I think no other justification is needed to end the death penalty than “it’s inhuman and barbaric”.
Even discussing other factors arguments and considerations dilutes the core point that’s it’s straight up wrong unethical and inhuman to murder others in the name of the law.
Paul Graham has a valid point, but if you say “it’s wrong cause it’s inaccurate”, implies it’s right if it’s accurate. And it’s not... the death penalty is wrong no matter be it accurate or inaccurate.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically, but this sort of remark is why the left and intellectuals more widely fail at winning politically. Rather than use arguments that are amenable even to people who disagree on the fundamentals, you would rather retain the moral high-ground by refusing even to debate on their terms, thereby failing to actually influence policy (in this case a matter of life and death).
If the death penalty debate were framed more around "innocent people get killed" and less around more nebulous value-judgement based arguments (which, though valid, divide pretty neatly along partisan and class lines), perhaps the death penalty in the US would have gone long ago.
> Even discussing other factors arguments and considerations dilutes the core point...
Fair enough, I understand that those are your beliefs (they are mine too) but you'd be surprised how poorly they hold up in the real world against the testimonies of victims of some truly horrific crimes.
But from the sound of it you would prefer to weaken the case for abolishing the death penalty for the sake of making a more general point around the sanctity of life that, in the long run, will achieve...what exactly?
An argument is what it will boil down to because there will be a group of people who don't believe that it is "inhuman and barbaric". For the record - I agree with you, but I also recognize there are people who do not agree with us.
That's not really what "justification" is. I go through life assuming that only my mother and other loved ones care what I believe as such. Other people care about the arguments that I can make, with a bonus if I can make them using premises that they already accept.
That's fair enough, but he's pointing out the consequences of your beliefs. The crux of the objection is that you position yourself in opposition to the discussion of any other justification for abolishing the death penalty; it is not that the death penalty must be abolished, but that it must be abolished for a specific correct reason. This presents a relationship between the death penalty and your beliefs where it seems to your audience that you wish to abolish the death penalty not due to any urgency regarding its consequences, but because of your insistence on imposing your will on others.
Let's assume the "innocent people get killed" argument abolishes death penalty today. What are the second-order effects of that argument which can be detrimental to the society that you can think of?
Well, none, we have plenty of evidence that there's none. Almost all the countries that have implemented it have lower homicide rates than the US. Usually significantly lower.
Obviously there's probably also various other reasons for that too, like they usually also have heavily restricted gun ownership, but there's certainly no evidence that abolishing the death penalty has adverse effects.
Actually, the counter-argument is "innocent people get killed by already convincted murderer that went out of jail"...
ECONOMICS: Another counter-argument is "the society pay for the whole life of the jailed murderer, so it's a cost paid by the society for something that broke society laws"
And then another argument is "a murderer may prefer to be killed than to be kept in jail for the rest of his life".
Actually, there's a whole philosophical debate around all this: what is the role of the sanction ? Is it revenge from breaking society laws ? Is it revenge from the victim ? Can someone that broke society laws (even in murder case) be changed by the jail time and come back to the society as a good citizen or are some crimes the mark that this people are forever lost to the society ?
I'm against the death penalty. I'm french so we don't have it since 1980. And we don't really have "forever jail": it's 20 years I think and can even be shortened if prisoner show in jail that he's ready to come back to society (except if it would be a trouble for the society). As a consequence, there's from time to time a convicted criminal, out of jail after a reduced time, that kill/rape someone again. And each time, there's a public discussion about this...
> And we don't really have "forever jail": it's 20 years I think and can even be shortened if prisoner show in jail that he's ready to come back to society (except if it would be a trouble for the society).
20 year is the maximum required in case of non-premeditated murder (or manslaughter on minor i think).
In some cases (murder of a minor, group manslaughter of a state agent, premeditated murder of a state agent and one other case i can't remember), the criminal can be given "incompressible" perpetuity. After a minimum of 30 year, on a judge decision (often because the murderer is dying or very, very old), the "incompressible" part can get shafted.
Also death penalty is expensive. More than keeping prisonners locked up.
> Actually, the counter-argument is "innocent people get killed by already convincted murderer that went out of jail"...
Counter-argument to what? Surely not counter-argument to the death penalty since "releasing people" is not the alternative to the death penalty, life imprisonment is.
This "debate" has been over in all other nations that the US likes to be compared for years.
It is similar to the "tough on crime" incarceration "debate" in the US, where perverse incentives and political expediency has led to the US being the highest-per-capita incarcerator in the world.
Framing the death penalty debate around "innocent people get killed" will not change the partisan/class perceptions.
The US criminal justice system requires root-and-branch reform, starting with issues around policing, cash bail, school-to-prison pipelines, and unfair drug and "victimless" crimes.
Australia has been going through a similar debate and is at a similar point, without the death penalty, but dealing with the systemic racism and other class related issues.
I don't know. Even the constitution acknowledges the possibility of truths that are 'self-evident'.
I remember when the Guantanamo torture scandals emerged in the 2000s, how various political actors attempted to say 'Let's not get hot under the collar about this - let's put it on the table and talk it through.'
For me, there are some things that just don't warrant debate, and encompass such deep-seated truths about humanity that putting them up for debate is a repulsive and disingenuous act, as outlined in 'A Modest Proposal' . I agree with the parent poster that this is one of those cases.
EDIT: This was supposed to be a response to the parent comment of the one it got attached to (for some reason).
Doesn't matter. The Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution is not limited to the words of the document. The Constitution itself is derived from a history of law, letters, and intent that predate the very concept of the United States.
> For me, there are some things that just don't warrant debate, and encompass such deep-seated truths about humanity that putting them up for debate is a repulsive and disingenuous act,
The authors of the Declaration of Independence would perhaps agree.
But, keep in mind that stance — as they will knew — would result in the ‘disagreement’ being resolved by force and war.
Consequently, it’s wise to really give some thought to whether an issue is ‘self-evident.’ I personally do not think capital punishment is such an issue; that is, I acknowledge there are good arguments on both sides.
(Are there good arguments on both sides regarding whether some people — like King George — are inherently and divinely superior to others by virtue of their lineage? That’s a different matter... I would have fallen into the ‘self-evidently’ absurd camp on that one.)
It isn't really over, even now it pops its head up now and again. There's probably more people who believe in it than you realize.
For example in the UK 58% of people believe that the death penalty should be allowed for some crimes (e.g. terrorist attacks). Only 32% oppose it (presumably with 10% undecided):
So far from being the majority view, often anti-death penalty stance is the minority view but the political elite suppress it.
Let that really sink in, most of the comments here are very wrong in thinking the debate is over, with twice as many of the public still supporting it in a country where it's been abolished for over 50 years. Always remember to fight against capital punishment, the deal is not done.
I believe they do this as they understand the nuance better and realize that overall it causes more problems than it solves, so don't want to open that can of worms once it's shut. Looking back in history there's also significant political fallout every time someone is found innocent after their execution. Some hard-right politicians will band it around for easy points with their base, plus obviously the wider public too for more extreme crimes.
I could believe that there is a minority that is strongly opposed and a majority that weakly supports it. So that if you weigh it by passion, net sentiment is against it.
Very much agreed. The left and intellectuals have won the debate in most (all?) of the west and the US policies are widely considered barbaric, inhumane and corrupt. The current state of affairs in the US is unfortunately a testament to the US society.
Having said that, the US is quite a specific case and the truth is that the current approach of the left doesn't seem to work there. Progress is being made, but as an outsider, there seems to be too much partisanship on both sides. Too much us versus them. There is as much derogatory and hostile attitude in the left leaning forums as the right leaning ones, with a small sliver of moderates who get lost in the noise.
I can't claim to have a solution to this. The US seems to be a feudal society at this point, where a large portion of the serfs are actively undermining efforts to lift them from their serfdom, and a large portion of the liberators consider the serfs uneducated peasants who refuse to accept what's good for them. They are both led by a political elite whose incentives are to maintain (even entrench) the status quo because it gives them an easily manipulated voter base and a clear enemy to rally against.
Some western countries have respectably high numbers: France 50%, UK 48%, Holland 42%.
Not that the USA wants to be compared to us, but here in Romania it's at 91% and we still don't have it. (I suspect that romantic notions of Vlad the Impaler's time has something to do with the percentage.)
I suspect that the very high percentage from Romania has much less to do with Vlad the Impaler than with the fact that there are still a large number of people alive who remember the unusual circumstances in which the death penalty was abolished in Romania.
In Romania, the death penalty was not abolished by any democratic institution and that action was not preceded by any public debate.
The gang who seized power in 1989 in Romania abolished the death penalty immediately after killing the dictator Ceausescu to remove the competition, because absolutely everybody expected that many other people who had important positions in the Communist must be also executed immediately, because only that would have been consistent with the messages spread by the new power in the previous days.
However, the people who had seized the power could not kill any other from the Communist leadership, because those were their friends, family or accomplices, so they used the surprise trick of promptly abolishing the death penalty.
This unexpected action was the moment when many people woke up from the euphoria after the supposed fall of the Communism and they began to suspect that the people composing the new power might not be who they claim to be, but it was already too late.
The immediate abolition of the death penalty in Romania had its desired effect, of transforming the former powerful communists into rich capitalists owning what had previously been called "the wealth belonging to all the people", so it is still strongly resented by many who remember those events.
So Romania is a very special case, which explains the unusually high percentage of support for the death penalty.
>Framing the death penalty debate around "innocent people get killed" will not change the partisan/class perceptions.
I don't agree. All of these moral castigations about it being 'inhumane' or 'barbaric' don't strike me as rational or compelling in the least. I think the idea is humane in the context of those impacted by the crimes in question and I don't see how putting a person in a box for the remainder of their life is qualitatively any less barbaric.
I don't know where pg lands politically but I'd say I'm probably right of center on the American spectrum and for me there are only two persuasive arguments that we should abolish the death penalty. One is that we make mistakes in who gets it, per TFA, and the other is that it's difficult to concretely describe the qualifications of who should get it, risking expansion at the whim of the populace. In other words I absolutely believe there are just executions, I'm just not entirely sure we can create a system to do it justly.
Why? If he (or she) believes or can be convinced that the death penalty should be abolished, why do you care if they also believe that some of the executions that already happened were just?
1) because it implies that one day they might be it favour of bringing them back with the right technology etc
2) because you want to convince people of important moral principles. I don't want you to not beat your wife because you'll get caught, but because it's inherently wrong.
Certainly fodder for ongoing discussion but I think it’s important to prioritize goals.
Alignment on public policy decisions allows for more degrees of freedom in underlying philosophical differences than attempts to align on the philosophical primitives themselves. It also achieves an immediate goal.
Plus if you are engaging in conversation in a good faith attempt to understand and be understood, you have to allow for the case that your views are moderated or changed as well.
(The distance you feel from that right now is approximately the same I feel in the opposite direction.)
How about that it's significantly more expensive on average to execute a prisoner (due to the extensive appeal processes) than to imprison him for life? I would assume that should be a very compelling argument in favour of abolishing the death penalty for somebody who is "right of center".
I can understand why you would say that based on all of the stereotypes floating around, but honestly I've never seen this argument move the needle for anyone.
For some they just say 'I'll do it for a dollar' and disengage. Realistically the cost of incarceration isn't what's driving their argument for the death penalty, it's just a talking point.
For me, it's just the price of due process.
Maybe to save a few keystrokes, I think we are too flippant about the death penalty today but I think its an essential part of a justice system.
The US criminal justice system requires root-and-branch reform, starting with issues around policing, cash bail, school-to-prison pipelines, and unfair drug and "victimless" crimes.
I'd put our abusive plea bargaining system in there.
Sadly the rest of the world is moving towards that bad idea, rather than away. :-(
Sure, from a persuasion point of view I agree. But from a "trying to understand another human" point of view, I'd recommend you to read the Wikipedia page on ethics [1]. My own education on the topic: a course in college (as a business student) and watching some of the Harvard lectures on ethics [0]. IMO ethics courses teaches people to gain a more fine-grained vocabulary on explaining their own positions and understanding other's positions.
GP clearly uses a deontological line of thinking on this matter. Something that GP considers to be "inhuman and barbaric" invokes a line of thinking in where he/she believes one ought to not do a certain action, because it simply is wrong.
I'm not the best at explaining deontological ethics, nor are the people who think like this. My point is: a lot of thought has gone into the types of statements that GP makes, and IMO it's worth thinking about.
The trap you are both falling into is the thought that political discussions centre around trying to understand the other persons point of view. It is almost always the other way around, one person trying to persuade an unwilling party that they are wrong. So as the poster said, as right as you are, you would still lose the political argument if that was how you tried to argue for your view.
You can be correct all day long and change nothing, or you can be persuasive and meet them in their thought bubble to coerce them toward aligning with your views. You can't just pop their world view with statements of fact, because they may very well think your fact is wrong. In this case not everyone believes the death penalty is immoral, so if your only argument is "the death penalty is immoral" you will change nothing.
It’s all good and well to try and persuade someone, but like the GP sometimes I like to simply state my ideological viewpoint. The problem with narrowly arguing based on someone else’s ideals, is that any agreement isn’t a true meeting of the minds.
For example people, once tried to end the deal then penalty by talking about to pain involved in hanging. Proponents agreed and eventually came up with the electric chair, then lethal injection. No pain, no problem right?
If we talk about innocents killed, proponents will add stricter guidelines, and allow for more appeals, or even say that the crime must have been videotaped in front of a crowd of witnesses. We might end up with a death penalty that applies to the likes of Derek Chauvin alone, but it’ll still be a death penalty.
That's called a compromise, right? Reducing the pain involved and increasing the burden of proof required are both concrete, positive reforms, even if it doesn't completely resolve the issue.
You can laugh all you want, but killing fewer innocent people is in fact a good thing. If you can't see the value in that, then politics is not for you :)
I think we should celebrate that kind of incremental progress so long as it's not progress towards some kind of inescapable local minimum. And even in that case, it just becomes more complicated, not obviously wrong either.
Reducing the number of innocent deaths is an improvement. It doesn't feel like it's worth patting yourself on the back over reducing the number of unnecessary deaths cause when the process itself should be eliminated. I reject the idea that "politics" means negotiating over how much completely unnecessary human suffering is acceptable because we have to compromise with the people who want humans to suffer for one reason or another. Not every issue has two sides. Sometimes people and ideas and practices are simply wrong.
> Sometimes people and ideas and practices are simply wrong.
Of course, and I agree with you on this particular issue. All I mean is that if we can act today to chip away at the problem rather than just talking about the ideals, that's good, and in a democracy, that's what we accept as we work towards the ideal.
> It doesn't feel like it's worth patting yourself on the back over reducing the number of unnecessary deaths cause when the process itself should be eliminated.
Life's too short, I'm happy to celebrate progress. I'm proud to see the end of it in my home state of Virginia this year, even if it's not nationally outlawed.
I do agree with you, I think we're also kind of discussing two separate points. Of course just stating how you truly feel is perfectly fine, I don't disagree with that at all. A meeting of the minds as you put it requires people are candid, agreement and compromise isn't really required for that kind of discussion.
Additionally we're also discussing whether or not that approach can be effective at bringing in good policy, and I think that's often not the case. A hard stance with a binary argument is just very difficult to work with, you end up giving the opponent no opportunity to compromise and so they don't, you end up with no policy being written and things don't change.
Policy making is very intentionally an attempt to make a vast array of different views from across a nation coalesce into something that can be made into law, so it requires compromise.
"You're a bad person if you disagree with me" is a great way to never get what you want. It's not simply stating your position, it's anti-persuasion whether you want it to be or not.
Saying “you’re a bad person if you disagree with me” draws a line in the sand that precludes civil disagreement and picks a fight. Most people like to avoid conflict, and any possible counterargument to “you’re a bad person” inevitably comes across as defensive.
In other words, the tactic is to bully the opposition into shutting up. And it works very well.
I don't think anybody really supports/opposes the death penalty because of a rational analysis of facts and statistics. It's usually an emotive decision - the notion that "revenge must be taken" or that "life is sacrosanct". These are pretty core parts of people's identity and it is hard for them to let go.
Either way, stories (e.g. miscarriages of justice by an uncaring state) are likely a more effective way to convince in this controversy, not statistics:
Society, businesses and families fail when there is no ground truth, right or wrong, historical knowledge and are based on the most recent FUD or feelgoodery.
Arguments and negotiations need to have common grounds on how thing are interpreted. Else the most immoral person flourishes.
Me following this US debate from the other side of the world I mostly see it framed as “the innocent people getting killed” and not the “immoral to kill” debate as per this article. I don’s see it getting anywhere.
The left is getting more votes and it seems like leftist ideas do well in polls. So when it comes to ability to convince people about issues, they actually do well.
Also, I don't really see equivalent expectation routinely placed on right - they are not expected to proactively make compromises on their own heads before they even state position.
Framing this as a left vs right issue is an USA-centric way to frame the question. Consider how the US is basically the only country in the american continent that still goes ahead with capital punishment. Most other countries in the continent, from all kinds of political orientations, have either banned capital punishment outright or haven't executed anyone in more than a decade.
Referring to "the American continent" is a very South American thing to do. I think in the US they consider themselves to be sharing a continent with just Mexico and Canada.
Furthermore I think you don't go far enough. Around the world, abolishing the death penalty seems to be a mark of high development, apart from Japan (and arguably China and India) there aren't any highly developed nations that are still killing people.
Stretching the definition of "high development" here a bit (but since you're considering China and India) Belarus still has the death penalty (they were executing at least 1 almost every year until 2020).
Not getting into anything else, but I will remark that I got in trouble in 5th grade (in a US school) and a letter sent home to my parents about my bad attitude and showing of disrespect towards my teacher after she asserted that Mexico was in "South America" and that "North America" consisted exclusively of the USA and Canada. I argued with her and neither of us would back down. It was the first time I'd ever been in any kind of trouble. My parents were proud and took me out for ice cream. US public schools have some decent teachers but also some really ignorant ones.
Even in the US, "left vs right" on the death penalty is an oversimplification. A pretty good summary can be found here: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/religious-st... ... Anecdotally, as a religious person, I'd say that most Catholics I know either oppose the death penalty or would want it to be much more limited than it is now.
I once had a surreal conversation with a Jehovah's Witness priest who was proselytizing on my campus. It was around the time of the Iraq war, and he opened with something like "if killing is wrong, why do we have the death penalty." I managed to use Saddam Hussein's alleged human rights violations as a rhetorical lever to justify the killing of one to prevent the killing of many. As a supporter of neither the death penalty nor the war on Iraq, I've never walked away from a victory with so much regret
That's fine, just understand that your moral intuition isn't universal.
If there were some device (which doesn't exist and maybe can't) which simply lights up with perfect accuracy when pointed at someone who tortured someone before murdering them, I would support instant execution of that person by firing squad.
I'm not willing to accept a 4% error rate however. I'm not sure how low it would have to go, but it's lower than it plausibly can.
This isn't some kind of lack of "understanding" on my part, and you're not going to "teach" me to feel the same way about this issue as you do. We have different values. So you'll have to content yourself with my being on the same side of the policy question for different reasons.
I don't know how anyone can acknowledge that moral intuitions aren't universal while simultaneously believing their moral intuition can be used to justify the death penalty.
I thought about this topic for decades now.when I was 16 I thought you should murder a murderer.
I thought a lot about moral and ethics, the balance between being right and no right exists.
So I do believe your thinking can and might change in the future.
Your torture example still ignores the history of the torturer. Would you like to be killed after this from a society which had it easier and better then you and did not help you? Is that really fair to anyone?
Do you believe in a god? Would you assume jesus would let you in after that? (I'm not religious, I do think so that either it's a good god and it doesn't matter believing in her but your actions)
Do you believe that we are in a simulation? What if you wake up in your next life as a murderer?
There are so many potential thoughts which we haven't thought through that removing a murderer from society to prison is the best choice we have as long as it is a prison who tries to rehabilitate a person.
I think there is a somewhat reasonable argument that a punishment should mirror the crime, and any less than inhuman and barbaric to the inhuman and barbaric lacks actual justice?
I’m not saying I agree, I don’t personally support the death sentence, but if you’re actually interested in changing peoples minds it’s good to know where they’re coming from, and why they may not find your argument compelling.
I personally find the posts argument far more compelling.
I'm not from the US, so my knowledge on the death penalty is quite limited. But I clicked on a link posted below listing executions in Texas, and I was shocked to see that the most recent execution was last year for a crime committed back in 1993. Why?? You've already locked the guy up for almost three decades, what possible benefit is there to executing him now?
I get that he ruined (well, ended) someones life, but what does society gain from ruining his life in turn, to the point of what feels like mental torture: Being locked up for such a long time, all the while knowing that you will eventually just be executed.
> but what does society gain from ruining his life in turn, to the point of what feels like mental torture: Being locked up for such a long time, all the while knowing that you will eventually just be executed.
From what I gather on Americans' comments about this over the years it's mostly about "not spending taxpayer money" to house, feed and take care of criminals that received a death penalty.
I don't know how true this argument can be given all the costs over decades associated with a death penalty judgment (appeals, preparation for death row, maintaining death rows, etc.)
It's the result of a decades-long lawfare campaign by anti-death penalty activists. The more protracted and expensive it is to carry out the death penalty, the easier it is to argue for abolishing it on the practical grounds of cost rather than convincing Americans of the ethical case. A rather messed up byproduct of this is cases like the one you highlight, where the convicted person is left on death row for decades as they make hail-mary appeals.
The death penalty used to be much faster. But through a series of laws and court rulings starting in the 1970's, they decided that the case has to go through a super long sequence of appeals and court proceedings, with the intent of making doubly triply extra sure we're not executing innocent people.
You can never 'match' the crime. Even if you go justicing around 'an eye for an eye' style, the perp will always have taken the initiative. You can never get that back. Everything you do is just a reaction.
That is what makes crime so heinous.
So your focus should be prevention at any cost first and foremost, then justice as prevention (= rehabilitation) as well. Murdering a murderer is pretty solid prevention though, I give you that.
> You can never get that back. Everything you do is just a reaction.
Yes, but you can try. I can see why the loved ones of a murdered person feel someone is 'getting away' when he is still alive. Killing them feels much more like payback.
I don't that this does reasonably make sense, but I can understand where they are coming from.
I'm sure many find that it didn't feel like it at all, because of my argumentation. Payback will always be incomplete. It can never be paid in full.
Even if you kill someone over and over again (some Sci-Fi comes to mind), the perp always took the first step and elevated his role in society unjustly.
Lack of punishment can lead to more crime if people lose faith in the system. To take it to an extreme, if murder were punished with only a fine then victim families would just hire assassins to kill off a murderer if they feel the fine doesn’t suffice.
As the loved one of a murdered person, I can speak to this. Nothing will bring back my loved one. Nothing. Gone forever. A hole left unfilled for eternity. Executing her killer won't bring her back. It won't help anyone "heal" or "find solace" or any other words that politicians use.
Moreover life imprisonment is far more of a punishment. The individual has to get up every day and contemplate what they have done - with no way to end that other than the passage of time and the hope of commutation.
If you're from a part of the world where the death penalty was consigned to history decades ago, it's quite astonishing that a supposedly civilised nation would defend it.
Sorry, but that's exactly the kind of world we live in. The world simply is barbaric no matter what we would prefer. When people mess up a little bit, we put them through a process that, despite its massive inadequacy, is intended to rehabilitate them so that they can return to society. The death penalty is for when someone commits a crime so severe that they cannot ever return to society. If you are not able to think of this kind of situation, I suggest you may not be very familiar with the details of truly horrendous crimes. If we don't have the death penalty, we end up in the strange position of housing and feeding and providing medical care for the most harmful people in society at the expense of their victims.
I think arguing for its abolition on the basis of "the system is bad" is completely valid
> familiar with the details of truly horrendous crimes
And this still happens. And I agree, society is sometimes too tolerant with people who have no business in being in it (which, true, is a much smaller percentage of people on death row)
But don't expect the legal system to try to improve how many innocents they convict.
With this type of argument you attack one of the central tenets of human rights where every human life, no matter what, is worth the same. The moment you define that there are certain crimes where a human life is not the same as other human lives, no matter the reason, you move away from this core tenet.
It's all a matter if you believe in that core piece of universal human rights or not.
> one of the central tenets of human rights where every human life, no matter what, is worth the same.
You have to define who made up this right. Not everyone will agree. Most people will have boundaries on that no matter what all human lives are the same. Killing someone else on purpose breaks that boundary.
Its way way way more complex than that. One point is that you have life imprisonment without parole - the same effect of people not coming back to society is achieved. Another one is expense - death row costs AFAIK are higher than life imprisonment, so the harmed society pays even more.
As for truly horrible crimes (which is something else to each of us), there are also tons of different views - do we want to be in society that is above emotional vengeful reactions, and more about compassionate loving ones? Ie like all good christians/muslims/etc are supposed to be according to their holiest books? You have to start somewhere if you even want to get there. You have to be morally strong to act in smart and compassionate way if you want to claim progress of mankind in this area. And so on.
I don't have a clear position on this myself and not stating some higher moral ground, since there are many pros and cons on both sides and quick emotional reaction to some murderous pedophile is as expected. But I am 100% certain that this very topic reveals a lot about mankind and us humans in our progression to be a better species, compared to primitive uneducated masses of the past. Or regression, its up to us.
I think you're sadly mistaken that there's any intent to rehabilitate people "who mess up a little bit." Our criminal justice system is an emotional retributive system. Rehabilitation gets perhaps 1% of the attention it should, and is far outweighed by the inherent brutality of the entire system.
That is not a helpful argument. It certainly is inhuman and barbaric, but is it less inhuman and barbaric than the alternatives?
Criminals sentenced to death are supposed to be a danger to society so great that the only solution is to eliminate them. So, typical trolley problem: is it better to kill a criminal or let him go, potentially resulting in the death or several more innocent victims. Prison for life is another option, but is permanently restraining someone and endangering guards and other inmates a good alternative?
So yes, other justifications are needed. And the article gives one.
If the only reason we sentence people to death were because it is more humane than putting them in prison for life, then it would be given as an option to the prisoner. I don't know of any case of someone sentenced to life in prison who argued they would rather be put to death.
Edit: I've now done some research and found some death-row-inmates do express a preference for a death sentence:
That's a philosophical point. In most areas of legal justice, the penalty exacted for transgressions far exceeds the damages. That is to say, the man who steals a hundred dollars or who punches someone in the face loses far more value from his life as punishment than he caused someone else to lose. A life for a life is a rather mild punishment compared to the rest of the justice system, especially considering the death penalty is typically meted out for multiple brutal murders, often preceded by torture and rape. A just world would have these monsters subjected to the same nightmare to which they treated the innocent.
However, I agree with Paul. The fact that anyone not guilty of the crime is executed is unacceptable, to say nothing of the startlingly bad accuracy of the system in practice.
This argument is useless because what inhuman and barbaric my means depends on your belief system. Abortion is inhuman and barbaric to significant % of the population and death penalty isn't. They use murder argument as well. Of course death penalty is not murder nor is abortion if you're honest about what the word means but here we are with those absolute statements about ethics.
If we just use this argument and don't try to establish general principles we end up with a pointless shouting contest.
For once I think the death penalty is at least worth considering from the utilitarian point of view (in our current system the consensus is that it's cheaper to keep someone in prison for life though but it might change in the future) as well as from revenge/restitution point of view as a lot of people strongly think someone doing deliberate great harm deserves to be killed.
One way or another it's not simple from either ethical nor practical point of view.
Personally I consider death penalty as desirable penalty for some crimes but I would never vote for it as I have no faith in our politicians being able to implement it in a fair way and flawed justice system not to abuse it.
Opposition to abortion and capital punishment is pretty basic moral reasoning and really not challenging. The premise is killing innocent human beings is wrong. In the case of abortion the innocence of the person being killed is assured. In the case of capital punishment that’s not necessarily true, but since we can’t truly know for certain the convict isn’t innocent we ought to err on the side of caution to avoid the possibility of killing an innocent person.
It’s odd to me how controversial both issues are when the moral reasoning required is so easy. Taking any other position requires denying the premise that it’s wrong to destroy innocent human life. One can, but accepting that has some very nasty consequences.
You're wrong about it being easy, that's why it doesn't make sense to you.
There are many ethical systems in which both death penalty and abortion are justified.
Death penalty is any easy one. It was considered to be a proper penalty for various crimes for most of the human history in many cultures. It just takes understanding of ethical values of those cultures to understand why it was justified.
Your argument about taking innocent human life is a naive one. We do a lot of things that cost innocent human lives. Allowing diesel cars in cities cost more innocent lives than all death penalties in the history of humanity combined and it's not a small difference.
It's about tradeoffs and priorities. It's natural for a tribe or state to kill for treason for example as disincentivizing treason is more important (saves more lives, prevents suffering and destruction of your countrymen) than occasional mistake. Putting long term survival and well being of your society is more important than individual lives.
Our wealth clouds the picture so well. If it was required of everyone one to spend addition 20 hours a week providing food and shelter for a murderer atop of all the work we need to put into getting food and shelter for ourselves and our families you would be very quick to accept death penalty instead. As the choices would be about caring for your family and making sure the murderer doesn't die in custody. Today we can arguably afford it but if that's the argument then we already agree it's about tradeoffs and where the exact line is not obvious.
Even if you don't agree you can at least see it's a justified view. It's all about tradeoffs.
Right, despite mostly common human emotions (justice, reciprocity, etc), specific moral beliefs are normative and vary wildly by upbringing, religion, and political persuasion.
It's inhuman and barbaric to sentence criminals to death penalty (usually very quick less painful), and yet, the usually much worse criminal acts (cold-blood torturing, mass murdering, beheadings, etc.) that they ACTUALLY conducted on other completely innocent human beings are just not inhuman and barbaric and unethical enough for you to the point that you think it is not even worth discussing and a no-brainer to forgive. This is why the crimes are on the rise in this world, and justice is not being enforced by law due to the hypocritical "empathy" for the real criminals.
It's not inhumane nor barbaric (appease to emotions fallacy). It has to be applied correctly however. When someone kills someone else on purpose and with determinism, they have forfeit their right to live. It's quite simple.
Of course, the application of the death penalty in the US is very wrong. Other cultures have solved this issue a long time ago.
I think the state legitimately reserves for itself the right to resort to lethal force. National defence and effective policing can require violence when necessary.
The key issue for me is necessity. It is not necessary to execute criminals, even murderers. I do have sympathy for the view that murderers deserve death, maybe many of them do, but then you get into drawing lines between cases that deserve death and ones that don't. Is the evidence in this case good enough to kill, but this one the evidence is only good enough to incarcerate. It politicises the judicial and criminal justice system. So I oppose the death penalty not because it's barbaric or morally wrong per se, but because it introduces moral hazard that compromises the system.
We can see this in the US where prosecutors fight tooth and nail to preserve convictions and ensure convicts get executed largely in order to protect the system of executions from the embarrassment of death row inmates getting exonerated. Defending the system becomes more important than serving justice.
As a Brit I think politicisation is the thing that concerns me most about the US justice system. Elected prosecutors, elected judges, the politicisation of executions I described above. I don't know what it's like in other countries, but comparatively speaking all that just isn't a thing over here at all. Political debate on criminal justice is focused on laws and the administration of policing. That's really about it. It's not like we don't have miscarriages of justice, our system is far from perfect but it's mainly sees as being independent and professionalised.
What if the criminal is extremely wealthy and powerful and can continue to exert his influence even from within prison (and possibly have a corrupting influence on prison guards)? This actually happens with cartel heads and crime syndicate leaders...
Most such criminals are likely to be imprisoned for crimes other than murder, so you're going to have the problem anyway. Better to address the actual issue rather than use it as an excuse.
Doesn't that exact same argument work as well when applied to jailing people? It's wrong if I kidnap someone and keep them confined for years in a small room, so how can it not be wrong for the state to do it in the name of the law?
Countries regularly kill others in the name of international laws about the preservation of peace and security. This has been the case since at least the Second World War, when many countries allied together to crush the Nazis and Imperial Japan. This was wholesale killing on a global scale for the sake of preventing certain states from doing more of their own vast killing while breaking many international norms, agreements and laws. Much of it was unjust, yes, but would you argue that an absolutist stance of it being wrong to kill others in the name of the law justified doing nothing while these ruthless empires conquered more territory and enslaved millions more people into a slow death?
Or how about self defense? If a person is protecting their lawful rights, home, property and family and in the process must kill an aggressor to do these things, should they just not do so out of a certain absolute ethical posture about the wrongness of killing other human beings? Just to clarify where your own fundamental posture on killing in the name of the law this draws some lines or exceptions.
Improper or mistaken convictions, where reasonable oversight would have detected the error, are barbaric. If you want barbarism, you can find plenty in the way the criminal justice system is run for all offenders.
Prison is inhumane and barbaric, and has the opposite of the intended effect most of the time. Many ex-cons have become hardened criminals through their time on the inside, and even for those who haven't and want to reintegrate productively, the outside world does its best to prevent reintegration.
How many innocent people are killed in prison, not by the state, or have their lives ruined? You can say as long as they're alive there's hope they'll achieve something and be happy, but statistically those prospects are dimmer every year they spend inside.
The only remaining good thing prison does is keep bad people from causing problems in society for some number of years. Which is the same thing the death penalty does.
I don't know if the most productive way to use political capital to reform the criminal justice system is to abolish the death penalty. Unjustified state-sanctioned death might be terrible, but so are things like the drug war which probably do more aggregate harm. In an ideal world we'd get rid of prisons somehow, too.
In addition to ending the drug war and trying to fix neighborhoods that have been broken by it, fixing misaligned incentives for prosecution and law enforcement to prosecute cases would have a massive impact, far greater than any squabbles about the death penalty. Too often the prosecutors and law enforcement have desire to convict someone, and the defendant is the best chance they have, so they go ahead. More neutrality has to be introduced somehow. Judges being allowed to direct questions to witnesses might be a place to start.
I would rather be killed than spend even 20 years in prison. Technically I might live another 20 years, but I would be very near EOL at that age. Could I get the choice?
If the only argument in favor of the death penalty is that the prison system is inhumane, to the point that someone would rather die than go through it, the answer to that should be to make the prison system more humane.
Death isn't categorically inhumane. There are many circumstances in life that I would choose death over survival. It's barbaric for you to force me, against my will, to keep going through such things.
That's simply a logical fallacy: P => Q does not imply (not P) => (not Q). Here:
"If it is inaccurate, then it is wrong" does not imply "If it is accurate, then it is right."
In-human; what does this mean? It has been a human condition throughout all ages to kill each other. So by basic observation one could easily conclude it is human to kill each other. Fortunately what has developed over the ages is a framework or legal system for reasons to do so as apposed to just the whim of one individual.
> I think no other justification is needed to end the death penalty than “it’s inhuman and barbaric”.
Thing is, most of the time, people who are subject to the death penalty are there because they did “inhuman and barbaric” acts.
It is kind of like the paradox of tolerance. For society to prosper, you need to punish inhuman and barbaric acts, or at least isolate people who do that from society. However, such punishment is likely inhuman and barbaric at least on some level. Limiting a persons freedom of movement and interaction is inhuman and barbaric.
In addition, by not having the death penalty, you are subjecting others to have to deal with the person who did the inhuman and barbaric acts, whether other inmates or guards.
I am of the opinion that there are some acts that are so heinous that a person should never be a part of human society again. In that case, rather than prolonged human isolation, which is actually barbaric in and of itself, I think it is actually more humane to end their life. It does not have to gruesome or painful, no more than euthanizing a beloved pet with a terminal condition has to be gruesome. But some acts are incompatible with ever being a member of human society in any form.
Edit:
In addition, there are a lot of stuff that could be considered inhuman and barbaric but we do them for what we think as the good of society.
Spaying and neutering your pet sounds inhuman and barbaric.
Modern surgery, especially cancer surgery where they remove large margins of apparently healthy looking tissue, could be considered inhuman and barbaric.
In the Middle Ages, dissecting dead human bodies was considered inhuman and barbaric.
So the fact that a person sees something as inhuman and barbaric really is not overwhelming evidence if something should be done.
I found a couple that were a bit less positive, but most do seem to appear remorseful to some extent. None seemed to be particularly extreme, though–I wonder if those are sanitized to some extent.
> Yes. My last statement. I was wrongfully convicted of this crime against Michael Watkins and James Williams on 10th Street on August 31, 1993. I got convicted on a false confession because I never admitted to it, but my lawyer did not put this out to the jury. I did not kill those drug dealers. I send love to my family and friends; my east side family and friends. I am being real with the real. That's all that counts in my heart. I will see you later. That's it.
That hit hard. At the risk of sounding like a cliche softy, those statements made really sad, and then even sadder when I thought that all[0] of them must have also commited terrible crimes and caused suffering to so many people.
This is the obvious reason, but of course there are many more: executions are quite expensive, they don't seem to actually deter crime, they're fundamentally pessimistic ("this person will never be useful to society"). Plus, they're kind of unnecessarily cruel: if we wanted to execute people painlessly we could just pump a room full of nitrogen and let the person drift off into unconsciousness and death relatively quickly and silently. But for whatever reason we don't do this, instead opting for spectacles of shooting the person or zapping them or injecting slow paralytics into their veins. My personal guess is that people like to watch for some sort of catharsis which a silent death doesn't give them, but of course I'm not necessarily in a position to judge this well.
I'm against the death penalty, but, since the alternative is most likely life in prison, this is very probably true for rightfully convicted.
> My personal guess is that people like to watch for some sort of catharsis which a silent death doesn't give them, but of course I'm not necessarily in a position to judge this well.
There's a very interesting documentary called "how to kill a human being". In it, Michael Portillo explores more humane ways to execute prisoners, but at the end his method is rejected by proponents as the do not want these people to die painless. So you're probably not wrong.
I haven't been to prison so I don't know how practical what I'm about to say actually is, but it seems like it's still possible to contribute to society while in prison. e.g. working in the library and helping someone with a shorter term get their GED, or even activism (like how Tookie Williams tried to end the cycle of gang violence that had put him on death row and got half a dozen Nobel Prize nominations before his execution)
I have a personal theory that the correlation between the popularity of religious fundamentalism and the presence of popular support for the death penalty in southern US states has a common underlying cause.
There seems to be a certain draw of the Sodom and Gomorrah treatment in some people that draws a straight line from modern day human culture in those places directly back to ancient desert folktales through all these thousands of years. Perhaps it is the belief that actions undertaken in the here-and-now aren't ultimately that important, a sort of cosmic nihilism with regards to the physical reality we live in.
> This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with the death penalty.
First order thinking. There's a time to argue with first principles and there's a time to make arguments via "back door hacks" in the guise of amenability. Life and death may not be the best time to use "hacky" arguments because down the line there may be do more harm than good. Particularly, in common-law systems.
Also,
> When intellectuals talk about the death penalty,
I see that intellectuals has been well normalised into a pejorative these days. What a time to live in!
The death penalty is immoral and unethical. The state should not have the power over the life of a person.
However, the problem with removing the death penalty in the US is that it will not deal with the underlying systemic racism and the misaligned incentives of police and prosecution to "get a conviction".
So yes, if the death penalty is removed, there is one less barbarism.
However, for those who are not on death row, who are subject to the injustices, will there be the same pressure to investigate and exonorate the innocent?
How do we ensure that the incentives for conviction do not supersede the incentives for solving the crime accurately?
> The state should not have the power over the life of a person.
Then it can't do war and can't defend its existence as a state unless it's somehow a dependent state of some other state that does have power over the life of a person. Like some small Pacific island that's protected by more militarily well equipped allies.
Incarceration also is irreversible as each of our time is finite. It should concern us when we downplay the risk of false incarceration, it also is unacceptable.
>More death-row inmates have been volunteering for their executions: Between 1993 and 2002, 75 volunteered for death, compared to the 22 consensual executions between 1977 and 1992. (Gary Gilmore, the first prisoner put to death after the Supreme Court reinstituted capital punishment in 1976, "volunteered" for his execution in 1977 because he did not want to live the rest of his life on death row.)
It's probably more an indictment of the torture they go through on death row than it is a signal that they all secretly have a death wish.
If they were given the option to send all the resources that get spent on them rotting in prison to a cause of their choosing - many of them would quickly choose a humane death.
The ones that wouldn't, only care about themselves and should be treated accordingly.
Arguments against the death penalty downplay how barbaric incarceration is in the first place. But ostracism and exile have their limits, and justice is an essential function of government ... so ... we have our current situation.
Yeah. Hard to see how the same argument wouldn't apply to the prison system as a whole. We can be sure there are people imprisoned their whole lives wrongfully as well even without the death penalty - why is that acceptable?
If the argument is that currently, the false positive rate is too high - then what would an acceptable false positive rate be?
I think saying "the real reason" is a mistake.
It's a big reason, but the others are also good reasons.
It is terrible that it affects innocents. It is also true that it is ineffective, counter-productive, and barbaric.
It's sad we're still having this discussion when "On Crimes and Punishments"[0] was published four centuries ago and not much has substantially changed since.
I have very strong beliefs about the death penalty. I believe it is the only just punishment for murder; that ALL murderers should be executed; that anything less than execution is a
grave miscarriage of justice for a crime that is so horrible the mind cannot even wrap around it. I also think that pain should be part of the death penalty... that a murderer doesn’t deserve a quick and painless death but rather a healthy period of searing agony to experience the anguish that they themselves wrought on another.
However I believe that there is too big a gulf between “murderers” and “people convicted of murderer”; that the crime of killing is so severe that doing it to an innocent person is a miscarriage of justice far graver than any underpunishment of murderers; and so I oppose the death penalty in all forms as a matter of law.
Just lacked therapy. Murderer was a cop, and made a mistake. Murderer was provoked. Family of murderee forgives murderer. Murderee was merely an 3 months old embryo. Evidence not 100% conclusive. Murderer claims self defense.
I can continue. The world is messy. Black white thinking will not do it justice.
Not that I agree with these reasons in all circumstances. I just want to point out there are reasons to treat a murderer less harsh.
“Revenge has no place in a civilized society” is just an opinion. Mine is different. I don’t believe a society is civilized if it treats murderers with anything less than the most extreme vengeance.
Because I care deeply about everybody – no matter what they have done. Because forgiveness and love are my core values, even if it doesn't usually show up in my day to day life. Because revenge is always bad. Torturing somebody no matter their crime would go fundamentally against those few things that I feel very deeply about – not that different from loving my family or caring about the longterm wellbeing of humanity.
If that sounds irrational to you: That's because it is irrational. Whether we choose to end another persons life is fundamental in our understanding of life itself, which is highly subjective.
But your belief that we should kill other humans is also irrational and subjective.
Edit: Also this paragraph in your first answer
>> I also think that pain should be part of the death penalty... that a murderer doesn’t deserve a quick and painless death but rather a healthy period of searing agony to experience the anguish that they themselves wrought on another."
is actually terrifying to me. Even reading it causes me some physical discomfort.
What if your love and forgiveness allow a killer to strike again? I share similar values but I'm prepared to compromise on them if necessary. Even incarceration is a compromise. Values are ideals, not absolutes.
I agree that incarceration is a necessary compromise and of course I don't want a killer to strike again. Forgiveness doesn't mean that I'm against all punishment. But I think that it means there always has to be a chance for somebody to change – no matter what they did. Even life sentences without any chance of parole should not be possible: if somebody is no longer a danger to society they should be allowed to return at some point.
Please don't post flamebait or take HN threads into generic ideological arguments. They are exceedingly repetitive and convince no one—they just get people activated and angry. This place is for curious conversation.
Whoa - going straight to personal attack like that is not allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Look at it this way: comments like what you posted here take the community further into hell war, which destroys the community. Even if you don't feel you owe the other commenter better, you definitely owe the community better if you're participating in it. The ecosystem is fragile—we all need to protect it. Setting it on fire because of how wrong you feel someone is is not a good idea.
I'm happy with the conclusion you have reached, but boy is your first paragraph terrifying. It seems that you're conflating justice and accountability with revenge.
What if they did the murder because of a brain tumor messing up their impulse control ability? Humans are just complicated machines that go wrong sometimes. I do however share your emotional position and it would make me feel better to see (actual) murderers get the death penalty.
Someone disabled to the point of having no compass for right and wrong would have what is legally known as “diminished mental capacity” and not be convicted of first degree murder.
If you genuinely hallucinate that I am an attacking Pit Bull and kill me, you are not guilty of first degree murder and I would not want you executed.
As we learn more about neuroscience, every murderer will look like they have "diminished mental capacity". This legal construct is merely a statement of our ignorance to understand what's actually going on in their brain.
The criminal justice system can still function without the false premise of free will and agency, and without the false premise that someone with a brain tumor magically has less agency than someone without a brain tumor but who has some more complicated and less understood problem with their brain.
It can be premised on concepts such as rehabilitation (which I believe mostly can't happen with murderers), deterrence, creating a sense of fairness in society (which builds trust), protecting people from the murderer, and so on.
It might not go that bad. But I suspect that as medical imaging hardware becomes better, we'll eventually face a crisis point: we'll be forced to re-evaluate most of what we call "character traits" and reclassify them as neurochemistry quirks. This is an important distinction, because as a society, we tend to hold people responsible for their character, but not for bugs in their brain.
We can already see some of this today. Many people that would've been shunned by society in the past as "unstable" and "crazy", can be fixed by giving them lithium. We know not to fault a person for what's just a bug in their hardware. Similarly, many people that today are called "lazy" or "annoying", and blamed for their obviously flawed character, can be instantly fixed by low doses of stimulant medication. This is something most people didn't get a memo on yet.
I find it highly likely that most homicides are also driven by fixable neurochemistry quirks, and that we'll learn to identify and fix them at some point, and we'll be appalled at the ease with which we jumped to killing people for having them.
They're still a danger to society. If we start crossing into the metaphysical then we'd have to make excuses for peadophiles having 'messed up impulse control' too.
But as another comment pointed out, we do account for this.
Which is one of the reasons why we have incarceration, which I believe is absolutely necessary in some form in a case where a person is a danger to others (whether or not it's "their fault").
> we'd have to make excuses for peadophiles having 'messed up impulse control' too.
It's not an excuse, it's more a description of reality. And it would apply to child abusers as well, as well as other criminals, yes.
This isn't an argument against "punishing" these people. It's an argument for being clear about why we are "punishing" them, to make sure it's not a revenge motive (which is a heavily biologically driven motive in itself)
That's a different argument. The OP said it he'd like muderers to have a fate similar to their victims, basically as revenge. When executing someone for this reason, their guilt clearly does matter - someone who enjoys killing is far worse than someone with a medical condition. Whether their death is 'practical' is a different matter.
Murder already has one of the lowest recidivism rates of crimes. Murderers typically don't murder again. And that's mostly because murder is a heat of the moment crime. Planned murders are fairly rare.
If you seriously wanted to use the death penalty to deter crime, you'd do better executing people for smaller offenses. If you got executed for drunk driving rather than a fine, there would be less drunk driving.
Not saying that's a good thing. But if you're looking to deter crime, executing murderers is not actually a good way to go about it.
> When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.
It’s not obvious whether Graham has read a reasonable cross-section of the literature on the death penalty and come to this conclusion (in which case some references might be in order) or whether he's just pulling this out of his arse. I’m not familiar with the literature, but a Google Scholar search brings up the following:
> Although death penalty discourse has always been, and remains, multifaceted - encompassing morality, religion, cost, deterrence, theories of punishment, fairness, race, class, and human rights - we suggest that over the past decade innocence has emerged as perhaps the dominant issue in death penalty discourse with "an unprecedented effect on the debate about capital punishment" (Bandes 2008, 5; Baumgartner, De Boef, and Boydstun 2008, 157). This phenomenon has been referred to by such labels as the "age of innocence" (Rosen 2006, 237) or even an "innocence revolution" (Marshall 2004, 573; Steiker and Steiker 2005, 613). The abolitionist movement has embraced innocence as a new rhetorical asset in the death penalty debate, one with the potential to decisively shift the weight of public opinion in abolition's favor (Radelet and Borg 2000; Bedau 2004a; Acker 2009). "Unlike other challenges to the fairness of capital proceedings, which have failed to stimulate widespread public outrage," Marshall (2004) argues, "evidence of the system's propensity to factual error has the power to open closed minds and trigger reexamination of the costs and benefits of capital punishment" (579). Banner (2002) notes, "the prospect of killing an innocent person seemed to be the one thing that could cause people to rethink their support for capital punishment" (304). He goes on to suggest that "if any development had the potential to change" the popularity of the death penalty, "this was the one" (305). Thus, one scholar claims, "it is no exaggeration to say that wrongful convictions spurred . . . the most successful death penalty reform movement in our lifetime" (Bandes 2008, 4). Already, scholars claim that innocence "has produced a massive shift in the terms of the national death-penalty debate" (Hoffman 2005, 562), a shift "away from moral and procedural considerations, and toward the more substantive question of guilt and innocence" (Hall 2005, 373).
(J.D. Aronson and S.A. Cole, "Science and the Death Penalty: DNA, Innocence, and the Debate over Capital Punishment in the United States", Law & Social Inquiry 34.3 (2009), pp. 603-33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40539373.)
Perhaps it’s somehow satisfying to Graham to make a wide sweep at ‘intellectuals’ whilst presenting a purportedly distinct argument without trying to determine whether it’s been anticipated, but it strikes me as rather dishonest.
> divide pretty neatly along partisan and class lines
In America. The rest of the civilised world decided on this a long time ago.
It's not so much a "partisan and class" divide, it's "right-wing Americans vs the rest of Western Civilisation"
Even right-wingers in the UK and Europe do not want to bring back capital punishment [0]
[0] Obviously there are some wingnuts who do, but there's not to my knowledge a serious right-wing political party that has a policy of bringing back capital punishment. Corporal punishment, maybe.
49% of Brits would support the reintroduction of the death penalty. I suspect that the same is true across Europe and that you are living in a bubble. [0]
"for the murder of a child" - this isn't about the death penalty. This is a "won't someone please think about the children" dog whistle to the "murder all the pedos" brigade.
Again, no-one is seriously suggesting bringing it back. My bubble is secure.
> 49% of Brits would support the reintroduction of the death penalty
... for murdering a child. You forgot that part didn’t you?
If you pull up the poll if death penalty should be reintroduced for all murderers only 32% are in support [0].
Please don’t pick and choose sources to make an argument which wasn’t even captured by the source. Also please don’t extrapolate to other countries like that. Us Europeans left the death Penalty behind a long time ago. This is not a thing anymore.
Us Americans left behind the death penalty as well, so you are being a bit nationalistic (racist?). The death penalty is against the law in nearly 1/2 of US states.
Even in the states where it is "legal," many have not carried out the procedure in several decades. They simply reserve the right to do so in the case where a child is murdered.
> The rest of the civilised world decided on this a long time ago.
But please, go on continuing to believe Europeans are superior to the rest of the world. I remember that working out really well for you guys back in the 1930s.
> But please, go on continuing to believe Europeans are superior to the rest of the world. I remember that working out really well for you guys back in the 1930s.
That is unnecessarily snarky. The comment I was replying to was suggesting that basically the UK and the other Europeans would happily welcome back the death penality. Which is not true. I only said that "we" - the strawman used by gp - left it behind and made no statement about other countries.
Please don't do this, no matter how provocative another comment was. The proper response is to flag it and ignore it—then the provocation fizzles out, as it should. The site guidelines put it this way: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." That's our euphemistic recoding of "Please don't feed the trolls."
I realize this is not so easy when you belong to a group that's being put down, but we all need to build up our tolerance to that kind of thing, since the alternative is to have it dominate discussion and that would make everything worse.
You've broken the site guidelines badly, even relative to the rest of this thread, with name-calling, flamebait and slurs. Would you please stop doing that? We ban accounts that post this way—it's destructive to everything this site is intended to be.
Seems like I disagree with everything this site is intended to be.
Can you please delete my account? I'm sick of this site and its biased, self-righteous mods. I even sent you an email and everything, just like you asked!
There's some variation inside the US. Michigan abolished the death penalty for all crimes other than treason in 1847 (It was abolished for treason in 1967, with no one having been executed).
> at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.
I expect in Scandinavia these numbers are different. But they dont have death penalty.
From the news I learn that US cops also kill innocent people in the street. And it's military wages illegal wars killing 100s of 1000s overseas. I think the US has a weird relation with violence. The death penalty and how it uses it is merely a symptom.
Yeah, considering the US have a bunch of problems related to violence (mass shootings, overzealous police force, invading other countries left and right), it makes sense that other violent processes are also problematic in the same environment. I agree with you death penalty is merely a symptom of something else in the whole system of the country.
Makes it extra weird when you consider how prude the US is when it comes to sexuality, while violence is something that is not only used as entertainment, but even many feel pride about.
My observation from the UK is that it's extremely polarised.
When I visited Miami for work I couldn't believe how many scantily clad people just walked around and the stories you see in media from coastal liberal areas (fictional and non-fictional) seem just as, if not more, open to sexuality as the UK (who are more prudish than Europe in general).
But in the otherhand there are large areas/groups dominated by conservative religious values who are hyper prudish.
Also mingling in politics. US has been in the business of that for decades. The whole of Central and South America has had a couple of regime changes dictated by the US.
Then Russia supposedly bought some Facebook ads or something for a US election years ago, and I still need to read about it in the news every week.
Conclusion: US also has a huge double measurement problem.
No? As far as I know, nipples are still "banned" on most US social media platforms, but only if they are female. Male nipples are fine. Then children are usually shielded from anything remotely sexual in both real-life and from media while violence seems to be fine even for the youngest.
This is a classic generic tangent of the sort the site guidelines ask people not to post to HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). You're changing the topic from a specific argument about death-penalty convictions to a generic, inflammatory point about how $country has a "weird relation" with $badness. This is how we get less interesting discussion, and also flamewar—in this case nationalistic flamewar, which we definitely do not want here.
Edit: not only that but you stoked the flamewar downthread with posts about regime changes and putdowns about "civilized society". This is what I'm talking about. Please don't.
Edit 2: not only that but you did the same thing yesterday, and to judge by recent history it looks like your account has swerved into using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. Please don't—that's against the site guidelines because it destroys the curiosity this site is supposed to exist for. You're a good HN user so this should be easy to fix.
If anyone's worried about us being biased in favor of $country—here's an example from yesterday that went exactly the other way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26892927. We couldn't care less what color the flames are—we just want to have an internet forum that doesn't suck. When people starting arguing about whose country isn't "civilized" or whose there should be a "bloody war" with, we have dangerously high levels of suckage.
Of course there will be miscarriages of justice and this has been talked about since the beginning. There is nothing new here.
> 4% of people on death row are innocent.
This is not true, but it's irrelevant anyway since what is the acceptable level? Since it's not mentioned, we have gotten nowhere in this blog post.
If we get it very close to zero, is it then ok then? Is the single incidence of executing a guilty man ok? Because either that's what this blog implies or it's skipping the real issues.
The post is indeed arguing that “zero people killed by the government for crimes they did not commit” is more ok than “greater than zero people killed.”
This is a valid argument, drawing on the intuition that accidentally letting a guilty person escape death (even if we accept they deserve it) is a lesser evil than letting an innocent person die.
> because so many of the people sentenced to death are actually innocent.
He puts a vague number to it in my reading.
The government regularly lets people die. The government regularly lets innocent people die. The government regularly changes things that then changes who dies. A human life is only worth around $2,000,000 in the rich west like the US. People, inflate that number a lot, but it's actually low millions.
If the argument is it has to be 0.00 for direct action by the government that deliberately kills a person then say it. That's the end. It's not possible to get 0, don't bring in the fact it's 4% or x% or bring in case studies because that's just a changing goal post.
The reason for the 'changing goal post' is because no one can ask why is the direct killing of innocent people different to allowing innocent people to die.
[edit] Here's a 150 year old 'against' blog post that innocent people will die - https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/128491969 Back then it was all about the innocent witches (which still happens today sadly)
Another solution is having a no doubt standard needed for the death penalty as opposed to a beyond a reasonable doubt standard.
No doubt standard would require some set elements. DNA + visual recording + electronic records.
I used to be anti death penalty but would be ok with it under a no doubt standard. Not for vengeance but simply society can spend the money on other things instead of spending money housing and feeding individuals who have caused such horrific pain on others.
I hope you realize that meeting that no doubt standard is going to cost a lot of money. The judiciary procedures for death penalty is extremely high, as are all the related costs for death rows & execution. In fact death penalty costs already more than life in prison: https://www.thebalance.com/comparing-the-costs-of-death-pena...
And that's with the current error-prone system. Think of what it would take to ensure that your criteria are met.
So costs is simply not an argument. In fact it's a pretty bad faith one regarding what happens with private prisons and the labor of inmates subjected to slavery (read the 13th amendment if you think slavery is universally abolished). The US wouldn't have the highest rate of incarceration in the world if it didn't make money somehow.
> But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.
I think we should also quantify how many people are victims of recidivism. You could make the exact same argument but instead of protecting innocent people wrongly on the death row , you would argue to protect innocent people victims of recidivists murderers.
I've found a bit of data [0] from an article [1] which has 3 homicide among 92 paroled homicide offenders. That's a bit more than 3% which is not far from 4%. The data here is of "lower quality" (there's less people on a shorter timeframe) than the one quoted in the article [2]. However, that same article estimates a 4.1% false conviction rate but adds:
> The most charged question in this area is different: How many innocent defendants have been put to death (6)? We cannot estimate that number directly but we believe it is comparatively low. If the rate were the same as our estimate for false death sentences, the number of innocents executed in the United States in the past 35 y would be more than 50 (20). We do not believe that has happened.
So the article doesnt' support "at least 4% of people on the death row are innocent".
I, as a 15 year old kid, was detained as a suspect in an armed robbery, and murder case for a few days. Of course the case never went anywhere, and that's why I can speak with you now. Fortunately, a complete bullshit FIR, and CCTV records made the case to look too silly even for a Russian criminal system.
Every time I see an immigration officer at the border raising his eyebrows in disbelief, I instantly understand that he took a look on my criminal file.
For me, the cruel tradition of Russian police to literally grab the first bystander they come upon near the crime scene to draw as a suspect did cost months of my life spent on legal paperwork, and an immigration nightmare.
Russian citizens have no ability to have anything struck from their file, even if those lucky got a rarest %0.8 acquittal. For most unlucky people, even if the case doesn't go anywhere, they will never get the clear acquittal record, but instead have something like "case struck on procedural grounds" in their file.
Getting wrongly accused is very easy. Just be the first person to be seen near the crime scene.
The thing I find distasteful is the 'sanitization' of execution. I've got some ideas on how to spice it up:
Brushing away of the wrongful executions as a price of justice. Hold a monthly lottery of the population, with the random 'winner' being executed. Out of a population of millions you wouldn't even notice, but would send a message to the world that you were OK with the cost.
Secondly. Repercussions for those that assisted in wrongful convictions. Your prosecutor withheld evidence of your innocence? Police dropped evidence into your pocket? Try them for attempted murder. Boggles my mind at the lack of repercussions that seem to come out of these cases.
Finally I think you should be executed by your peers, in the same way as we tried you. At your conviction lottery is held of the population and winner is your executioner. They're given a gun/syringe/whatever and they're pointed at the prisoner. Oh, and I'd like this televised - maybe as part of the superbowl show. "Here's Charlene from Ohio, she's just celebrated her sweet-sixteenth, likes horses and reading and has selected a crossbow"
The point you're making is that living in society each day is a ticket in lottery where we could be falsely accused of a crime, falsely convicted, and unjustly punished. That's horrific all around, a death penalty is a factor but not even the biggest. On the contrary, if we need a death penality to make someone like your audience care about that horror of punishing innocent people then perhaps there is a beneficial purpose? Maybe executions make people care about bad things done in their name in the name of justice?
>Police dropped evidence into your pocket? Try them for attempted murder.
Yes, naturally. Some archaic pockets of government do this, sort of! What comes to mind is a specific public officer in my state who is personally responsible by law for breaches of privacy in her office. Consequences like that focus the mind! So much so, in fact, that those consequences come to dominate the public officer's thinking. I don't disagree, but forget 'defund the police'-- you're going to need a lot more police to enforce the modern criminal code at the current level of enforcement if police are threatened with death for misplacing their notes , memories and paperwork.
>At your conviction lottery is held of the population and winner is your executioner.
Again, the result here would be that some people would be assigned an executioner who would show them mercy. This too has analogues in our modern systems. In some parts of the world the victim's family can stop an execution if they feel the victim has been adequately avenged-- not a bad result! In the US context governors-- arguably the people responsible for these killings-- can and frequently do commute sentences out of compassion or lack of clarity about the crime.
I think my more concise post would be that "law and order" (unlike practically any other issue) is thought of by the majority as "something that happens to other people". It's not. They think it's fair. It's not.
Example in the UK is that we used to have "Legal Aid" - if you were accused of something (and were of modest means) the government would pay a modest amount for a laywer to represent you. Wasn't a cheap system in absolute terms, but as a proportion of government expenditure was tiny. Over the years successive governments of all sides have gutted the system - and media delights in planted stories like "Insurance companies scammed" and "Terrorist receives money". Basically, "We're giving money to criminals and we should stop."
Nobody considers the flip side - "Can you pay for a legal defence if the Police knock on your door tomorrow?"
Most of the examples of innocents being convicted are from before the invention of DNA forensics. The problem is the criminal justice system which too easily gives the death penalty. We could easily reduce the probability of conviction innocents from 4% to one in a trillion by enforcing a set of requirements:
- Must have DNA evidence
- Must have audio and video evidence
- Must have fingerprints
- Must have at least 2 witnesses
There are plenty of cases that satisfy these conditions (terrorist attacks being one of them).
Scientific knowledge that connects brain injuries to violent crime is an even better reason to end the death penalty.
Traumatic brain injury damages self-regulation and changes social behavior. Uninhibited or impulsive behavior, including problems controlling anger and unacceptable sexual behavior, leads to crime. The concept of insanity used in the US criminal system is based on science 130 years ago, combined with the religious concept of sin and soul. The thinking is that if a person knows what they do is wrong, they could choose to not do it is BS. With brain injury person can lose that ability.
>In another study, of 14 juveniles sentenced to death, the researchers found that all had suffered head trauma, most in car accidents but many by beatings as well. 12 had suffered brutal physical abuse, 5 of those sodomized by relatives.
>According to jail and prison studies,
25-87% of inmates report having
experienced a head injury or TBI 2-4
as compared to 8.5% in a general
population reporting a history of
TBI.
I want to preface what I'm about to say with: I'm against the death penalty. However, innocent people die every day, they're hit by cars, they're shot by police, they commit suicide. If your argument is that you want to save the lives of innocent poeple then you should be having a discussion about reducing the use of cars.
If your argument isn't about the state's role, then what is the distinction between these things. 4% doesn't actually seem like a high rate to me and it's not a high percentage of a relatively small number in the first place.
We have discussions about how to reduce the number of deaths by cars every day. Don't pretend we don't. We have discussions about suicide prevention. Cancer prevention and treatment. Healthy living, blah blah blah.
Yes, the number of people who die from those things are still non-zero.
But what you're suggesting is that we need to get those to zero before we address the death penalty. That's a false dichotomy.
The death penalty is one are where we are making the deliberate choice to end someone's life. We can prevent that 4% rate simply by not making that choice. We can make that number zero and it would cost us practically nothing to do so.
I am not impressed by your faux-concern for automobile deaths.
I'm not suggesting that we need to get those things to zero. I'm suggesting that's what PG is making the argument for. You can't have it both ways, you can't argue that the death penalty is a unique harm because of the innocent deaths whilst ignoring other innocent deaths. The death penalty is all about the state's role -that is the thing that distinguishes it from traffic deaths. If you really do subcribe to PG's argument then the answer is "Well, if that's the priority, the death penalty isn't bad compared to 1000 other things". We're literally talking about more innocent people dying from car deaths in a day that from being sentenced to death in a year.
What PG is doing here is making the argument for the death penalty weaker by arguing for it on the weakest possible basis.
Oh and also, it's not 0 cost. It's probably a hugely expensive long and drawn out politial process to get rid of. For the pay off that's similar in scope to a moderate sized town lowering its speed limit. Not to mention the fact that these people who are sentenced to death incorrectly aren't being set free, they're likely still spending decades in prison.
You're ignoring our active participation in it. It's not about the state's role in it per se, so much as, like I've said previously, the fact that we are choosing to directly end someone's life.
And innocent people don't die in car accidents, unfortunate people do. People who get executed are deliberately executed.
It's as 0 cost as you can get. It's not a hugely expensive process, courts can just not sentence people to death. It's not like we're sticking these people on a huge conveyor belt that's impossible to remove them from.
> Not to mention the fact that these people who are sentenced to death incorrectly aren't being set free, they're likely still spending decades in prison.
And? Because we've wronged them somewhat, it's ok that we wrong them further? What sort of logic is that?
Though I agree that in most cases death penalty should not be used, in some very specific but not rare cases - like mass shootings with dozens dead - where you have a lot of video and DNA evidence and dozens of witnesses - I just can't find a single argument against it. If I find any - I would gladly change my mind.
Then let me offer you this question to ponder: What benefit is there to adding another tally to the body count from a mass shooting, once the perpetrator has been taken into custody?
Executing someone doesn't reduce the number of unnecessarily lost lives, it only increases it.
Someone who is assaulted or robbed might also benefit from the sense of closure they would receive knowing that the perpetrator had died. Similarly someone who found their partner cheating on them with a rival might find it easier to move on from that if their rival was then killed.
In general I don't think that society is best served by legitimising and implementing the irrational desires we have for killing people who have emotionally hurt us.
I think it would instead make sense to try to improve the support given to people who have suffered from crimes. If this means years of expensive therapy, paid for by the near-slavery of the perpetrator carrying out their life sentence, then we could have an outcome that is slightly more humane.
I think spending the rest of your life in solitary in a supermax prison sounds like a fate much worse than death. I'd rather see that happen to a terrorist than the death penalty.
Can someone explain the logic behind District Attorney's being elected? I'm not from the US so don't understand the reasoning. Why are certain crimes prosecuted based on decisions of an elected official? That just seems obviously highly manipulatable to me.
The theory is that democracy allows the people to hold the DA accountable to the public good, vs an appointed DA who can use their power for political ends and is only accountable to the person that appoints them (who they can do favors for).
If we did that, commenters would complain "yet again, the HN moderators completely change the meaning of a title with their invasive and random editing. It's infuriating." And in this case they'd be right, because in this case the definite article and the word "real" are essential—the article's argument doesn't really exist without them.
I think that you got that backwards. What ‘raldi’ was trying to say that it’s good that you didn’t edit the title, but implied that it’s sad that it was merely because it was pg who wrote the post that the title was left unaltered.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadEven discussing other factors arguments and considerations dilutes the core point that’s it’s straight up wrong unethical and inhuman to murder others in the name of the law.
Paul Graham has a valid point, but if you say “it’s wrong cause it’s inaccurate”, implies it’s right if it’s accurate. And it’s not... the death penalty is wrong no matter be it accurate or inaccurate.
If the death penalty debate were framed more around "innocent people get killed" and less around more nebulous value-judgement based arguments (which, though valid, divide pretty neatly along partisan and class lines), perhaps the death penalty in the US would have gone long ago.
Fair enough, I understand that those are your beliefs (they are mine too) but you'd be surprised how poorly they hold up in the real world against the testimonies of victims of some truly horrific crimes.
But from the sound of it you would prefer to weaken the case for abolishing the death penalty for the sake of making a more general point around the sanctity of life that, in the long run, will achieve...what exactly?
Obviously there's probably also various other reasons for that too, like they usually also have heavily restricted gun ownership, but there's certainly no evidence that abolishing the death penalty has adverse effects.
ECONOMICS: Another counter-argument is "the society pay for the whole life of the jailed murderer, so it's a cost paid by the society for something that broke society laws"
And then another argument is "a murderer may prefer to be killed than to be kept in jail for the rest of his life".
Actually, there's a whole philosophical debate around all this: what is the role of the sanction ? Is it revenge from breaking society laws ? Is it revenge from the victim ? Can someone that broke society laws (even in murder case) be changed by the jail time and come back to the society as a good citizen or are some crimes the mark that this people are forever lost to the society ?
I'm against the death penalty. I'm french so we don't have it since 1980. And we don't really have "forever jail": it's 20 years I think and can even be shortened if prisoner show in jail that he's ready to come back to society (except if it would be a trouble for the society). As a consequence, there's from time to time a convicted criminal, out of jail after a reduced time, that kill/rape someone again. And each time, there's a public discussion about this...
20 year is the maximum required in case of non-premeditated murder (or manslaughter on minor i think).
In some cases (murder of a minor, group manslaughter of a state agent, premeditated murder of a state agent and one other case i can't remember), the criminal can be given "incompressible" perpetuity. After a minimum of 30 year, on a judge decision (often because the murderer is dying or very, very old), the "incompressible" part can get shafted.
Also death penalty is expensive. More than keeping prisonners locked up.
Counter-argument to what? Surely not counter-argument to the death penalty since "releasing people" is not the alternative to the death penalty, life imprisonment is.
It is similar to the "tough on crime" incarceration "debate" in the US, where perverse incentives and political expediency has led to the US being the highest-per-capita incarcerator in the world.
Framing the death penalty debate around "innocent people get killed" will not change the partisan/class perceptions.
The US criminal justice system requires root-and-branch reform, starting with issues around policing, cash bail, school-to-prison pipelines, and unfair drug and "victimless" crimes.
Australia has been going through a similar debate and is at a similar point, without the death penalty, but dealing with the systemic racism and other class related issues.
I remember when the Guantanamo torture scandals emerged in the 2000s, how various political actors attempted to say 'Let's not get hot under the collar about this - let's put it on the table and talk it through.'
For me, there are some things that just don't warrant debate, and encompass such deep-seated truths about humanity that putting them up for debate is a repulsive and disingenuous act, as outlined in 'A Modest Proposal' . I agree with the parent poster that this is one of those cases.
EDIT: This was supposed to be a response to the parent comment of the one it got attached to (for some reason).
The authors of the Declaration of Independence would perhaps agree.
But, keep in mind that stance — as they will knew — would result in the ‘disagreement’ being resolved by force and war.
Consequently, it’s wise to really give some thought to whether an issue is ‘self-evident.’ I personally do not think capital punishment is such an issue; that is, I acknowledge there are good arguments on both sides.
(Are there good arguments on both sides regarding whether some people — like King George — are inherently and divinely superior to others by virtue of their lineage? That’s a different matter... I would have fallen into the ‘self-evidently’ absurd camp on that one.)
For example in the UK 58% of people believe that the death penalty should be allowed for some crimes (e.g. terrorist attacks). Only 32% oppose it (presumably with 10% undecided):
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/legal/articles-reports/2019/10/0...
So far from being the majority view, often anti-death penalty stance is the minority view but the political elite suppress it.
Let that really sink in, most of the comments here are very wrong in thinking the debate is over, with twice as many of the public still supporting it in a country where it's been abolished for over 50 years. Always remember to fight against capital punishment, the deal is not done.
I believe they do this as they understand the nuance better and realize that overall it causes more problems than it solves, so don't want to open that can of worms once it's shut. Looking back in history there's also significant political fallout every time someone is found innocent after their execution. Some hard-right politicians will band it around for easy points with their base, plus obviously the wider public too for more extreme crimes.
Having said that, the US is quite a specific case and the truth is that the current approach of the left doesn't seem to work there. Progress is being made, but as an outsider, there seems to be too much partisanship on both sides. Too much us versus them. There is as much derogatory and hostile attitude in the left leaning forums as the right leaning ones, with a small sliver of moderates who get lost in the noise.
I can't claim to have a solution to this. The US seems to be a feudal society at this point, where a large portion of the serfs are actively undermining efforts to lift them from their serfdom, and a large portion of the liberators consider the serfs uneducated peasants who refuse to accept what's good for them. They are both led by a political elite whose incentives are to maintain (even entrench) the status quo because it gives them an easily manipulated voter base and a clear enemy to rally against.
Some western countries have respectably high numbers: France 50%, UK 48%, Holland 42%.
Not that the USA wants to be compared to us, but here in Romania it's at 91% and we still don't have it. (I suspect that romantic notions of Vlad the Impaler's time has something to do with the percentage.)
In Romania, the death penalty was not abolished by any democratic institution and that action was not preceded by any public debate.
The gang who seized power in 1989 in Romania abolished the death penalty immediately after killing the dictator Ceausescu to remove the competition, because absolutely everybody expected that many other people who had important positions in the Communist must be also executed immediately, because only that would have been consistent with the messages spread by the new power in the previous days.
However, the people who had seized the power could not kill any other from the Communist leadership, because those were their friends, family or accomplices, so they used the surprise trick of promptly abolishing the death penalty.
This unexpected action was the moment when many people woke up from the euphoria after the supposed fall of the Communism and they began to suspect that the people composing the new power might not be who they claim to be, but it was already too late.
The immediate abolition of the death penalty in Romania had its desired effect, of transforming the former powerful communists into rich capitalists owning what had previously been called "the wealth belonging to all the people", so it is still strongly resented by many who remember those events.
So Romania is a very special case, which explains the unusually high percentage of support for the death penalty.
I don't agree. All of these moral castigations about it being 'inhumane' or 'barbaric' don't strike me as rational or compelling in the least. I think the idea is humane in the context of those impacted by the crimes in question and I don't see how putting a person in a box for the remainder of their life is qualitatively any less barbaric.
I don't know where pg lands politically but I'd say I'm probably right of center on the American spectrum and for me there are only two persuasive arguments that we should abolish the death penalty. One is that we make mistakes in who gets it, per TFA, and the other is that it's difficult to concretely describe the qualifications of who should get it, risking expansion at the whim of the populace. In other words I absolutely believe there are just executions, I'm just not entirely sure we can create a system to do it justly.
I think that is the GP,s point: the real problem is to convince you otherwise.
2) because you want to convince people of important moral principles. I don't want you to not beat your wife because you'll get caught, but because it's inherently wrong.
Alignment on public policy decisions allows for more degrees of freedom in underlying philosophical differences than attempts to align on the philosophical primitives themselves. It also achieves an immediate goal.
Plus if you are engaging in conversation in a good faith attempt to understand and be understood, you have to allow for the case that your views are moderated or changed as well.
(The distance you feel from that right now is approximately the same I feel in the opposite direction.)
For some they just say 'I'll do it for a dollar' and disengage. Realistically the cost of incarceration isn't what's driving their argument for the death penalty, it's just a talking point.
For me, it's just the price of due process.
Maybe to save a few keystrokes, I think we are too flippant about the death penalty today but I think its an essential part of a justice system.
I'd put our abusive plea bargaining system in there.
Sadly the rest of the world is moving towards that bad idea, rather than away. :-(
GP clearly uses a deontological line of thinking on this matter. Something that GP considers to be "inhuman and barbaric" invokes a line of thinking in where he/she believes one ought to not do a certain action, because it simply is wrong.
I'm not the best at explaining deontological ethics, nor are the people who think like this. My point is: a lot of thought has gone into the types of statements that GP makes, and IMO it's worth thinking about.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics
You can be correct all day long and change nothing, or you can be persuasive and meet them in their thought bubble to coerce them toward aligning with your views. You can't just pop their world view with statements of fact, because they may very well think your fact is wrong. In this case not everyone believes the death penalty is immoral, so if your only argument is "the death penalty is immoral" you will change nothing.
For example people, once tried to end the deal then penalty by talking about to pain involved in hanging. Proponents agreed and eventually came up with the electric chair, then lethal injection. No pain, no problem right?
If we talk about innocents killed, proponents will add stricter guidelines, and allow for more appeals, or even say that the crime must have been videotaped in front of a crowd of witnesses. We might end up with a death penalty that applies to the likes of Derek Chauvin alone, but it’ll still be a death penalty.
I think we should celebrate that kind of incremental progress so long as it's not progress towards some kind of inescapable local minimum. And even in that case, it just becomes more complicated, not obviously wrong either.
Of course, and I agree with you on this particular issue. All I mean is that if we can act today to chip away at the problem rather than just talking about the ideals, that's good, and in a democracy, that's what we accept as we work towards the ideal.
> It doesn't feel like it's worth patting yourself on the back over reducing the number of unnecessary deaths cause when the process itself should be eliminated.
Life's too short, I'm happy to celebrate progress. I'm proud to see the end of it in my home state of Virginia this year, even if it's not nationally outlawed.
Additionally we're also discussing whether or not that approach can be effective at bringing in good policy, and I think that's often not the case. A hard stance with a binary argument is just very difficult to work with, you end up giving the opponent no opportunity to compromise and so they don't, you end up with no policy being written and things don't change.
Policy making is very intentionally an attempt to make a vast array of different views from across a nation coalesce into something that can be made into law, so it requires compromise.
Saying “you’re a bad person if you disagree with me” draws a line in the sand that precludes civil disagreement and picks a fight. Most people like to avoid conflict, and any possible counterargument to “you’re a bad person” inevitably comes across as defensive.
In other words, the tactic is to bully the opposition into shutting up. And it works very well.
You're not going to persuade a Q follower or BLM protester about the opposing viewpoint.
Polemics in this realm are far more effective.
Either way, stories (e.g. miscarriages of justice by an uncaring state) are likely a more effective way to convince in this controversy, not statistics:
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/02/23/why-is-it-so-hard-to-pe...
Arguments and negotiations need to have common grounds on how thing are interpreted. Else the most immoral person flourishes.
Me following this US debate from the other side of the world I mostly see it framed as “the innocent people getting killed” and not the “immoral to kill” debate as per this article. I don’s see it getting anywhere.
Also, I don't really see equivalent expectation routinely placed on right - they are not expected to proactively make compromises on their own heads before they even state position.
Furthermore I think you don't go far enough. Around the world, abolishing the death penalty seems to be a mark of high development, apart from Japan (and arguably China and India) there aren't any highly developed nations that are still killing people.
Everyone has a moral high-ground that isn't debatable.
The right does this as well for it's issues such as abortion.
Left or Right, everyone thinks there is some moral high ground that's not debatable. Everyone has some line that they don't think should be crossed.
I’m not even sure what that is intended to mean - specifically the bit about intellectuals.
Now I'm not sure what you think fundamental, but I am pretty sure that "murder" is a something the other side understands.
The irony in this is iron clad. It is also hyperbole, because this is an internet comment, not a political debate.
It could be their upbringing which should be the responsibility of the society and clearly the society failed.
It could be a medical issue. A biological one.
It could be that the murderer did nothing wrong in their worldview.
We have to understand this as a society. We have to teach it if people don't understand it.
If there were some device (which doesn't exist and maybe can't) which simply lights up with perfect accuracy when pointed at someone who tortured someone before murdering them, I would support instant execution of that person by firing squad.
I'm not willing to accept a 4% error rate however. I'm not sure how low it would have to go, but it's lower than it plausibly can.
This isn't some kind of lack of "understanding" on my part, and you're not going to "teach" me to feel the same way about this issue as you do. We have different values. So you'll have to content yourself with my being on the same side of the policy question for different reasons.
I thought a lot about moral and ethics, the balance between being right and no right exists.
So I do believe your thinking can and might change in the future.
Your torture example still ignores the history of the torturer. Would you like to be killed after this from a society which had it easier and better then you and did not help you? Is that really fair to anyone?
Do you believe in a god? Would you assume jesus would let you in after that? (I'm not religious, I do think so that either it's a good god and it doesn't matter believing in her but your actions)
Do you believe that we are in a simulation? What if you wake up in your next life as a murderer?
There are so many potential thoughts which we haven't thought through that removing a murderer from society to prison is the best choice we have as long as it is a prison who tries to rehabilitate a person.
I’m not saying I agree, I don’t personally support the death sentence, but if you’re actually interested in changing peoples minds it’s good to know where they’re coming from, and why they may not find your argument compelling.
I personally find the posts argument far more compelling.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
I get that he ruined (well, ended) someones life, but what does society gain from ruining his life in turn, to the point of what feels like mental torture: Being locked up for such a long time, all the while knowing that you will eventually just be executed.
From what I gather on Americans' comments about this over the years it's mostly about "not spending taxpayer money" to house, feed and take care of criminals that received a death penalty.
I don't know how true this argument can be given all the costs over decades associated with a death penalty judgment (appeals, preparation for death row, maintaining death rows, etc.)
Quick edit after reading the thread a bit more, an example of what I mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900987
That is what makes crime so heinous.
So your focus should be prevention at any cost first and foremost, then justice as prevention (= rehabilitation) as well. Murdering a murderer is pretty solid prevention though, I give you that.
Yes, but you can try. I can see why the loved ones of a murdered person feel someone is 'getting away' when he is still alive. Killing them feels much more like payback.
I don't that this does reasonably make sense, but I can understand where they are coming from.
I'm sure many find that it didn't feel like it at all, because of my argumentation. Payback will always be incomplete. It can never be paid in full.
Even if you kill someone over and over again (some Sci-Fi comes to mind), the perp always took the first step and elevated his role in society unjustly.
If you're from a part of the world where the death penalty was consigned to history decades ago, it's quite astonishing that a supposedly civilised nation would defend it.
The USA has some odd hangups.
Sorry, but that's exactly the kind of world we live in. The world simply is barbaric no matter what we would prefer. When people mess up a little bit, we put them through a process that, despite its massive inadequacy, is intended to rehabilitate them so that they can return to society. The death penalty is for when someone commits a crime so severe that they cannot ever return to society. If you are not able to think of this kind of situation, I suggest you may not be very familiar with the details of truly horrendous crimes. If we don't have the death penalty, we end up in the strange position of housing and feeding and providing medical care for the most harmful people in society at the expense of their victims.
I think arguing for its abolition on the basis of "the system is bad" is completely valid
> familiar with the details of truly horrendous crimes
And this still happens. And I agree, society is sometimes too tolerant with people who have no business in being in it (which, true, is a much smaller percentage of people on death row)
But don't expect the legal system to try to improve how many innocents they convict.
It's all a matter if you believe in that core piece of universal human rights or not.
You have to define who made up this right. Not everyone will agree. Most people will have boundaries on that no matter what all human lives are the same. Killing someone else on purpose breaks that boundary.
As for truly horrible crimes (which is something else to each of us), there are also tons of different views - do we want to be in society that is above emotional vengeful reactions, and more about compassionate loving ones? Ie like all good christians/muslims/etc are supposed to be according to their holiest books? You have to start somewhere if you even want to get there. You have to be morally strong to act in smart and compassionate way if you want to claim progress of mankind in this area. And so on.
I don't have a clear position on this myself and not stating some higher moral ground, since there are many pros and cons on both sides and quick emotional reaction to some murderous pedophile is as expected. But I am 100% certain that this very topic reveals a lot about mankind and us humans in our progression to be a better species, compared to primitive uneducated masses of the past. Or regression, its up to us.
Criminals sentenced to death are supposed to be a danger to society so great that the only solution is to eliminate them. So, typical trolley problem: is it better to kill a criminal or let him go, potentially resulting in the death or several more innocent victims. Prison for life is another option, but is permanently restraining someone and endangering guards and other inmates a good alternative?
So yes, other justifications are needed. And the article gives one.
Edit: I've now done some research and found some death-row-inmates do express a preference for a death sentence:
https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2012/09/25/why-death-row-inmates-...
https://www.quora.com/Is-prison-crueller-than-the-death-pena...
http://www.bu.edu/pilj/files/2015/09/17-2SmithArticle.pdf
However, I agree with Paul. The fact that anyone not guilty of the crime is executed is unacceptable, to say nothing of the startlingly bad accuracy of the system in practice.
If we just use this argument and don't try to establish general principles we end up with a pointless shouting contest.
For once I think the death penalty is at least worth considering from the utilitarian point of view (in our current system the consensus is that it's cheaper to keep someone in prison for life though but it might change in the future) as well as from revenge/restitution point of view as a lot of people strongly think someone doing deliberate great harm deserves to be killed.
One way or another it's not simple from either ethical nor practical point of view. Personally I consider death penalty as desirable penalty for some crimes but I would never vote for it as I have no faith in our politicians being able to implement it in a fair way and flawed justice system not to abuse it.
It’s odd to me how controversial both issues are when the moral reasoning required is so easy. Taking any other position requires denying the premise that it’s wrong to destroy innocent human life. One can, but accepting that has some very nasty consequences.
Death penalty is any easy one. It was considered to be a proper penalty for various crimes for most of the human history in many cultures. It just takes understanding of ethical values of those cultures to understand why it was justified.
Your argument about taking innocent human life is a naive one. We do a lot of things that cost innocent human lives. Allowing diesel cars in cities cost more innocent lives than all death penalties in the history of humanity combined and it's not a small difference.
It's about tradeoffs and priorities. It's natural for a tribe or state to kill for treason for example as disincentivizing treason is more important (saves more lives, prevents suffering and destruction of your countrymen) than occasional mistake. Putting long term survival and well being of your society is more important than individual lives.
Our wealth clouds the picture so well. If it was required of everyone one to spend addition 20 hours a week providing food and shelter for a murderer atop of all the work we need to put into getting food and shelter for ourselves and our families you would be very quick to accept death penalty instead. As the choices would be about caring for your family and making sure the murderer doesn't die in custody. Today we can arguably afford it but if that's the argument then we already agree it's about tradeoffs and where the exact line is not obvious.
Even if you don't agree you can at least see it's a justified view. It's all about tradeoffs.
I dont want to work to house, guard, and feed them.
There have been some political leaders in the past who have said the same about the disabled.
If we give our government the power to premeditatedly kill people merely to reduce the costs to taxpayers, we are stepping down a very dark path.
Of course, the application of the death penalty in the US is very wrong. Other cultures have solved this issue a long time ago.
The key issue for me is necessity. It is not necessary to execute criminals, even murderers. I do have sympathy for the view that murderers deserve death, maybe many of them do, but then you get into drawing lines between cases that deserve death and ones that don't. Is the evidence in this case good enough to kill, but this one the evidence is only good enough to incarcerate. It politicises the judicial and criminal justice system. So I oppose the death penalty not because it's barbaric or morally wrong per se, but because it introduces moral hazard that compromises the system.
We can see this in the US where prosecutors fight tooth and nail to preserve convictions and ensure convicts get executed largely in order to protect the system of executions from the embarrassment of death row inmates getting exonerated. Defending the system becomes more important than serving justice.
As a Brit I think politicisation is the thing that concerns me most about the US justice system. Elected prosecutors, elected judges, the politicisation of executions I described above. I don't know what it's like in other countries, but comparatively speaking all that just isn't a thing over here at all. Political debate on criminal justice is focused on laws and the administration of policing. That's really about it. It's not like we don't have miscarriages of justice, our system is far from perfect but it's mainly sees as being independent and professionalised.
Or how about self defense? If a person is protecting their lawful rights, home, property and family and in the process must kill an aggressor to do these things, should they just not do so out of a certain absolute ethical posture about the wrongness of killing other human beings? Just to clarify where your own fundamental posture on killing in the name of the law this draws some lines or exceptions.
Prison is inhumane and barbaric, and has the opposite of the intended effect most of the time. Many ex-cons have become hardened criminals through their time on the inside, and even for those who haven't and want to reintegrate productively, the outside world does its best to prevent reintegration.
How many innocent people are killed in prison, not by the state, or have their lives ruined? You can say as long as they're alive there's hope they'll achieve something and be happy, but statistically those prospects are dimmer every year they spend inside.
The only remaining good thing prison does is keep bad people from causing problems in society for some number of years. Which is the same thing the death penalty does.
I don't know if the most productive way to use political capital to reform the criminal justice system is to abolish the death penalty. Unjustified state-sanctioned death might be terrible, but so are things like the drug war which probably do more aggregate harm. In an ideal world we'd get rid of prisons somehow, too.
In addition to ending the drug war and trying to fix neighborhoods that have been broken by it, fixing misaligned incentives for prosecution and law enforcement to prosecute cases would have a massive impact, far greater than any squabbles about the death penalty. Too often the prosecutors and law enforcement have desire to convict someone, and the defendant is the best chance they have, so they go ahead. More neutrality has to be introduced somehow. Judges being allowed to direct questions to witnesses might be a place to start.
Thing is, most of the time, people who are subject to the death penalty are there because they did “inhuman and barbaric” acts.
It is kind of like the paradox of tolerance. For society to prosper, you need to punish inhuman and barbaric acts, or at least isolate people who do that from society. However, such punishment is likely inhuman and barbaric at least on some level. Limiting a persons freedom of movement and interaction is inhuman and barbaric.
In addition, by not having the death penalty, you are subjecting others to have to deal with the person who did the inhuman and barbaric acts, whether other inmates or guards.
I am of the opinion that there are some acts that are so heinous that a person should never be a part of human society again. In that case, rather than prolonged human isolation, which is actually barbaric in and of itself, I think it is actually more humane to end their life. It does not have to gruesome or painful, no more than euthanizing a beloved pet with a terminal condition has to be gruesome. But some acts are incompatible with ever being a member of human society in any form.
Edit:
In addition, there are a lot of stuff that could be considered inhuman and barbaric but we do them for what we think as the good of society.
Spaying and neutering your pet sounds inhuman and barbaric.
Modern surgery, especially cancer surgery where they remove large margins of apparently healthy looking tissue, could be considered inhuman and barbaric.
In the Middle Ages, dissecting dead human bodies was considered inhuman and barbaric.
So the fact that a person sees something as inhuman and barbaric really is not overwhelming evidence if something should be done.
https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/death_row/dr_executed_offenders.h...
My favorite is Delbert Teague, Jr. who quoted the oath of the Knights of Solamnia from Dragonlance.
> Yes. My last statement. I was wrongfully convicted of this crime against Michael Watkins and James Williams on 10th Street on August 31, 1993. I got convicted on a false confession because I never admitted to it, but my lawyer did not put this out to the jury. I did not kill those drug dealers. I send love to my family and friends; my east side family and friends. I am being real with the real. That's all that counts in my heart. I will see you later. That's it.
It's disgusting.
For the record, I'm not for death penalty at all.
[0] - Well, at least 96% according to the OP.
Simple crawling of all the statements: Promise.all([...$$('a[href$="last.html"]')].map(aa => fetch(aa.href).then(a => a.text()).then(a => a.replace(/(\n|\r|<[^->]>| )/g, '').match(/Last Statement:(.?)<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->/)).then(a => [aa.href, a && a[1].trim()]))).then(a => console.log(JSON.stringify(a)))
All while insisting on the humanness of those sweet pharmaceuticals.
I'm against the death penalty, but, since the alternative is most likely life in prison, this is very probably true for rightfully convicted.
> My personal guess is that people like to watch for some sort of catharsis which a silent death doesn't give them, but of course I'm not necessarily in a position to judge this well.
There's a very interesting documentary called "how to kill a human being". In it, Michael Portillo explores more humane ways to execute prisoners, but at the end his method is rejected by proponents as the do not want these people to die painless. So you're probably not wrong.
There seems to be a certain draw of the Sodom and Gomorrah treatment in some people that draws a straight line from modern day human culture in those places directly back to ancient desert folktales through all these thousands of years. Perhaps it is the belief that actions undertaken in the here-and-now aren't ultimately that important, a sort of cosmic nihilism with regards to the physical reality we live in.
We still have so, so far to go.
First order thinking. There's a time to argue with first principles and there's a time to make arguments via "back door hacks" in the guise of amenability. Life and death may not be the best time to use "hacky" arguments because down the line there may be do more harm than good. Particularly, in common-law systems.
Also,
> When intellectuals talk about the death penalty,
I see that intellectuals has been well normalised into a pejorative these days. What a time to live in!
Trump was right about how he attracted his support.
However, the problem with removing the death penalty in the US is that it will not deal with the underlying systemic racism and the misaligned incentives of police and prosecution to "get a conviction".
So yes, if the death penalty is removed, there is one less barbarism.
However, for those who are not on death row, who are subject to the injustices, will there be the same pressure to investigate and exonorate the innocent?
How do we ensure that the incentives for conviction do not supersede the incentives for solving the crime accurately?
Then it can't do war and can't defend its existence as a state unless it's somehow a dependent state of some other state that does have power over the life of a person. Like some small Pacific island that's protected by more militarily well equipped allies.
I call bullshit.
If you've been killed already, that is not going to help you much.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90935&page=1
>More death-row inmates have been volunteering for their executions: Between 1993 and 2002, 75 volunteered for death, compared to the 22 consensual executions between 1977 and 1992. (Gary Gilmore, the first prisoner put to death after the Supreme Court reinstituted capital punishment in 1976, "volunteered" for his execution in 1977 because he did not want to live the rest of his life on death row.)
It's probably more an indictment of the torture they go through on death row than it is a signal that they all secretly have a death wish.
The ones that wouldn't, only care about themselves and should be treated accordingly.
If the argument is that currently, the false positive rate is too high - then what would an acceptable false positive rate be?
It is terrible that it affects innocents. It is also true that it is ineffective, counter-productive, and barbaric.
It's sad we're still having this discussion when "On Crimes and Punishments"[0] was published four centuries ago and not much has substantially changed since.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Crimes_and_Punishments
However I believe that there is too big a gulf between “murderers” and “people convicted of murderer”; that the crime of killing is so severe that doing it to an innocent person is a miscarriage of justice far graver than any underpunishment of murderers; and so I oppose the death penalty in all forms as a matter of law.
That's such a twisted mind you have there.
I can continue. The world is messy. Black white thinking will not do it justice.
Not that I agree with these reasons in all circumstances. I just want to point out there are reasons to treat a murderer less harsh.
If that sounds irrational to you: That's because it is irrational. Whether we choose to end another persons life is fundamental in our understanding of life itself, which is highly subjective.
But your belief that we should kill other humans is also irrational and subjective.
Edit: Also this paragraph in your first answer
>> I also think that pain should be part of the death penalty... that a murderer doesn’t deserve a quick and painless death but rather a healthy period of searing agony to experience the anguish that they themselves wrought on another."
is actually terrifying to me. Even reading it causes me some physical discomfort.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Later on is where things gets scary though, where even death is not enough and it needs to be agonized death!
> I also think that pain should be part of the death penalty [...] rather a healthy period of searing agony
It is beyond fucked up to not only wanting to execute people but also make sure they feel pain while doing so.
Look at it this way: comments like what you posted here take the community further into hell war, which destroys the community. Even if you don't feel you owe the other commenter better, you definitely owe the community better if you're participating in it. The ecosystem is fragile—we all need to protect it. Setting it on fire because of how wrong you feel someone is is not a good idea.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you genuinely hallucinate that I am an attacking Pit Bull and kill me, you are not guilty of first degree murder and I would not want you executed.
As we learn more about neuroscience, every murderer will look like they have "diminished mental capacity". This legal construct is merely a statement of our ignorance to understand what's actually going on in their brain.
It can be premised on concepts such as rehabilitation (which I believe mostly can't happen with murderers), deterrence, creating a sense of fairness in society (which builds trust), protecting people from the murderer, and so on.
We can already see some of this today. Many people that would've been shunned by society in the past as "unstable" and "crazy", can be fixed by giving them lithium. We know not to fault a person for what's just a bug in their hardware. Similarly, many people that today are called "lazy" or "annoying", and blamed for their obviously flawed character, can be instantly fixed by low doses of stimulant medication. This is something most people didn't get a memo on yet.
I find it highly likely that most homicides are also driven by fixable neurochemistry quirks, and that we'll learn to identify and fix them at some point, and we'll be appalled at the ease with which we jumped to killing people for having them.
But as another comment pointed out, we do account for this.
Which is one of the reasons why we have incarceration, which I believe is absolutely necessary in some form in a case where a person is a danger to others (whether or not it's "their fault").
> we'd have to make excuses for peadophiles having 'messed up impulse control' too.
It's not an excuse, it's more a description of reality. And it would apply to child abusers as well, as well as other criminals, yes.
This isn't an argument against "punishing" these people. It's an argument for being clear about why we are "punishing" them, to make sure it's not a revenge motive (which is a heavily biologically driven motive in itself)
That's a different argument. The OP said it he'd like muderers to have a fate similar to their victims, basically as revenge. When executing someone for this reason, their guilt clearly does matter - someone who enjoys killing is far worse than someone with a medical condition. Whether their death is 'practical' is a different matter.
If you seriously wanted to use the death penalty to deter crime, you'd do better executing people for smaller offenses. If you got executed for drunk driving rather than a fine, there would be less drunk driving.
Not saying that's a good thing. But if you're looking to deter crime, executing murderers is not actually a good way to go about it.
It’s not obvious whether Graham has read a reasonable cross-section of the literature on the death penalty and come to this conclusion (in which case some references might be in order) or whether he's just pulling this out of his arse. I’m not familiar with the literature, but a Google Scholar search brings up the following:
> Although death penalty discourse has always been, and remains, multifaceted - encompassing morality, religion, cost, deterrence, theories of punishment, fairness, race, class, and human rights - we suggest that over the past decade innocence has emerged as perhaps the dominant issue in death penalty discourse with "an unprecedented effect on the debate about capital punishment" (Bandes 2008, 5; Baumgartner, De Boef, and Boydstun 2008, 157). This phenomenon has been referred to by such labels as the "age of innocence" (Rosen 2006, 237) or even an "innocence revolution" (Marshall 2004, 573; Steiker and Steiker 2005, 613). The abolitionist movement has embraced innocence as a new rhetorical asset in the death penalty debate, one with the potential to decisively shift the weight of public opinion in abolition's favor (Radelet and Borg 2000; Bedau 2004a; Acker 2009). "Unlike other challenges to the fairness of capital proceedings, which have failed to stimulate widespread public outrage," Marshall (2004) argues, "evidence of the system's propensity to factual error has the power to open closed minds and trigger reexamination of the costs and benefits of capital punishment" (579). Banner (2002) notes, "the prospect of killing an innocent person seemed to be the one thing that could cause people to rethink their support for capital punishment" (304). He goes on to suggest that "if any development had the potential to change" the popularity of the death penalty, "this was the one" (305). Thus, one scholar claims, "it is no exaggeration to say that wrongful convictions spurred . . . the most successful death penalty reform movement in our lifetime" (Bandes 2008, 4). Already, scholars claim that innocence "has produced a massive shift in the terms of the national death-penalty debate" (Hoffman 2005, 562), a shift "away from moral and procedural considerations, and toward the more substantive question of guilt and innocence" (Hall 2005, 373).
(J.D. Aronson and S.A. Cole, "Science and the Death Penalty: DNA, Innocence, and the Debate over Capital Punishment in the United States", Law & Social Inquiry 34.3 (2009), pp. 603-33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40539373.)
Perhaps it’s somehow satisfying to Graham to make a wide sweep at ‘intellectuals’ whilst presenting a purportedly distinct argument without trying to determine whether it’s been anticipated, but it strikes me as rather dishonest.
In America. The rest of the civilised world decided on this a long time ago.
It's not so much a "partisan and class" divide, it's "right-wing Americans vs the rest of Western Civilisation"
Even right-wingers in the UK and Europe do not want to bring back capital punishment [0]
[0] Obviously there are some wingnuts who do, but there's not to my knowledge a serious right-wing political party that has a policy of bringing back capital punishment. Corporal punishment, maybe.
[0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/should-the-dea...
As ever with polls it depends how you frame the question.
Obligatory 'Yes, Prime Minister' clip: https://youtu.be/G0ZZJXw4MTA
Again, no-one is seriously suggesting bringing it back. My bubble is secure.
... for murdering a child. You forgot that part didn’t you? If you pull up the poll if death penalty should be reintroduced for all murderers only 32% are in support [0].
Please don’t pick and choose sources to make an argument which wasn’t even captured by the source. Also please don’t extrapolate to other countries like that. Us Europeans left the death Penalty behind a long time ago. This is not a thing anymore.
[0]: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/should-the-dea...
Even in the states where it is "legal," many have not carried out the procedure in several decades. They simply reserve the right to do so in the case where a child is murdered.
> The rest of the civilised world decided on this a long time ago.
But please, go on continuing to believe Europeans are superior to the rest of the world. I remember that working out really well for you guys back in the 1930s.
That is unnecessarily snarky. The comment I was replying to was suggesting that basically the UK and the other Europeans would happily welcome back the death penality. Which is not true. I only said that "we" - the strawman used by gp - left it behind and made no statement about other countries.
You are the one getting all nationalistic.
I realize this is not so easy when you belong to a group that's being put down, but we all need to build up our tolerance to that kind of thing, since the alternative is to have it dominate discussion and that would make everything worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Can you please delete my account? I'm sick of this site and its biased, self-righteous mods. I even sent you an email and everything, just like you asked!
You ended up calling half the world's population "uncivilized".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900759.
> at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.
I expect in Scandinavia these numbers are different. But they dont have death penalty.
From the news I learn that US cops also kill innocent people in the street. And it's military wages illegal wars killing 100s of 1000s overseas. I think the US has a weird relation with violence. The death penalty and how it uses it is merely a symptom.
Yeah, considering the US have a bunch of problems related to violence (mass shootings, overzealous police force, invading other countries left and right), it makes sense that other violent processes are also problematic in the same environment. I agree with you death penalty is merely a symptom of something else in the whole system of the country.
Makes it extra weird when you consider how prude the US is when it comes to sexuality, while violence is something that is not only used as entertainment, but even many feel pride about.
When I visited Miami for work I couldn't believe how many scantily clad people just walked around and the stories you see in media from coastal liberal areas (fictional and non-fictional) seem just as, if not more, open to sexuality as the UK (who are more prudish than Europe in general).
But in the otherhand there are large areas/groups dominated by conservative religious values who are hyper prudish.
Then Russia supposedly bought some Facebook ads or something for a US election years ago, and I still need to read about it in the news every week.
Conclusion: US also has a huge double measurement problem.
This hasn't been true for decades.
If anyone wants more explanation, I wrote a detailed post yesterday about a similar case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894739
Edit: not only that but you stoked the flamewar downthread with posts about regime changes and putdowns about "civilized society". This is what I'm talking about. Please don't.
Edit 2: not only that but you did the same thing yesterday, and to judge by recent history it looks like your account has swerved into using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. Please don't—that's against the site guidelines because it destroys the curiosity this site is supposed to exist for. You're a good HN user so this should be easy to fix.
If anyone's worried about us being biased in favor of $country—here's an example from yesterday that went exactly the other way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26892927. We couldn't care less what color the flames are—we just want to have an internet forum that doesn't suck. When people starting arguing about whose country isn't "civilized" or whose there should be a "bloody war" with, we have dangerously high levels of suckage.
Of course there will be miscarriages of justice and this has been talked about since the beginning. There is nothing new here.
> 4% of people on death row are innocent.
This is not true, but it's irrelevant anyway since what is the acceptable level? Since it's not mentioned, we have gotten nowhere in this blog post.
If we get it very close to zero, is it then ok then? Is the single incidence of executing a guilty man ok? Because either that's what this blog implies or it's skipping the real issues.
The post is indeed arguing that “zero people killed by the government for crimes they did not commit” is more ok than “greater than zero people killed.”
This is a valid argument, drawing on the intuition that accidentally letting a guilty person escape death (even if we accept they deserve it) is a lesser evil than letting an innocent person die.
He puts a vague number to it in my reading.
The government regularly lets people die. The government regularly lets innocent people die. The government regularly changes things that then changes who dies. A human life is only worth around $2,000,000 in the rich west like the US. People, inflate that number a lot, but it's actually low millions.
If the argument is it has to be 0.00 for direct action by the government that deliberately kills a person then say it. That's the end. It's not possible to get 0, don't bring in the fact it's 4% or x% or bring in case studies because that's just a changing goal post.
The reason for the 'changing goal post' is because no one can ask why is the direct killing of innocent people different to allowing innocent people to die.
[edit] Here's a 150 year old 'against' blog post that innocent people will die - https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/128491969 Back then it was all about the innocent witches (which still happens today sadly)
No doubt standard would require some set elements. DNA + visual recording + electronic records.
I used to be anti death penalty but would be ok with it under a no doubt standard. Not for vengeance but simply society can spend the money on other things instead of spending money housing and feeding individuals who have caused such horrific pain on others.
And that's with the current error-prone system. Think of what it would take to ensure that your criteria are met.
So costs is simply not an argument. In fact it's a pretty bad faith one regarding what happens with private prisons and the labor of inmates subjected to slavery (read the 13th amendment if you think slavery is universally abolished). The US wouldn't have the highest rate of incarceration in the world if it didn't make money somehow.
Costs would actually be reduced as can shorten the appeals process when a no doubt standard has been met.
Mass murders who don't hide their killings would be one example. Costs no extra money to meet the no doubt standard.
I think we should also quantify how many people are victims of recidivism. You could make the exact same argument but instead of protecting innocent people wrongly on the death row , you would argue to protect innocent people victims of recidivists murderers.
I've found a bit of data [0] from an article [1] which has 3 homicide among 92 paroled homicide offenders. That's a bit more than 3% which is not far from 4%. The data here is of "lower quality" (there's less people on a shorter timeframe) than the one quoted in the article [2]. However, that same article estimates a 4.1% false conviction rate but adds:
> The most charged question in this area is different: How many innocent defendants have been put to death (6)? We cannot estimate that number directly but we believe it is comparatively low. If the rate were the same as our estimate for false death sentences, the number of innocents executed in the United States in the past 35 y would be more than 50 (20). We do not believe that has happened.
So the article doesnt' support "at least 4% of people on the death row are innocent".
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Types-of-Recidivism-Amon...
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259809249_Criminal_...
[2]: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7230
Every time I see an immigration officer at the border raising his eyebrows in disbelief, I instantly understand that he took a look on my criminal file.
For me, the cruel tradition of Russian police to literally grab the first bystander they come upon near the crime scene to draw as a suspect did cost months of my life spent on legal paperwork, and an immigration nightmare.
Russian citizens have no ability to have anything struck from their file, even if those lucky got a rarest %0.8 acquittal. For most unlucky people, even if the case doesn't go anywhere, they will never get the clear acquittal record, but instead have something like "case struck on procedural grounds" in their file.
Getting wrongly accused is very easy. Just be the first person to be seen near the crime scene.
Brushing away of the wrongful executions as a price of justice. Hold a monthly lottery of the population, with the random 'winner' being executed. Out of a population of millions you wouldn't even notice, but would send a message to the world that you were OK with the cost.
Secondly. Repercussions for those that assisted in wrongful convictions. Your prosecutor withheld evidence of your innocence? Police dropped evidence into your pocket? Try them for attempted murder. Boggles my mind at the lack of repercussions that seem to come out of these cases.
Finally I think you should be executed by your peers, in the same way as we tried you. At your conviction lottery is held of the population and winner is your executioner. They're given a gun/syringe/whatever and they're pointed at the prisoner. Oh, and I'd like this televised - maybe as part of the superbowl show. "Here's Charlene from Ohio, she's just celebrated her sweet-sixteenth, likes horses and reading and has selected a crossbow"
The point you're making is that living in society each day is a ticket in lottery where we could be falsely accused of a crime, falsely convicted, and unjustly punished. That's horrific all around, a death penalty is a factor but not even the biggest. On the contrary, if we need a death penality to make someone like your audience care about that horror of punishing innocent people then perhaps there is a beneficial purpose? Maybe executions make people care about bad things done in their name in the name of justice?
>Police dropped evidence into your pocket? Try them for attempted murder.
Yes, naturally. Some archaic pockets of government do this, sort of! What comes to mind is a specific public officer in my state who is personally responsible by law for breaches of privacy in her office. Consequences like that focus the mind! So much so, in fact, that those consequences come to dominate the public officer's thinking. I don't disagree, but forget 'defund the police'-- you're going to need a lot more police to enforce the modern criminal code at the current level of enforcement if police are threatened with death for misplacing their notes , memories and paperwork.
>At your conviction lottery is held of the population and winner is your executioner.
Again, the result here would be that some people would be assigned an executioner who would show them mercy. This too has analogues in our modern systems. In some parts of the world the victim's family can stop an execution if they feel the victim has been adequately avenged-- not a bad result! In the US context governors-- arguably the people responsible for these killings-- can and frequently do commute sentences out of compassion or lack of clarity about the crime.
Example in the UK is that we used to have "Legal Aid" - if you were accused of something (and were of modest means) the government would pay a modest amount for a laywer to represent you. Wasn't a cheap system in absolute terms, but as a proportion of government expenditure was tiny. Over the years successive governments of all sides have gutted the system - and media delights in planted stories like "Insurance companies scammed" and "Terrorist receives money". Basically, "We're giving money to criminals and we should stop."
Nobody considers the flip side - "Can you pay for a legal defence if the Police knock on your door tomorrow?"
Society would do well to learn the Original Position Fallacy:
https://matthewmcateer.me/blog/original-position-fallacy/
- Must have DNA evidence - Must have audio and video evidence - Must have fingerprints - Must have at least 2 witnesses
There are plenty of cases that satisfy these conditions (terrorist attacks being one of them).
Traumatic brain injury damages self-regulation and changes social behavior. Uninhibited or impulsive behavior, including problems controlling anger and unacceptable sexual behavior, leads to crime. The concept of insanity used in the US criminal system is based on science 130 years ago, combined with the religious concept of sin and soul. The thinking is that if a person knows what they do is wrong, they could choose to not do it is BS. With brain injury person can lose that ability.
Damaged Brains and the Death Penalty https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/damaged-brains-and-the-...
>In another study, of 14 juveniles sentenced to death, the researchers found that all had suffered head trauma, most in car accidents but many by beatings as well. 12 had suffered brutal physical abuse, 5 of those sodomized by relatives.
Traumatic brain injury: a potential cause of violent crime? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6171742/
Traumatic Brain Injury in Prisons and Jails: An Unrecognized Problem https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/pdf/prisoner_tbi_pr...
>According to jail and prison studies, 25-87% of inmates report having experienced a head injury or TBI 2-4 as compared to 8.5% in a general population reporting a history of TBI.
If your argument isn't about the state's role, then what is the distinction between these things. 4% doesn't actually seem like a high rate to me and it's not a high percentage of a relatively small number in the first place.
Yes, the number of people who die from those things are still non-zero.
But what you're suggesting is that we need to get those to zero before we address the death penalty. That's a false dichotomy.
The death penalty is one are where we are making the deliberate choice to end someone's life. We can prevent that 4% rate simply by not making that choice. We can make that number zero and it would cost us practically nothing to do so.
I am not impressed by your faux-concern for automobile deaths.
What PG is doing here is making the argument for the death penalty weaker by arguing for it on the weakest possible basis.
Oh and also, it's not 0 cost. It's probably a hugely expensive long and drawn out politial process to get rid of. For the pay off that's similar in scope to a moderate sized town lowering its speed limit. Not to mention the fact that these people who are sentenced to death incorrectly aren't being set free, they're likely still spending decades in prison.
And innocent people don't die in car accidents, unfortunate people do. People who get executed are deliberately executed.
It's as 0 cost as you can get. It's not a hugely expensive process, courts can just not sentence people to death. It's not like we're sticking these people on a huge conveyor belt that's impossible to remove them from.
> Not to mention the fact that these people who are sentenced to death incorrectly aren't being set free, they're likely still spending decades in prison.
And? Because we've wronged them somewhat, it's ok that we wrong them further? What sort of logic is that?
Then let me offer you this question to ponder: What benefit is there to adding another tally to the body count from a mass shooting, once the perpetrator has been taken into custody?
Executing someone doesn't reduce the number of unnecessarily lost lives, it only increases it.
In general I don't think that society is best served by legitimising and implementing the irrational desires we have for killing people who have emotionally hurt us.
I think it would instead make sense to try to improve the support given to people who have suffered from crimes. If this means years of expensive therapy, paid for by the near-slavery of the perpetrator carrying out their life sentence, then we could have an outcome that is slightly more humane.
This is the real issue with almost every human endeavor, especially those that affect other people's lives. ( example politics, taxes)