Which part do you think is absurd?
That eye witness data can be considered or that the DNA evidence is irrelevant?
I don't support the death penalty but I see the judge's point. Most DNA evidence isn't very useful and rarely as damning or exculpatory as people think.
Eye witness testimony is only slightly more reliable as waving purple LEDs around while chanting long words and rambling off conspiracy theories. (Which is apparently now an acceptable form of criminal investigation in the US).
The idea that eyewitness testimony obviates the need to examine hard evidence is absurd, given how poor people are at providing accurate eyewitness testimony. It’s not that DNA evidence is perfect, it’s that eyewitness testimony is hot garbage.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg was apparently quoted as saying: "No well defended person receives the death penalty." One of the issues with death penalty cases is that they require special hand-selected judges and juries who favor the death penalty, and they have a very hard time finding competent defense lawyers.
In fact, an extension is "no well defended person gets convicted," which isn't quite as ironclad, but still works pretty well in practice. This is actually a good thing. Our system was intended to make it hard to convict people.
> In an effort to prevent his execution, Lee's attorney sought in the post-conviction appeals process to finally have the DNA evidence in the case tested for the first time. [...] Their request was denied.
"The reasoning given by the judge was it wouldn't matter, that there were three people who saw him at or near that neighborhood on that day and time and honestly the DNA just wouldn't matter," Short said.
Wow. Like, I completely fail to comprehend how it's legal in the US judiciary system to ignore any piece of available hard evidence in a case that is punishable by execution?
Then again, if execution itself is still legal, I can answer part of that question myself, even if I don't like the answer.
Well that kind of depends on the actual testimony, doesn't it?
Here, the defendant was neighbors with the victim, and the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least.
the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least.
Sure there is, if you seem someone leaving a house that resembles another neighbor you’re going to assume its the neighbor and not a stranger. Context is huge.
I didn’t see that in the article, but it’s still trivial to come up with reasonable doubts:
1. What does known/recognized mean? It’s perfectly possible for additional people to make a mistake in identification, especially if prompted by others.
2. Even if it was him, the crime wasn’t witnessed; he’d be agitated just by having seen the scene, I imagine
The big thing that adds to number 2 is that people often forget that reality is messier than neat stories. The defendant could very well have been doing something else illegal or furtive, and been agitated for that reason. They might have been involved in related criminal activity but not responsible for the actual attack. They might have had an innocent reason to be there and not expected to be believed. It may really not have been the suspect there to begin with.
That’s why the death penalty is bad, and it’s why eyewitness testimony is crap by itself, especially when it’s circumstantial.
The point is that the article is completely one sided propaganda.
It didn't mention anything about any contradictory evidence, except to say the judge felt enough existed.
Debating the death penalty is one thing, but advocates for abolishing it aren't helping themselves by relying on this type of propaganda. This was and is a solid conviction of a guilty man.
There are enough legitimate concerns to debate without taking the word of the click bait.
As for your what-if's: that's what a jury is for. Determining matters-of-fact from presented evidence. They convicted.
If they could (and did!) do that without needing DNA evidence, the presence of someone else's trace DNA, or absence of the suspect's on one specific piece of evidence isn't likely to change that, even if it's the murder weapon.
All evidence is imperfect, and I personally think we'll start to publicly realize that DNA evidence is just as malleable as eye-witness testimony. Just run more PCR iterations until some other DNA is amplified above the signal/noise floor! (If people knew the amount of analytical probability that goes into PCR/ matching DNA samples, they'd have a lot less faith in the technology, but that's another topic.) Same thing for manipulated/edited video and even deep-fakes.
Which, isn't too say all evidence is crap and therefore no convictions are valid.
It's why we put faith in the system and in our peers serving on petit-juries...
and why it's up to a them and the judge to evaluate the evidence, and decide whether or not to convict...
And why we don't have a computer run a PCR and automatically say: "Positive dna-sample: go directly to jail".
> that's what a jury is for. Determining matters-of-fact from presented evidence.
That’s a pretty shockingly huge amount of faith you’re putting in a system with well documented shortcomings and biases, especially in a capital case with a black defendant.
Also, it seems frankly absurd to claim that the absence of the subject’s DNA on the murder weapon isn’t material to the decision to convict . It’s surprisingly hard not to get DNA on things, and the prosecution’s case appears not to have painted the defendant as some sort of methodical dexter-type.
Nobody has claimed that we should rely solely on DNA tests - that’s an absurd straw man. I think it’s even more absurd to defend this sequence of events in a capital case.
For context, here’s the other evidence the judge is referring to:
> Asked about the new DNA evidence, Rutledge repeatedly insisted Lee was "lawfully executed" and pointed to the testimony of an eyewitness who purportedly saw Lee enter Reese's home that day and then leave, "erratically," 20 minutes later.
> In April 2021, new DNA testing found "unknown male" DNA on the murder weapon and bloody clothes found at the scene. However, the test also "found moderate support" that blood on Lee's left shoe could have belonged to Reese.
EDIT: Apparently, a “tire thumper” looks a lot like a small wooden bat, so there’s not as much confusion as I thought about the murder weapon. I mistakenly thought the prosecution was alleging a “tire iron” was the murder weapon.
> This 19 wooden tire thumper lets you know if your tires are fully pressurized by making a thump as it hits the rubber. Just swing the thumper and listen for the sound. If your tires are low in pressure it makes a different sound. Save time checking tire pressure on your rig with this wooden tire thumper.
Is this some kind of nonsense to avoid marketing it as a weapon, or do people really use these to check tyre pressures instead of… looking at or kicking the tyre? Or even a tyre pressure gauge?
Yes, if one views the package marketing at your local truck stop (and probably not at your family-friendly Pilot) it is quite obvious that it is a versatile tool, and you might even use it on occasion to check tires.
But, yes, it is manufactured and market to thump one thing: someone’s skull.
Tire thumpers are an actual thing that truck drivers use to check tire pressure. Unlike cars, you can't just visually inspect tire pressure on empty trucks, because dual-mounted tires with one tire completely deflated will still "look" normal. Checking with a small bat is something so routine, I would wager on you never finding a truck anywhere that doesn't have one readily accessible in the cab, and that tire thumpers are used to thump tires over thumping humans 10000000:1.
Source: I paid for college as a class A truck driver, and I used one to check every single dual-mounted tire every single day.
>Drivers of big rigs, with a gazillion tires, don’t want to take the time to apply a pressure gauge to each one...
so according to this, the intended market for a tire thumper is evidently drivers of 18 wheelers, as it would take an inordinate amount of time to check the tire pressure of every single tire with a pressure gauge. that being said, it very clearly can be used for other, more nefarious purposes, and I would be inclined to assume that a large percentage of individuals purchasing one intend to use it for said other purposes.
it's conceptually similar to how gas stations, etc, ostensibly sell "glass roses" as a gift a and a certain type of tire pressure gauge as a tool, when in reality, the majority of purchases for them are to be used as paraphernalia for consuming illicit substances (methamphetamine/any substance to be vaporized via indirect heat and freebase cocaine/"crack", respectively.)
it's telling in the latter case that you can usually find chore boy or some other similar scouring pad generally sold near the gauge (which is used as a screen for capturing the melted substance,) especially in places where no such cleaning products are sold elsewhere.
Thumping is a quick and dirty check for a grossly under pressure tire. This video shows the sound difference… https://youtu.be/6yboxSUt26s
You can use a hammer, a bat, a pry bar, anything with some mass and some reach so you can easily hit the inner tire of the dual pair. (All of which are perfectly serviceable weapons in their own right.)
And sure, in an ideal world maybe people would use gauges, or have internal monitors, or some fancy solution, but time is money and money is money, so a quick thumping suffices and don’t follow the trucks so closely that you get hit by the fragments went their retreaded tires come apart.
Any attorney or judge who justifies their conviction on eyewitness testimony has to know, at this point, its bullshit. Every criminal attorney at this point knows the infallibility of an eye witness has been proven over and over to be false.
Eye witness testimony is unreliable, but that doesn’t mean it’s always false. It just shouldn’t be the only evidence or the primary evidence in a conviction, as in this case. But if it’s used to corroborate other known facts that haven’t been revealed to the witness, then it’s still beneficial.
Right. There was an incident in Europe, I believe, where law enforcement thought they'd identified an individual responsible for a massive international crime spree.
What they'd actually identified was the factory worker who packaged the DNA collection swabs.
You believe right but forgot 1 thing: these DNA collection swabs were supposed to be DNA-free (or at least sold as that) but some problem while manufacturing put DNA on them. It‘s known as „Heilbronner Phantom“ (phantom of heilbronn).
1) That really isn't true. Studies indicated anywhere from 40-75% of the time you can't find "touch" DNA on objects that were handled by someone. That's not even considering whether he could have been wearing gloves or wiped the object after.
2) Since the testing was conducted by defense counsel, we don't really know what an objective test would even show. His lawyers statements are a bit weasel worded--"did not show an 'absolute or conclusive' connection to Lee." Okay, but does that mean it showed a probable match? Is the DNA just too degraded to test?
Not really. Reasonable doubt refers to the totality of the evidence.
A piece of evidence that probably supports a guilty verdict does not undue other evidence just because it doesn't rise the level of reasonable doubt by itself.
While I agree with you seems like this was a sketchy case to go forward with the execution, like me, you already had a strong opinion about capital punishment before you read the article.
> Wow. Like, I completely fail to comprehend how it's legal in the US judiciary system to ignore any piece of available hard evidence in a case that is punishable by execution?
It wasn't "completely ignored". It was presented to the court and the test was requested, and the request was denied. Evidentiary rules are complicated and subject to abuse, yes, but they protect all of us. It's not like we'd be better off if discovery was unlimited.
Your complaint isn't about the way courts treat evidence, it's with the punishment. Death is final and not subject to appeal. And fundamentally that's an argument for why it shouldn't be available to courts at all.
But really, there's nothing especially wrong with evidentiary process in US criminal law. There are problems with it like any bureaucracy, but on the whole it does pretty well.
More generally there should be more legal paths towards stays of execution even if new evidence does not yet on its own reach the standard necessary for an appeal or retrial. Not having these paths to me seems cruel and unusual.
As if judge was interested in closing the case and moving onto the next one rather than serving justice.
In many countries judges are unsackable, is it true in the US?
Many judges in the US have lifetime appointments. This is one reason it was so damaging (depending on your point of view) when congress refused to confirm Obama’s judicial nominees, then rammed through a record number under Trump.
It led to Trump boasting that the judges would just tilt the scales on the election for him if the count said he lost (that didn’t work out), and the current large crop of new abortion bans working their way up to the (in his words), “Trump judge” federal courts.
Being surprised at any travesty of justice means you still believe "justice the meme", and "justice the reality" have any hope of being similar to each other.
If the country in question has a good track record of punishing judges, prosecutors, and LEA, then it would be abolishing the death penalty _de facto_, as no-one would take that sort of risk over just imprisoning the person for life.
If the country does not have a good track record, it doesn't really change anything.
There are sometimes sitautions where someone's guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt; I don't imagine prosecutors would be particularly afraid to pursue the death penalty for someone like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik (who got 21 years in jail for the murder of 77 people).
Whilst that's the maximum permissible sentence in Norway it's worth highlighting that it can be extended indefinitely if he is considered still a risk to society - the requirement to review the need to continue detaining him (on a semi frequent basis) being considered a human right.
Based on his activity since being convicted I doubt he'll be released for significantly longer than his minimum sentence.
Yeah- I mean I get that's what happening here. It's just weird to me to consider it a "right."
I just don't see how it's fundamentally any better than the US system of minimum and maximum sentences, with some possibly some provisions for early parole reviewed every year or two after some portion "X" of the sentence has been served.
You could punishes judges even for harsh senteces (of people later exonerated), doesn't have to be just about the death penalty.
And to make it more balanced, you could also punish them for exonerating someone later found guilty (with the available evicence at the first trial re-examined).
Just rough ideas, which might not work at all, but still, as it is judges have no skin in the game (not even their reputation, sometimes it's even the inverse: some judges purposefully give harsh senteces, e.g. to blacks to score political points they'll later exploit).
No one would ever want to be a judge then. And your second paragraph is very much in conflict with the tenet that everyone is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Law is a process, punishing people who do their duty for the errors in the process when they have not been involved in misconduct would not be justice.
>Law is a process, punishing people who do their duty for the errors in the process when they have not been involved in misconduct would not be justice.
There are tons of ways to perform badly without misconduct. Companies punish/fire/demote/etc employees who underperform all the time, for example. Or who make bad decisions consistently. Or even a single costly bad decision.
Why should "life of death judging" officials, highly paid at that, get a free pass?
The judge's job is to make a decision based on the evidence in front of them. The judge has to weigh the evidence based on their training and knowledge.
That decision might prove in hindsight to be incorrect, based on new information or a fresh perspective. The judge cannot be held accountable for that.
We accept this as part of the job, that difficult decisions cannot always be made perfectly within any legal framework, but still need to be decided.
If this results in disproportionate punishment, the system is at fault - the system of laws - not the judge, who was doing their job.
The judge's decision might alternatively prove to be corrupt, in that the judge has been influenced by something outside of their training, knowledge of the law, and the evidence. The judge should be held accountable for that.
>The judge's job is to make a decision based on the evidence in front of them. The judge has to weigh the evidence based on their training and knowledge. That decision might prove in hindsight to be incorrect, based on new information or a fresh perspective. The judge cannot be held accountable for that.
Well, I already covered that in another comment: we could still hold them accountable for decisions deemed later to be incorrect with the same data available at the time.
Because their 'performance' is to perform their part best they can.
In common law systems (US, UK for example) the trial proceedings is adversarial system. If someone should lose money because the innocent is convicted, it should be the defense lawyer. The trial is a game.
In civil law jurisdictions (like in Continental Europe) the trial is fact-finding public inquiry. The court is more actively involved in investigating the the case.
Kinda, but I didn't ask for a discussion atm, I stated my opinion of what should be, and re-stated parts of it to make clear what that is.
In order to express a desire for a specific change, you need to have normative ideas. At least a conception of how things should be (or shouldn't). So it comes down to, do you agree that judges should not just handle out death sentences, for starters, without any negative consequence on them if they get them wrong?
But note that if my request was normative (it was), the response: "Because their 'performance' is to perform their part best they can" is even less than a normative statement: it's a tautology.
The death penalty should be abolished, end of discussion. If even a single innocent person is murdered, then an obscene and heinous crime has been committed by the state.
Train police to de-escalate and avoid police violence at all costs instead of the US approach where a traffic stop can involve pointing your gun at the suspect...
> instead of the US approach where a traffic stop can involve pointing your gun at the suspect...
Realistically though, for that to work the US needs a sweeping reform of drug and gun laws. Right now, if I'm a drug mule with a ton of meth in my trunk and get stopped on some lonely road, I have the choice between shooting the cop and maybe get away or getting a life in jail for the drugs.
Here in Germany, you usually get out after 5, 6 years as a simple mule, and our cops (unless you're on an international route where cops can claim Schengen border duty rights) can't simply demand to open your trunk unless they have reasonable suspicion - and it's really hard to get your hand on a gun. As a result, our cops don't have to be afraid for their life at a random traffic stop.
There's a reason why cops are so trigger happy in the US, and it goes way beyond shoddy training.
I've seen part of police training in a big city and was impressed. They have a good portion of their training already on all the different methods of deescalation. With simulators (I tried them it is pretty impressive and immersive), role-play and so on. My guess is that the problem is after training.
I ran a simulator system for a couple of years for a military law course. The idea was to give those in the course first-hand experience with ROE/RUF concerns through the eyes of the people they'd be writing ROE/RUF for.
The scenarios presented were laughable, badly-acted and completely unrealistic. Worse, every single one ended, by default, with the suspect pulling out a gun and shooting at the user. All of them. This is, of course, completely counter to reality.
One could say that the issue is then the quality of these systems, but the fact that, apparently, it has been a viable business for going on a decade shows me that the issue isn't being taken seriously be their customers - that is, police departments and their trainers. The issue is, in fact, the institution as a whole. They're fundamentally incapable of reforming themselves.
No these were interactive scenarios, with a human behind the controls. So it really depends on the human of course. But you can select where the situation goes, raise the tone of voice or aggressiveness of the actor (real actor videos smoothly integrated) of course the operator can make it shoot and you also need to simulate that. The subject in the simulator has a prop taser and gun that work pretty realisticly (blank bullets and no voltage of course). I don't know how common this kind of training is across US probably not that much.
Right. The default (or, at least, the choice heavily weighted by system) was the shot ending. I could choose to allow the scenario to progress to a surrender, but there was no instance where a gun or knife could not possibly be produced. Ostensibly, these scenarios are meant to train police for realistic encounters; that is, there SHOULD be a number, if not a majority, that don't end in violence, even if the user fails to de-escalate properly.
> I wonder how this argument would be applied to police murders of innocents. How do we deal with that?
Realistically I think you'd have to drastically lower the perceived risk of a public interaction to the police. As long as they think they are going to get hurt, they'll feel the need to get in front of the problem.
This angle always amuses me, because while there's some truth to it, it means that raising "public awareness" of the issue is, in fact, making the issue worse. Which might be true, but that also lays at least some blame on the activists/ fear mongers.
But also, it's just a different type of victim blaming. Anytime perception is allowed to be blamed, logic goes out the window.
The same excuse was (is) used against minorites for years: if they don't want me to feel threatened by them, then they shouldn't be (perceived as being) so threatening.
It's why any type of "thought crime" is so dangerous. It doesn't matter what you (the accused) actually think; it matters what someone else thinks/perceives what you thought.
Which means that what someone else thinks of you can make you actually guilty of a crime.
Or it could be as simple as improving physical security for police.
Put an Ironman suit on a cop and he isn't going to much care if the potential perp is carrying a knife.
It's a weird gig (street patrol) and it's hard to have a strong opinion on it without actually being a cop or going out on numerous ride-alongs. Naturally, it's easy to come up with 'solutions' behind the safety of a screen.
One thing that brought that home to me is having several friends who are retired COs (Correctional Officers) from the California state system and several friends who are released felons. One thing their stories taught me is that people who are uninvolved in those systems don't know a thing about it and have nearly useless theories on the way things-oughta-be.
The idea that any person is immutably a "criminal" is as passe as the xenophobic belief that certain ethnic groups are innately violent, untrustworthy, or simpleminded. It's a failed ideology that justifies selective dehumanization.
And conversely, how much value in contracted services performed by potentially wrongly incarcerated people performing un- or under-compensated labor are you willing to accept? If they're paying for the privilege of their own imprisonment, it should at least include rehabilitation.
More than I’m willing to pay to house innocent convicts, and to pay the salaries of the people that locked them up. Fixing those problems would save a lot more money than tweaking death penalty rates (in either direction).
That just hides the problem. The existence of a death penalty brings a special salience to injustice but is orthogonal to the key injustice in this case.
The state is sure good at killing innocent people in other countries.
I'm going to have to vote for the death penalty, of course with high standards of proof. If anything, the whole idea of bolting people into a small box for 50-60 years is a much more perverse idea. Only the US could invent something like a Supermax prison (although the Black Dolphin looks like no picnic, the Russian answer to abolishing the death penalty).
edit: I'll add that the US justice system (and probably any other) appears quite arbitrary in it's punishment. The sentences people receive and actually serve can be all over the map.
Furthermore, consider the view of repentance. Let's say that you are at least willing to admit the possibility there is an afterlife with judgement. Having a defined date when you will die means you are more likely to repent than when you die of old age 60 years from now at some undefined time.
Also, have you investigated how much it costs the US Taxpayer to house a prisoner in a Supermax prison? If it was income, that prisoner would be making money in the upper 5%. It's also perverse to make the taxpayer pay so much to house a prisoner, who committed atrocious crimes normally worthy of death, for so long.
There's also the fact that a wrong person convicted usually means the guilty party going free and the investigation closed.
This is bad enough normally but the death penalty creates even bigger incentives for people to claim the right person was convicted after the fact and not to look too closely at any new evidence which comes to light which could lead to the actually guilty party being found.
So, if a single person is killed by a government-mandated airbag, we should throw away all the safety trade-offs (the numbers of people killed and saved by airbags) and remove the airbags?
Emotional slogans should be abolished, end of discussion.
The difference is you wrote "killed", LocalH wrote "murdered" (implies intentional killing, I believe).
The death penalty's only intention is to end your life (and cynically speaking, save life long imprisonment costs).
How does the state justify this behavior in 2017? We execute so few people and it’s already so excessively expensive what’s the logic for refusing to test and retest everything? 20+ years in jail waiting to be executed seems pretty cruel, if not all that unusual IMO.
Tangential but I also strongly oppose lethal injection as a method of execution - if the state lacks the will to line up a proper firing squad, it has no business executing citizens in the first place.
>The reasoning given by the judge was it wouldn't matter, that there were three people who saw him at or near that neighborhood on that day and time and honestly the DNA just wouldn't matter," Short said.
Not mentioned is that he was her neighbor. So, yeah, people saw him in the neighborhood, often.
Death is an immutable punishment, that really should be all the logic needed to dissuade people from supporting the death penalty. Locking an innocent person up for n number of years is a massive injustice but at least the person can be freed and compensated.
The federal government, the District of Columbia, and 36 states have compensation statutes of some form. The following 14 states do not: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
Anyone want to summarize the argument of these 14 states that isn't "Yes, we as a society locked up an innocent for 30 years, but now that they're free we don't owe them anything"..?
Why would they need an argument? Politics isn't about who has the better argument. It's just that no one in those states has (so far) had the skill, energy, and resources to organize political change on the issue.
the legal argument in the U.S for not giving compensation (as I recall) tends to be you should only be compensated if there was legal irregularities (cough, cough) that resulted in your incarceration - for example falsification of evidence, withholding evidence by the police, forced confessions etc.
So if things were fair and followed correctly and you were by mistake locked up that's too bad, regrettable but not the state's fault and as such the state does not need to compensate you.
Or put another way: a legal conviction is still legally correct even if it ends up being factually wrong.
Compensation would generally require the accused (the State, or it's agents in this case) to do something illegal, or at least legally incorrect, to be held legally responsible, and therefore financially responsible.
I don't know that there are states that are not historically racist, but we could assume there are states that are less historically racist than others - states without slavery and large pro-abolition movements might be better situated for historical morality, or states without sundown towns or counties.
Don't forget that most of the states against slavery, were also against those slaves being present in the country at all.
It wasn't until war was pretty much inevitable that many, including Lincoln, started to realize that moving towards freedom/equality was the winning move, strategically, practically, and politically.
Even after admitting equality was the answer, he still wrote plenty of extremely racist rants about he didn't mean that legal equality didn't mean that the races were ever capable of being equal, etc.
The other blatant example that people misinterpret is the 3/5 compromise in the constitution.
It often gets framed that the slave states valued slaves lives as less (3/5) than free persons, but remember that the northern states that were against slavery were also against counting slaves as constitutional persons at all: they wanted 0/5s.
>the northern states that were against slavery were also against counting slaves as constitutional persons at all: they wanted 0/5s
You're saying that 0/5ths was more racist than 3/5ths? That makes no sense, because the benefit of being counted was being given to the slave owners. I don't see any ambiguity or subjectivity here.
Because at the time, basically only white land owners were voting. They were definitely the only ones putting the choices on the ballot.
There wasn't any concern from the north over women, children, or (tax-paying) indians being denied voting rights, yet still being counted for apportionment. No, slaves didn't enjoy the same level of rights as those groups, but this also wasn't about voting power being synonymous with apportionment numbers.
It was a politically convenient power grab, not an altruistic hill-to-die-on.
> It often gets framed that the slave states valued slaves lives as less (3/5) than free persons, but remember that the northern states that were against slavery were also against counting slaves as constitutional persons at all: they wanted 0/5s.
This actually gets the 3/5 compromise wrong worse than the view it (correctly) points to as being wrong.
The 3/5 compromise isn’t about “constitutional personhood” of slaves at all. The southern states actually wanted 5/5 (which they ended up after the war, when they replaced chattel slavery with penal slavery) and the northern states wanted 0/5 — which is how 3/5 was a “compromise” — because the issue wasn’t about how much legal personhood slaves were granted (which was zero and not being negotiated), it was about how much voting power in the federal government the people allowed to vote in slave states got as a bonus for having them in bondage. The position of the northern states was “if you keep humans in a condition where they are legally something like livestock or industrial machines, you don’t get any more extra votes for having them than you would for livestock or industrial machines.”
I'm not saying the south had the moral high-ground, just that this is proof that the north didn't hold it either.
Yes- they (the south) wanted slaves to be counted 5/5 for apportionment for the purposes of representation. I'm not sure how that's getting it backwards. Women and children at the time had a similar "be counted, but don't get to vote" status.
My point is that the north wasn't being altruistic with a lot of slavery/ equality issues, but ruthlessly political. And that being anti-slavery at the time definitely didn't (necessarily) mean being pro-abolition (even if they labeled themselves abolitionists), or even anti-racist (not by the standards of the time and definitely not by the standards of today), which is how it's now often framed. And what the comment I was replying to implied.
Northern states being "anti-slavery" was not the evidence of moral high-ground that people give them credit for.
> I’m not saying the south had the moral high-ground, just that this is proof that the north didn’t hold it either.
How is insisting that slave owners don’t also get bonus votes for holding slaves prove that? There are certainly arguments that the North was far from perfect on race issues (though I don’t think any of them come anywhere close to an argument that they didn’t have the moral high ground on racial issues compared to the South), but “didn’t give in to a demand that the South made specifically to secure the long-term future of slavery” is…not one of them.
I'm pretty sure that anti-slavery was always taken to mean we don't want people to have slaves, not that we want you to have slaves but not get extra votes because of it.
Status quo and a governance which would rather work on "sexier" political issues. I'm sure if you polled the citizens of those respective states you'd fine overwhelming support for compensation, but that doesn't bring in the votes the same way [hot political issue] does
Thanks, I had no idea things had progressed so far, I basing my opinions on out of date perceptions I see now. On the other hand 14 states not compensating is not good.
I commented this above, but I think it's relevant here.
It's odd that I hear people who say "Oh, in prison, they're safe from society." That's not true historically. Some of the most dangerous people in history were imprisoned, multiple times, and not killed for fear of public anger - only to get out of prison and wreak havoc.
Hitler was found guilty of treason, but was given a more humane 5 years in prison instead of the death penalty that would have historically been applied to treasonous people. He wrote Mein Kampf, got out of prison, started World War II, and killed millions.
Stalin was exiled to Siberia multiple times for his crimes including bank robbery, kidnappings, and extortion instead of being given death. He came back to Russia for the February Revolution, overthrew the Russian empire, started the Gulag system, and caused the deaths of millions.
For all we know, the Unabomber is in prison right now, but what happens if he escaped? It is not historically impossible, or even implausible, that he couldn't repeat history like many revolutionaries who were arrested, got out, and took over.
The point is more that there is zero guarantee historically that people in prison are completely safely isolated from society. And for that reason, let's say 90% of convictions to death (considering only 22 people died in 2019) were accurate and 2 were wrong. Considering how extremely dangerous historically and in reality the criminals being convicted to death are considered to be, it's a necessary evil to ensure justice and safety for the regular citizen.
For that reason, will some innocent people be sentence to death? Unlikely considering how much crime is required, but it is possible. But just because that could potentially happen doesn't invalidate the death penalty. If we invalidated everything because it could affect _just one_ person, why not have the police be able to break down doors at will because just one kidnapped person might be found? Why not throw out encryption on our phones because just one child molester might be found?
Recently there was a case where the Finnish police arrested a person as a suspect for a robbery of a convenience store on basis of DNA evidence: the robber had dropped a plastic glove, presumably to hide fingerprints, on the floor of the store. Officers isolated DNA from the glove, searched archives, found a match with a person who had had some minor offense years prior, and brought him in for a questioning.
It turned out the DNA-matched first suspect was innocent when the police found a second suspect, who confessed to the crime and whose clothes fitted security camera footage of the robbery better. So how the first suspect's DNA arrived on the gloves at the crime scene? The investigators noticed he told he had visited the same mall where the second suspect (according to his testimony) had obtained the gloves prior to the robbery. Based on the security camera footage from the mall, the investigators concluded that the likeliest way the DNA of the first suspect ended up on the gloves the robber because they rode the same escalator.
I'm not sure either prosecutors or defense attorneys would, in general, like the idea of basically forcing a jury to hear about percentages that they can't somewhat control via expert witness narrative.
Or the idea of introducing most jurors to advanced statistics for the first time.
I mean, even a lot of reasonably intelligent, college educated professionals that have taken a statistics class get lots of things very very wrong, very often.
This case has been so poorly reported by the mainstream media. Just going to quote a couple other sources about the case and Ledell Lee. AK Supreme Court[1]:
At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and “did not trust this guy.” The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived.
Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and “make a B-line inside just real fast.” Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair.
Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as “Skip” walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder.
Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police.
---
AK Supreme Court in Lee's previous rape case[2]:
Evidence -- evidence of rape overwhelming -- trial court did not err in denying motion for directed verdict. -- There was overwhelming evidence of the rape and kidnapping from the testimony of the victim and the emergency-room physician; moreover, the evidence linking appellant to the assault was substantial and included fingerprints taken from the place of attack that matched appellant's and semen in the vaginal swabs taken from the victim and appellant's blood that matched, with the chance of an identical match being one in eighty-three million; the evidence was sufficient to support appellant's conviction for the crimes charged; the trial court did not err in denying his motion for directed verdict.
Lee was convicted of the kidnapping and rape of a seventeen- year-old girl in Jacksonville, Arkansas. The victim was abducted from her sister's home on the night of November 27, 1990, and was raped in a wooded area behind the house. The victim described her attacker as a tall, black male, but was unable to identify him because he prevented her from seeing his face during the attack. Evidence from a rape-kit examination performed on the victim was submitted to the state crime laboratory for analysis. Hair combings from the victim's clothing contained two Negroid hairs, and semen was identified in vaginal swabs taken from the rape exam...
Thank you for supplying this plethora of information with corresponding cited sources. This is not a normally upvoted topic on HN and seems rather strange that it popped to the top page so quickly after being submitted (less than an hour).
Thanks for this excellent alternate perspective. The inclusion of the facts that CNN conveniently left out makes this verdict look a whole lot more reasonable. But balanced perspectives don't drive outrage clicks I guess.
Thanks for the explanation. I was about to say everything you mentioned was circumstantial: the victim said he’d left, so someone seeing him enter and leave adds nothing.
I think you buried the lede:
> They even found moderate support for his DNA on the murder weapon.
Assuming the weapon was an old tool, it would be suspicious if there wasn’t DNA from third parties on it.
The Innocence Project and ACLU said five of the six hairs tested for mitochondrial DNA excluded Lee as the source. Lee could not be "excluded as a potential source" in one of the hairs.
Lee's counsel had argued that they should be allowed to locate crime scene evidence collected in 1993, including a single hair and a Converse shoe with a pinhead-sized spot of human blood on it, for modern DNA testing.
The death penalty is plain hypocrisy, because it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment. It is not also about preventing dangerous individuals from causing harm on other people because again, that is already plainly achieved by incarceration.
The death penalty is 100% state-mandated revenge against the perpetrators of heinous crimes. It is been known for centuries (at least since the 1700s) as being completely ineffective as a deterrent, and it has been shunned by most of the western world, the USA remaining the last holdout of such a barbaric practice.
Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not.
"strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment."
Well... duh. The death penalty being a punishment is a feature, not a bug. Nobody says the death penalty is about re-education. It's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime. If somebody molested my prepubescent daughter, I would say that person should _die_, as _punishment_, and that would be fair and just.
You are operating from the premise that justice is only about re-education. There are plenty of people who reject this view and say that justice is about both re-education and punishment for the crime. And that yes, justice involves punishment, not re-education.
"Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not."
What planet are you living on? There are lots of countries far less powerful than the US who execute far more prisoners than the US. The US executed 22 people, Egypt 32, Iran 251, Saudi Arabia 184, China over 1000, and Iraq over 100 in 2019.
The problem of lifetime state issued punishments that are designed to make people feel really bad is their economic insanity. Applying the death penalty in the US involves spending millions in legal and incarceration fees. It also seems to have no deterrence effect on mass murderers, which the US has a high concentration of.
The cost of lifetime imprisonment or execution is outright massive, in the millions over the lifetime of imprisonment. When you look at it in terms of economic output, these sentences are a calamity. For $2m USD spent on achieving a death penalty outcome, you could buy over 600k healthy school lunches for $3 each or pay the salary for one extra school teacher per year over a lifetime.
In my mind, that would be a problem with the justice system, rather than the death penalty as a concept.
Also, as for why it seems to have no deterrence, how many people in the whole United States were killed? Only 22 in 2019, and you probably have never heard the names of even one of those people. If the fact of who was dying, for what crime, was highlighted more often in the media, the statistics may be significantly different.
Like, imagine if CNN and FOX had a simple image of who was dying each day with a two-or-three-sentence description of the crime, each time someone was put to death. To most people, that would be about every 2 weeks. Public awareness would explode. And criminals would have a far greater awareness that they could die for crimes.
> The US executed 22 people, Egypt 32, Iran 251, Saudi Arabia 184, China over 1000, and Iraq over 100 in 2019
None of those countries are neither Western nor democracies. All western democracies have been pushed by the influence of the others to abolish death penalty (for instance, it's a mandatory requirement in order to join the EU), the US being the only outlier. What if the situation was different, i.e. the US was an abolitionist country and only a small country like Luxembourg was the only remaining Western democracy to execute its citizens? It would quickly become a pariah among its peers.
> it's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime
The basic problem with this is that it _does not work_, and it does not accomplish anything than pleasing the victims of a crime. Killing convicts has been the default punishment for millenia and still it hasn't deterred anyone from doing crimes. It simply creates a state where people are harshly punished for what they've done, and that often is used as a way to avoid doing absolutely nothing to fix the issues that caused the offense to occur in the first place.
Europe has abolished executions decades ago, with some places like Italy doing that in the '800s. Still, Europe has a much lower crime rate than the US, where prisons are much harsher and the worst convicts may face an execution for their crimes.
1. Execution absolutely guarantees that the criminal will not hurt anyone ever again. In prison, criminals can still hurt prison guards and other prisoners. They can also escape or be freed by mistake. There is a clearly benefit in terms of risk to innocent people. There are certainly innocent people that have been spared harm or death by virtue of executions.
I don't view execution as punishment or revenge. I view it the same way I view putting down a rabid animal. I would never take pleasure or vengeful satisfaction in it, even if the criminal had hurt me or someone I knew.
2. It's not significantly more ethical to keep someone that is innocent locked up in a prison for their entire life. Someone being freed after 50 years in prison has had their life stolen from them, even if they were not actually executed. The stakes for life imprisonment are just as high as execution. Arguably, the torture of prison makes it worse than execution in many cases.
3. Execution makes sense in some rare cases, where the criminal is very clearly guilty (e.g. video evidence of them murdering multiple people) but only as a way to prevent them from hurting people in the future. Not as a deterrent, punishment, and not for revenge.
4. If I was a sociopath serial killer that couldn't help myself, I might view execution as a relief. Even if outwardly I was begging not to be executed, I might appreciate that my society had the courage to kill me instead of leaving me to rot in prison for 50 years.
5. Ultimately, we need to be able to cure these people and release them back into society. Science just isn't there yet, so for now we have execution and life imprisonment as our primary tools. No one should be satisfied with either option. They're both terrible options that are not as dissimilar as some portray them to be.
"Arguably, the torture of prison makes it worse than execution in many cases."
This. Whenever somebody says we shouldn't abolish the death penalty, I ask them how it would feel to be locked in a cage for 23 hours a day for up to 60 years (which in most Supermax prisons for people who committed atrocious crimes, is very much the case). If they admit that would be torturous, I then point out that the death penalty is death, abolishing the death penalty is torture and death. Which one is preferable? Which one is more humane?
I think that when you consider how much it costs to house a prisoner in a Supermax prison for that long, the sense of justice on behalf of the victims, and just for the prisoner's own sake to avoid being mentally and psychologically damaged by being solitary for so long (which we scientifically know will happen), the death penalty makes more sense than people give it credit for.
You can't make a human being feel psychological pain since the perception is individual. Once in a prison where their medical, food, and financial needs are 100% assumed by the state, they might find their lives better.
If they believed the world was so unjust that they went out and committed horrible crimes in the name of self-satisfaction or their personal beliefs on how to make the world just, they might just sit in a cell and feel good about what they did in perpetuity.
People like the Unabomber continue to sit around and pen manifestos justifying their own actions because of their political beliefs.
This too. And what's odd is that I hear people who say "Oh, in prison, they're safe from society." That's not true historically. Some of the most dangerous people in history were imprisoned, multiple times, and not killed for fear of public anger - only to get out of prison and wreak havoc.
Hitler was found guilty of treason, but was given a more humane 5 years in prison instead of the death penalty that would have historically been applied to treasonous people. He wrote Mein Kampf, got out of prison, started World War II, and killed millions.
Stalin was exiled to Siberia multiple times for his crimes including bank robbery, kidnappings, and extortion instead of being given death. He came back to Russia for the February Revolution, overthrew the Russian empire, started the Gulag system, and caused the deaths of millions.
For all we know, the Unabomber is in prison right now, but what happens if he escaped? It is not historically impossible, or even implausible, that he couldn't repeat history like many revolutionaries who were arrested, got out, and took over.
There is zero guarantee historically that people in prison are 100% totally safely isolated from society and can't do harm in the future.
What a weird argument for the death penalty. If you worry about this aspect surely you can just ask the convict if they prefer to stay in prison or if they prefer to die. And not in a philosophical thought experiment way, but in the most direct way possible: “You have been found a very bad egg by the rules of the area you are in. We decided to never let you out again. Since this decision you have been in this facility for x days. Do you want to die today or do you want to die in a future uncertain date?” And see what that particular person thinks instead of some armchair philosopher on some random website.
"You have been found a very bad egg by the rules of the area you are in."
If a person is being sentenced to death, this is a ridiculous statement and it betrays your worldview. It implies that they are only being put to death because of the rules that somebody came up with, rather than for having done things that are objectively, unspeakably, bad.
You don't get the death penalty for stealing purses at Walmart, protesting in the streets, or even killing somebody. You get it for unspeakable crimes that are far more broadly condemned than just the "rules of the area." You get it for bombing planes, child molestation, genocide. People that society should not pity as having a good heart in there somewhere.
These are people, who, frankly, we shouldn't sympathize with. We shouldn't feel bad that they are being put to death as if that is some miscarriage of justice. We should put them to death humanely, quickly upon conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, and resign that justice has been done the same way you would a rabid dog. You don't hate the dog or seek revenge upon it, but you know it must be done for the safety of everyone.
> it betrays your worldview. It implies that they are only being put to death because of the rules that somebody came up with, rather than for having done things that are objectively, unspeakably, bad.
No betrayal there. That is my worldview. Cultures through history varied a lot on which crimes were deemed worthy of capital punishment. Even now as we speak there are people who has been sentenced to death because someone saw them tear pages out of a book. Where I am from that is either not a crime or minor property damage. So clearly we as humans can’t agree on what is “objectively bad”. Even if we argue that those other cultures got it wrong and we have it right on who is objectively bad our processes are not deterministic. The same person if tried again with a different jurry might get acquited. Not always, and not and not every case, but often enough to undermine the notion that we are dealing with some kind of objective badness.
> it must be done for the safety of everyone
The idea that we have these dangerous criminals who cannot be contained safely in any other way than by killing them is a comic book plotpoint not reality. We have the technology and the resources to keep any humans safely contained if we choose to. We can even do this in a non-cruel way if that is what we want to do.
You're assuming that the person was rightfully convicted, under an article implying potentially redeeming evidence was overlooked in a case that ended up with a death sentence.
If you think life in prison is more inhumane than death then I could be convinced that prisoners with a life sentence should be allowed to voluntarily choose euthanasia.
If you are concerned about cost then it's worth noting that execution (in the US) is more expensive than life in prison.
That leaves the "sense of justice". Given the high likelihood that the government already has killed innocent people, and the likelihood that it will continue to do so, that seems insufficient to me.
1, only applies if you are right about the verdict, which we can never be sure about. In fact execution almost guarantees that the criminal will re-offend if he is watching an innocent man being put to death for his crimes.
2, Its significantly more ethical to potentially give some of an innocent persons life back and make some restitution. Than none.
3, There is never cases where we are sure; There can always be new evidence or a new way to look at old evidence that changes the amount guilt or innocence. To think you can be sure for all time about a set of events, even if you were there, is just wrong. If we replace reasonable doubt with no doubt at all then No one would be convicted of anything.
> it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment
It's only hypocritical if the justice system claims to be solely about re-education. But you point out two other goals—deterrence and isolation—and there really are people out there who believe punishment is a moral good and a necessary component of justice.
As I've said in my other post, a penal system that focuses on punishment and not on rehabilitation is not positive for a society, because it doesn't actually help reducing the causes behing crime (and thus stop it from happening), and often degenerates towards being unfair to certain groups and minorities.
Why would there need to be appearance of re-education? The society doesn't owe anyone a re-education. It's not really about punishment either... If someone doesn't respect others' life and property, why would theirs be respected at all? There's no more revenge here than in drowning a tick that bit you instead of releasing it back into the wild. In abstract, I'd apply it to many more crimes with an unambiguous victim and selfish intent, even minor ones.
The only problems I have with death penalty is potential for abuse (to be clear, I don't believe it's the present danger, more of a future danger if the death penalty was normalized), and wrong convictions (and that I think would mostly be solved by requiring multiple separate convictions before it's applied).
Maybe not vengeance, but there is passionate cruelty in drowning an ant if you had a vision of the world where the ant was no longer dangerous. What's wrong with indefinite imprisonment over death? Now you can figure out if you accidentally killed people, at least; you don't need abuse to accidentally put people to death.
And on the matter of death penalty, does one lead with an attitude of "Why should we help unless we owe you?" Is that the right moral motivation for death penalty? I mean, that's the attitude of big business in commerce.
I'd argue it's a minor component. Especially with something like a tick, that will go on to bite someone else.
I am morally indifferent between life imprisonment and death, but life imprisonment costs more and can fail. On the other hand, the original comment framed death penalty as "hypocrisy" of "justice being about re-education"; I am saying justice doesn't have to be primarily about re-education, no supporter of death penalty argues that; there's no hypocrisy. I think the removal is the most important component. Punishment and re-education should be prioritized depending on the crime, but in any case both are just nice, optional perks.
> Punishment and re-education should be prioritized depending on the crime, but in any case both are just nice, optional perks.
Again there is this framing about what is deserved and what is owed.
This is in contrast to the framing of what is best for society — if your prevailing theory is that some people are safe and some people are dangerous (as opposed to some people are criminals and some people are owed), then those individuals who still have a good future story ought be candidates for rehabilitation. From this perspective, it is not a matter of what is a "perk" and what is owed, but rather what the state has to gain.
Well, is re-education better for society than removal? It's expensive and unreliable, whereas if you only consider the society of people whom we owe the respect of their negative rights (based on reciprocity), incarceration is cheaper and more reliable, and death penalty is cheaper and more reliable yet.
I’ve recently had the privilege of watching “12 angry men” for the first time. It’s a masterpiece in showing how a legal “sure thing” can be so wrong.
Legal cases are often constructed with testimony, unreliable evidence, and chance. Its an effort to increase likelihood of certainty using very unreliable data. And human intuition really sucks when it comes to probability calculations.
I think that film as no other really captures how wrong we can be, even if we “feel” certain about it. It might sound like a tangent but I think it narrates how errors like this are possible more eloquently than I would ever be able to do on my own.
I recently watched the films "Hannibal," and "Silence of the Lambs," which convinced me that killers who aren't executed will continue to orchestrate murders from inside prison by psychologically manipulating people.
I think those films really capture what happens when we only imprison killers, even if we feel certain that there would be no public harm from handing down a life sentence instead of the death penalty.
The Louisiana non-unanimous jury verdict saga just got similar, scary, one-sided newspaper treatment.
Not necessary because it should or shouldn't have been changed, but because the obvious propaganda was so damn effective. And it wasn't blanket coverage by every local news outlet, but constant, serialized coverage from one, arguably dying, newspaper.
Reminds you of just how powerful even a single media outlet can be when it wants to.
Also, that any future that newspapers might have will require selling influence, instead of advertising and subscriptions.
Wasn't Lee reported as asking around the neighborhood for tools immediately before the person was murdered? Someone else's DNA being on the murder weapon isn't particularly surprising if that weapon wasn't owned by Lee.
Prosecutors are typically promoted based on conviction rates.
Each false conviction, plea bargain or guilty plea should count as -20 convictions.
It all comes down to incentives. Murdering this man was probably great for all of the involved people’s careers (and I’d be surprised if he is their only victim). If it was a potential career-ender, they’d find some other way to game the system, or others would be promoted instead of them.
The same story plays out millions of times a year in the US (though usually with lesser crimes); it’s clearly a systemic issue.
This is why the corporate punishment zealots should be kept in check by sane laws. Giving the state the power to execute people can, did and will go wrong and is too abusable.
For example, soon after the Iranian government was overthrown by the UK puppet "shah", within a year butchers who were regarded as brutes suddenly have been delegated to positions of executioners, killing previous government officials.
Death is irreversible and what would be the correct punishment for the judge or prosecutor here?
If you ever think judges, state attorney's and prosecutors are humans of elevated morals, then I know where you can buy bridges for a good price.
To use the state apparatus when sending someone to death row after interpreting "beyond reasonable suspicion" in such a liberal, reckless way is pretty much first degree murder.
Monetary fine will not reanimate the dead and is footed by taxpayer money.
The death penalty is a ridiculous and archaic concept, it is no better than blood feuds between families or gangs, just applied by the state instead.
It should have no place in a civil legal system.
Someone said Stalin and Hitler barely avoided execution. Sure thing, they were some monsters, but who elevated them to power? People with the same mentality who welcome the death penalty. Neither Hitler nor Stalin would have ever happened if they did not have wide support from coward and dumb citizens along with whatever financed them.
Stupidity and cowardice are not fixed via death penalty.
you can be guilty and someone else’s dna can be found on the murder weapon. both can be true. it actually seems pretty easy to not get your own dna on it
Legalese: "Asked about the new DNA evidence, Rutledge repeatedly insisted Lee was "lawfully executed" and pointed to the testimony of an eyewitness who purportedly saw Lee enter Reese's home that day and then leave, "erratically," 20 minutes later."
This is how the justice system hides behind its sins: Judges/Officials/Prosecutors say "there is no blood on my hands", Lee was "lawfully executed". Sidestepping the question.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadI don't support the death penalty but I see the judge's point. Most DNA evidence isn't very useful and rarely as damning or exculpatory as people think.
Eye witness testimony is only slightly more reliable as waving purple LEDs around while chanting long words and rambling off conspiracy theories. (Which is apparently now an acceptable form of criminal investigation in the US).
I did not ask for absurd. I asked what they thought was absurd.
In fact, an extension is "no well defended person gets convicted," which isn't quite as ironclad, but still works pretty well in practice. This is actually a good thing. Our system was intended to make it hard to convict people.
Wow. Like, I completely fail to comprehend how it's legal in the US judiciary system to ignore any piece of available hard evidence in a case that is punishable by execution?
Then again, if execution itself is still legal, I can answer part of that question myself, even if I don't like the answer.
Here, the defendant was neighbors with the victim, and the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least.
Sure there is, if you seem someone leaving a house that resembles another neighbor you’re going to assume its the neighbor and not a stranger. Context is huge.
1. What does known/recognized mean? It’s perfectly possible for additional people to make a mistake in identification, especially if prompted by others. 2. Even if it was him, the crime wasn’t witnessed; he’d be agitated just by having seen the scene, I imagine
The big thing that adds to number 2 is that people often forget that reality is messier than neat stories. The defendant could very well have been doing something else illegal or furtive, and been agitated for that reason. They might have been involved in related criminal activity but not responsible for the actual attack. They might have had an innocent reason to be there and not expected to be believed. It may really not have been the suspect there to begin with.
That’s why the death penalty is bad, and it’s why eyewitness testimony is crap by itself, especially when it’s circumstantial.
It didn't mention anything about any contradictory evidence, except to say the judge felt enough existed.
Debating the death penalty is one thing, but advocates for abolishing it aren't helping themselves by relying on this type of propaganda. This was and is a solid conviction of a guilty man.
There are enough legitimate concerns to debate without taking the word of the click bait.
If they could (and did!) do that without needing DNA evidence, the presence of someone else's trace DNA, or absence of the suspect's on one specific piece of evidence isn't likely to change that, even if it's the murder weapon.
All evidence is imperfect, and I personally think we'll start to publicly realize that DNA evidence is just as malleable as eye-witness testimony. Just run more PCR iterations until some other DNA is amplified above the signal/noise floor! (If people knew the amount of analytical probability that goes into PCR/ matching DNA samples, they'd have a lot less faith in the technology, but that's another topic.) Same thing for manipulated/edited video and even deep-fakes.
Which, isn't too say all evidence is crap and therefore no convictions are valid.
It's why we put faith in the system and in our peers serving on petit-juries...
and why it's up to a them and the judge to evaluate the evidence, and decide whether or not to convict...
And why we don't have a computer run a PCR and automatically say: "Positive dna-sample: go directly to jail".
That’s a pretty shockingly huge amount of faith you’re putting in a system with well documented shortcomings and biases, especially in a capital case with a black defendant.
Also, it seems frankly absurd to claim that the absence of the subject’s DNA on the murder weapon isn’t material to the decision to convict . It’s surprisingly hard not to get DNA on things, and the prosecution’s case appears not to have painted the defendant as some sort of methodical dexter-type.
Nobody has claimed that we should rely solely on DNA tests - that’s an absurd straw man. I think it’s even more absurd to defend this sequence of events in a capital case.
> Asked about the new DNA evidence, Rutledge repeatedly insisted Lee was "lawfully executed" and pointed to the testimony of an eyewitness who purportedly saw Lee enter Reese's home that day and then leave, "erratically," 20 minutes later.
There’s also more context here for anyone interested in the case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledell_Lee
As for the DNA findings:
> In April 2021, new DNA testing found "unknown male" DNA on the murder weapon and bloody clothes found at the scene. However, the test also "found moderate support" that blood on Lee's left shoe could have belonged to Reese.
EDIT: Apparently, a “tire thumper” looks a lot like a small wooden bat, so there’s not as much confusion as I thought about the murder weapon. I mistakenly thought the prosecution was alleging a “tire iron” was the murder weapon.
https://www.thv11.com/mobile/article/news/crime/ledell-lee-d...
https://www.amazon.com/RoadPro-RPTT-1-Thumper-19-Inches-Asso...
Is this some kind of nonsense to avoid marketing it as a weapon, or do people really use these to check tyre pressures instead of… looking at or kicking the tyre? Or even a tyre pressure gauge?
But, yes, it is manufactured and market to thump one thing: someone’s skull.
Source: I paid for college as a class A truck driver, and I used one to check every single dual-mounted tire every single day.
>Drivers of big rigs, with a gazillion tires, don’t want to take the time to apply a pressure gauge to each one...
so according to this, the intended market for a tire thumper is evidently drivers of 18 wheelers, as it would take an inordinate amount of time to check the tire pressure of every single tire with a pressure gauge. that being said, it very clearly can be used for other, more nefarious purposes, and I would be inclined to assume that a large percentage of individuals purchasing one intend to use it for said other purposes.
it's conceptually similar to how gas stations, etc, ostensibly sell "glass roses" as a gift a and a certain type of tire pressure gauge as a tool, when in reality, the majority of purchases for them are to be used as paraphernalia for consuming illicit substances (methamphetamine/any substance to be vaporized via indirect heat and freebase cocaine/"crack", respectively.)
it's telling in the latter case that you can usually find chore boy or some other similar scouring pad generally sold near the gauge (which is used as a screen for capturing the melted substance,) especially in places where no such cleaning products are sold elsewhere.
You can use a hammer, a bat, a pry bar, anything with some mass and some reach so you can easily hit the inner tire of the dual pair. (All of which are perfectly serviceable weapons in their own right.)
And sure, in an ideal world maybe people would use gauges, or have internal monitors, or some fancy solution, but time is money and money is money, so a quick thumping suffices and don’t follow the trucks so closely that you get hit by the fragments went their retreaded tires come apart.
It was a witness who literally chased/followed the suspect from the crime scene to a place where people knew who he was.
If I murder someone with my kitchen knife, my wife and her fathers DNA will be on the murder weapon.
If you buy a gun from someone and then go shoot someone with it, it might have the sellers DNA on it.
So it’s sometimes the case that DNA can’t really create reasonable doubt.
What they'd actually identified was the factory worker who packaged the DNA collection swabs.
Source: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilbronner_Phantom
2) Since the testing was conducted by defense counsel, we don't really know what an objective test would even show. His lawyers statements are a bit weasel worded--"did not show an 'absolute or conclusive' connection to Lee." Okay, but does that mean it showed a probable match? Is the DNA just too degraded to test?
A piece of evidence that probably supports a guilty verdict does not undue other evidence just because it doesn't rise the level of reasonable doubt by itself.
They did find the victims DNA on Lee's shoe. That would need to be admitted as well.
It wasn't "completely ignored". It was presented to the court and the test was requested, and the request was denied. Evidentiary rules are complicated and subject to abuse, yes, but they protect all of us. It's not like we'd be better off if discovery was unlimited.
Your complaint isn't about the way courts treat evidence, it's with the punishment. Death is final and not subject to appeal. And fundamentally that's an argument for why it shouldn't be available to courts at all.
But really, there's nothing especially wrong with evidentiary process in US criminal law. There are problems with it like any bureaucracy, but on the whole it does pretty well.
Why not? Why shouldn't the defense be able to present all evidence in their possession?
Since the defense has not received the subpoenaed material, the case can not go to trial and the defendant should be released."
It led to Trump boasting that the judges would just tilt the scales on the election for him if the count said he lost (that didn’t work out), and the current large crop of new abortion bans working their way up to the (in his words), “Trump judge” federal courts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27246831
Would it be a good or bad idea?
I mean, better to just ban it entirely, but I’d take culpability as a half measure.
If the country does not have a good track record, it doesn't really change anything.
Based on his activity since being convicted I doubt he'll be released for significantly longer than his minimum sentence.
(If the law doesn't permit a longer minimum, then 21 years is the "maximum sentence" in that there cannot be a longer mandatory period imposed.)
I just don't see how it's fundamentally any better than the US system of minimum and maximum sentences, with some possibly some provisions for early parole reviewed every year or two after some portion "X" of the sentence has been served.
(Just devils' advocate, I live in a country without it or a need for it.)
And to make it more balanced, you could also punish them for exonerating someone later found guilty (with the available evicence at the first trial re-examined).
Just rough ideas, which might not work at all, but still, as it is judges have no skin in the game (not even their reputation, sometimes it's even the inverse: some judges purposefully give harsh senteces, e.g. to blacks to score political points they'll later exploit).
I doubt that. People can be punished if they fail badly, or even die if they make a mistake in all kinds of jobs, and they still do them.
>And your second paragraph is very much in conflict with the tenet that everyone is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Well, if there really wasn't a "reasonable doubt" (as deemed on a second look) and the first judge decided it was, then it's on them...
Law is a process, punishing people who do their duty for the errors in the process when they have not been involved in misconduct would not be justice.
Death penalty itself is wrong.
There are tons of ways to perform badly without misconduct. Companies punish/fire/demote/etc employees who underperform all the time, for example. Or who make bad decisions consistently. Or even a single costly bad decision.
Why should "life of death judging" officials, highly paid at that, get a free pass?
That decision might prove in hindsight to be incorrect, based on new information or a fresh perspective. The judge cannot be held accountable for that.
We accept this as part of the job, that difficult decisions cannot always be made perfectly within any legal framework, but still need to be decided.
If this results in disproportionate punishment, the system is at fault - the system of laws - not the judge, who was doing their job.
The judge's decision might alternatively prove to be corrupt, in that the judge has been influenced by something outside of their training, knowledge of the law, and the evidence. The judge should be held accountable for that.
Well, I already covered that in another comment: we could still hold them accountable for decisions deemed later to be incorrect with the same data available at the time.
In common law systems (US, UK for example) the trial proceedings is adversarial system. If someone should lose money because the innocent is convicted, it should be the defense lawyer. The trial is a game.
In civil law jurisdictions (like in Continental Europe) the trial is fact-finding public inquiry. The court is more actively involved in investigating the the case.
Well, this "best" should be judged and rewarded or punished too.
In order to express a desire for a specific change, you need to have normative ideas. At least a conception of how things should be (or shouldn't). So it comes down to, do you agree that judges should not just handle out death sentences, for starters, without any negative consequence on them if they get them wrong?
But note that if my request was normative (it was), the response: "Because their 'performance' is to perform their part best they can" is even less than a normative statement: it's a tautology.
Realistically though, for that to work the US needs a sweeping reform of drug and gun laws. Right now, if I'm a drug mule with a ton of meth in my trunk and get stopped on some lonely road, I have the choice between shooting the cop and maybe get away or getting a life in jail for the drugs.
Here in Germany, you usually get out after 5, 6 years as a simple mule, and our cops (unless you're on an international route where cops can claim Schengen border duty rights) can't simply demand to open your trunk unless they have reasonable suspicion - and it's really hard to get your hand on a gun. As a result, our cops don't have to be afraid for their life at a random traffic stop.
There's a reason why cops are so trigger happy in the US, and it goes way beyond shoddy training.
The scenarios presented were laughable, badly-acted and completely unrealistic. Worse, every single one ended, by default, with the suspect pulling out a gun and shooting at the user. All of them. This is, of course, completely counter to reality.
One could say that the issue is then the quality of these systems, but the fact that, apparently, it has been a viable business for going on a decade shows me that the issue isn't being taken seriously be their customers - that is, police departments and their trainers. The issue is, in fact, the institution as a whole. They're fundamentally incapable of reforming themselves.
You make them accountable/actually punishable if they kill someone ?
As to the death penalty, it's a bit different : you need law enforcement, you don't need the death penalty.
Realistically I think you'd have to drastically lower the perceived risk of a public interaction to the police. As long as they think they are going to get hurt, they'll feel the need to get in front of the problem.
But also, it's just a different type of victim blaming. Anytime perception is allowed to be blamed, logic goes out the window.
The same excuse was (is) used against minorites for years: if they don't want me to feel threatened by them, then they shouldn't be (perceived as being) so threatening.
It's why any type of "thought crime" is so dangerous. It doesn't matter what you (the accused) actually think; it matters what someone else thinks/perceives what you thought.
Which means that what someone else thinks of you can make you actually guilty of a crime.
Put an Ironman suit on a cop and he isn't going to much care if the potential perp is carrying a knife.
It's a weird gig (street patrol) and it's hard to have a strong opinion on it without actually being a cop or going out on numerous ride-alongs. Naturally, it's easy to come up with 'solutions' behind the safety of a screen.
One thing that brought that home to me is having several friends who are retired COs (Correctional Officers) from the California state system and several friends who are released felons. One thing their stories taught me is that people who are uninvolved in those systems don't know a thing about it and have nearly useless theories on the way things-oughta-be.
Let's not forget that someone else was also murdered too
Besides, it’s well known that the CYA process for state murder is more expensive than keeping someone locked up for a lifetime.
You’re just lusting for revenge, not justice
Random source, I believe this is well accepted though. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs
And conversely, how much value in contracted services performed by potentially wrongly incarcerated people performing un- or under-compensated labor are you willing to accept? If they're paying for the privilege of their own imprisonment, it should at least include rehabilitation.
By the same reasoning, should COVID-19 vaccines be banned because some doctors murdered people with them (even if they may have saved millions).
It is the trolley problem, ut has no definitive answer, it is not "end of discussion".
I'm going to have to vote for the death penalty, of course with high standards of proof. If anything, the whole idea of bolting people into a small box for 50-60 years is a much more perverse idea. Only the US could invent something like a Supermax prison (although the Black Dolphin looks like no picnic, the Russian answer to abolishing the death penalty).
edit: I'll add that the US justice system (and probably any other) appears quite arbitrary in it's punishment. The sentences people receive and actually serve can be all over the map.
Also, have you investigated how much it costs the US Taxpayer to house a prisoner in a Supermax prison? If it was income, that prisoner would be making money in the upper 5%. It's also perverse to make the taxpayer pay so much to house a prisoner, who committed atrocious crimes normally worthy of death, for so long.
...if your argument is that the victim and not the State is entitled to justice.
This is bad enough normally but the death penalty creates even bigger incentives for people to claim the right person was convicted after the fact and not to look too closely at any new evidence which comes to light which could lead to the actually guilty party being found.
Emotional slogans should be abolished, end of discussion.
Tangential but I also strongly oppose lethal injection as a method of execution - if the state lacks the will to line up a proper firing squad, it has no business executing citizens in the first place.
https://nypost.com/2021/05/17/south-carolina-becomes-fourth-...
Not mentioned is that he was her neighbor. So, yeah, people saw him in the neighborhood, often.
I don't think most innocent people who are freed get any compensation in the U.S.
The federal government, the District of Columbia, and 36 states have compensation statutes of some form. The following 14 states do not: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
https://innocenceproject.org/compensating-wrongly-convicted/
So if things were fair and followed correctly and you were by mistake locked up that's too bad, regrettable but not the state's fault and as such the state does not need to compensate you.
Compensation would generally require the accused (the State, or it's agents in this case) to do something illegal, or at least legally incorrect, to be held legally responsible, and therefore financially responsible.
It wasn't until war was pretty much inevitable that many, including Lincoln, started to realize that moving towards freedom/equality was the winning move, strategically, practically, and politically.
Even after admitting equality was the answer, he still wrote plenty of extremely racist rants about he didn't mean that legal equality didn't mean that the races were ever capable of being equal, etc.
The other blatant example that people misinterpret is the 3/5 compromise in the constitution.
It often gets framed that the slave states valued slaves lives as less (3/5) than free persons, but remember that the northern states that were against slavery were also against counting slaves as constitutional persons at all: they wanted 0/5s.
You're saying that 0/5ths was more racist than 3/5ths? That makes no sense, because the benefit of being counted was being given to the slave owners. I don't see any ambiguity or subjectivity here.
There wasn't any concern from the north over women, children, or (tax-paying) indians being denied voting rights, yet still being counted for apportionment. No, slaves didn't enjoy the same level of rights as those groups, but this also wasn't about voting power being synonymous with apportionment numbers.
It was a politically convenient power grab, not an altruistic hill-to-die-on.
But I never heard anyone claim that so I don't know why it's worth refuting.
This actually gets the 3/5 compromise wrong worse than the view it (correctly) points to as being wrong.
The 3/5 compromise isn’t about “constitutional personhood” of slaves at all. The southern states actually wanted 5/5 (which they ended up after the war, when they replaced chattel slavery with penal slavery) and the northern states wanted 0/5 — which is how 3/5 was a “compromise” — because the issue wasn’t about how much legal personhood slaves were granted (which was zero and not being negotiated), it was about how much voting power in the federal government the people allowed to vote in slave states got as a bonus for having them in bondage. The position of the northern states was “if you keep humans in a condition where they are legally something like livestock or industrial machines, you don’t get any more extra votes for having them than you would for livestock or industrial machines.”
Yes- they (the south) wanted slaves to be counted 5/5 for apportionment for the purposes of representation. I'm not sure how that's getting it backwards. Women and children at the time had a similar "be counted, but don't get to vote" status.
My point is that the north wasn't being altruistic with a lot of slavery/ equality issues, but ruthlessly political. And that being anti-slavery at the time definitely didn't (necessarily) mean being pro-abolition (even if they labeled themselves abolitionists), or even anti-racist (not by the standards of the time and definitely not by the standards of today), which is how it's now often framed. And what the comment I was replying to implied.
Northern states being "anti-slavery" was not the evidence of moral high-ground that people give them credit for.
How is insisting that slave owners don’t also get bonus votes for holding slaves prove that? There are certainly arguments that the North was far from perfect on race issues (though I don’t think any of them come anywhere close to an argument that they didn’t have the moral high ground on racial issues compared to the South), but “didn’t give in to a demand that the South made specifically to secure the long-term future of slavery” is…not one of them.
It's odd that I hear people who say "Oh, in prison, they're safe from society." That's not true historically. Some of the most dangerous people in history were imprisoned, multiple times, and not killed for fear of public anger - only to get out of prison and wreak havoc.
Hitler was found guilty of treason, but was given a more humane 5 years in prison instead of the death penalty that would have historically been applied to treasonous people. He wrote Mein Kampf, got out of prison, started World War II, and killed millions.
Stalin was exiled to Siberia multiple times for his crimes including bank robbery, kidnappings, and extortion instead of being given death. He came back to Russia for the February Revolution, overthrew the Russian empire, started the Gulag system, and caused the deaths of millions.
For all we know, the Unabomber is in prison right now, but what happens if he escaped? It is not historically impossible, or even implausible, that he couldn't repeat history like many revolutionaries who were arrested, got out, and took over.
The point is more that there is zero guarantee historically that people in prison are completely safely isolated from society. And for that reason, let's say 90% of convictions to death (considering only 22 people died in 2019) were accurate and 2 were wrong. Considering how extremely dangerous historically and in reality the criminals being convicted to death are considered to be, it's a necessary evil to ensure justice and safety for the regular citizen.
For that reason, will some innocent people be sentence to death? Unlikely considering how much crime is required, but it is possible. But just because that could potentially happen doesn't invalidate the death penalty. If we invalidated everything because it could affect _just one_ person, why not have the police be able to break down doors at will because just one kidnapped person might be found? Why not throw out encryption on our phones because just one child molester might be found?
Until we invent time travel, incarceration for n number of years is also immutable.
Almost any form of justice is going to be immutable in some way, but it's not a reason to abandon the justice system.
Recently there was a case where the Finnish police arrested a person as a suspect for a robbery of a convenience store on basis of DNA evidence: the robber had dropped a plastic glove, presumably to hide fingerprints, on the floor of the store. Officers isolated DNA from the glove, searched archives, found a match with a person who had had some minor offense years prior, and brought him in for a questioning.
It turned out the DNA-matched first suspect was innocent when the police found a second suspect, who confessed to the crime and whose clothes fitted security camera footage of the robbery better. So how the first suspect's DNA arrived on the gloves at the crime scene? The investigators noticed he told he had visited the same mall where the second suspect (according to his testimony) had obtained the gloves prior to the robbery. Based on the security camera footage from the mall, the investigators concluded that the likeliest way the DNA of the first suspect ended up on the gloves the robber because they rode the same escalator.
Like this: https://images.cdn.yle.fi/image/upload//w_1200,h_1200,f_auto...
The lesson is, humans shed lot of skin cells around. The DNA from incriminating bodily fluids or similar is much better evidence than random DNA.
Source https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11811155 and Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
Or the idea of introducing most jurors to advanced statistics for the first time.
I mean, even a lot of reasonably intelligent, college educated professionals that have taken a statistics class get lots of things very very wrong, very often.
But now that I think about it, I bet defense counsel already does this. They did during the OJ trial.
At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and “did not trust this guy.” The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived.
Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and “make a B-line inside just real fast.” Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair.
Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as “Skip” walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder.
Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police.
---
AK Supreme Court in Lee's previous rape case[2]:
Evidence -- evidence of rape overwhelming -- trial court did not err in denying motion for directed verdict. -- There was overwhelming evidence of the rape and kidnapping from the testimony of the victim and the emergency-room physician; moreover, the evidence linking appellant to the assault was substantial and included fingerprints taken from the place of attack that matched appellant's and semen in the vaginal swabs taken from the victim and appellant's blood that matched, with the chance of an identical match being one in eighty-three million; the evidence was sufficient to support appellant's conviction for the crimes charged; the trial court did not err in denying his motion for directed verdict.
Lee was convicted of the kidnapping and rape of a seventeen- year-old girl in Jacksonville, Arkansas. The victim was abducted from her sister's home on the night of November 27, 1990, and was raped in a wooded area behind the house. The victim described her attacker as a tall, black male, but was unable to identify him because he prevented her from seeing his face during the attack. Evidence from a rape-kit examination performed on the victim was submitted to the state crime laboratory for analysis. Hair combings from the victim's clothing contained two Negroid hairs, and semen was identified in vaginal swabs taken from the rape exam...
I think you buried the lede:
> They even found moderate support for his DNA on the murder weapon.
Assuming the weapon was an old tool, it would be suspicious if there wasn’t DNA from third parties on it.
https://www.thv11.com/article/news/crime/ledell-lee-dna-test...
Lee's counsel had argued that they should be allowed to locate crime scene evidence collected in 1993, including a single hair and a Converse shoe with a pinhead-sized spot of human blood on it, for modern DNA testing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledell_Lee
The death penalty is 100% state-mandated revenge against the perpetrators of heinous crimes. It is been known for centuries (at least since the 1700s) as being completely ineffective as a deterrent, and it has been shunned by most of the western world, the USA remaining the last holdout of such a barbaric practice. Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not.
Well... duh. The death penalty being a punishment is a feature, not a bug. Nobody says the death penalty is about re-education. It's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime. If somebody molested my prepubescent daughter, I would say that person should _die_, as _punishment_, and that would be fair and just.
You are operating from the premise that justice is only about re-education. There are plenty of people who reject this view and say that justice is about both re-education and punishment for the crime. And that yes, justice involves punishment, not re-education.
"Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not."
What planet are you living on? There are lots of countries far less powerful than the US who execute far more prisoners than the US. The US executed 22 people, Egypt 32, Iran 251, Saudi Arabia 184, China over 1000, and Iraq over 100 in 2019.
The cost of lifetime imprisonment or execution is outright massive, in the millions over the lifetime of imprisonment. When you look at it in terms of economic output, these sentences are a calamity. For $2m USD spent on achieving a death penalty outcome, you could buy over 600k healthy school lunches for $3 each or pay the salary for one extra school teacher per year over a lifetime.
Also, as for why it seems to have no deterrence, how many people in the whole United States were killed? Only 22 in 2019, and you probably have never heard the names of even one of those people. If the fact of who was dying, for what crime, was highlighted more often in the media, the statistics may be significantly different.
Like, imagine if CNN and FOX had a simple image of who was dying each day with a two-or-three-sentence description of the crime, each time someone was put to death. To most people, that would be about every 2 weeks. Public awareness would explode. And criminals would have a far greater awareness that they could die for crimes.
None of those countries are neither Western nor democracies. All western democracies have been pushed by the influence of the others to abolish death penalty (for instance, it's a mandatory requirement in order to join the EU), the US being the only outlier. What if the situation was different, i.e. the US was an abolitionist country and only a small country like Luxembourg was the only remaining Western democracy to execute its citizens? It would quickly become a pariah among its peers.
> it's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime
The basic problem with this is that it _does not work_, and it does not accomplish anything than pleasing the victims of a crime. Killing convicts has been the default punishment for millenia and still it hasn't deterred anyone from doing crimes. It simply creates a state where people are harshly punished for what they've done, and that often is used as a way to avoid doing absolutely nothing to fix the issues that caused the offense to occur in the first place. Europe has abolished executions decades ago, with some places like Italy doing that in the '800s. Still, Europe has a much lower crime rate than the US, where prisons are much harsher and the worst convicts may face an execution for their crimes.
I don't view execution as punishment or revenge. I view it the same way I view putting down a rabid animal. I would never take pleasure or vengeful satisfaction in it, even if the criminal had hurt me or someone I knew.
2. It's not significantly more ethical to keep someone that is innocent locked up in a prison for their entire life. Someone being freed after 50 years in prison has had their life stolen from them, even if they were not actually executed. The stakes for life imprisonment are just as high as execution. Arguably, the torture of prison makes it worse than execution in many cases.
3. Execution makes sense in some rare cases, where the criminal is very clearly guilty (e.g. video evidence of them murdering multiple people) but only as a way to prevent them from hurting people in the future. Not as a deterrent, punishment, and not for revenge.
4. If I was a sociopath serial killer that couldn't help myself, I might view execution as a relief. Even if outwardly I was begging not to be executed, I might appreciate that my society had the courage to kill me instead of leaving me to rot in prison for 50 years.
5. Ultimately, we need to be able to cure these people and release them back into society. Science just isn't there yet, so for now we have execution and life imprisonment as our primary tools. No one should be satisfied with either option. They're both terrible options that are not as dissimilar as some portray them to be.
This. Whenever somebody says we shouldn't abolish the death penalty, I ask them how it would feel to be locked in a cage for 23 hours a day for up to 60 years (which in most Supermax prisons for people who committed atrocious crimes, is very much the case). If they admit that would be torturous, I then point out that the death penalty is death, abolishing the death penalty is torture and death. Which one is preferable? Which one is more humane?
I think that when you consider how much it costs to house a prisoner in a Supermax prison for that long, the sense of justice on behalf of the victims, and just for the prisoner's own sake to avoid being mentally and psychologically damaged by being solitary for so long (which we scientifically know will happen), the death penalty makes more sense than people give it credit for.
If they believed the world was so unjust that they went out and committed horrible crimes in the name of self-satisfaction or their personal beliefs on how to make the world just, they might just sit in a cell and feel good about what they did in perpetuity.
People like the Unabomber continue to sit around and pen manifestos justifying their own actions because of their political beliefs.
Hitler was found guilty of treason, but was given a more humane 5 years in prison instead of the death penalty that would have historically been applied to treasonous people. He wrote Mein Kampf, got out of prison, started World War II, and killed millions.
Stalin was exiled to Siberia multiple times for his crimes including bank robbery, kidnappings, and extortion instead of being given death. He came back to Russia for the February Revolution, overthrew the Russian empire, started the Gulag system, and caused the deaths of millions.
For all we know, the Unabomber is in prison right now, but what happens if he escaped? It is not historically impossible, or even implausible, that he couldn't repeat history like many revolutionaries who were arrested, got out, and took over.
There is zero guarantee historically that people in prison are 100% totally safely isolated from society and can't do harm in the future.
For all we know? What is your information that he's not?
If a person is being sentenced to death, this is a ridiculous statement and it betrays your worldview. It implies that they are only being put to death because of the rules that somebody came up with, rather than for having done things that are objectively, unspeakably, bad.
You don't get the death penalty for stealing purses at Walmart, protesting in the streets, or even killing somebody. You get it for unspeakable crimes that are far more broadly condemned than just the "rules of the area." You get it for bombing planes, child molestation, genocide. People that society should not pity as having a good heart in there somewhere.
These are people, who, frankly, we shouldn't sympathize with. We shouldn't feel bad that they are being put to death as if that is some miscarriage of justice. We should put them to death humanely, quickly upon conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, and resign that justice has been done the same way you would a rabid dog. You don't hate the dog or seek revenge upon it, but you know it must be done for the safety of everyone.
No betrayal there. That is my worldview. Cultures through history varied a lot on which crimes were deemed worthy of capital punishment. Even now as we speak there are people who has been sentenced to death because someone saw them tear pages out of a book. Where I am from that is either not a crime or minor property damage. So clearly we as humans can’t agree on what is “objectively bad”. Even if we argue that those other cultures got it wrong and we have it right on who is objectively bad our processes are not deterministic. The same person if tried again with a different jurry might get acquited. Not always, and not and not every case, but often enough to undermine the notion that we are dealing with some kind of objective badness.
> it must be done for the safety of everyone
The idea that we have these dangerous criminals who cannot be contained safely in any other way than by killing them is a comic book plotpoint not reality. We have the technology and the resources to keep any humans safely contained if we choose to. We can even do this in a non-cruel way if that is what we want to do.
If you are concerned about cost then it's worth noting that execution (in the US) is more expensive than life in prison.
That leaves the "sense of justice". Given the high likelihood that the government already has killed innocent people, and the likelihood that it will continue to do so, that seems insufficient to me.
2, Its significantly more ethical to potentially give some of an innocent persons life back and make some restitution. Than none.
3, There is never cases where we are sure; There can always be new evidence or a new way to look at old evidence that changes the amount guilt or innocence. To think you can be sure for all time about a set of events, even if you were there, is just wrong. If we replace reasonable doubt with no doubt at all then No one would be convicted of anything.
It's only hypocritical if the justice system claims to be solely about re-education. But you point out two other goals—deterrence and isolation—and there really are people out there who believe punishment is a moral good and a necessary component of justice.
The only problems I have with death penalty is potential for abuse (to be clear, I don't believe it's the present danger, more of a future danger if the death penalty was normalized), and wrong convictions (and that I think would mostly be solved by requiring multiple separate convictions before it's applied).
And on the matter of death penalty, does one lead with an attitude of "Why should we help unless we owe you?" Is that the right moral motivation for death penalty? I mean, that's the attitude of big business in commerce.
I am morally indifferent between life imprisonment and death, but life imprisonment costs more and can fail. On the other hand, the original comment framed death penalty as "hypocrisy" of "justice being about re-education"; I am saying justice doesn't have to be primarily about re-education, no supporter of death penalty argues that; there's no hypocrisy. I think the removal is the most important component. Punishment and re-education should be prioritized depending on the crime, but in any case both are just nice, optional perks.
Again there is this framing about what is deserved and what is owed.
This is in contrast to the framing of what is best for society — if your prevailing theory is that some people are safe and some people are dangerous (as opposed to some people are criminals and some people are owed), then those individuals who still have a good future story ought be candidates for rehabilitation. From this perspective, it is not a matter of what is a "perk" and what is owed, but rather what the state has to gain.
Legal cases are often constructed with testimony, unreliable evidence, and chance. Its an effort to increase likelihood of certainty using very unreliable data. And human intuition really sucks when it comes to probability calculations.
I think that film as no other really captures how wrong we can be, even if we “feel” certain about it. It might sound like a tangent but I think it narrates how errors like this are possible more eloquently than I would ever be able to do on my own.
I think those films really capture what happens when we only imprison killers, even if we feel certain that there would be no public harm from handing down a life sentence instead of the death penalty.
But you can release someone, even after 20 years. "Oops it wasn't you who raped and strangled that child sorry". The death penalty is final however.
Sometimes it's necessary, but most of the time it's just generating a lot of low-information outrage.
(This is apart from the larger question of whether we should abolish the death penalty. But that's not really news.)
Not necessary because it should or shouldn't have been changed, but because the obvious propaganda was so damn effective. And it wasn't blanket coverage by every local news outlet, but constant, serialized coverage from one, arguably dying, newspaper.
Reminds you of just how powerful even a single media outlet can be when it wants to.
Also, that any future that newspapers might have will require selling influence, instead of advertising and subscriptions.
In this case, the neighbor saw the suspect go into the victim's house and then leave, and followed him.
At the suspects next stop there was a women who knew him. This is the woman who later ID'd him.
This isn't a case of a botched police lineup, or a stranger relying on memory.
Each false conviction, plea bargain or guilty plea should count as -20 convictions.
It all comes down to incentives. Murdering this man was probably great for all of the involved people’s careers (and I’d be surprised if he is their only victim). If it was a potential career-ender, they’d find some other way to game the system, or others would be promoted instead of them.
The same story plays out millions of times a year in the US (though usually with lesser crimes); it’s clearly a systemic issue.
-20 legal points for each aquitted defendant that goes on to actually be a repeat criminal.
Death is irreversible and what would be the correct punishment for the judge or prosecutor here?
If you ever think judges, state attorney's and prosecutors are humans of elevated morals, then I know where you can buy bridges for a good price.
To use the state apparatus when sending someone to death row after interpreting "beyond reasonable suspicion" in such a liberal, reckless way is pretty much first degree murder. Monetary fine will not reanimate the dead and is footed by taxpayer money. The death penalty is a ridiculous and archaic concept, it is no better than blood feuds between families or gangs, just applied by the state instead. It should have no place in a civil legal system.
Someone said Stalin and Hitler barely avoided execution. Sure thing, they were some monsters, but who elevated them to power? People with the same mentality who welcome the death penalty. Neither Hitler nor Stalin would have ever happened if they did not have wide support from coward and dumb citizens along with whatever financed them. Stupidity and cowardice are not fixed via death penalty.
This is how the justice system hides behind its sins: Judges/Officials/Prosecutors say "there is no blood on my hands", Lee was "lawfully executed". Sidestepping the question.