Hacker News Reader

The Singapore (and rest of Southeast Asia) solution set might work here, but there's no way we have the political will for it. If we won't execute the vast majority of murderers, there's no way we'll do it for people just running a kilo of coke or weed.

Not to mention "works" and "worth it" are not quite the same thing.

View on HN

Singapore can do this because they're a city state without jury trials, a bill of rights, or the Kennedy v. Louisiana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Louisiana) decision. It's doubtful that the Supreme Court would allow a similar policy. If they did then the cost of appeals make this approach too expensive to implement it.

Yeah, executing drug dealers/smugglers at scale would require significant and likely negative rollbacks to our system of jurisprudence. The US used to do things like this though!

(I say likely negative because a system of trials that didn't cost 100k+ and take years for an actual defense would be a dramatic improvement)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com