro-life people are anti-help, pro-intimidation people?
> It is a fundamentally negative and cynical perspective on humanity. I guess that is what you get when people follow a faith which teaches that people are only good because the fear eternal punishment in hell.
That's not what Christianity teaches. Christianity teaches that people are sinful, period. It is only through the redeeming sacrifice of Christ that we can be washed of our sins and be seen as holy in God's sight. We should then be motivated to lead holy lives primarily in gratitude and love, not out of fear. For example, I John 4:18: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love."
Under the assumption that people believe executions offer <real> relief, I think that killing people convicted of murder for the hope of delivering speculative folksy medical / psychological intervention for proximally injured parties values life as absurdly trivial.
At the very least, any rational person should see that compared to armchair speculation of medical interventions, organ extraction offers real value! And not to mention, think of all those who die or suffer because of the pace of medical research. With these worthy prisoners, we can change that! This mindset that values convicts' lives as so trivial is troubling and wasteful.
TLDR: Who cares if a family didn't get the speculative relief they wanted from somebody's execution? That's a perspective that treats life as absurdly trivial, and I doubt the medical community believes this as a serious intervention to clinically significant distress.
The death penalty never made sense to me. We teach our kids its wrong to kill by killing? I'd rather the person spend their life in jail to think about what they have done.
I'm against the death penalty, but I don't think that argument holds up very well. We say it's wrong to kidnap people and hold them against their will, but we put people in prison as punishment. We say it's wrong to steal, but we use fines as punishment. Pretty much by definition, any effective punishment has to be something that's wrong to do to people in general.
Saying all of these things are wrong is indeed consistent, but I don't think many people would agree that it's a good idea to have no way to enforce laws.
I oppose the death penalty but by this logic we shouldn't have prison at all because it's wrong to kidnap and hold someone in 6'x10' room against their will.
prison is a place for people who can't be trusted in the general public. We add layers of protections in case we are wrong (juries, appeals). There is no CTRL-Z for the death penalty.
Does a death sentence make us a better society for justice? I don't have an answer to that question. However, it is a question I prefer to not have experimented on in our justice system.
I recently watched the documentary 13th from Netflix. It really puts into perspective our pro-incarnation justice system. While capital punishment and death row is a section of our justice system, it has the highest stakes in outlining where our ethical limits reside as a society.
The single best reason why the death penalty should be abolished is because it does not have an 'undo' button. It's bad enough if people get jailed for a long time when they are innocent, it is much worse when they're murdered by the state for crimes they did not commit.
Exactly. I am astonished that there is no debate around this. Drone killing ought to be regarded as a war crime. When you go around performing targeted killing of people in peace time, then that is unlawful execution.
> Drone killing ought to be regarded as a war crime.
It is a war crime. That doesn't mean any drone wielders will ever be brought to justice, but the same goes for all those Blackwater (oh, sorry 'Xe', oh, sorry 'Academi', it's hard to keep track of these scumbags) contractors during the Iraq war.
War crimes as a rule will only see their day in court if they are committed by relatively powerless people on the losing side of some conflict. Otherwise you're probably in worse shape shoplifting or stealing a car.
Heck, America doesn't even subscribe to the international tribunal for warcrimes.
And let's not forget all the torturers and their enablers and protectors. Torture is a very serious crime. But will the people who commit it and those who order it ever be held accountable? Nope. The US government just stamps "legal" on it after it makes a splash in the press, and then people mostly forget about it. Now Trump is promising to "bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding".
This is just the tip of the criminal iceberg in the US. But crime is really the wrong word when the people who commit and order the crime and those who protect them are the same people who write and enforce the laws.
Because improperly jailed people who are later freed are at least paid some compensation, and at least they can try to live a normal life afterward. It's not great, nor nearly enough, but it's something. None of this is possible with people who are improperly executed.
Don't succumb to the Nirvana fallacy here - for sure, the American justice system has many more serious flaws than just the death penalty, and those won't be fixed right away. But this is a step in the right direction and worth taking even if many other problems still remain.
That is bad, but you can compensate an wrongfully jailed person afterwards. But I think it is a fair point, which is why I am also against harsh prison conditions. I think prison should mainly be about rehabilitation and shielding society from the danger of the person. If prison mainly means losing freedom, you aren't necessarily ruined mentally when you get out.
That depends. If you spend long enough isolated from society you won't be able to function in it anymore.
People coming out of jail after 10 years of imprisonment are used to the original iphone as the only smartphone. They don't know about Uber, Venmo, Bitcoin, Amazon and Google have both changed dramatically. Now you need an EZPass for most roads, healthcare laws are different, they missed the whole Snowden ordeal. Weed is borderline legal, gay marriage is legal, etc etc.
Things have changed a lot in the past 10 years. If you weren't allowed to keep up with it, you probably don't know how to navigate society anymore.
None of the things you mention would stop someone from re-entering society, in quite a few countries there are rehabilitation programmes in the jails with gradual re-introduction to 'normal' life after longer jail sentences.
Yes, this costs money but it helps to reduce recidivism and in general is a good thing to do.
Wow, this seems extremely naive. (Honestly I'm feeling like I got trolled.)
You don't know of anybody who has never been imprisoned who is managing to live their life without interacting with any of the things you've mentioned?
If not, I would recommend enlarging your circle of contact.
When you come back to society and try to make friends, everyone is going to be utilizing technology to shape their interactions. Uber makes new types of socializing reasonable. (bars and parties farther away). Phones change how people schedule events. Chips in credit cards change how you spend your money.
This isn't trolling. If you don't know how to use modern tech, it's going to be harder to socialize, especially if you are in a city (as they tend to adopt tech faster).
If even a person has successfully rejected some tech (maybe Facebook, maybe smartphones), it's doubtful that they've rejected all tech and if they have they've developed skills for living without it among people who otherwise expect them to have it.
I might be overstating this on a timeline of one decade, but it gets much worse on a timeline of 20 years.
20 years means you were likely using Windows 95. Texting wasn't a thing. Phones didn't have "apps". Banks didn't have websites. The average person's job had a lot less tech in it.
Can you survive? Sure, but your options are a lot more limited compared to someone who knows how to use the tech of the 21st century.
It wouldn't take more than a few weeks to learn how to use those newfangled bits of tech. In fact, a very large portion of the world gets along just fine without them.
There are far worse consequences to being jailed for 10 years or more than not to be able to use a cell phone or the latest social media fad.
Failure of the prison system to protect its inmates should not become a factor in deciding whether or not it is more 'humane' to kill them outright.
The you might as well kill all prisoners because it is more humane, after all where would you draw the line, 5 years, 10 years, 15 or 20, it's all time that has passed.
Compensation should be of such a magnitude that it incentivizes society to make sure it happens as little as possible.
If that is really true, why do inmates try to get out, instead of killing themselves? Why not just kill themselves after release, since having lived through that is so much worse than death?
As well, its fairly clear that the compensation offered is better than nothing. Sure, it may not be a 1:1 ratio of bad to good (rape to cash) but its clearly a step in the right direction to offer someone a "plus" in recompense for the negatives wrongly imposed.
Even a single minute of my time wasted can not be un-done. So if you accept the arrow of time points forward and that no single action can ever be truly un-done there are some actions that are worse than others. And so it would be good to aim for the least harm done.
Death is final, everything else is on a gradient, death is an absolute. So yes, it's fundamentally different. That's why we hold parties on New Years Eve to mark the passing of time but we also hold funeral wakes when someone dies.
That's the single best argument. The single best reason is the immorality of killing.
If you want to gouge a society's level of civilization, look at their prisons. What sets humanity apart is the ability of reason to control instinct. It has taken us from beast to philosopher to The Weather Channel, and its measure is how we treat those everyone hates.
One of the best measures for whether or not a country is civilized or not (or where it sits on a scale of civilization) is to see how they treat their prison inmates, people with mental issues and people without income.
In other words: those over which society wields a lot of power who do not have much power of their own.
Life in jail without possibility of parole executed until the person dies in jail -- is also unreversible and can also be applied to someone who is innocent.
I like his message mainly because I agree with the death penalty in principle. If you want to be a shitty human being, with 7B people on the planet we don't really need you.
But, in practice, we will never get it 100% right. Probability of killing an innocent person will always be >0.
Nothing is 100% certain. If you perform a heart operation, there's a chance you'll kill the patient. Does that mean we should get rid of heart operations?
If you put a serial killer to death, you can be 100% sure they won't kill any more people. If you put him in prison, you can't. He may escape, or he may get released early and kill again. Or as often happens, he'll kill other prisoners whilst in prison.
It's a question of whether you value potential victims, or potential falsely convicted innocent people. IMHO the former is a far bigger problem.
This is a bit of a red herring as I am making no assertions regarding what else may or may be assured 100%.
We have different tolerance for accuracy depending on the context, and my assertion was that in this case 100% would be necessary for, at least me, to feel comfortable carrying out the punishment.
But my point is that are you just "ignoring" the other side of the argument - if you don't put a serial killer to death, there's a chance others will be killed.
If you don't put them to death, can you be 100% sure saving that life isn't going to cause more people to die?
It's not simply a case of "punishment". It's preventing further crime and deaths.
If there's a serial killer, even if you put a person accused of being that serial killer to death, you can't be sure that serial killer won't kill any more people. This isn't just an edge case: serial killers often claim credit for any and all crimes that might be attributed to them. Kill them off, attribute all the murders to them, and the actual serial killer is more likely to stay in the wild.
That was my perspective as well before, but what I never paid much attention to is the fact that every person is part of a network of relationships which gets affected by that person's death.
The importance of that I think is clear with respect to the dynamics for terrorism and war. People who experience their loved ones dying easily get vengeful and radicalized.
If I lost somebody dear to me, I don't think the execution of the killer that my increased satisfaction from this would likely pale compared to the sadness inflicted on those who cared about the killer.
This is a fundamental thing in human psychology. We react more to losses than gains. If e.g. the boss takes money from you and gives to me as a bonus, then my joy from this will be significantly less, than the dissatisfaction you will feel from this loss. The sum is lesser than its parts so to speak ;-)
Execution is cathartic but hardly effective. Clearly it does not deter murderers as they believe they will either get away with it or they simply don't care as long as they satisfy their need to kill.
The wrong people can be executed and unlike a prison sentence, there's no going back.
Appeals can last for decades and waste enormous amounts of time and money.
I think research shows, that what people care about is the likeliness of getting caught. The length of the sentence doesn't really have that deterring effect. If it did then the US with each extremely long sentences should not be having magnitudes higher homocide rate than European countries with rather mild sentences.
> Is it better to kill an innocent or let them spend their life in jail? Given the states of our jails, I'm not sure but I think I'd prefer death.
We can't undo killing them. We can't give them back their years, either. But depriving someone of their life entirely is worse than depriving them of a portion of their life. At least in the latter case they have a chance to go out and do something, reconnect, however painfully, with loved ones, or make new connections.
Well, okay, when you are wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in prison you can request execution. For every other innocent person that's wrongly convicted let's not murder them against their will, eh?
Its hard to fix the jails and prisons when widespread poverty still exists in society, for the simple reason that if the prisons offer a better lifestyle than living in the society, more people would choose to go to prison.
Inverting the logic: We must let or make the conditions in our prisons be harsh, harsh enough so that poor people don't commit crimes just to get "three hots and a cot" on the taxpayers' dime.
Doesn't that sound insane?
Let's fix the prisons, and let's have something like a basic standard of living, below which we only let people live if they want to. I.e. so-called Universal Basic Income, or something. I think we should literally give people housing, food, water, and health care, just because.
But that is only your choice. Someone else might prefer to see his kids grow up. And really, do you prefer death penalty even when you are innocent when there is the possibility to be pardoned one year later? And also, it's not like you are killed immediately now, so you spent time in jail anyways.
Being 20 years in jail destroys you live, innocent or not, I agree. But by killing people you are not giving them a choice either, so your argument can be negated with the same message.
(Not that I am for the choice of death for prison inmates either, a terrorist for example should not be allowed to become a martyr and escape prosecution.)
This is a difficult question. I have often thought about what would happen if for some reason I was wrongfully convicted of a serious crime (e.g. like in Shawshank Redemption). Its absolutely unimaginable for me to think of living a life such as one in prison, and in the US, even after you leave prison, your rights are severely curtailed, as are your job prospects and much of everything else. Stuff of nightmares, really.
I don't find the fact that some people are found innocent to be a convincing reason to be against the death penalty. The replacement, which is life in prison, strikes me as even less appealing. How is sending someone to jail and leaving them there for 20 years only to figure out that people fucked up and the guy wasn't actually guilty - "Sorry chap, but it's only a third of your life we've ripped away from you, you've still got one third left!" - any better? I'd rather be dead.
"What if it was me?" is exactly what I'm considering. Life doesn't have infinite value in and of itself. Consider - if you were in a coma or vegetative state, is that a life worth living, even if we have the technology to keep that person alive? If you had Alzheimer's and were gradually losing all mental faculties, would there be a point where you'd rather be dead?
I'd consider being in long-term or life prison to be the next closest thing to those examples; a life without freedom, friends, family, with the potential for a wide variety of suffering beyond that - poor medical, poor food, guard abuse, fights, solitary, rape - what in this is worth living for? Prison is specifically meant to be a punishment, not a rehabilitation. And then maybe you get out a couple decades later, everything has changed, no one will hire you, everyone has moved on...
Most people do not feel the same way. Also, the death penalty does not allow an inmate to choose death over life in prison; this decision is forced upon them.
Back in the day, there was a serial killer named Ted Bundy. He killed a number of women, was imprisoned, escaped (twice) and killed at least three more people.
That kind of incident makes the problem much more complicated. The typical argument against the death penalty is that sometimes innocent people are executed. And it's true, and it's horrible. But if you don't execute them, then the alternative is that they should be in prison for the rest of their life. If they're innocent, that's still pretty horrible. The real objective is to keep innocent people from being convicted in the first place.
But like many other situations, the false positive rate and the false negative rate are inversely correlated. How many guilty people should we free to avoid sending one innocent person to prison? The obvious answer is "as many as we have to" - it's not acceptable to have innocent people in prison. But if we're talking about serial killers, that question becomes "How many innocent people do we want to see dead on the streets to avoid sending one innocent person to prison?"
Back to the death penalty. Sometimes guilty people escape, too, and sometimes they kill people after they escape. Executed people don't kill anyone ever again. So, how many innocent people are you willing to execute in order to prevent innocent people dying on the streets?
This stuff is very difficult. But given less-than-perfect prisons, I can see a case for keeping the death penalty for serial killers.
4% of innocent put to death vs. Ted's 3?
Don't forget the pressure on prosecutors to arrest a serial killer, the chances of pinning it on someone (say a relative) is nonzero. But the chance of undoing a wrongful death penalty is exactly zero.
True. But the chance of undoing a murder is also exactly zero.
4% innocents on death row is a higher number than those killed by escapees, I will agree. But where do you stop? That means at least 4% of those sentenced to life without parole are innocent. Now what? Is leaving them to rot in jail for the rest of their life really that much better than executing them?
If we cared about this, then why is revenge the core focus on American justice system and not rehabilitation?
When people exit the prison system un-rehabilitated they will hurt more people.
I think this is a more important question. Why is revenge given priority over avoiding new victims?
Also if one actually cares about life, why are prisons such overcrowded hell holes that prisoners get shanked and killed on a regular basis?
This is my issue with this sort of reasoning as it easily becomes cherry picking of issues to support harsher justice system while ignoring all the related issues which speaks for a milder system.
Except that historically it wasn't exactly a perfect record and faking evidence is still quite possible.
Killing someone as punishment is simply not fault-proof and the whole idea behind a justice system worthy of the name is that it tries very hard to protect the innocent even if that means some of the guilty will go free or will escape punishment. 'Perfect' evidence rarely is, and even confessions are not always true.
> We shouldn't be coddling those who commit violent acts against others.
How is spending a lifetime in prison coddling?
> The derrent of death alone would save far many more people.
That isn't true, criminals as a rule have a hard time tying consequences to their actions, have a high incidence of mental issues. If deterrence would work at all it would be nice but it rarely does.
> take these cretins out of the gene pool Keeping them locked up for 25 to life does no one any good.
It does if they're found innocent after conviction, as has happened at least 347 times so far[1].
It should also be noteworthy to the true law and order types that false convictions mean the real perpetrator is still going unpunished. If you kill everyone who does something you dislike, the pressure applied by those bleeding hearts at the Innocence Project will go away, which means now not only have you killed someone innocent, but you've pointed blame away from the guilty and basically assured they'll get away with it. I must confess my failure to understand how this outcome is supportive of law and order.
And with regards to the comment about surveillance and DNA testing, you might benefit from a bit of reading about the history of forensics. It is a history of foolproof methods being rather less than foolproof. Of if you really can't dismiss the idea that we've achieved the pinnacle of physical evidence analysis, at least do some reading on what is actually involved. Remember that with, e.g., DNA testing for legal purposes, you're not looking at just the test: you're looking at the whole "stack", from our understanding of biology to the lab performance to the chain of custody to jurors' understanding of science. Not going to point to anything specific; there are a ton of explainers out there about this waiting for the interested.
I'll end with a simple question: do you believe that Blackstone's famous ratio is false?
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer[.]"
A) Guilty people who don't deserve to be put to death.
B) Guilty people who deserve to be put to death.
C) Innocent people who don't deserve to be put to death.
D) Innocent people who deserve to be put to death.
D is empty, so let's just consider A, B, and C.
I agree there are people in B. At the same time, it seems very hard to design a death penalty system that selects any of B without selecting any of A or C.
I'd be very curious to hear what system you propose that is able to limit false positives more for A and C than death penalty abolition would. Unless you're able to, I, and a whole lot of other people, are more willing to support Charles Manson spending the rest of his life in a cell than murdering someone--or dozens or hundreds of people--to satisfy mob rage at the existence of Charles Manson type people.
>
In the real world, about 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent. So this is not about whether it's ok to kill killers. This is about whether it's ok to kill innocent people.
Cute, but fallacious. To unpack, you seem to be arguing that since 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent, then about 1 in 25 people are wrongly convicted, and PG is saying that ratio is unacceptable.
I think your probabilistic reasoning is a bit off (by confusing P(I|DS) with P(DS|I)).
But the actual issue is about the punishment, not the guilty/innocent determination. So in other words, PG doesn't seem to be making any claim about the size of the group of "n guilty men" -- but rather about the way they can be punished.
Saying we shouldn't punish anyone with the death penalty, because 1 in 25 of them will be innocent, is making a claim about n guilty men. From my link:
>Commandments for man can be found in the book of Exodus, by the same Author(s), where God rejects the tradeoff between convicting the guilty and convicting the innocent, and simply commands, "the innocent and righteous slay thou not." 32 One can take this to imply an infinite value of n, at least in capital cases. The twelfth-century Judeo-Spanish legal theorist Moses Maimonides, however, interpreted the commandment of Exodus as implying a value of n = 1000 for execution. 33 He refers to it as the "290th Negative Commandment" and argues that executing an accused criminal on anything less than absolute certainty would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof, until we would be convicting merely "according to the judge's caprice. Hence the Exalted One has shut this door" 34 against the use of presumptive evidence, for "it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death once in a way." 35
There may be multiple ns required, one for conviction and one for punishment, but the underlying structure is the same.
>To unpack, you seem to be arguing that since 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent, then about 1 in 25 people are wrongly convicted, and PG is saying that ratio is unacceptable.
I think your probabilistic reasoning is a bit off (by confusing P(I|DS) with P(DS|I)).
I'm not sure what you mean. If 25 people are sentenced to death, and one of them is innocent, then PG is arguing we should let 24 guilty men escape death rather than allowing 1 innocent man to be killed. I guess maybe I should have said n>24, then, but the overall point remains.
No, it doesn't. They won't escape death, they'll be dead sooner or later anyway. It is just that society will not have lowered itself to their level in response and will have an opportunity to figure out which of those people was in fact innocent.
It's all fun and games until you are that innocent person.
Well, it all depends on how many people you intend to kill, it's all about the ratio npeopleinnocent/npeopleguilty after all.
The problem is that no matter how small the ratio gets in absolute terms there is only the possibility of killing an innocent person or not killing an innocent person. Even if you assume that everybody is guilty I'd still make the argument that people can genuinely change and that no matter what you do you will not be bringing anybody back that's already dead.
Think of still having the death penalty as a black mark on a civilization. As a nice example have a look at the Philippines and try to work out for yourself if you feel that even if society will be better afterwards it is worth it to kill this many people, many of them in serious trouble already.
The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it?
>Even if you assume that everybody is guilty I'd still make the argument that people can genuinely change and that no matter what you do you will not be bringing anybody back that's already dead.
That may be (and I agree with it), but I'm critiquing PG's argument (in particular his assertion that it's obvious), not his conclusion.
>The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it?
You need different punishments for different crimes, or someone who commits a small crime has no more deterrence against big crimes. I'm not sure what point you're making with this.
The justice system is - in principle - not about revenge but about balance, a balance between running a safe society and one where people that misbehave are placed in a spot where they can be re-habilitated and then can re-enter society. That path is closed in an extreme way by killing someone, there is no rehabilitation from that no matter what.
Deterrence and punishment have very little to do with each other (but deterrence and the chance of being caught do have a lot to do with each other).
So fundamentally the justice system is not about punishment at all, though from the victims perspective that might seem to be the case.
> Saying we shouldn't punish anyone with the death penalty, because 1 in 25 of them will be innocent, is making a claim about n guilty men.
No. PG's piece leaves open the option for punishment by other means, even if they do turn out to be innocent.
For instance, to take the extreme case, nothing in PG's article says he would have a problem with punishing everyone accused of murder with one year imprisonment, with probability one.
I get that you want to tie PG's piece to the Volokh article, but PG's piece is about this particular form of punishment.
[edited to add: since we're going in circles, I'll stop now]
I think you misunderstood me. "we shouldn't punish anyone with the death penalty" means we shouldn't kill anyone, it allows for other methods of punishment.
The Volokh article allows for multiple levels of punishment as well. The quote from Maimonides doesn't mean we simply let them go free if we aren't absolutely sure that they are guilty, instead we would lock them up.
The death penalty makes no logical sense. It only appeals to primitive emotions.
Why have a penalty which 1) Can never be reversed if you kill an innocent 2) Cost a lot more than life in prison.
Now why it might be argued that a killer has no right to life, what about those close to the killer? Killers might have a wife, husband, brother, sister, friends, mother and a a father. By killing the killer you inflict hardship on these people. To what purpose? In prison this person can't hurt anybody else, so why unnecessarily reduce the life quality of somebody else.
I see it being argued that the victims families deserve this, but I think that has been learnt and conditioned in society. E.g. in my own country Norway, I hardly ever read about victims and relatives who desire a death penalty or any particularly harsh or painful punishment. I think the desire for revenge is something which is simply promoted by conservative christian groups.
Plenty of articles if you google. Gist of it is that the repeals process and such take many years and often end up costing more. Most people are on death row for >10 years
It's a pretty well-known fact that execution typically costs around 10 times more than life imprisonment. Here's a page with links to multiple peer-reviewed sources, covering multiple states: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty.
The issue is that the appeals process is extremely expensive and time-consuming. You could conceivably simplify and streamline it (to the extent permitted by the Supreme Court, which has been mandating ever-stricter requirements for capital punishment cases), but that would make it even more unacceptably error-prone than it already is.
"In prison this person can't hurt anybody else" - totally false. The homicide rate in prison is about double that of the rest of the country. In California it is 15 per 100,000 - terribly high.
"Cost a lot more than life in prison" - death penalty opponents have driven up the cost, so if cost was a real reason you oppose the death penalty, then we could keep it and focus on reducing cost.
"By killing the killer you inflict hardship on these people"- in your opinion. I think it would be a bigger hardship to have to have a living murderer as part of the family.
"I think the desire for revenge" - Why is incarceration not revenge? Justice flows from the notion that punishment is proportional to the crime. Taking a life should mean losing your life Whether is is lifetime imprisonment or the death penalty, you can call it revenge or punishment or justice.
This kind of post isn't going to change anybody's mind, and isn't intended to (Paul Graham is a fine persuasive writer, and good persuasive writing tends not to include appeals like "a child could answer that one for you").
No, this is just an update, for Graham's California readers, most of whom can safely be assumed to agree with him, that they should take special care to vote this year.
I'm glad California has a chance to end the death penalty this year. You'll catch up to Illinois soon enough, Silicon Valley!
But this isn't the kind of post that finds a good home here on HN. This is the kind thing you want to post (repeatedly) to Twitter. Here, it's just more flame war stimulus.
I flagged this post --- and, because it's a PG post, did so vocally this time. You should too!
So how do people ever change their mind on anything? I'd say that within any group with a certain conviction there will always be people at the fringes which are less convinced and who are willing to explore alternatives.
I once believed in the death penalty. I once believe in God. I was once a libertarian. Of course a single person didn't change my mind on these points, but being exposed to alternatives by many people over time changed my perspective. Although I guess often simply seeking information is what eventually does most to change opinions.
I'm not arguing against persuasive essays. Persuasive essays are great. I'm saying that this isn't a persuasive essay. It's a political bulletin. I agree with its politics, but not with its place on the HN front page.
Even if the essay isn't persuasive the discussion could be.
I also think that your flag-marshalling is in pretty poor taste, flagging it yourself for whatever reasons you have is fine but to call on others to do so as well is really not good.
No, it isn't. Flags are counted asymmetrically compared to votes. But if you want to be clever about it go ahead, personally I think it is against what HN is about, if we're going to have flag brigading we might as well have vote brigading. See also: digg.
> So why is the discussion to eliminate the death penalty instead of ensuring more oversight or limitations?
The Supreme Court has gradually been mandating more and more oversight and limitations on death penalty cases since 1976. It doesn't seem to have made a major dent in the false conviction rate or the arbitrariness of when capital punishment is used, especially with regards to race. And while I don't think cost should even be relevant to the discussion, it's worth noting that these limitations and oversight requirements- which still aren't good enough- are the main reason why it costs 10 times more to execute someone than to put them in prison for life. Combined with the death penalty's demonstrated lack of deterrent effect - simpler and better to just get rid of it.
I always think of Star Trek and how some advanced civilization or a future version of ourselves will perceive the barbarism of our current society. I would not be surprised if the earth gets paved over for an intergalactic superhighway because frankly, we are not worth saving. Humans, have very little humanity. We have a LONG way to go. This is a small start.
There is one good reason to keep the status quo (death penalty without any actual deaths) which is that anyone given a death sentence gets their case extensively reviewed and appealed by excellent lawyers working pro bono. The people who get life get no help at all.
I have read of prisioners being upset when given a life sentence as they know that no one will help them appeal their conviction. If you are innocent you want to be given a death sentence since you will have so many more people helping you get your conviction overturned.
241 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadI know all the arguments against the death penalty, but I just can't manage to get myself upset that there is a death penalty for such things.
I know, constitution and all. But still, that sounds a bit mercantile.
Since being reinstated only 13 people have been executed. And none in the past 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Californ...
Meaning that, there are certain cases where we are 100% certain of a persons guilt and can mostly agree that that person should die but how do we ensure a death penalty is used exlusively in those cases?
Though it might be considered poor policy, since it would discourage people from accepting a plea bargain or confessing.
False confessions are a common cause of incorrect convictions.
https://courses2.cit.cornell.edu/sociallaw/student_projects/...
[1] - https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Paradise-Lost-The-Child-Murder...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost:_The_Child_Murde...
I weigh that measure of justice as less meaningful than the potential execution of innocents.
The will of the people is the ultimate mandate in a democracy. In 1972 this mandate was for the death penalty. We'll see next week whether the mandate has changed.
Until a small group of judges say otherwise.
Charles Manson and other 106 inmates on death row in 1972 were all convicted killers who were relieved from the death penalty.
Many victim's family members were upset by the courts decision.
That qualifies more as 'revenge' than as 'justice'.
Unfortunately, the US has long since decided that punishment is the purpose, that these people are getting what they deserve. It's a very frustrating culture to be surrounded by.
According to whom?
> But executing them makes 'us' just as bad as 'them'.
So you're saying that, for example, the state executing a mass murderer is just as bad as mass murder?
And even if you don't accept that, just consider: most crimes aren't murder. They don't get people sent away for life, but for a period of 1-a few years.
They will be released back into society. If we do not rehabilitate them, we can expect recidivism from either failing to counter the errant impulses, exposure to similar or worse criminal elements while incarcerated, or failure to reenter society (due to ostracism, failure to adapt to changes, lack of social structure like family and friends). We are literally creating the problem by failing to rehabilitate criminals, and instead focusing on "punishing" them.
Justice is supposed to measured and balancing for society as a whole, meted out by an impartial judge and jury of peers.
Revenge is completely subjective and ruled by emotional responses by the aggrieved party. It's almost always going to be more destructive disproportionate than it needs to be.
The last people that should decide the fate of those who have harmed them are the victims. That just leads to pure chaos.
I could decide that if someone threatened my life that I would achieve justice by circumventing law enforcement and the justice system by murdering the person in question plus their whole family, whether they meant it or not. I could state reasons of personal/family honour and whatever other bullshit would justify those actions in my mind. That doesn't make it right, or just. It makes it a response borne of unchecked emotion.
You might say that is okay, but it would quickly lead to pure anarchy if we all followed that ideal. That's why we have a justice system in place that doesn't (or tries not to) focus on revenge.
And thus the state protects the convicted from the vengeful desires of the victim's family members and doles out the justice the community has deemed appropriate. Just because the victims pay the state to "string 'em up!" instead of doing it themselves doesn't mean it's not mob justice.
So 'the people' will want both, depending on whether they have the long or the short term view and those two views can and do contradict at times.
nobody was impeached. It was a normal judicial retention election.
If people require revenge for emotionally healing then that is because society has promoted this as justice.
I've never heard of victims desiring death for killers in my home country, but we are not so big on revenge and don't.
The American justice system frequently paints a trial as some sort of game, where the victims family score more points in the competition for every year extra the perpetrator gets in prison.
What about helping victims in meaningful ways instead? They might need mental health care, time of from work, economic support etc. America tend to do little in this regard.
It reminds me of the conservative desire to ban abortion, but unwillingness to actually help a family in a difficult situation giving birth to a child. Instead of making it easier to have a child so people themselves will chose to keep it, instead they want to intimidate parents to keep it threatening with prison and fines.
It is a fundamentally negative and cynical perspective on humanity. I guess that is what you get when people follow a faith which teaches that people are only good because the fear eternal punishment in hell.
Where did you get this idea, that pro-life people are anti-help, pro-intimidation people?
> It is a fundamentally negative and cynical perspective on humanity. I guess that is what you get when people follow a faith which teaches that people are only good because the fear eternal punishment in hell.
That's not what Christianity teaches. Christianity teaches that people are sinful, period. It is only through the redeeming sacrifice of Christ that we can be washed of our sins and be seen as holy in God's sight. We should then be motivated to lead holy lives primarily in gratitude and love, not out of fear. For example, I John 4:18: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love."
At the very least, any rational person should see that compared to armchair speculation of medical interventions, organ extraction offers real value! And not to mention, think of all those who die or suffer because of the pace of medical research. With these worthy prisoners, we can change that! This mindset that values convicts' lives as so trivial is troubling and wasteful.
TLDR: Who cares if a family didn't get the speculative relief they wanted from somebody's execution? That's a perspective that treats life as absurdly trivial, and I doubt the medical community believes this as a serious intervention to clinically significant distress.
This is rather an arguments against prisons to me.
> We say it's wrong to steal, but we use fines as punishment.
Objectivists would indeed argue this is an argument against taxes.
I recently watched the documentary 13th from Netflix. It really puts into perspective our pro-incarnation justice system. While capital punishment and death row is a section of our justice system, it has the highest stakes in outlining where our ethical limits reside as a society.
Other important work done:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/
edit: sad to see this thread flagged off the homepage.
Neither does killing people with drones...
It is a war crime. That doesn't mean any drone wielders will ever be brought to justice, but the same goes for all those Blackwater (oh, sorry 'Xe', oh, sorry 'Academi', it's hard to keep track of these scumbags) contractors during the Iraq war.
War crimes as a rule will only see their day in court if they are committed by relatively powerless people on the losing side of some conflict. Otherwise you're probably in worse shape shoplifting or stealing a car.
Heck, America doesn't even subscribe to the international tribunal for warcrimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Internat...
And they're the main users of drones for killing people in countries they are not formally at war with.
This is just the tip of the criminal iceberg in the US. But crime is really the wrong word when the people who commit and order the crime and those who protect them are the same people who write and enforce the laws.
Why, in your view, is it much worse for the state to jail an innocent person for a long time (say, their entire adult life) instead of killing them?
Don't succumb to the Nirvana fallacy here - for sure, the American justice system has many more serious flaws than just the death penalty, and those won't be fixed right away. But this is a step in the right direction and worth taking even if many other problems still remain.
People coming out of jail after 10 years of imprisonment are used to the original iphone as the only smartphone. They don't know about Uber, Venmo, Bitcoin, Amazon and Google have both changed dramatically. Now you need an EZPass for most roads, healthcare laws are different, they missed the whole Snowden ordeal. Weed is borderline legal, gay marriage is legal, etc etc.
Things have changed a lot in the past 10 years. If you weren't allowed to keep up with it, you probably don't know how to navigate society anymore.
Their failure to adapt is our failure as a society to prepare them. By imprisoning them we become their guardians and stewards, we are responsible.
Yes, this costs money but it helps to reduce recidivism and in general is a good thing to do.
You don't know of anybody who has never been imprisoned who is managing to live their life without interacting with any of the things you've mentioned?
If not, I would recommend enlarging your circle of contact.
This isn't trolling. If you don't know how to use modern tech, it's going to be harder to socialize, especially if you are in a city (as they tend to adopt tech faster).
If even a person has successfully rejected some tech (maybe Facebook, maybe smartphones), it's doubtful that they've rejected all tech and if they have they've developed skills for living without it among people who otherwise expect them to have it.
I might be overstating this on a timeline of one decade, but it gets much worse on a timeline of 20 years.
20 years means you were likely using Windows 95. Texting wasn't a thing. Phones didn't have "apps". Banks didn't have websites. The average person's job had a lot less tech in it.
Can you survive? Sure, but your options are a lot more limited compared to someone who knows how to use the tech of the 21st century.
There are far worse consequences to being jailed for 10 years or more than not to be able to use a cell phone or the latest social media fad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_syndrome
How do you compensate someone for being imprisoned (and likely raped) from the age of 28 to 45?
In many cases, the death penalty is more humane.
The you might as well kill all prisoners because it is more humane, after all where would you draw the line, 5 years, 10 years, 15 or 20, it's all time that has passed.
Compensation should be of such a magnitude that it incentivizes society to make sure it happens as little as possible.
But the degree to which it is worse (and whether it is enough to ban the death penalty) seems quite subjective.
Seems to me that you could use an identical line of reasoning to conclude that prison sentences longer than N years should be banned.
Is it a matter of degree? Or is there something fundamentally different about the death penalty that warrants a ban?
After someone has been executed, nobody pursues the case anymore.
If you want to gouge a society's level of civilization, look at their prisons. What sets humanity apart is the ability of reason to control instinct. It has taken us from beast to philosopher to The Weather Channel, and its measure is how we treat those everyone hates.
In other words: those over which society wields a lot of power who do not have much power of their own.
While the innocence project has saved many innocent people, it's important to remember that they also are wrong sometimes.
Your life was taken, and no one can give it back.
It's a difference of degree only, not kind.
But, in practice, we will never get it 100% right. Probability of killing an innocent person will always be >0.
For that reason alone, we should get rid of it.
If you put a serial killer to death, you can be 100% sure they won't kill any more people. If you put him in prison, you can't. He may escape, or he may get released early and kill again. Or as often happens, he'll kill other prisoners whilst in prison.
It's a question of whether you value potential victims, or potential falsely convicted innocent people. IMHO the former is a far bigger problem.
We have different tolerance for accuracy depending on the context, and my assertion was that in this case 100% would be necessary for, at least me, to feel comfortable carrying out the punishment.
If you don't put them to death, can you be 100% sure saving that life isn't going to cause more people to die?
It's not simply a case of "punishment". It's preventing further crime and deaths.
The importance of that I think is clear with respect to the dynamics for terrorism and war. People who experience their loved ones dying easily get vengeful and radicalized.
If I lost somebody dear to me, I don't think the execution of the killer that my increased satisfaction from this would likely pale compared to the sadness inflicted on those who cared about the killer.
This is a fundamental thing in human psychology. We react more to losses than gains. If e.g. the boss takes money from you and gives to me as a bonus, then my joy from this will be significantly less, than the dissatisfaction you will feel from this loss. The sum is lesser than its parts so to speak ;-)
The wrong people can be executed and unlike a prison sentence, there's no going back.
Appeals can last for decades and waste enormous amounts of time and money.
End the death penalty. It's just not worth it.
Of course it is effective. If only because it reliably and permanently removes the dangerous person from the society.
We can't undo killing them. We can't give them back their years, either. But depriving someone of their life entirely is worse than depriving them of a portion of their life. At least in the latter case they have a chance to go out and do something, reconnect, however painfully, with loved ones, or make new connections.
(Also, let's fix the jails and prisons!)
Doesn't that sound insane?
Let's fix the prisons, and let's have something like a basic standard of living, below which we only let people live if they want to. I.e. so-called Universal Basic Income, or something. I think we should literally give people housing, food, water, and health care, just because.
Being 20 years in jail destroys you live, innocent or not, I agree. But by killing people you are not giving them a choice either, so your argument can be negated with the same message.
(Not that I am for the choice of death for prison inmates either, a terrorist for example should not be allowed to become a martyr and escape prosecution.)
State murder is an ugly business that has no part in any modern society.
I'd consider being in long-term or life prison to be the next closest thing to those examples; a life without freedom, friends, family, with the potential for a wide variety of suffering beyond that - poor medical, poor food, guard abuse, fights, solitary, rape - what in this is worth living for? Prison is specifically meant to be a punishment, not a rehabilitation. And then maybe you get out a couple decades later, everything has changed, no one will hire you, everyone has moved on...
That kind of incident makes the problem much more complicated. The typical argument against the death penalty is that sometimes innocent people are executed. And it's true, and it's horrible. But if you don't execute them, then the alternative is that they should be in prison for the rest of their life. If they're innocent, that's still pretty horrible. The real objective is to keep innocent people from being convicted in the first place.
But like many other situations, the false positive rate and the false negative rate are inversely correlated. How many guilty people should we free to avoid sending one innocent person to prison? The obvious answer is "as many as we have to" - it's not acceptable to have innocent people in prison. But if we're talking about serial killers, that question becomes "How many innocent people do we want to see dead on the streets to avoid sending one innocent person to prison?"
Back to the death penalty. Sometimes guilty people escape, too, and sometimes they kill people after they escape. Executed people don't kill anyone ever again. So, how many innocent people are you willing to execute in order to prevent innocent people dying on the streets?
This stuff is very difficult. But given less-than-perfect prisons, I can see a case for keeping the death penalty for serial killers.
4% innocents on death row is a higher number than those killed by escapees, I will agree. But where do you stop? That means at least 4% of those sentenced to life without parole are innocent. Now what? Is leaving them to rot in jail for the rest of their life really that much better than executing them?
When people exit the prison system un-rehabilitated they will hurt more people.
I think this is a more important question. Why is revenge given priority over avoiding new victims?
Also if one actually cares about life, why are prisons such overcrowded hell holes that prisoners get shanked and killed on a regular basis?
This is my issue with this sort of reasoning as it easily becomes cherry picking of issues to support harsher justice system while ignoring all the related issues which speaks for a milder system.
Killing someone as punishment is simply not fault-proof and the whole idea behind a justice system worthy of the name is that it tries very hard to protect the innocent even if that means some of the guilty will go free or will escape punishment. 'Perfect' evidence rarely is, and even confessions are not always true.
Preventable deaths are a step or two removed from state inflicted and sanctioned murder.
How is spending a lifetime in prison coddling?
> The derrent of death alone would save far many more people.
That isn't true, criminals as a rule have a hard time tying consequences to their actions, have a high incidence of mental issues. If deterrence would work at all it would be nice but it rarely does.
http://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
But you're welcome to your own opinion, but 'you reap what you sow' applies to societies just as it does to farmers.
Violence projected and practiced by the state will not help in moving society to a more peaceful quadrant.
It does if they're found innocent after conviction, as has happened at least 347 times so far[1].
It should also be noteworthy to the true law and order types that false convictions mean the real perpetrator is still going unpunished. If you kill everyone who does something you dislike, the pressure applied by those bleeding hearts at the Innocence Project will go away, which means now not only have you killed someone innocent, but you've pointed blame away from the guilty and basically assured they'll get away with it. I must confess my failure to understand how this outcome is supportive of law and order.
And with regards to the comment about surveillance and DNA testing, you might benefit from a bit of reading about the history of forensics. It is a history of foolproof methods being rather less than foolproof. Of if you really can't dismiss the idea that we've achieved the pinnacle of physical evidence analysis, at least do some reading on what is actually involved. Remember that with, e.g., DNA testing for legal purposes, you're not looking at just the test: you're looking at the whole "stack", from our understanding of biology to the lab performance to the chain of custody to jurors' understanding of science. Not going to point to anything specific; there are a ton of explainers out there about this waiting for the interested.
I'll end with a simple question: do you believe that Blackstone's famous ratio is false?
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer[.]"
[1] http://www.innocenceproject.org
A) Guilty people who don't deserve to be put to death.
B) Guilty people who deserve to be put to death.
C) Innocent people who don't deserve to be put to death.
D) Innocent people who deserve to be put to death.
D is empty, so let's just consider A, B, and C.
I agree there are people in B. At the same time, it seems very hard to design a death penalty system that selects any of B without selecting any of A or C.
I'd be very curious to hear what system you propose that is able to limit false positives more for A and C than death penalty abolition would. Unless you're able to, I, and a whole lot of other people, are more willing to support Charles Manson spending the rest of his life in a cell than murdering someone--or dozens or hundreds of people--to satisfy mob rage at the existence of Charles Manson type people.
Keeping a violent offender removed from society for the duration of their life DOES all of us a lot of good.
>A child could answer that one for you.
http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm
N>25 [0]
[0] Graham, 2016
I think your probabilistic reasoning is a bit off (by confusing P(I|DS) with P(DS|I)).
But the actual issue is about the punishment, not the guilty/innocent determination. So in other words, PG doesn't seem to be making any claim about the size of the group of "n guilty men" -- but rather about the way they can be punished.
>Commandments for man can be found in the book of Exodus, by the same Author(s), where God rejects the tradeoff between convicting the guilty and convicting the innocent, and simply commands, "the innocent and righteous slay thou not." 32 One can take this to imply an infinite value of n, at least in capital cases. The twelfth-century Judeo-Spanish legal theorist Moses Maimonides, however, interpreted the commandment of Exodus as implying a value of n = 1000 for execution. 33 He refers to it as the "290th Negative Commandment" and argues that executing an accused criminal on anything less than absolute certainty would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof, until we would be convicting merely "according to the judge's caprice. Hence the Exalted One has shut this door" 34 against the use of presumptive evidence, for "it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death once in a way." 35
There may be multiple ns required, one for conviction and one for punishment, but the underlying structure is the same.
>To unpack, you seem to be arguing that since 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent, then about 1 in 25 people are wrongly convicted, and PG is saying that ratio is unacceptable. I think your probabilistic reasoning is a bit off (by confusing P(I|DS) with P(DS|I)).
I'm not sure what you mean. If 25 people are sentenced to death, and one of them is innocent, then PG is arguing we should let 24 guilty men escape death rather than allowing 1 innocent man to be killed. I guess maybe I should have said n>24, then, but the overall point remains.
It's all fun and games until you are that innocent person.
Are you arguing for n=infinity?
The problem is that no matter how small the ratio gets in absolute terms there is only the possibility of killing an innocent person or not killing an innocent person. Even if you assume that everybody is guilty I'd still make the argument that people can genuinely change and that no matter what you do you will not be bringing anybody back that's already dead.
Think of still having the death penalty as a black mark on a civilization. As a nice example have a look at the Philippines and try to work out for yourself if you feel that even if society will be better afterwards it is worth it to kill this many people, many of them in serious trouble already.
The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it?
That may be (and I agree with it), but I'm critiquing PG's argument (in particular his assertion that it's obvious), not his conclusion.
>The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it?
You need different punishments for different crimes, or someone who commits a small crime has no more deterrence against big crimes. I'm not sure what point you're making with this.
Deterrence and punishment have very little to do with each other (but deterrence and the chance of being caught do have a lot to do with each other).
So fundamentally the justice system is not about punishment at all, though from the victims perspective that might seem to be the case.
No. PG's piece leaves open the option for punishment by other means, even if they do turn out to be innocent.
For instance, to take the extreme case, nothing in PG's article says he would have a problem with punishing everyone accused of murder with one year imprisonment, with probability one.
I get that you want to tie PG's piece to the Volokh article, but PG's piece is about this particular form of punishment.
[edited to add: since we're going in circles, I'll stop now]
The Volokh article allows for multiple levels of punishment as well. The quote from Maimonides doesn't mean we simply let them go free if we aren't absolutely sure that they are guilty, instead we would lock them up.
Why have a penalty which 1) Can never be reversed if you kill an innocent 2) Cost a lot more than life in prison.
Now why it might be argued that a killer has no right to life, what about those close to the killer? Killers might have a wife, husband, brother, sister, friends, mother and a a father. By killing the killer you inflict hardship on these people. To what purpose? In prison this person can't hurt anybody else, so why unnecessarily reduce the life quality of somebody else.
I see it being argued that the victims families deserve this, but I think that has been learnt and conditioned in society. E.g. in my own country Norway, I hardly ever read about victims and relatives who desire a death penalty or any particularly harsh or painful punishment. I think the desire for revenge is something which is simply promoted by conservative christian groups.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/05/01/cons...
The issue is that the appeals process is extremely expensive and time-consuming. You could conceivably simplify and streamline it (to the extent permitted by the Supreme Court, which has been mandating ever-stricter requirements for capital punishment cases), but that would make it even more unacceptably error-prone than it already is.
"Cost a lot more than life in prison" - death penalty opponents have driven up the cost, so if cost was a real reason you oppose the death penalty, then we could keep it and focus on reducing cost.
"By killing the killer you inflict hardship on these people"- in your opinion. I think it would be a bigger hardship to have to have a living murderer as part of the family.
"I think the desire for revenge" - Why is incarceration not revenge? Justice flows from the notion that punishment is proportional to the crime. Taking a life should mean losing your life Whether is is lifetime imprisonment or the death penalty, you can call it revenge or punishment or justice.
No, this is just an update, for Graham's California readers, most of whom can safely be assumed to agree with him, that they should take special care to vote this year.
I'm glad California has a chance to end the death penalty this year. You'll catch up to Illinois soon enough, Silicon Valley!
But this isn't the kind of post that finds a good home here on HN. This is the kind thing you want to post (repeatedly) to Twitter. Here, it's just more flame war stimulus.
I flagged this post --- and, because it's a PG post, did so vocally this time. You should too!
I once believed in the death penalty. I once believe in God. I was once a libertarian. Of course a single person didn't change my mind on these points, but being exposed to alternatives by many people over time changed my perspective. Although I guess often simply seeking information is what eventually does most to change opinions.
I also think that your flag-marshalling is in pretty poor taste, flagging it yourself for whatever reasons you have is fine but to call on others to do so as well is really not good.
Generally, if all I have to say about a submission is that I flagged it, I'll refrain from saying that. But that's not all I had to say here.
So why is the discussion to eliminate the death penalty instead of ensuring more oversight or limitations?
Something like:
- Not applicable when only one murder committed
- Bigger burden of proof for the DP to be applicable (not only relying on witnesses, for example)
The Supreme Court has gradually been mandating more and more oversight and limitations on death penalty cases since 1976. It doesn't seem to have made a major dent in the false conviction rate or the arbitrariness of when capital punishment is used, especially with regards to race. And while I don't think cost should even be relevant to the discussion, it's worth noting that these limitations and oversight requirements- which still aren't good enough- are the main reason why it costs 10 times more to execute someone than to put them in prison for life. Combined with the death penalty's demonstrated lack of deterrent effect - simpler and better to just get rid of it.
And of course, prosecutors that push dubious cases should be punished as well.
Regardless of where you stand on either issue, supporting one but not the other seems like hypocrisy.
I have read of prisioners being upset when given a life sentence as they know that no one will help them appeal their conviction. If you are innocent you want to be given a death sentence since you will have so many more people helping you get your conviction overturned.
I know if I was innocent and poor and had been convicted of a crime that was either life in prison or death that I would want a death sentence.
Be careful how you read this number.
This is NOT the proportion of convicts wrongfully killed. This is the number that have wrongfully received a death sentence.
A death sentence is nearly always appealed, and usually multiple times.
The number of convicts sentenced to be executed that subsequently fail every single appeal is likely far, far smaller than that statistic.