California Gov Newsom commutes death sentences for all 548 people on death row
bbc.com
bbc.com
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://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
Either way, it sounds like you have a very low opionion of the search for justice in society.
Alternatively they could be saying all the resources put towards catching murderers since the number of those they murdered are relatively few.
To be clear I'm strongly against the death penalty. OPs comment seemed to trivialize the deaths that happen as a cause of murderers or the actual killing of those murderers and I have an issue with that framing. I think putting resources towards understanding these things are resources well spent since they directly impact what society decides is justice.
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...
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.
This is the man that told the entire state, millions of people, to shelter in place ... and then went to one of the fanciest restaurants in the entire state (French Laundry) to solicit campaign donations during lockdown.
Newsom will say or do anything to become president, but he should never become president precisely because he will say or do anything, with no moral compass guiding him.
That is, I think the Trump family ideology is “Trump must win” and I think the Newsom ideology is “Newsom must win”. Newsom only appears better than Trump to a certain portion of the population because Newsom understands who he needs to pander to. Put Newsom on the national stage, and he will go just as low as Trump, without hesitation.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Virtually all cases involving death penalty have a jury trial, higher stakes == higher priced lawyers, there are built-in automatic appeals, there are actually two separate trials for guilt and application of death penalty vs. one trial with a sentencing phase, etc.
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?
Edit: after reading the article seems like a no-brainer, CA is not executing anyone anyway, so why maintain the fiction:
> 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.
The state is usually paying for the prosecution and defense as well as the court staff in these hearings.
Relative to California's law enforcement and judicial budgets required to investigate, arrest, try and convict them in the first place? Irrelevant noise. That's just a silly argument.
(There's also the whole moral thing about "we should kill people because it's too expensive to keep them alive", but even so, the financial thing just doesn't logic.)
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more...
Probably a good thing considering (what I perceive to be) a rise in political violence that seems to push for and/or celebrate summary executions with little to no due process.
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.
This doesn't excuse the immorality of the death penalty.