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Comment by TrapLord_Rhodo | Hacker News Reader

i think you missed my last line. That should answer your question. The government can never be perfect, and killing and innocent is a tragedy. However, you cannot cripple the whole system for this vanishgly small chance or you have an equal chance of success across the system. If you keep making those compromises, putting systems in place to correct the errors of past systems; it quickly becomes a losing game. Put more simply, If you lose trust in the system, you can't rely on the system to fix it.

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This argument always falls flat because those that claim state-sanctioned killing of innocent citizens is a necessary tragedy, never seem to say that they’d be willing to be murdered themselves in that scenario. It’s more like “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

So why not just select random citizens by lottery and publicly execute one for every 50 or 100 convicts executed?

You're willing to accept that if the random citizen is labeled as guilty even if they're not. If it's acceptable for innocent people to be executed, what's the difference in having a random death lottery?

That's the whole point of the system is it not? We accept that there is a vanishigly small chance that a innocent person may be locked up and imprisoned. The point i was making is that we are already making that choice by the allowance of jails and prisons. So if we accept that, the sentencing does not matter. They were proven guilty in the court of law. There is a handful of studies, i'm sure someone could pull up about such cases where people on death row were found innocent after 20 years. However, those are exceptions and 99.99% of cases are not that way and are mostly because we "discovered" dna evidence as a thing.

It's death by a million cuts as soon as you start second guessing the system and trying to use the same system to fix it's inherent imperfections. Proven guilty by the court of law needs to mean something.

I think put yourself in the shoes of someone about to be executed innocent of their crime. Then make your argument. It sounds like “some of you die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” otherwise.

> what's the difference in having a random death lottery?

Due process?

Perhaps I misunderstood it, but I read that as you not finding the value of avoiding accidental executions as worth the cost to avoid them. And if so, then I think that’s a perfectly valid position. But it’s subjective, since others may find the value worth it.

I’m curious though: is there an error rate where you would feel like capital punishment would be off the table? For instance, if 90% of people executed were innocent, would you still want it for the 10% who deserve it? I admit that if we had a 100% success rate, I would be open to capital punishment, so we may actually agree that there’s a threshold where the system shouldn’t be allowed to use that as a form of punishment, and only disagree about about the percentage.

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