The real reason to end the death penalty
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
> The standard that must be met by the prosecution's evidence in a criminal prosecution: that no other logical explanation can be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty.
And yet, DNA testing has exonerated many convicted in death-penalty cases where that standard should be applied with the most thought and care.
I don't think there any conclusion other than: The system of trial-by-peers is flawed with a measurable error rate. The judges failed, the juries failed and the prosecution failed; Innocent people have been put to death, while the real culprits have walked free.
Putting people to death based on such a flawed system is unconscionable.
I've been listening to the podcast Court Junkie (not to be confused with "Crime Junkie"; long story...), and this was my main takeaway as well.
The podcast is great because it is almost entirely audio excerpts from actual murder trials, with some extra narration to tie it together. It made me realize my understanding of trial-by-jury was formulated almost entirely by television and other storytelling, and not be reality.
What amazed me the most is how the winner seems to be biased toward whichever side can present the most compelling story. Not the most realistic story or most likely story, just the most interesting one.
The money doesn't come from legal analysis at all; frankly many were not very bright on legal issues -- that's what second-chairs and legal experts are for. They all, without exception, were fantastically entertaining, funny, weird, charismatic people.
It's an important takeaway for life in general. The money follows people who are good at emotions.
I think the point should be more: the justice system sucks and we should work very hard to make it better, instead of complaining about a particular consequence of it, that is ultimately irrelevant.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/17/opinion/sunda...
None of your points are wrong, none of your conclusions are wrong, yet your comment still derails and detracts from GP's well stated point. Don't do this.
In the last 31 years a total of 375 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence (not just the people on death row).
[1] https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...
But yeah: given that the error rate is in the 1-2 9's range, it seems like applying it to capital cases is a horrifying mistake. Imagine a medical device with only a 99% chance of not killing you.
Also, while you’re thinking about that, what’s your estimate of the probability that Derek Chauvin’s negligence was the but for cause of George Floyd’s death (and not some other factor mentioned by the defense expert in the case such as his health or drugs). Note that’s a scientific question—but for causation is an element of the crime. It’s not enough that what Chauvin did was reckless as to human life. His recklessness had to be the cause. Are you 99% certain of that?
For example, if a body of jurors say that they are 95% certain that John Smith murdered Jane Brown, that does not mean that there is a 5% probability that John Smith did not commit the murder, or a 5% probability that he will be wrongfully convicted. The 95% number quantifies the belief of the jurors that John Smith is the murderer. 5% quantifies their belief that John Smith is not the murderer. Nothing in those numbers tells us anything about how often jurors are wrong- it only tells us how strongly they believe they are right.
To know the frequency of wrongful convictions we must look at the frequency of exonerations. Whatever is the state of belief of jurors or judges etc during the trial where someone was convicted of a crime can't really inform us about the probability of their future exoneration.
You only need to be very sure that what Chauvin did was reckless and unreasonable and also very sure that had Chauvin not knelt on his neck for nearly 10 minutes, that Floyd wouldn't have died at that same moment anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
I believe that to be "working as designed" we would see a lot more guilty people going free than innocent people being convicted.
When serving as a juror in a criminal trial, I asked precisely this question of the judge.
Her response was that the law does not prescribe a percentage.
> Most people say 90-95%
Most people believe that the 538's 2016 presidential forecast was incompetent because it said trump only had a 1/3 chance of winning and he won. Other papers put it at 10%. People said this was a huge failure because people generally are terrible at intuitively reasoning about probabilities, which is well established.
I'd put reasonable doubt at closer to 1 in a few hundred, maybe even rarer.
Is the link you included talking about the probability of convicting a person, given that they're innocent, or the probability that a convicted person is innocent? It brings too mind the classic stats issues of testing positive for a disease via a highly accurate test, with it still being probable that you don't have the disease. Even a highly accurate test can be entirely unreasonable as evidence of the rare case. We should probably care about making the false discovery rate the unreasonable one. Of the convicted people, is it unreasonable to doubt that a random one is guilty.
Chauvin's case was unique because the narrative of him being a murderer had already been broadcast across the entire country. While I'm not personally 99% sure of his guilt to second-degree murder, the jurors most likely were.
Although there are indeed issues with peers (and witnesses). I was in a large lecture hall some time ago and someone came in to do an staged purse snatch. You couldn't see the person's face and they were moving fast.
When the class was shown a lineup to say who it was, most all agreed it was one of the suspects. When asked why, they said he was tall (he was much taller than the others in the lineup).
And that was the whole point. People will try and identify based on little info and they make the incorrect assumption that the lineup they were presented with actually has the real perpetrator!
So if you presented a lineup (maybe an impartial organization other than the police) and made it really clear to the witnesses that the perp may very well NOT be in the lineup, you would probably fix a lot of bad identifications. And you wouldn't have detectives trying to influence a decision. That would be a good start.
One part of this is the education system. A jury who is susceptible to junk science and junk logic is more likely to run into these issues.
At any rate judges sometimes make really bad decisions. The most remembered from where I live is Affluenza:
Even discussing other factors arguments and considerations dilutes the core point that’s it’s straight up wrong unethical and inhuman to murder others in the name of the law.
Paul Graham has a valid point, but if you say “it’s wrong cause it’s inaccurate”, implies it’s right if it’s accurate. And it’s not... the death penalty is wrong no matter be it accurate or inaccurate.
If the death penalty debate were framed more around "innocent people get killed" and less around more nebulous value-judgement based arguments (which, though valid, divide pretty neatly along partisan and class lines), perhaps the death penalty in the US would have gone long ago.
It is similar to the "tough on crime" incarceration "debate" in the US, where perverse incentives and political expediency has led to the US being the highest-per-capita incarcerator in the world.
Framing the death penalty debate around "innocent people get killed" will not change the partisan/class perceptions.
The US criminal justice system requires root-and-branch reform, starting with issues around policing, cash bail, school-to-prison pipelines, and unfair drug and "victimless" crimes.
Australia has been going through a similar debate and is at a similar point, without the death penalty, but dealing with the systemic racism and other class related issues.
GP clearly uses a deontological line of thinking on this matter. Something that GP considers to be "inhuman and barbaric" invokes a line of thinking in where he/she believes one ought to not do a certain action, because it simply is wrong.
I'm not the best at explaining deontological ethics, nor are the people who think like this. My point is: a lot of thought has gone into the types of statements that GP makes, and IMO it's worth thinking about.
Arguments and negotiations need to have common grounds on how thing are interpreted. Else the most immoral person flourishes.
Me following this US debate from the other side of the world I mostly see it framed as “the innocent people getting killed” and not the “immoral to kill” debate as per this article. I don’s see it getting anywhere.
Either way, stories (e.g. miscarriages of justice by an uncaring state) are likely a more effective way to convince in this controversy, not statistics:
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/02/23/why-is-it-so-hard-to-pe...
It could be their upbringing which should be the responsibility of the society and clearly the society failed.
It could be a medical issue. A biological one.
It could be that the murderer did nothing wrong in their worldview.
We have to understand this as a society. We have to teach it if people don't understand it.
I’m not even sure what that is intended to mean - specifically the bit about intellectuals.
Now I'm not sure what you think fundamental, but I am pretty sure that "murder" is a something the other side understands.
The irony in this is iron clad. It is also hyperbole, because this is an internet comment, not a political debate.
Also, I don't really see equivalent expectation routinely placed on right - they are not expected to proactively make compromises on their own heads before they even state position.
Everyone has a moral high-ground that isn't debatable.
The right does this as well for it's issues such as abortion.
Left or Right, everyone thinks there is some moral high ground that's not debatable. Everyone has some line that they don't think should be crossed.
If we just use this argument and don't try to establish general principles we end up with a pointless shouting contest.
For once I think the death penalty is at least worth considering from the utilitarian point of view (in our current system the consensus is that it's cheaper to keep someone in prison for life though but it might change in the future) as well as from revenge/restitution point of view as a lot of people strongly think someone doing deliberate great harm deserves to be killed.
One way or another it's not simple from either ethical nor practical point of view. Personally I consider death penalty as desirable penalty for some crimes but I would never vote for it as I have no faith in our politicians being able to implement it in a fair way and flawed justice system not to abuse it.
It’s odd to me how controversial both issues are when the moral reasoning required is so easy. Taking any other position requires denying the premise that it’s wrong to destroy innocent human life. One can, but accepting that has some very nasty consequences.
I’m not saying I agree, I don’t personally support the death sentence, but if you’re actually interested in changing peoples minds it’s good to know where they’re coming from, and why they may not find your argument compelling.
I personally find the posts argument far more compelling.
That is what makes crime so heinous.
So your focus should be prevention at any cost first and foremost, then justice as prevention (= rehabilitation) as well. Murdering a murderer is pretty solid prevention though, I give you that.
I get that he ruined (well, ended) someones life, but what does society gain from ruining his life in turn, to the point of what feels like mental torture: Being locked up for such a long time, all the while knowing that you will eventually just be executed.
If you're from a part of the world where the death penalty was consigned to history decades ago, it's quite astonishing that a supposedly civilised nation would defend it.
The USA has some odd hangups.
Criminals sentenced to death are supposed to be a danger to society so great that the only solution is to eliminate them. So, typical trolley problem: is it better to kill a criminal or let him go, potentially resulting in the death or several more innocent victims. Prison for life is another option, but is permanently restraining someone and endangering guards and other inmates a good alternative?
So yes, other justifications are needed. And the article gives one.
Edit: I've now done some research and found some death-row-inmates do express a preference for a death sentence:
https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2012/09/25/why-death-row-inmates-...
https://www.quora.com/Is-prison-crueller-than-the-death-pena...
The key issue for me is necessity. It is not necessary to execute criminals, even murderers. I do have sympathy for the view that murderers deserve death, maybe many of them do, but then you get into drawing lines between cases that deserve death and ones that don't. Is the evidence in this case good enough to kill, but this one the evidence is only good enough to incarcerate. It politicises the judicial and criminal justice system. So I oppose the death penalty not because it's barbaric or morally wrong per se, but because it introduces moral hazard that compromises the system.
We can see this in the US where prosecutors fight tooth and nail to preserve convictions and ensure convicts get executed largely in order to protect the system of executions from the embarrassment of death row inmates getting exonerated. Defending the system becomes more important than serving justice.
As a Brit I think politicisation is the thing that concerns me most about the US justice system. Elected prosecutors, elected judges, the politicisation of executions I described above. I don't know what it's like in other countries, but comparatively speaking all that just isn't a thing over here at all. Political debate on criminal justice is focused on laws and the administration of policing. That's really about it. It's not like we don't have miscarriages of justice, our system is far from perfect but it's mainly sees as being independent and professionalised.
Thing is, most of the time, people who are subject to the death penalty are there because they did “inhuman and barbaric” acts.
It is kind of like the paradox of tolerance. For society to prosper, you need to punish inhuman and barbaric acts, or at least isolate people who do that from society. However, such punishment is likely inhuman and barbaric at least on some level. Limiting a persons freedom of movement and interaction is inhuman and barbaric.
In addition, by not having the death penalty, you are subjecting others to have to deal with the person who did the inhuman and barbaric acts, whether other inmates or guards.
I am of the opinion that there are some acts that are so heinous that a person should never be a part of human society again. In that case, rather than prolonged human isolation, which is actually barbaric in and of itself, I think it is actually more humane to end their life. It does not have to gruesome or painful, no more than euthanizing a beloved pet with a terminal condition has to be gruesome. But some acts are incompatible with ever being a member of human society in any form.
Edit:
In addition, there are a lot of stuff that could be considered inhuman and barbaric but we do them for what we think as the good of society.
Spaying and neutering your pet sounds inhuman and barbaric.
Modern surgery, especially cancer surgery where they remove large margins of apparently healthy looking tissue, could be considered inhuman and barbaric.
In the Middle Ages, dissecting dead human bodies was considered inhuman and barbaric.
So the fact that a person sees something as inhuman and barbaric really is not overwhelming evidence if something should be done.
Or how about self defense? If a person is protecting their lawful rights, home, property and family and in the process must kill an aggressor to do these things, should they just not do so out of a certain absolute ethical posture about the wrongness of killing other human beings? Just to clarify where your own fundamental posture on killing in the name of the law this draws some lines or exceptions.
However, I agree with Paul. The fact that anyone not guilty of the crime is executed is unacceptable, to say nothing of the startlingly bad accuracy of the system in practice.
Prison is inhumane and barbaric, and has the opposite of the intended effect most of the time. Many ex-cons have become hardened criminals through their time on the inside, and even for those who haven't and want to reintegrate productively, the outside world does its best to prevent reintegration.
How many innocent people are killed in prison, not by the state, or have their lives ruined? You can say as long as they're alive there's hope they'll achieve something and be happy, but statistically those prospects are dimmer every year they spend inside.
The only remaining good thing prison does is keep bad people from causing problems in society for some number of years. Which is the same thing the death penalty does.
I don't know if the most productive way to use political capital to reform the criminal justice system is to abolish the death penalty. Unjustified state-sanctioned death might be terrible, but so are things like the drug war which probably do more aggregate harm. In an ideal world we'd get rid of prisons somehow, too.
In addition to ending the drug war and trying to fix neighborhoods that have been broken by it, fixing misaligned incentives for prosecution and law enforcement to prosecute cases would have a massive impact, far greater than any squabbles about the death penalty. Too often the prosecutors and law enforcement have desire to convict someone, and the defendant is the best chance they have, so they go ahead. More neutrality has to be introduced somehow. Judges being allowed to direct questions to witnesses might be a place to start.
I dont want to work to house, guard, and feed them.
There have been some political leaders in the past who have said the same about the disabled.
If we give our government the power to premeditatedly kill people merely to reduce the costs to taxpayers, we are stepping down a very dark path.
Sorry, but that's exactly the kind of world we live in. The world simply is barbaric no matter what we would prefer. When people mess up a little bit, we put them through a process that, despite its massive inadequacy, is intended to rehabilitate them so that they can return to society. The death penalty is for when someone commits a crime so severe that they cannot ever return to society. If you are not able to think of this kind of situation, I suggest you may not be very familiar with the details of truly horrendous crimes. If we don't have the death penalty, we end up in the strange position of housing and feeding and providing medical care for the most harmful people in society at the expense of their victims.
It's all a matter if you believe in that core piece of universal human rights or not.
I think arguing for its abolition on the basis of "the system is bad" is completely valid
> familiar with the details of truly horrendous crimes
And this still happens. And I agree, society is sometimes too tolerant with people who have no business in being in it (which, true, is a much smaller percentage of people on death row)
But don't expect the legal system to try to improve how many innocents they convict.
As for truly horrible crimes (which is something else to each of us), there are also tons of different views - do we want to be in society that is above emotional vengeful reactions, and more about compassionate loving ones? Ie like all good christians/muslims/etc are supposed to be according to their holiest books? You have to start somewhere if you even want to get there. You have to be morally strong to act in smart and compassionate way if you want to claim progress of mankind in this area. And so on.
I don't have a clear position on this myself and not stating some higher moral ground, since there are many pros and cons on both sides and quick emotional reaction to some murderous pedophile is as expected. But I am 100% certain that this very topic reveals a lot about mankind and us humans in our progression to be a better species, compared to primitive uneducated masses of the past. Or regression, its up to us.
Of course, the application of the death penalty in the US is very wrong. Other cultures have solved this issue a long time ago.
Just look at the death penalty historically, even not too long ago, and how it was used in many now "civilized" countries to kill people for minor crimes. Or look at the contemporary world, at the countries that use capital punishment and the crimes they prescribe it for (even assuming they were prescribing it justly.) Aren't these countries themselves a good argument that it's best to err on the side of not having capital punishment at all, anywhere?
I think some criminals are truly awful and deserve to die for their heinous crimes. Yet it's simply too dangerous for any society to have the death penalty, even for these heinous crimes. As an intellectual, I'd be somewhat or very scared of living in any of the contemporary countries that have capital punishment (not to mention the ones that essentially allow street executions by the police. But that is another topic for another day...)
This is America and it needs to change.
Why? Tyranny? (As per the rest of your note).
If someone commits a premeditated crime carrying a guideline sentence of {20 years in State A, vs 30 years in State B} do we really think that they're more likely to commit the crime in State A?
It's my intuition that for the most part, people committing crimes aren't thinking about potential repercussions, much less measuring them.
I mean is someone thinking "Oh, only 10 years? I'll do it. But not if it's 15."?
By far, the largest factor of deterrence was the likelihood of getting caught.
So, people, do in fact rationalize "I'm definitely going to get caught and the consequences are bad, I won't do it".
So, to your point, the punishment itself is largely a deterrence. I think because a rational human being simply cannot grok the differences in long term effects. This is already essentially proven in how people behave with money - i.e. people suck at long term saving without external forces nudging them to do so.
Does that mean it prevents people capable (mentally and morally) from committing a planned crime or is it in general? Because everything I've seen says most people who for instance attack others almost never consider the consequences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)#Certaint...
Most of those who are caught aren't brought to trial. For obvious reasons, prosecutors strongly prefer cases supported by very strong evidence.
The corollary is there are a lot of murderers walking around unremarked and free - either caught and released for lack of evidence, or not caught at all.
So it's unlikely the death penalty has much a deterrent effect. There would be a much stronger deterrent effect if there was some magic way to increase the catch rate which didn't also intrude on privacy or civil liberties.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180514-do-long-prison-s...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1745-9133...
It's not backed by the evidence, though.
Harsher sentences do not decrease crime rates.
Every time I see an immigration officer at the border raising his eyebrows in disbelief, I instantly understand that he took a look on my criminal file.
For me, the cruel tradition of Russian police to literally grab the first bystander they come upon near the crime scene to draw as a suspect did cost months of my life spent on legal paperwork, and an immigration nightmare.
Russian citizens have no ability to have anything struck from their file, even if those lucky got a rarest %0.8 acquittal. For most unlucky people, even if the case doesn't go anywhere, they will never get the clear acquittal record, but instead have something like "case struck on procedural grounds" in their file.
Getting wrongly accused is very easy. Just be the first person to be seen near the crime scene.
Tolkien fought in WW1 and it's easy to tell from his writing he was a very sensitive individual. There's not much in LOTR about killing but his notes and the Silmarillion do shed some light on his moral view on the matter of ending a life.
That said, I don't believe Tolkien was ever totally comfortable with his treatment of orcs, he just never reconciled his morals and personal narratives with his desire to tell faerie tales and myths, where "evil goblins" are just part of the landscape. No sources for that, though, I just recall reading it somewhere, perhaps in his son's writings...
I write fiction occasionally. When wondering if it’s ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ for a character to do something repugnant, I often have to remind myself that none of it is real!
The ‘moral’ issue — if there is one — I suppose pertains to the author deliberately holding an immoral character up as an example of good behavior in the ‘real’ world. Maybe even then there is no real moral issue...
The gang of thugs possessed the Ring of Power, stolen from its rightful owner, and capable of killing millions; it’s like a nuclear bomb!
If some gang of trespassers snuck into your dwelling with a nuclear bomb, I think “shoot first, ask questions later” would be the order of the day.
The only character that seemed to have his shit together was Sauron. Even Sauramon agreed the safest thing to do would be to peacefully return the ring to its rightful owner before anyone got hurt...
- For many people I suspect that there is a combination of level of proof and severity of crime that would lead them to say the risk of erroneous conviction can be ignored.
- Someone will say let's focus on improving the justice system to deal with the errors.
I'd rather the burden of justification be the other way: what does the death penalty actually achieve, with a high burden of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that as a policy it actually benefits society as a whole.
In all such cases the corollary is "We can accept a lower standard of proof because we're not actually killing them. We're just locking them in a room forever and waiting until they die." I don't honestly see much difference between these outcomes. Why is one so morally superior to the other?
There are much better arguments against the death penalty. One is that if the death penalty exists, it's much easier for the state to execute political dissidents. If the death penalty is abolished (and there are strong controls on extra-judicial killings, like police murdering civilians during arrests), it's much more difficult for the state to silence critics. Even if they are locked away in jail forever, they will still have a voice.
Another good argument is that if the death penalty is a possibility it gives criminals nothing to lose which makes it more dangerous to apprehend them. If you want your police to be able to more peacefully arrest criminals, it makes sense to abolish the death penalty.
One of them gives you your remaining lifetime for evidence to be found or overturned; one of them doesn't.
I have to question this. Determining whether someone can be reintegrated into society cannot be determined during the sentencing process. I would rather prefer a Norway-like system where the max imprisonment time at the start is 21 years. At the end of that initial time, 5 more years can be added on if the prisoner has not reformed. The process repeats until the prisoner is released or dies. A small percentage of people will still die in prison, but I wager that that percentage will be less than the percentage of life imprisonment sentences currently.
The downsides are of a moral nature and twofold:
1) We should not punish innocent people. As societies we consider this as a huge and irrecoverable loss (What if we executed Einstein). 2) The state should not have the right to take the lives of its citizens. (Literally numerous examples from history why this can end up really bad)
Re 2): Again from [1], I've heard executions are actually quite expensive. Thus, it doesn't scale well.
Re 3): It doesn't make me feel safe if somebody can frame me and get me killed. It makes me feel safer knowing I have time to prove my innocence.
Re 4): I am very skeptical of this claim. Any solid evidence for this being true? Anecdotal evidence shows the opposite. Most criminals don't have good long-term thinking skills, so they won't recognize the tradeoff between 40 years in prison and death, and use that to not commit a crime.
[1] John Oliver on death penalty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kye2oX-b39E
[1] https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt....
Assuming that we absolutely know that someone is guilt (ignoring how that would happen), it doesn't need to take years and millions of dollars to simply shoot someone.
Then there are the people who are not only a financial burden on society, they are actively making it worse, much worse. Sometimes we just sit back an wonder why even spend resources keep this person terrible person imprisoned for decades. People who have killed, raped or tortured and been in and out of jail multiple times, no we really need to keep them around?
Regardless of how much we may hate the idea of the death penalty, there is some cold, brutal logic to simply shooting someone.
However, my version of the world in which the death penalty would be admissible is a lot different from what we have now. In that version, a death sentence would never be executed on first conviction; the verdict would contain a suspended death sentence, more or less. After serving time, a criminal could be put to death only when convicted a second time for a similar offense. I'd also want to see the burden of proof reversed for that punishment: not only must the crime be proven in court (not by plea), but the government must show it provided adequate support and rehabilitation to avoid relapse.
That would be the only world in which I would defend the use of capital punishment. I don't think I'll ever see it happen.
In the past: societal self-defence.
Older prisons were not as secure, and so the risk of dangerous people escaping was high(er). If they got out they could do more harm to innocent people. This is less of an issue in modern developed countries which have pretty secure buildings now, especially for those classified as the most dangerous.
This may be less true in other countries where prison you may hear about prison breaks, with or without external help:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazni_prison_escape
* https://globalnews.ca/news/7740153/nigerian-inmates-freed-at...
If you think there's little/no chance of reform, then keeping someone around that will likely strike again is asking for trouble.
See also David Oderberg's book Applied Ethics.
Considering that during some periods a fine or monetary compensation to the victims family was considered to be reasonable punishment for murder and that on the (on the opposite end of the spectrum) during other periods people were often hanged for what we would currently consider to be petty theft, one could argue that pre modern societies were much more concerned about presereving their social order rather than protecting innocent people from harm.
I think the death penalty does deter people from committing certain crimes. But many many people don't. (for the record, I also believe in abolishing the death penalty where I live where many innocent people fall victim to it).
The problem is this isn't something you can really prove with scientific evidence. You can't do a double blind trial in separate societies with and without the death penalty.
Not every social policy can be proven before it is enacted. Life just doesn't work that way. Evidence isn't always available for every possible option.
If we had a magic oracle which supplies us with the absolutely correct guilty or not guilty verdict, there would be no problem with the death penalty.
> what does the death penalty actually achieve
Rids the world of an instance of evil, efficiently and permanently.
Vindicates victims.
You're also saying that you're prepared to ignore the wider impact that the act of executing that individual has on society.
On the apparent grounds that the dead victim is somehow vindicated (which I can only interpret as meaning that someone else feels that they have been vindicated).
That sounds like a motive for murder.
I'm against the death penalty, but, since the alternative is most likely life in prison, this is very probably true for rightfully convicted.
> My personal guess is that people like to watch for some sort of catharsis which a silent death doesn't give them, but of course I'm not necessarily in a position to judge this well.
There's a very interesting documentary called "how to kill a human being". In it, Michael Portillo explores more humane ways to execute prisoners, but at the end his method is rejected by proponents as the do not want these people to die painless. So you're probably not wrong.
There seems to be a certain draw of the Sodom and Gomorrah treatment in some people that draws a straight line from modern day human culture in those places directly back to ancient desert folktales through all these thousands of years. Perhaps it is the belief that actions undertaken in the here-and-now aren't ultimately that important, a sort of cosmic nihilism with regards to the physical reality we live in.
We still have so, so far to go.
All while insisting on the humanness of those sweet pharmaceuticals.
It is terrible that it affects innocents. It is also true that it is ineffective, counter-productive, and barbaric.
It's sad we're still having this discussion when "On Crimes and Punishments"[0] was published four centuries ago and not much has substantially changed since.
That said, I have to snark a little about it, because I was in high school, in the 90s, when I came to the same realization about why the death penalty is wrong. So this seems pretty obvious to me.
Our justice system is not reliable enough to have the death penalty.
When I hit my late 30s, my position changed entirely. It’s hard to tell why. I now have no moral qualms about a society choosing to put to death people who are guilty of heinous and depraved acts against others.
That said, I’m reading the March National Geographic, and the pictures of innocent men freed after being sentenced to death have given me pause. Given the apparent scope of prosecutorial misconduct (in the US, but it’s likely to be worse in many other places), it’s hard to entrust the state with this sort of responsibility, especially when there are alternatives that greatly reduce the threat to others, while avoiding the finality of capital punishment.
I consider the society to be at least somewhat to blame for those acts.
If a proposal came to redefine the threshold for the death penalty from "beyond reasonable doubt" to "irrefutable" then the arguments here would not hold.
with such extraordinarily tiny incidence rates and an erroneous implicit mental model, it's no surprise that we misidentify the truly irredeemable so often. our implicit expectations simply get in the way of being impartial and objective.
If you extend the logic to other sentences they become similarly problematic. In other words, clearly it's bad to execute an innocent person. But it's also bad to imprison them for life, or 30 years or 20 years or 10 years and so on. There's no clear reason to draw the line at execution but not at life imprisonment.
However it is currently impossible to unkill someone, which makes executing someone for a crime they didn't commit significantly worse, this seems a reasonable place to draw a line to me.
But, ultimately, some people are going to go away forever. People like Manson are never going to get released. What's the big difference between the death penalty and life imprisonment with no parole that attenuates the error in the conviction process.
You can't reverse the damage done by either sentence. However a sentence of life without parole is correctible as soon as a mistake is identified. Releasing an innocent person after taking 40 years of their life is awful, but it is better than realizing we killed an innocent person 25 years ago.
But I can understand why some people do when we see so many violent offenders released only to reoffend.
If people are going to have faith in the justice system then a whole life tariff needs to be a reasonable possibility - the USA actually isn't so bad for this but over here in Europe we have far shorter sentences.
There must be a better way.
This seems like a better way to go. He will be evaluated for extensions of his sentence periodically, and (showing my ignorance of their system here) I presume the panel will include medical professionals who are more equipped to gauge his mental health and danger to society than a judge would.
A family member of mine was murdered in the 90s. I would advocate for the same treatment of the killer. Though I suppose I am still biased since it was unprovoked, and the killer would probably be judged a continual danger to society.
Pretty obvious we should abolish cars. Duh.
But 36,000 deaths from road accidents are fine. 892 of them in 2019 were "large truck occupants" that died - i.e. people working.
https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/death_row/dr_executed_offenders.h...
My favorite is Delbert Teague, Jr. who quoted the oath of the Knights of Solamnia from Dragonlance.
Simple crawling of all the statements: Promise.all([...$$('a[href$="last.html"]')].map(aa => fetch(aa.href).then(a => a.text()).then(a => a.replace(/(\n|\r|<[^->]>| )/g, '').match(/Last Statement:(.?)<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->/)).then(a => [aa.href, a && a[1].trim()]))).then(a => console.log(JSON.stringify(a)))
[0] - Well, at least 96% according to the OP.
> Yes. My last statement. I was wrongfully convicted of this crime against Michael Watkins and James Williams on 10th Street on August 31, 1993. I got convicted on a false confession because I never admitted to it, but my lawyer did not put this out to the jury. I did not kill those drug dealers. I send love to my family and friends; my east side family and friends. I am being real with the real. That's all that counts in my heart. I will see you later. That's it.
It's disgusting.
For the record, I'm not for death penalty at all.
Simply not true that he will be walking free in 9 years time.
> A sentence of permanent detention can be imposed if there is considerable danger of repetition. Permanent detention is not subject to any timeframe. However, the court always fixes a timeframe that may not exceed 21 years. When the timeframe expires the offender may be re-assessed. If the court concludes that there is still a danger of repetition the timeframe may be extended by up to five years at a time. There is no upper limit to the number of times that the court may extend the timeframe.
This seems honestly like something you would read on a far-right conspiracy website about what a liberal hellhole Europe is.
Assuming you're talking about Breivik and the Utøya-massacre, that happened in 2011. And he is unlikely to ever "go free". He was sentenced to "containment" (sikring), which can extended indefinitely (and almost certainly will be).
This is not true. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, but his prison stay can be extended, indefinitely, as long as he is deemed a danger to society.
I would be extremely surprised if Breivik walks at the end of the 21 years.
But can you come up with some standard of evidence that would be 100% accurate in all cases? Real life tends to get complicated very quickly, and there have been people that have been executed on seemingly clear-cut evidence, only to be exonerated later (Timothy Evans comes to mind). When the cost of failure is so high, it's a safer move to just avoid the risk altogether.
By a strict logical interpretation, you might consider executing yourself as you have met your own stated criterion for being eligible for execution.
However, the problem with removing the death penalty in the US is that it will not deal with the underlying systemic racism and the misaligned incentives of police and prosecution to "get a conviction".
So yes, if the death penalty is removed, there is one less barbarism.
However, for those who are not on death row, who are subject to the injustices, will there be the same pressure to investigate and exonorate the innocent?
How do we ensure that the incentives for conviction do not supersede the incentives for solving the crime accurately?
Then it can't do war and can't defend its existence as a state unless it's somehow a dependent state of some other state that does have power over the life of a person. Like some small Pacific island that's protected by more militarily well equipped allies.
I call bullshit.
If your answer is yes, then by all means, support the death penalty.
If you don't trust ambitious politicians, then you can't trust the process for selecting who is to be put to death by the state either, because DAs and AGs are politicians.
Then, whenever someone sentenced to death was later found to be innocent (or pardoned), a random name on the list of "Yes" voters would be picked to be killed in place of the innocent convict.
Wouldn't it make more sense as a thought experiment if only "Yes" voters could be executed only if and when convicted of a crime deserving of capital punishment?
Maybe. Maybe if the person is obviously committed to harming others and refuses all attempts at reform. How do you know when someone is past helping? Anyway, there just aren't very many people who match this description.
As a Christian against the death penalty I find myself often in a very unexpected minority. Many Christians I know and grew up around are very pro-death-penalty, to the point of being religious about it. But even Jesus declined to carry out capital punishment when given the opportunity to (and if anyone had the right, it would be him).
Even in that instance, I can't imagine it ever being necessary to end their life. We have more than sufficient technology and resources to sustain such a hopeless case in a state in which they, and everyone else, are safe from harm.
Taking a life simply because it's inconvenient to go to the lengths to secure someone from harming others for the short time that is a natural human lifespan is... befuddling. It's such a simple and tiny expense in the grand scheme of things, and such a deep and dark cliff off which to jump to save a few pennies.
The police in the US are largely incompetent, it's true. Prosecutors and police regularly get things wrong, and what's worse yet is that it is often willfully so. They've far too much power, and the whole system needs to be overhauled, because it's rotten to the core.
That said: inaccuracy is not why the state should not murder people. Even if the system were replaced and could somehow become and remain provably 100% accurate, executing human beings is an abhorrent sentence.
There are certain inalienable rights that every human must attempt to preserve for every other human. Chiefly among them are a freedom from torture and freedom from being murdered by other human beings.
All other considerations are secondary. The moment we start treating human beings like objects and simply snuffing them out in response to perceived or adjudicated crimes, we become as a society no better than the common criminal. The fact that we have codified premeditated murder into law in some insane act of mental gymnastics will possibly be the thing that our so-called "civilization" will be judged most harshly upon come the verdict of history.
We have no claim to humanity or civilization whatsoever so long as we smite the life from living, thinking brothers and sisters at will, which is what a society having capital punishment has chosen to do with their system of law.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
"We've eliminated the death penalty because we are so enlightened. But now that we've sentenced you to life in prison, every morning with breakfast, we offer a side of poison just in case you would like to exercise your right to check out of this hell hole.
No pressure. Just being helpful."
> This Article challenges the seemingly developing conventional wisdom that the error rate in America’s criminal justice system is 1% or even higher. In fact, looking at the best available and current data, a conservative estimate of the error rate is somewhere close to the 0.027% posited by Justice Scalia.
Anyone who says the rate is 0.027% is obviously bonkers, given what sample you'd need to specify the result with a 0.0005% error. I don't see how anyone could practically do that.
Because we rightfully try to set a high bar and have many delays, opportunities for appeal to minimize executing innocent people and also need high security confinement (since someone sentenced to death doesn't have a lot to lose in attempting to escape...) the entire process is extraordinarily expensive.
The resources we spend on it could instead be spend elsewhere and save lot of lives, cut taxes, -- whatever stokes your particular political perspective would be better off if we weren't spending resources killing people.
If you've been killed already, that is not going to help you much.
There are only two legal remedies provided by the death penalty:
* Repeat offenders of capital crimes have no cause for separation or special treatment from a prison’s general population. This is a rare edge cases that generally only applies to inmates that continue to participate in extreme criminal activities even under incarceration. Death row prisoners are generally isolated from the general population of a prison system to limit such interaction where such separation is otherwise not typically available.
* Capital punishment is a legal surety to enforce life without parole even if there is no intention to execute the convict.
Capital punishment provides those two legal remedies that the law otherwise does not fulfill or fulfills with numerous exceptions.
Unfortunately, the death penalty is frequently used for a variety of other concerns, such as compelling testimony. The same problems the plague the US criminal justice system at large also allow abuse and misuse of the death penalty.
The US’s two largest problems in regards to criminal justice are cultural and funding inversion. The cultural problem is that many people believe incarceration is a form of revenge or retribution but the constitution was written to prevent such sentiments creating a conflict of motive. The funding inversion applies to many police forces receiving funding disproportionately to their respective district attorneys offices resulting in system overload and backlog with insufficient oversight.
First, yes, PG is right that we need to do something about wrongful convictions. If we do away with the death penalty and these people live the rest of their life in prison, but we don't kill them, that's... better, I guess? But it's still horrible, and it's still a problem that we need to fix. Just eliminating the death penalty doesn't fix the problem. If you make eliminating the death penalty a side effect of the campaign against wrongful convictions, that's fine. But if you make eliminating the death penalty the fix, that's hopelessly inadequate.
Second, the moral calculus gets awful. The usual question is, how many guilty people would you let go free to avoid putting one innocent person in prison? That shows the problem - false positives and false negatives are inversely related. But there's another issue, which is that some people who murder do so more than once. So, to avoid putting one innocent person in prison, how many innocent people are you willing to see die because of not-convicted murderers who repeat the crime? (If anyone has recidivism statistics on released murderers, I would welcome them.)
Traumatic brain injury damages self-regulation and changes social behavior. Uninhibited or impulsive behavior, including problems controlling anger and unacceptable sexual behavior, leads to crime. The concept of insanity used in the US criminal system is based on science 130 years ago, combined with the religious concept of sin and soul. The thinking is that if a person knows what they do is wrong, they could choose to not do it is BS. With brain injury person can lose that ability.
Damaged Brains and the Death Penalty https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/damaged-brains-and-the-...
>In another study, of 14 juveniles sentenced to death, the researchers found that all had suffered head trauma, most in car accidents but many by beatings as well. 12 had suffered brutal physical abuse, 5 of those sodomized by relatives.
Traumatic brain injury: a potential cause of violent crime? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6171742/
Traumatic Brain Injury in Prisons and Jails: An Unrecognized Problem https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/pdf/prisoner_tbi_pr...
>According to jail and prison studies, 25-87% of inmates report having experienced a head injury or TBI 2-4 as compared to 8.5% in a general population reporting a history of TBI.
You need to be 100% sure that you are about to execute the right person for the right reason every single time.
And there are very few cases where we can be that sure of something.
Then let me offer you this question to ponder: What benefit is there to adding another tally to the body count from a mass shooting, once the perpetrator has been taken into custody?
Executing someone doesn't reduce the number of unnecessarily lost lives, it only increases it.
Since innocent people also get life imprisonment, one could argue that any punishment like this that could potentially harm innocent people should be outlawed.
If the justice system were perfect there could be a case for execution in place of life sentences, but it has been shown time and time again that going free depends more on the quality of your lawyer than the facts of the case. Prosecutors will lie and fabricate evidence because the cops did a terrible job and they figure you must be guilty. Even if it's not of this particular crime you're just the criminal type and they'll be doing society a favor by locking you away.
The system is highly classist and racist. It shouldn't be allowed to make such final decisions like killing someone. This makes it impossible to reverse the injustice in the future.
"You’ve enabled HTTPS-Only Mode for enhanced security, and a HTTPS version of paulgraham.com is not available."
Related:
> "But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are innocent."
Where does this guy "practice"? Does he know anyone who goes to church? The debate is very, very much about whether it's okay to kill murderers.
I'm against the death penalty - it is too much power for a government to have. I am slightly less against it after reading Paul Graham's argument. I guess that's called an own goal.
Another argumemt against the death sentence I haven't heard here:
I think the whole 'eye-for-an-eye'-principle of the justice system sets a negative example for the respective society and thus facilitates violence.
"It is okay to kill someone for a crime. Even the state does it. My reason is valid."
It lowers the bar for violence even further unnecessarily.
I did not fact check this. Its just a gut feeling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDcwIZzaf-k
"Capital Punishment (& Prison Abolition)"
She's a bit left of me. I'm okay with keeping prisons, at least in some part. Gotta put murderers somewhere.
To read more interesting thoughts on the matter : https://speakola.com/ideas/robert-badinter-death-penalty-abo...
Killing is the upper end point of brutality.
Society not deciding to end death penalty is Society with one foot in the mud of ancient brutal regime.
Ending dath penalty is, of course, avoiding killing by mistake 4% of those sentenced. But is is also elavating ourselves from the mud of past regime.
We shall not kill
In any given year, there are relatively few executions in the US — in recent years it has been around 25. [1] If we assume the 4% figure as correct, then every four years there is one innocent person who is executed.
That is a terrible outcome. But it's quite possible that eliminating the death penalty completely would cause at least 2 more deaths every four years.
I'm not advocating for or against the death penalty — just pointing out that if the goal is to minimize the death of innocent people, we might want to consider second-order effects. I will admit that state-sanctioned killing of innocent people seems worse than general killing of innocent people. At the same time, if the government makes a decision that it knows will result in a net increase in the number of innocent people killed, the fact that they're not sticking a needle into the arm of the innocent people who will die is somewhat less of a salient distinction.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...
The real reason is that you should respect life. You should give it your utmost respect. Taking away a life when it's unnecessary, speaks of a lack of respect. Innocent people getting punished unfairly is a terrible thing, but it happens all the time. Justice systems are imperfect. And removing the death penalty won't change that. Maybe it will make injustice slightly less permanent but that's about it. It will however make a symbolic point. That you can't morally justify murder. That's probably a better deterrent to murder than harsh punishment. If 'eye for an eye' is the standard for the state why would you expect the people to do any better? Why would you not expect them to say, carry arms all the time and get provoked into making a headline when they have a bad day? It's all connected. Leadership sometimes means leading by example and a firm 'no' to murder implies a 'no' to the death penalty.
At the end of the day if a man is wrongfully convicted, spending life in prison is hardly much better than the death penalty.
Reasonable doubt.. super dangerous, because it relies entirely on spinning a story, and reality has no obligation to be reasonable.
One of the crazy parts of his story was how the state dug in its heels and did everything possible to prevent him from being acquitted, long after the new evidence was introduced.
I'll note that most of these problems are unique to the US justice system.
There's a more charitable way to reach the same conclusion. Experienced cops must see dozens or hundreds of cases over their careers, where guys who "obviously did it" get off on technicalities or random chance. (This is an official TV Trope for a reason.) Even if we grant that that instinct is actually unreliable and often wrong, that's still a huge number of real cases where the "system didn't work". From an outsider perspective, of course, we tolerate that as a tradeoff to avoid convicting innocent people. But from an insider perspective, it's natural to come to see The System as an adversary, and to see your job as working around and compensating for that Failed System.
This is a problem, and it absolutely ruins a lot of innocent people's lives, and there are clearly ways we could address it on the margins. But at the same time, it might not be a central problem that we solve directly and completely. Rather, we could acknowledge that, to some extent, it's an expected component of a deliberately adversarial system. A lot of legal mechanisms work this way. My defense attorney's job isn't to be a perfectly objective arbiter of whether I should be in jail. Rather, their job is to make the best (most overwhelmingly biased) argument possible that I shouldn't be, and we leave it to the prosecutor (and their presumably opposite biases) to argue that I should. There are reasonable limits to this, and you can get disbarred for violating them, but for the most part everyone's biases are acknowledged and expected. That's not entirely true of policing, but it's part of the truth. Juries of our peers exist because we know it's not realistic to make the police or the judiciary solely responsible for fairness and justice. We can understand this as a normal part of human nature and system design, without necessarily taking a position on whether it represents "incompetence" or "dishonesty".
So...why nitpick these words to death like this? Because there's a symmetry here. When one group is calling another incompetent, it's a sure bet that the second group is calling the first clueless. And it goes without saying that both groups consider the other dishonest. Each side retreats to its bubble, and progress is impossible. The rhetorical habits that break this cycle are super important.
This is the real issue with almost every human endeavor, especially those that affect other people's lives. ( example politics, taxes)
Capital punishment is applied to murderers. By killing the convict, you're basically committing the same crime you're punishing him for.
It’s not obvious whether Graham has read a reasonable cross-section of the literature on the death penalty and come to this conclusion (in which case some references might be in order) or whether he's just pulling this out of his arse. I’m not familiar with the literature, but a Google Scholar search brings up the following:
> Although death penalty discourse has always been, and remains, multifaceted - encompassing morality, religion, cost, deterrence, theories of punishment, fairness, race, class, and human rights - we suggest that over the past decade innocence has emerged as perhaps the dominant issue in death penalty discourse with "an unprecedented effect on the debate about capital punishment" (Bandes 2008, 5; Baumgartner, De Boef, and Boydstun 2008, 157). This phenomenon has been referred to by such labels as the "age of innocence" (Rosen 2006, 237) or even an "innocence revolution" (Marshall 2004, 573; Steiker and Steiker 2005, 613). The abolitionist movement has embraced innocence as a new rhetorical asset in the death penalty debate, one with the potential to decisively shift the weight of public opinion in abolition's favor (Radelet and Borg 2000; Bedau 2004a; Acker 2009). "Unlike other challenges to the fairness of capital proceedings, which have failed to stimulate widespread public outrage," Marshall (2004) argues, "evidence of the system's propensity to factual error has the power to open closed minds and trigger reexamination of the costs and benefits of capital punishment" (579). Banner (2002) notes, "the prospect of killing an innocent person seemed to be the one thing that could cause people to rethink their support for capital punishment" (304). He goes on to suggest that "if any development had the potential to change" the popularity of the death penalty, "this was the one" (305). Thus, one scholar claims, "it is no exaggeration to say that wrongful convictions spurred . . . the most successful death penalty reform movement in our lifetime" (Bandes 2008, 4). Already, scholars claim that innocence "has produced a massive shift in the terms of the national death-penalty debate" (Hoffman 2005, 562), a shift "away from moral and procedural considerations, and toward the more substantive question of guilt and innocence" (Hall 2005, 373).
(J.D. Aronson and S.A. Cole, "Science and the Death Penalty: DNA, Innocence, and the Debate over Capital Punishment in the United States", Law & Social Inquiry 34.3 (2009), pp. 603-33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40539373.)
Perhaps it’s somehow satisfying to Graham to make a wide sweep at ‘intellectuals’ whilst presenting a purportedly distinct argument without trying to determine whether it’s been anticipated, but it strikes me as rather dishonest.
No doubt standard would require some set elements. DNA + visual recording + electronic records.
I used to be anti death penalty but would be ok with it under a no doubt standard. Not for vengeance but simply society can spend the money on other things instead of spending money housing and feeding individuals who have caused such horrific pain on others.
And that's with the current error-prone system. Think of what it would take to ensure that your criteria are met.
So costs is simply not an argument. In fact it's a pretty bad faith one regarding what happens with private prisons and the labor of inmates subjected to slavery (read the 13th amendment if you think slavery is universally abolished). The US wouldn't have the highest rate of incarceration in the world if it didn't make money somehow.
If society converges on spontaneously destroying some human entities it deems a threat, it seems that this behavior arises from the chaos and can not be stopped (since it is found in every human society in past history).
The alternative is to treat murders equivalent to the Bernie Madoffs of the world, which some people might find unjust.
But the central argument for death penalty is whether it is _just_ to punish a person by death, if they commit a certain crime, or if it is _just_ to imprison them. It is not a question of what benefits society, but whether it is a form of justice. Those who advocate for generally believe that punishment is not primitively a method for fixing behavior, though that might or might not occur. Instead, it is a form of intentionally inflecting damage/pain for justice[1].
But the article is right on that in practice, there are important and significant difficulties in carrying out the death penalty. But those who advocate for death penalty would say that it is unjust to not punish people by death when they commit certain crimes.
It would be great though if the USA would end killing people in other countries! Most of whom don't come anywhere near a trial or even being accused of a crime. They probably outnumber the wrongly imprisoned/executed by thousands or hundreds of thousands to 1.
This reminds me of trying to read Phil Zimbardo's recent book, half of which is about Abu Ghraib. He agonizes over that, while totally ignoring the bloodbath going on in Iraq, as if that raised no ethical issues. I couldn't read it.
Sorry if this comment is deemed whataboutism/off-topic.
There’s an interesting dialectic between notions of justice and the realities of common good. From the justice perspective, a criminal is likely to face the death penalty if it can be shown that they planned, committed homicide, and then attempted evasion, all in sound mind. Whereas, if the criminal was not of sound mind, lacked the ability to understand consequence, and this condition is permanent, then sentencing is likely to be quite lax. Unfortunately, the likelihood of recidivism is the opposite of what compassion drives us to believe.
In animal shelters, this is well-understood. The goal is always safety and reform, never punishment. An animal of sound mind is reformable. Rarely, an animal has been drugged, diseased, or abused beyond hope of sanity, and must be destroyed. A human criminal in such a condition would be likely to receive clemency. Occasionally, I have known people to destroy their own dog out of a sense of justice for non-threatening bites such as on the hand when receiving food. I personally regard these people as absolutely horrendous, and they’ll never understand why. They think they are executing justice, like some form of discipline, and I really wonder who they are trying to teach.
Likewise, I believe that we, as a society, are massively deluded about the idea of justice. Everything today is about ‘justice’: social, economic, criminal. Just because it makes you feel good, doesn’t mean that it does you or anybody else any good. I am not saying that we should be lenient or rule out all use of necessary lethal force in peacekeeping, but it seems that the moral reasoning that leads to any act of unthreatened aggression ought to be questioned.
tl;dr: The ‘death penalty’ is bullshit precisely because it doesn’t function at all as a penalty. A penalty is a device for behavior modification. I don’t know exactly what ‘justice’ is either, but all I see is chaos and violence from people demanding it.
I disagree with a lot of comments in this thread. The death penalty is in fact the appropriate punishment for murderers. This is not true in order to deter crime or so that we can create a better society or any other similar rationalization. Justice, by which I mean reciprocity, is an end in itself. A crime should be punished proportionally and the only justification for punishment is guilt.
A simple explanation of this theory of justice:
> A great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal (Yosal Rogat).
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You misspelled "revenge" there.
> at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.
I expect in Scandinavia these numbers are different. But they dont have death penalty.
From the news I learn that US cops also kill innocent people in the street. And it's military wages illegal wars killing 100s of 1000s overseas. I think the US has a weird relation with violence. The death penalty and how it uses it is merely a symptom.
If anyone wants more explanation, I wrote a detailed post yesterday about a similar case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894739
Edit: not only that but you stoked the flamewar downthread with posts about regime changes and putdowns about "civilized society". This is what I'm talking about. Please don't.
Edit 2: not only that but you did the same thing yesterday, and to judge by recent history it looks like your account has swerved into using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. Please don't—that's against the site guidelines because it destroys the curiosity this site is supposed to exist for. You're a good HN user so this should be easy to fix.
If anyone's worried about us being biased in favor of $country—here's an example from yesterday that went exactly the other way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26892927. We couldn't care less what color the flames are—we just want to have an internet forum that doesn't suck. When people starting arguing about whose country isn't "civilized" or whose there should be a "bloody war" with, we have dangerously high levels of suckage.
Yeah, considering the US have a bunch of problems related to violence (mass shootings, overzealous police force, invading other countries left and right), it makes sense that other violent processes are also problematic in the same environment. I agree with you death penalty is merely a symptom of something else in the whole system of the country.
Makes it extra weird when you consider how prude the US is when it comes to sexuality, while violence is something that is not only used as entertainment, but even many feel pride about.
Brushing away of the wrongful executions as a price of justice. Hold a monthly lottery of the population, with the random 'winner' being executed. Out of a population of millions you wouldn't even notice, but would send a message to the world that you were OK with the cost.
Secondly. Repercussions for those that assisted in wrongful convictions. Your prosecutor withheld evidence of your innocence? Police dropped evidence into your pocket? Try them for attempted murder. Boggles my mind at the lack of repercussions that seem to come out of these cases.
Finally I think you should be executed by your peers, in the same way as we tried you. At your conviction lottery is held of the population and winner is your executioner. They're given a gun/syringe/whatever and they're pointed at the prisoner. Oh, and I'd like this televised - maybe as part of the superbowl show. "Here's Charlene from Ohio, she's just celebrated her sweet-sixteenth, likes horses and reading and has selected a crossbow"
The point you're making is that living in society each day is a ticket in lottery where we could be falsely accused of a crime, falsely convicted, and unjustly punished. That's horrific all around, a death penalty is a factor but not even the biggest. On the contrary, if we need a death penality to make someone like your audience care about that horror of punishing innocent people then perhaps there is a beneficial purpose? Maybe executions make people care about bad things done in their name in the name of justice?
>Police dropped evidence into your pocket? Try them for attempted murder.
Yes, naturally. Some archaic pockets of government do this, sort of! What comes to mind is a specific public officer in my state who is personally responsible by law for breaches of privacy in her office. Consequences like that focus the mind! So much so, in fact, that those consequences come to dominate the public officer's thinking. I don't disagree, but forget 'defund the police'-- you're going to need a lot more police to enforce the modern criminal code at the current level of enforcement if police are threatened with death for misplacing their notes , memories and paperwork.
>At your conviction lottery is held of the population and winner is your executioner.
Again, the result here would be that some people would be assigned an executioner who would show them mercy. This too has analogues in our modern systems. In some parts of the world the victim's family can stop an execution if they feel the victim has been adequately avenged-- not a bad result! In the US context governors-- arguably the people responsible for these killings-- can and frequently do commute sentences out of compassion or lack of clarity about the crime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900759.
[0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/should-the-dea...
You ended up calling half the world's population "uncivilized".
I am not interested in some esoteric academic ethics argument.. in this, I want to hear, from people who lost loved ones - who are against Death penalty.
Who endured and still endure the suffering of a losing loved ones. If we get an even split from this group of people, may be then only then I will consider the academic arguments.
If your argument isn't about the state's role, then what is the distinction between these things. 4% doesn't actually seem like a high rate to me and it's not a high percentage of a relatively small number in the first place.
Yes, the number of people who die from those things are still non-zero.
But what you're suggesting is that we need to get those to zero before we address the death penalty. That's a false dichotomy.
The death penalty is one are where we are making the deliberate choice to end someone's life. We can prevent that 4% rate simply by not making that choice. We can make that number zero and it would cost us practically nothing to do so.
I am not impressed by your faux-concern for automobile deaths.
First order thinking. There's a time to argue with first principles and there's a time to make arguments via "back door hacks" in the guise of amenability. Life and death may not be the best time to use "hacky" arguments because down the line there may be do more harm than good. Particularly, in common-law systems.
Also,
> When intellectuals talk about the death penalty,
I see that intellectuals has been well normalised into a pejorative these days. What a time to live in!
Trump was right about how he attracted his support.
I think we should also quantify how many people are victims of recidivism. You could make the exact same argument but instead of protecting innocent people wrongly on the death row , you would argue to protect innocent people victims of recidivists murderers.
I've found a bit of data [0] from an article [1] which has 3 homicide among 92 paroled homicide offenders. That's a bit more than 3% which is not far from 4%. The data here is of "lower quality" (there's less people on a shorter timeframe) than the one quoted in the article [2]. However, that same article estimates a 4.1% false conviction rate but adds:
> The most charged question in this area is different: How many innocent defendants have been put to death (6)? We cannot estimate that number directly but we believe it is comparatively low. If the rate were the same as our estimate for false death sentences, the number of innocents executed in the United States in the past 35 y would be more than 50 (20). We do not believe that has happened.
So the article doesnt' support "at least 4% of people on the death row are innocent".
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Types-of-Recidivism-Amon...
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259809249_Criminal_...
Of course there will be miscarriages of justice and this has been talked about since the beginning. There is nothing new here.
> 4% of people on death row are innocent.
This is not true, but it's irrelevant anyway since what is the acceptable level? Since it's not mentioned, we have gotten nowhere in this blog post.
If we get it very close to zero, is it then ok then? Is the single incidence of executing a guilty man ok? Because either that's what this blog implies or it's skipping the real issues.
The post is indeed arguing that “zero people killed by the government for crimes they did not commit” is more ok than “greater than zero people killed.”
This is a valid argument, drawing on the intuition that accidentally letting a guilty person escape death (even if we accept they deserve it) is a lesser evil than letting an innocent person die.
- Must have DNA evidence - Must have audio and video evidence - Must have fingerprints - Must have at least 2 witnesses
There are plenty of cases that satisfy these conditions (terrorist attacks being one of them).
That said, I think there is an economic argument to be made against capital punishment.
Killing someone is definitely a waste of human life and economic potential.
Wouldn't it be better to have the sentenced man work for the rest of his life in prison and create value? You could potentially have a deal in which the prison organise the work, keep a portion of the profits to keep operating and pays the victim / victim's family for the crime they were subjected to.
I think this is fantasy right now because the government is terribly inefficient in everything they do - but with a system of private prisons (another fantasy, given the current trend of increasing the government size, instead of reducing it), maybe someone would be able to turn a profit and make it work.
Both prison labor and private prisons are absolutely a thing in the United States today. As I understand, prison labor is illegal in privately operated prisons. However, state-run prisons are allowed to use prison labor to manufacture goods and sell them to private entities for profit it many US jurisdictions.
Many people find this practice objectionable because it creates a profit-based incentive for states to issue more prison sentences and to make them longer.
However I believe that there is too big a gulf between “murderers” and “people convicted of murderer”; that the crime of killing is so severe that doing it to an innocent person is a miscarriage of justice far graver than any underpunishment of murderers; and so I oppose the death penalty in all forms as a matter of law.
If you seriously wanted to use the death penalty to deter crime, you'd do better executing people for smaller offenses. If you got executed for drunk driving rather than a fine, there would be less drunk driving.
Not saying that's a good thing. But if you're looking to deter crime, executing murderers is not actually a good way to go about it.
That's such a twisted mind you have there.