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Comment by bahmboo | Hacker News Reader

Consider that a non-zero number of them are likely innocent. It's hard to know for sure but even 1% is 5 people. There has been some research on it.

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It’s quite shocking that innocent people get convicted of first degree murder. In theory, premeditation beyond a reasonable doubt must be proven. And you need consensus of 12 people!

To me this is proof of failure of system to educate a sufficient majority of people to think rigorously.

why? Say someone is murdered, and it doesn't take much forensics to determine that they were attacked, restrained while alive, then shot in the back of the head execution style.

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.

Evidence of pre-meditation !== evidence the suspect applied pre-meditation. You need to tie the premeditation to the suspect, I think. In your example, if you can't prove the suspect wrote the note, I don't think you can convict on first degree murder.

You don't need a jury. Almost every murder conviction in the USA is via a plea deal, and another percent are "bench trials" where you risk the judge's opinion instead of the jury.

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.

Why would anyone plead guilty to first degree murder?

Most people plead guilty to it.

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."

Fair enough, and fascinating. I guess I’m conflating first degree murder with “death penalty”. Please tell me nobody is pleading guilty and getting the death penalty.

It has happened: https://law.justia.com/cases/indiana/supreme-court/1997/77s0...

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.

Project Innocence helps exonerate innocent people. They claim that about 30% of their “clients” had admitted guilt. My understanding is that it’s mostly based on DNA evidence so not really a matter of opinion: https://innocenceproject.org/exonerations-data/

“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.

Yeah, that's what they did with Kevin Fox who spent 9 months in the jail getting regular off-camera beatings from the guards, because he'd been charged with raping and killing his own daughter, before the prosecution admitted they'd been hiding exculpatory DNA evidence.

https://chicagojustice.org/inside-kevin-foxs-appellate-court...

After winning a $16m verdict against the corrupt cops and prosecutor he moved to Alabama where he was hit in a head-on collision by a car in the wrong lane and perished.

Sodium Thiopental could be used to weed out the criminals from innocent, but its use is often considered a violation of the 5th amendment. That's a key phrase equivalent for, "Oh! Oh!, they can prove my guilt with that, regardless of the amount of money and power I have." As such, both the criminals and the innocent will inevitably be sent down the river or the grave while ideologues continue to engage in political debates related to the drug's legality or usage in a criminal setting.

I would want a lot of peer reviewed research before I considered "truth serums" as providing anything actionable. The evidence would have to be absolutely overwhelming.

Read up on the Doolin case, which is mentioned in TFA. At best it's an incredibly shaky conviction based on a badly mishandled legal process, at worst it's an appalling miscarriage of justice.

if anyone has any information, its these folks - https://innocenceproject.org

Globally around 43,000,000 people die from premature /avoidable aka innocent deaths.

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

I'm confused. Are you saying we shouldn't put resourced towards saving the criminals or catching them? After all, as you said, it is only a small % of total deaths.

Either way, it sounds like you have a very low opionion of the search for justice in society.

Justice doesn’t mean killing.

That is kind of my point. I was being sincere when I said I was confused by the person I replied to. It seems like they are advocating for less research into the negative/positive effects of the death penalty because those deaths are relatively few.

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.

I think the point is that innocent people die every day. By the time I’ve typed this out, some more have died. It may seem crass and heartless, but the number of innocent lives in the relatively small population of death row is many orders of magnitude lower than in many other populations such as victims of avoidable vehicular accidents. Yes, both issues can be attacked at the same time. But the purist anti capital punishment view is based on an emotional argument, “even a single innocent life taken by failed justice system is too many”, while fatal accidents are essentially wholesale slaughter, relatively speaking by the numbers.

I think "stop killing people" is easier in a practical sense than "cure cancer"; it's only due to the bloodlust that people feel the need to spend time advocating against it.

We shouldn't put resources in saving violent criminals. There is a reason why they are given death penalties in the first place.

Now you have just exposed the risk of them existing in this planet and doing more harm. Not to mention say 40 * $50,000 or $2 Million spent on keeping them alive

Here's a fun one: crime lab scientist frauded and lied about it all and she just happened to get caught. Terrible that it was not caught earlier. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g22gb9gSPjo

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