A beautiful statement by Newsom. Prisoners rotting away in a supermax prison is a much better punishment than the 15 minutes of fame they get from their execution.
The crimes are horrific and the victims families want revenge, that’s what life prison sentences are for. Fundamentally, the state should not be an arbiter of life and death.
> Fundamentally, the state should not be an arbiter of life and death
In the U.S. the state has never been an arbiter of life and death. A jury of peers decide that.
In a state where we struggle to house people, home prices are exploding through the roof, who bears the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need increasingly more care?
"it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer." – Benjamin Franklin
That's a founding father of the USA, talking about imprisonment. When you extend that to state-sanctioned execution... capital punishment makes no sense as it cannot be undone.
> In the U.S. the state has never been an arbiter of life and death. A jury of peers decide that.
In at least some US states, the jury decides guilt/innocence but the judge determines the sentences for guilty verdicts. So in those cases the jury of peers is certainly not being the arbiter of life and death.
Judges in the US have gone completely off the rails.
The constitution puts no limits on the power of a jury to acquit someone and it's absolutely despicable that judges have tried to usurp that authority under that pretext of following the rule of law.
If we want to make it harder for juries to acquit someone, then that should be written in the law; not invented by judges. Jury instructions must follow what the law says; not what judges want it to say.
> A beautiful statement by Newsom. Prisoners rotting away in a supermax prison is a much better punishment than the 15 minutes of fame they get from their execution.
and the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need more care?
> and the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need more care?
Imagine using _just saving some money_ to justify the death of a person. What a country.
> It's perfectly reasonable for a person to decide where to spend their tax dollars
No, it's not. You don't get the right to audit where "your" dollars go. Where the government should better use EVERYBODY's money, sure. But when an USian says "I don't want MY tax dollars to be used in this", is usually because they'd rather apply a fast revenge against any criminal for any crime, not caring if the person is maybe innocent (and trusting their judgement magically will allow them to have perfect knowledge of culpability), or they just don't want those dollars they believe they have the right to audit go to something as, for instance, socialized health care, where "their" dollars accidentally could benefit someone with the wrong skin color.
The speed at which USians classify people they don't like in the "unworthy of human rights" category is truly frightening.
As others have said, the death penalty is actually more costly to the state than simply housing people in prison for life.
The US is also the only "first world" nation that still has the capital punishment.
Our justice system is flawed by bias and careerism (the same is true anywhere, and the US is no exception). The fact that innocent people sometimes exonerated for crimes years or decades later is reason enough to ban the death penalty forever, IMO. Every time an innocent person is put to death, that's horrible itself, but it also means the real offender is still out there somewhere. Even if it happens 1% of the time that's still dozens of people over the years.
I would rather let the worst criminals stay alive in prison if it means one innocent person isn't put to death so they can appeal their case.
Should the state implement a system where anyone sentenced to over X amount of years in prison is automatically executed? Should something like the potential value a person can provide to society be considered a mitigating factor in sentencing?
Is it? It's no picnic, but if someone gave me the choice of being executed or live the rest of my life in prison, I'm choosing prison without a doubt. I'd probably get to knock off most of the books on my reading list before dying
I disagree. Just finished a book about a serial killer who relished fame. He really didn’t want to die. He fought death sentence hard to try to live rest of life in supermax prison. I think the preferences of those facing this predicament, who tend to appeal in every possible way is instructive.
‘The decision to spare death row inmates is largely symbolic in a state that has not executed an inmate since 2006, though experts say it could save millions of dollars in court costs each year. Only 13 inmates have been executed since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978.’
He’s a politician for sure. Make a big scene out of nothing.
As a political move it's not a bad one. It saves the state money (eliminating the mandatory appeals), and it forces the pro-life fiscal conservatives who want to oppose it to explain that they're actually pro-death and in favor of spending more money, not less. Which puts them in a conundrum. Espouse their actual views and let their opponents use it against them, or stay quiet and irritate their constituents who want them to be in favor of executions (irrespective of the cost).
And all the while, it really changes nothing about the status quo of executions in the state, they weren't going to happen before this commutation, and they won't happen after.
The apparent contradiction between "pro-life" and "pro-death-penalty", and "anti-spending" and "pro-expensive-appeals" has always been addressed by "tough on crime saves more lives" and "its worth it because the death penalty is a deterrent".
Accusations of hypocrisy generally only work if they're coming from inside the house. Basically, if you know that I already disagree with you on a fundamental level, you're not going to trust that I have a deep enough grasp of your position to point out a real inconsistency.
In what way is he making a scene? All he did was release a written statement, in the midst of ubiquitous coverage of a hugely significant national election. If anything he is trying to minimize publicity.
It’s quite shocking that innocent people get convicted of first degree murder. In theory, premeditation beyond a reasonable doubt must be proven. And you need consensus of 12 people!
To me this is proof of failure of system to educate a sufficient majority of people to think rigorously.
why? Say someone is murdered, and it doesn't take much forensics to determine that they were attacked, restrained while alive, then shot in the back of the head execution style.
Or maybe it's even more blatent. police find a note from the day before that says "im going to kill you" then they end up dead.
Would you construe that the commission of those murders was premeditated? almost certainly yes, ergo whoever it gets pinned on, innocent or not will get premeditation applied, it doesn't take much extra here.
Evidence of pre-meditation !== evidence the suspect applied pre-meditation. You need to tie the premeditation to the suspect, I think. In your example, if you can't prove the suspect wrote the note, I don't think you can convict on first degree murder.
You don't need a jury. Almost every murder conviction in the USA is via a plea deal, and another percent are "bench trials" where you risk the judge's opinion instead of the jury.
The reason so many innocent people end up with life convictions is because so many face the death penalty and take a plea for life to avoid it, even knowing they are innocent.
Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong
by Brandon Garrett (2011)
"In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA."
Let's say the sentencing range after trial is 20 to 60 years (typical across the USA).
Let's also say you killed someone with a gun. That might add 25 years onto the base sentence (e.g. Illinois).
The prosecutor comes to you and says "If you go to trial you're facing 45 years minimum from the judge. Might be 50, 60, 70 years. Trial is a lot of work from my office, and a lot of money. We're going to have to bring in forensic experts and go through reams of police reports. I have a lot of other criminals that need my time, so I'll do you a favor. Plead out for 30 years today."
Also, murders can easily take five years to get through to disposition. Look at Cook County, you have Augustin Toscano who still hasn't got to trial after 15 years.
In that time you are sitting in a county jail. County jails generally have, by far, the worst conditions of any institution a prisoner can be held in. I deposed a warden once to ask him why. "Because these are short term facilities. The average stay is under 30 days. In fact, most people stay less than 48 hours." This is because they bond out, so the stats are skewed and don't provide for the edge cases.
Everybody in a county jail wants to get out of a county jail at almost any cost. I remember a case from a few years back when a homeless guy was snatched up coming out of a food bank with a bag of white powder. He was charged with possession of cocaine and he plead guilty and was sentenced to ten years. Just before shipping out to the big house the test results came back: it was powdered milk. The judge asked him why he plead guilty. "Because I couldn't stand another day in the county."
Fair enough, and fascinating. I guess I’m conflating first degree murder with “death penalty”. Please tell me nobody is pleading guilty and getting the death penalty.
There are also many cases of people waving their right to appeal once sentenced, which can cause challenges for their counsel (from the link: "Should a death-row inmate who wishes to waive his appeals be viewed as a client making a legal decision to accept the justness of his punishment, or as a person seeking the aid of the state in committing suicide?"): https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
There are difficult issues everywhere you look with the death penalty. The one I can't understand how people get past is execution of the wrongfully convicted. Any justice system is flawed and makes mistakes - it's just too complicated to establish absolute truth when so many people with diverse motivations are involved in the process. We can save money by just putting them in prison until they die, giving us the option to partially undo the sentence in cases where innocence is later established.
Project Innocence helps exonerate innocent people. They claim that about 30% of their “clients” had admitted guilt. My understanding is that it’s mostly based on DNA evidence so not really a matter of opinion: https://innocenceproject.org/exonerations-data/
“Why” seems to be essentially coercion from the interviewers. People told that if they admit guilt then they’ll get a slap on the wrist and be let go, else go to costly trial etc.
Yeah, that's what they did with Kevin Fox who spent 9 months in the jail getting regular off-camera beatings from the guards, because he'd been charged with raping and killing his own daughter, before the prosecution admitted they'd been hiding exculpatory DNA evidence.
After winning a $16m verdict against the corrupt cops and prosecutor he moved to Alabama where he was hit in a head-on collision by a car in the wrong lane and perished.
Sodium Thiopental could be used to weed out the criminals from innocent, but its use is often considered a violation of the 5th amendment. That's a key phrase equivalent for, "Oh! Oh!, they can prove my guilt with that, regardless of the amount of money and power I have." As such, both the criminals and the innocent will inevitably be sent down the river or the grave while ideologues continue to engage in political debates related to the drug's legality or usage in a criminal setting.
I would want a lot of peer reviewed research before I considered "truth serums" as providing anything actionable. The evidence would have to be absolutely overwhelming.
Read up on the Doolin case, which is mentioned in TFA. At best it's an incredibly shaky conviction based on a badly mishandled legal process, at worst it's an appalling miscarriage of justice.
We spend a disproportionate amount of time/resources on the 10 deaths of people who have actually committed violent crimes.
FSD, Accelerating cures via AI, safety automation all save 10,000x more innocent deaths. But reams of books/articles/philosophy/debates around capital punishment compared to accelerating technology.
Here's a fun one: crime lab scientist frauded and lied about it all and she just happened to get caught. Terrible that it was not caught earlier. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g22gb9gSPjo
What are the reasons to not believe that this is just a stunt designed to support a flimsy and unprincipled narrative of his shifting away from the side of the party closest in culture to the losers of the midterms?
Maybe not in a general election either (even though I normally practice harm reduction voting)... but if he's the Democratic nominee in 2028 we're already off the cliff.
About half of the people in this thread are of the it is better that 10 guilty people go free than one innocent suffer, which is the traditional American view, while it seems that the other half are more in Von Bismarck territory, who said “it is better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape.”
Well, when a lot of crime is committed by repeat offenders it’s going to change how you view these things. If we were a lower crime society things would be different.
Letting the guilty live is mercy without justice. Society is bearing the cost of one who would see the innocent dead. Simply saying “death penalty bad” is cruelty to law abiding members of society, and that will quickly lead to chaos. Sacrificing the good of the whole for the benefit of an ill intended minority.
I’m not saying it’s black and white, but there is a balance to these decisions.
My position is that if we'd like to lower recidivism then treating prisoners poorly is a very bad idea.
Society is bearing the cost (in repeat offending) of treating everyone who goes to prison as a person incapable of acting pro-socially.
It's not just that the death penalty is cruel (though I believe that it is), its that much of the carcerial state is there to do everything possible to make it hard to do anything other than remain a criminal once a person has been to prison.
From my position, much of the cruelty and retribution against criminals (ranging from poor conditions to bad healthcare to lack of post-incarceration support) just increases recidivism and that a real problem for all of us:
cruelty in the name of retribution is the real sacrifice of the good of the whole.
I wish we would shift from a punishment strategy to a rehabilitation strategy.
Maybe we still determine they stay in prison for life but i think we'd feel much better as a society for at least trying to change their behaviors rather than just essentializing them as evil and determining punishment helps us feel better or deters behavior.
I’m pro rehabilitation but I also recognize that some people really are just evil.
I don’t get a sense of pleasure from the idea of them getting punished. Rather, I feel like society benefits when those sociopaths and psychopaths are locked away from it.
Of course, the bar for life imprisonment should be high. I also want to make it clear that I do not think all criminals are irredeemable - only that some are.
There's a lot of people with a lot of undiagnosed mental illnesses.
A good percentage of those can be treated with medication, but also a good percentage of those will not continue any medication they are prescribed and their "evil" thoughts will resurface.
Another percent of people are born with conditions such as severe psychopathy that just seem outright evil, even though they just got given a bad hand in life.
Punishment either has zero effect, or the opposite effect on many of these people. Additionally, prison treats people so severely that they come out with a ton of side-effects which make them vastly more anti-social than when they entered.
Some people are irredeemable, but we need better systems for dealing with those. Right now we put them in mental facilities -- and they do need to be kept away from society -- but we need to take into account those people are born with those defects and they are not the product of their own making.
For the ones who are redeemable we need better support. Rehabilitation is unbelievably difficult. There is almost zero money for programs inside prisons that would help anyone on the outside. All the money goes into the punishment bit, because that is easy. The programs that do exist (cleaning, serving food, stamping license plates) are mostly "do busywork, it will make an honest citizen out of you."
Visit any halfway house where parolees are trying to reenter society and see how badly the system is stacked against their success. It's hard enough for a regular Joe to find a job in 2026, never mind someone who has no money, no phone, no bank account, no address and a criminal record.
Criminal justice is the hardest of the hard problems. Maybe ASI can figure it out...
64 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 42.5 ms ] threadIn the U.S. the state has never been an arbiter of life and death. A jury of peers decide that.
In a state where we struggle to house people, home prices are exploding through the roof, who bears the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need increasingly more care?
That's a founding father of the USA, talking about imprisonment. When you extend that to state-sanctioned execution... capital punishment makes no sense as it cannot be undone.
In at least some US states, the jury decides guilt/innocence but the judge determines the sentences for guilty verdicts. So in those cases the jury of peers is certainly not being the arbiter of life and death.
The constitution puts no limits on the power of a jury to acquit someone and it's absolutely despicable that judges have tried to usurp that authority under that pretext of following the rule of law.
If we want to make it harder for juries to acquit someone, then that should be written in the law; not invented by judges. Jury instructions must follow what the law says; not what judges want it to say.
and the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need more care?
Imagine using _just saving some money_ to justify the death of a person. What a country.
- provide housing, education and medical coverage to people who are trying their best to make a living
- support a person who has killed atleast one more person for reasons that a jury of 12 people found unreasonable
Money unfortunately is zero sum.
No, it's not. You don't get the right to audit where "your" dollars go. Where the government should better use EVERYBODY's money, sure. But when an USian says "I don't want MY tax dollars to be used in this", is usually because they'd rather apply a fast revenge against any criminal for any crime, not caring if the person is maybe innocent (and trusting their judgement magically will allow them to have perfect knowledge of culpability), or they just don't want those dollars they believe they have the right to audit go to something as, for instance, socialized health care, where "their" dollars accidentally could benefit someone with the wrong skin color.
The speed at which USians classify people they don't like in the "unworthy of human rights" category is truly frightening.
The US is also the only "first world" nation that still has the capital punishment.
Our justice system is flawed by bias and careerism (the same is true anywhere, and the US is no exception). The fact that innocent people sometimes exonerated for crimes years or decades later is reason enough to ban the death penalty forever, IMO. Every time an innocent person is put to death, that's horrible itself, but it also means the real offender is still out there somewhere. Even if it happens 1% of the time that's still dozens of people over the years.
I would rather let the worst criminals stay alive in prison if it means one innocent person isn't put to death so they can appeal their case.
He’s a politician for sure. Make a big scene out of nothing.
And all the while, it really changes nothing about the status quo of executions in the state, they weren't going to happen before this commutation, and they won't happen after.
Sure it does.
A lot of them still aren't aware that the death penalty costs so much more because of the intense appeals process.
Accusations of hypocrisy generally only work if they're coming from inside the house. Basically, if you know that I already disagree with you on a fundamental level, you're not going to trust that I have a deep enough grasp of your position to point out a real inconsistency.
To me this is proof of failure of system to educate a sufficient majority of people to think rigorously.
Or maybe it's even more blatent. police find a note from the day before that says "im going to kill you" then they end up dead.
Would you construe that the commission of those murders was premeditated? almost certainly yes, ergo whoever it gets pinned on, innocent or not will get premeditation applied, it doesn't take much extra here.
The reason so many innocent people end up with life convictions is because so many face the death penalty and take a plea for life to avoid it, even knowing they are innocent.
Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong by Brandon Garrett (2011)
"In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA."
https://www.themarshallproject.org/books?share=book-10
Amazing book on how this happens.
Let's say the sentencing range after trial is 20 to 60 years (typical across the USA).
Let's also say you killed someone with a gun. That might add 25 years onto the base sentence (e.g. Illinois).
The prosecutor comes to you and says "If you go to trial you're facing 45 years minimum from the judge. Might be 50, 60, 70 years. Trial is a lot of work from my office, and a lot of money. We're going to have to bring in forensic experts and go through reams of police reports. I have a lot of other criminals that need my time, so I'll do you a favor. Plead out for 30 years today."
Also, murders can easily take five years to get through to disposition. Look at Cook County, you have Augustin Toscano who still hasn't got to trial after 15 years.
In that time you are sitting in a county jail. County jails generally have, by far, the worst conditions of any institution a prisoner can be held in. I deposed a warden once to ask him why. "Because these are short term facilities. The average stay is under 30 days. In fact, most people stay less than 48 hours." This is because they bond out, so the stats are skewed and don't provide for the edge cases.
Everybody in a county jail wants to get out of a county jail at almost any cost. I remember a case from a few years back when a homeless guy was snatched up coming out of a food bank with a bag of white powder. He was charged with possession of cocaine and he plead guilty and was sentenced to ten years. Just before shipping out to the big house the test results came back: it was powdered milk. The judge asked him why he plead guilty. "Because I couldn't stand another day in the county."
There are also many cases of people waving their right to appeal once sentenced, which can cause challenges for their counsel (from the link: "Should a death-row inmate who wishes to waive his appeals be viewed as a client making a legal decision to accept the justness of his punishment, or as a person seeking the aid of the state in committing suicide?"): https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
There are difficult issues everywhere you look with the death penalty. The one I can't understand how people get past is execution of the wrongfully convicted. Any justice system is flawed and makes mistakes - it's just too complicated to establish absolute truth when so many people with diverse motivations are involved in the process. We can save money by just putting them in prison until they die, giving us the option to partially undo the sentence in cases where innocence is later established.
“Why” seems to be essentially coercion from the interviewers. People told that if they admit guilt then they’ll get a slap on the wrist and be let go, else go to costly trial etc.
https://chicagojustice.org/inside-kevin-foxs-appellate-court...
After winning a $16m verdict against the corrupt cops and prosecutor he moved to Alabama where he was hit in a head-on collision by a car in the wrong lane and perished.
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/topic-detail...
We spend a disproportionate amount of time/resources on the 10 deaths of people who have actually committed violent crimes.
FSD, Accelerating cures via AI, safety automation all save 10,000x more innocent deaths. But reams of books/articles/philosophy/debates around capital punishment compared to accelerating technology.
Sad state of humanity
Still won't vote for him in a primary.
Maybe not in a general election either (even though I normally practice harm reduction voting)... but if he's the Democratic nominee in 2028 we're already off the cliff.
so, that is interesting I guess.
https://medium.com/luminasticity/commentary-on-n-guilty-men-...
Letting the guilty live is mercy without justice. Society is bearing the cost of one who would see the innocent dead. Simply saying “death penalty bad” is cruelty to law abiding members of society, and that will quickly lead to chaos. Sacrificing the good of the whole for the benefit of an ill intended minority.
I’m not saying it’s black and white, but there is a balance to these decisions.
Society is bearing the cost (in repeat offending) of treating everyone who goes to prison as a person incapable of acting pro-socially.
It's not just that the death penalty is cruel (though I believe that it is), its that much of the carcerial state is there to do everything possible to make it hard to do anything other than remain a criminal once a person has been to prison.
From my position, much of the cruelty and retribution against criminals (ranging from poor conditions to bad healthcare to lack of post-incarceration support) just increases recidivism and that a real problem for all of us:
cruelty in the name of retribution is the real sacrifice of the good of the whole.
I thought it was just about not killing people. They're still prisoners.
Maybe we still determine they stay in prison for life but i think we'd feel much better as a society for at least trying to change their behaviors rather than just essentializing them as evil and determining punishment helps us feel better or deters behavior.
I don’t get a sense of pleasure from the idea of them getting punished. Rather, I feel like society benefits when those sociopaths and psychopaths are locked away from it.
Of course, the bar for life imprisonment should be high. I also want to make it clear that I do not think all criminals are irredeemable - only that some are.
A good percentage of those can be treated with medication, but also a good percentage of those will not continue any medication they are prescribed and their "evil" thoughts will resurface.
Another percent of people are born with conditions such as severe psychopathy that just seem outright evil, even though they just got given a bad hand in life.
Punishment either has zero effect, or the opposite effect on many of these people. Additionally, prison treats people so severely that they come out with a ton of side-effects which make them vastly more anti-social than when they entered.
Some people are irredeemable, but we need better systems for dealing with those. Right now we put them in mental facilities -- and they do need to be kept away from society -- but we need to take into account those people are born with those defects and they are not the product of their own making.
For the ones who are redeemable we need better support. Rehabilitation is unbelievably difficult. There is almost zero money for programs inside prisons that would help anyone on the outside. All the money goes into the punishment bit, because that is easy. The programs that do exist (cleaning, serving food, stamping license plates) are mostly "do busywork, it will make an honest citizen out of you."
Visit any halfway house where parolees are trying to reenter society and see how badly the system is stacked against their success. It's hard enough for a regular Joe to find a job in 2026, never mind someone who has no money, no phone, no bank account, no address and a criminal record.
Criminal justice is the hardest of the hard problems. Maybe ASI can figure it out...