>where the three prison system volunteer shooters were
It's strange to me that this isn't simply automated, although personally I don't think any state should be in the business of killing anyone outside of war and similar circumstances. I don't think states are capable of making these sorts of decisions accurately enough.
Good instinct -- this is absolutely being explored in the academy[1], and IMO it's only a matter of time before Palantir, Anduril, or even Sauron (yes, all real companies interested in ideas like this...) start pitching such a product to the government.
Besides the arguments I gave above for a firing squad being philosophically superior, it's just clearly way cheaper and way less likely to go wrong, especially if you don't even need to find three prison guards who are ready and able to shoot accurately.
I saw Richard Moore die Nov. 1, looking serenely at the ceiling as his lawyer, who became close to him while fighting for his life over a decade, wept...
Also etched in my mind: Sigmon talking or mouthing toward his lawyer, trying to let him know he was OK before the hood went on.
It literally sickens me that we've come so far yet have successfully seemed to extract the violence from capital punishment -- superficially, of course. There are certainly philosophical & political arguments for granting the state permission to murder captives, but I feel we should at the very least agree to not hide it; for our own sakes and those of our descendants, if nothing else. In this view, the firing squad is something of a macabre improvement.
Really, it's the same way I feel about carnism: I'm not prepared to personally chastise someone for drawing a different line on when human pleasure outweighs the moral rights of animals, but you must acknowledge what you're doing. Again: failing to speak clearly about our moral choices is a dangerous, dangerous road.
Killing is a violent act. If you are unable to look at your actions as they are, if you must paralyze a man so he does not yell and moan as he dies, you have lost the moral authority to take his life.
The whole case of Richard Moore is confusing to me.
He apparently killed in self-defense, three jurors requested his sentenced be changed, and he was considered harmless and rehabilitated in prison. Mentoring inmates and helping guards keep peace.
>failing to speak clearly about our moral choices is a dangerous, dangerous road.
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes By Stephen Colbert about Christianity and the US:
"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it."
There's always the unresolved concern of the state killing people amid the uncertainty of a criminal conviction process.
There's also an element of incompetence and cruelty to consider when executions cannot be done mercifully, ideally instantly and painlessly as a goal. Seems we stray pretty far from any such ideal though:
"In its annual report on the use of capital punishment in the country, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) said on Friday that seven of the 20 attempted executions by US states in 2022 were “visibly problematic”."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/16/us-botched-executi...
The state/federal definitions of botched executions might be more conservative than more detailed analyses done by advocacy groups like Reprieve, so what the rates are might be higher depending on the exact definition of a botched execution.
It's not clear that firing squad 'fixes' this or is more merciful in terms of having less botched execution, but maybe that's not the point since the condemned prisoner opted for it. Does that matter?
Worse still, there are pop groups that have apparently have significantly worse outcomes in US executions, reasons unknown. It's pretty horrible to look at an overall botched-execution rate when it belies horrible outcomes for specific groups:
"One of the most significant findings to emerge from the regression analysis is that Black people had 220% higher odds of suffering a botched execution than white people, accounting for gender and age.
Analysis of the lethal injection executions conducted in the modern era of capital punishment found that 8% of executions of Black people were botched (37 executions out of a total of 465 executions), compared to 4% of executions of white people in the same time period (28 out of a total of 780 executions)."
https://reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/04/2024...
So I don't want to argue with you here, since there really is no point. But please note that I never expressed my view on anything but your limited mental capacity here, which you keep proving to be rather low sentence by sentence.
I feel bad for the ad hominem tho, flame wars typically don't lead anywhere. Just, please try to use your nugget a bit before posting.
What was your flagged comment? I missed it before it was buried.
Capital punishment is flawed because it's a permanent (certain) solution to an inherently uncertain problem of whether people are guilty. We can't be 100% sure we aren't killing the innocent, and I don't want to enable the State to be more of a death machine capable of killing its political enemies than it already is.
The thought that any one ideology is going to remain in control of such a system is unlikely, so in our system, this means the guns alternate between who they're pointed at in a twisted pendulum swing or feedback loop. Making it easy for the State to kill is just building a weapon for the baying mobs to get hold of, and that's probably going to be the end.
As to your point on cruelty, it's sort of clumsily inherent in executions and no longer a feature, if it ever was. There's little evidence deterrence exists today, if it ever did. If it takes cruelty to the point of putting terror in the hearts of people to be a deterrent, it's not workable. The West isn't going to have crosses, quarterings, public hangings, etc, and that's just the tame stuff we've tried over the ages. Physically, anyway -- solitary confinement is up there mentally, if you value inflicting suffering. A race to the bottom in terms of brutality isn't going to bring about a new great empire or help us maintain this one, imo.
I don't think the liberal societies built on rule of law really have an answer to growing contingents of the bottom 10-20% of men. The solutions of antiquity are probably just wholly incompatible today, so I'd say we're going to have to spend lots of money to push those people down in society rather than out in exile. That means things like conservatorship to camps to cells, at great cost.
Idk if it’s still up, but your comment was vile. You did not just mention that the Romans had worse punishments -which would have been totally irrelevant in itself- but to apply these methods today, as if capital punishment isn’t dubious enough.
I don't see what telling them means here, if they had no families would that matter? It still doesn't change the end result ... and that's assuming you kill the right person. States aren't good at that.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot with this account, in multiple threads. We have to ban accounts that do this because it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This was a well-written article, I appreciate the simple journalism on display. A reporter dedicating themselves to an area, showing up faithfully and reporting their observations without bias or personal commentary. What else could we ask for? I read it on the AP app and appreciated still having a source for this kind of thing.
27 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 80.7 ms ] threadIt's strange to me that this isn't simply automated, although personally I don't think any state should be in the business of killing anyone outside of war and similar circumstances. I don't think states are capable of making these sorts of decisions accurately enough.
Besides the arguments I gave above for a firing squad being philosophically superior, it's just clearly way cheaper and way less likely to go wrong, especially if you don't even need to find three prison guards who are ready and able to shoot accurately.
[1] Execution by Lethal Autonomous Mechanism: How Anti-Capital Punishment Arguments Might Lead to Automated Executions—and Why Such Automation Must Be Prevented: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5146574
Really, it's the same way I feel about carnism: I'm not prepared to personally chastise someone for drawing a different line on when human pleasure outweighs the moral rights of animals, but you must acknowledge what you're doing. Again: failing to speak clearly about our moral choices is a dangerous, dangerous road.
Killing is a violent act. If you are unable to look at your actions as they are, if you must paralyze a man so he does not yell and moan as he dies, you have lost the moral authority to take his life.
He apparently killed in self-defense, three jurors requested his sentenced be changed, and he was considered harmless and rehabilitated in prison. Mentoring inmates and helping guards keep peace.
What good came from his death?
https://apnews.com/article/south-carolina-execution-richard-...
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes By Stephen Colbert about Christianity and the US:
"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it."
There's also an element of incompetence and cruelty to consider when executions cannot be done mercifully, ideally instantly and painlessly as a goal. Seems we stray pretty far from any such ideal though:
"In its annual report on the use of capital punishment in the country, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) said on Friday that seven of the 20 attempted executions by US states in 2022 were “visibly problematic”." https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/16/us-botched-executi...
The same policy group estimates a 3% failure rate for executions from 1890-2010, with lethal injection at more than twice that, at 7%. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/botched-executions
The state/federal definitions of botched executions might be more conservative than more detailed analyses done by advocacy groups like Reprieve, so what the rates are might be higher depending on the exact definition of a botched execution.
It's not clear that firing squad 'fixes' this or is more merciful in terms of having less botched execution, but maybe that's not the point since the condemned prisoner opted for it. Does that matter?
Worse still, there are pop groups that have apparently have significantly worse outcomes in US executions, reasons unknown. It's pretty horrible to look at an overall botched-execution rate when it belies horrible outcomes for specific groups:
"One of the most significant findings to emerge from the regression analysis is that Black people had 220% higher odds of suffering a botched execution than white people, accounting for gender and age.
Analysis of the lethal injection executions conducted in the modern era of capital punishment found that 8% of executions of Black people were botched (37 executions out of a total of 465 executions), compared to 4% of executions of white people in the same time period (28 out of a total of 780 executions)." https://reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/04/2024...
We have to pretend that Rome didn't practice a violent and brutal death penalty?
We have to pretend the Pax Romana was fake?
I feel bad for the ad hominem tho, flame wars typically don't lead anywhere. Just, please try to use your nugget a bit before posting.
Capital punishment is flawed because it's a permanent (certain) solution to an inherently uncertain problem of whether people are guilty. We can't be 100% sure we aren't killing the innocent, and I don't want to enable the State to be more of a death machine capable of killing its political enemies than it already is.
The thought that any one ideology is going to remain in control of such a system is unlikely, so in our system, this means the guns alternate between who they're pointed at in a twisted pendulum swing or feedback loop. Making it easy for the State to kill is just building a weapon for the baying mobs to get hold of, and that's probably going to be the end.
As to your point on cruelty, it's sort of clumsily inherent in executions and no longer a feature, if it ever was. There's little evidence deterrence exists today, if it ever did. If it takes cruelty to the point of putting terror in the hearts of people to be a deterrent, it's not workable. The West isn't going to have crosses, quarterings, public hangings, etc, and that's just the tame stuff we've tried over the ages. Physically, anyway -- solitary confinement is up there mentally, if you value inflicting suffering. A race to the bottom in terms of brutality isn't going to bring about a new great empire or help us maintain this one, imo.
I don't think the liberal societies built on rule of law really have an answer to growing contingents of the bottom 10-20% of men. The solutions of antiquity are probably just wholly incompatible today, so I'd say we're going to have to spend lots of money to push those people down in society rather than out in exile. That means things like conservatorship to camps to cells, at great cost.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.