The Glade 4.0

So, recently, the Innocence Project (which is fast becomming one of my very favorite non profit organizations in the country) helped this guy prove his innocence after serving 35 years of his life behind bars for a crime he did not commit (the abduction and rape of a 9 year old boy). In the article, it says that 245 people have now been exonerated through the use of DNA evidence.

I am not trying to claim that all of them were death row inmates. However, I will say this - we have 245 miscarriages of justice that we have proven via DNA evidence. Imagine if they *were* all death penalty cases.

In a system as imperfect as ours, it is imperative that we adopt a system that is barred from taking citizen's lives. At least with this man, he has his freedom to help his ailing mother, even so late in life. Had he been executed (a punishment often desired for such crimes as he was accused of), we would have been guilty, as a society, of murdering an innocent man.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

So, does your NPO have anything about a guy they helped in Georgia who confessed to the crime after being exonerated and caught for another murder?

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I would 100% in favor of eliminating the death penalty if there was an alternative that did not merely shift the injustice to the innocent public that now has to support/care for the convict.

But I strongly believe there are some people have no business in civilization and cannot be rehabilitated/returned to civilization.

It is not a miscarriage of justice when a person is convicted of something they didn't do in our system. It's a miscarriage of justice when that happens because someone did something unlawful or unethical in the process of convicting them.

Even if these people had been executed they would not have been murdered, unless someone had done something to violate the proper process of conviction. It's understood that occasionally people will be convicted of things they didn't do. The system is designed to minimize that, not prevent it entirely.

If false conviction is an argument against the death penalty, it's also an argument that people should not be imprisoned. 35 years of one's life lost in an institution? Even with what time this person has left, how will they deal with that sense of loss? In many ways death is more merciful than lengthy prison terms.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Life in prison, without parole actually costs the tax payers less than a death sentence.

And before someone says that this is only due to the lengthy appeals process, getting rid of that would likely drasticly increase the number of innocents executed, which makes the whole problem worse.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

What innocents are being executed that the number could be drastically reduced?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The main problem with the death penalty is it's shown to not actually deter crime. So by shortcutting the appeals process you're basically just executing more innocent people in order to save money. It doesn't increase the number of guilty people executed, and because the death penalty doesn't deter crime it doesn't reduce the crime rate.

Really? I'm willing to bet if you took a poll of people on death row which they would prefer, nearly all would chose not to be on death row




That assumes the main goal is a reduction in the crime rate. I tend to think its more about getting our pound of flesh.

And an appeal to popularity is valid because...?




Part of the reason it doesn't deter crime is the lengthy appeals process. Therefore you can't assume that reducing the appeals will not increase the deterrence value.

As for how one thinks of it, there's nothing wrong with getting a pound of flesh from criminals either, in proportion to the crime, even assuming that actually is the reasoning.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Which has absolutely no bearing on my comment, unless you were just adding some already well documented knowledge?

But the appeals process is expensive, no doubt, but no less expensive than the appeals process for non-death row inmates that have their legal fees picked up by tax payers. The difference in cost comes from the manner in which death row inmates are housed. The guard to inmate ratio goes way up, the living space per inmate goes way up, etc.

The crux of your comment was cost, so I assumed that because you weren't advocating life in prison, you didn't understand that it was cheaper.

If your main goal is to reduce the cost to tax payers for criminals that should not be re-introduced into society, then life in prison is the obvious answer.

Why is that the obvious answer? Reducing the length of appeals and cutting down on the high overhead for housing death row inmates would work too.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You're misusing the fallacy.

Since we're talking about something that is a matter of opinion rather than fact. (Humane is an abstract that is in the eye of the beholder) Then the fact that the majority of those for whom the decision is relevant feel one particular way, then yes, it is perfectly valid.

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You either didn't read or don't agree with Talya's comment. I also disagree with cutting down on the overhead on death row inmates. There is a reason why there is a higher guard/inmate ratio for death row inmates. They have no hope, so are much more likely to act out or cause trouble.

The only thing that the death penalty does is give the victims or victims families revenge. And while that's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm not convinced it outweights the additional costs and risk of mistakes.

Keeping an innocent man in prison for 35 years is no more correctable than executing him. It is no less a miscarriage of justice, or whatever else you want to call it.

California has 5 automatic appeals - does anyone here think that is a good idea?

If we simply require DNA evidence (from two different labs) for a death penalty case we could do away with a lot of appeals, shorten the process and make it much cheaper.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

No, that is not true. The original argument I was responding to was false conviction, which is not a matter of opinion. A person who is convicted erroneously for a lengthy prison term will lose that time irretrevably. In fact, a person convicted for a life sentence will be looking at the rest of their life in an institution with questionable prospects for exoneration, and the attendant physical and psychological consequences such as institutionalization, the strong prospect of assault, rape, or murder (in the first two cases quite possibly repeatedly) and having to live with the sense of loss of whatever time they have been deprived of even if they are eventually released.

Just because death row inmates would choose life if given the choice does not mean it is actually more humane; humane is somewhat subjective but harm can also be assessed through observation. That's why it's an appeal to popularity. A dog, like a death row inmate has a survival instinct. If hit by a car it will try to get away and live, but that does not make it more humane to let the thing suffer on the off chance it will recover. You shoot the injured dog unless there is good reason to think it can be saved.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I imagine we'll see movement in that direction when it comes to sentencing. Looking briefly through the exonerations on the Innocence Project's website, every single one I randomly clicked on was an overturned rape based on further DNA testing. In that sense, it may well be that what appears to be the Innocence Project's "bread and butter", if you want to call it that, exists in a current and finite window of opportunity. The cases appear to be uniformly based on wrongful convictions that can now be overturned due to technological progress with DNA. So, the window has one "end" at the point where this technology begins to be appropriately applied before conviction and sentencing. The other "end" runs out when currently incarcerated convicts who were convicted prior to proper DNA testing, for want of a better term, die out. Groups like the Innocence Project will continue to have work I'm sure, but I imagine the volume of exonerations will diminish.

Just because I'm a contrary old fart, I'm tying this into a point you raised earlier... As it applies to people, the concept that a convict can be "saved" is, for me anyway, rooted in the concept of penitence. The concept of a "pound of flesh" is rooted in retribution. There's a reason we call our prisons penitentiaries, and pounds of flesh have no place in sentencing in my concept of justice. We're strictly punishing criminals at that juncture, in my understanding. We have civil suits for rewarding victims.

(edit: I just noticed that you can change your posts's subject, for the first time ever... go me! so now it doesn't just say Re: Re: any more)

I don't see anything wrong with retribution as part of justice, when it's applied after a lawful finding of guilt.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Okay I have to think about it some more then, and on further review, I think it's... tricky, but you're probably right. There's justice to be meted out to the criminal, and then there's justice for the victim. I agree that there's some reciprocity to be acknowledged there - it's not simply a case of "you've done wrong, now go learn your lesson". They've done wrong TO someone. Justice that is limited in focus to penitence on the part of the criminal would be too narrow, because the victim has some right to justice as well, and that's doubtful to be served by leaving them out of the equation in sentencing. So, I think you're right there. For some reason though, the idea of differentiating, where "this is for punishment, and this other is for payback" is distasteful to me. I guess at its root it smacks of vengeance to me, and that's tied to our baser nature.

I suppose my perspective is that in sentencing that's focused on the criminal, we ostensibly have punishment, penitence, rehabilitation in mind. That seems potentially at odds with sentencing that attempts to redress the victim - that gets dangerously close to payback, and that's a little too Hammurabi for my concept of western world justice. But you're right, the victim can't be left out of the picture.

So revenge should be the standard? If that is the case why don't we allow the victims to determine sentences?

Sure it's correctable. You can let him out of prison.

Now I'll grant you, that you've pretty much completely **** the guy out of the majority of his life, but there is still life left that he's now free to do with as he pleases.

I agree that it's not less a miscarriage of justice.

Why not just say you disagree, and add what you propose to be closer to just? I'd think that the impartiality of a jury trial as opposed to mob justice was pretty obvious.