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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Repost from the dead thread.

There is one good reason to keep the status quo (death penalty without any actual deaths) which is that anyone given a death sentence gets their case reviewed and appealed by excellent lawyers working pro bono. The people who get life get no help at all and are just left to rot in jail.

I have read of prisioners being upset when given a life sentence as they know that no one will help them appeal their conviction. If you are innocent you want to be given a death sentence and sit on death row since you will have people helping you get your conviction overturned.

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"If you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system." - Peter Thiel

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/single-digit-millionaires-l...

Yep. Imagine you are a poor, young black man and have been given an overworked public defender who has no time to put together even the most basic defence. You are innocent, but have been found guilty. Do you want to be left to rot in jail for the rest of your life with zero outside support or given a death sentence and have a huge amount of legal effort put into overturning your conviction?

There are tens of thousands of people serving life sentences getting zero legal support and quite a few of them are innocent.

Interesting point. Isn't the solution to get people to help overturn unjust life sentences as well?

The real solution would be to give the poor adequate legal representation so that innocent people are not convicted.

In every case of a death penalty that was later overturned that I have examined there was an overworked public defender failing to put together even the most basic defence. For every person on death row there are dozens who went through the same process and drew the life sentence straw and who nobody cares about.

Good luck getting it passed in California. I voted already to ban it (and against the law proposing to speed up the death penalty), but according to all the major polls done on it, it won't pass.

Californians are, by and large, religious savages. They'll toke up before slaughtering prisoners like farm sows.

3 strikes? You're out. Thank prison lobby! On death row? Hurry up and die you sow!

Pretty pathetic. Thinking of moving to a more progressive state like Oregon or Washington.

Well a death penalty that does not get applied in practice is really just a life sentence with a lot more judicial oversight.

I am not in favour of the death penalty myself, but until the poor are given adequate legal representation it might be the best way of avoiding miscarriages of justice. The quality of legal representation poor people on death row get is orders of magnitude better than those serving life sentences.

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