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Comment by dreamdu5t | Hacker News Reader

I find it insulting to any logical concept of justice that people who murder other people deserve what they willfully deprived of their victims. Nonsense about forgiveness and "becoming one of them" is just that... nonsense.

Now everyone wants to defend this man's life, a man who intentionally took the life of another by hiring a hitman. He doesn't deserve life. Why should the victim's family be obligated to respect the right he willfully deprived the victim of?

Queue the "because forgiveness herp derp civil society" comments. Spare me. An eye for an eye does not make those blind who didn't poke someone's eyes out.

If you take a $500 item from me, you owe me $500 not $250. If you take my life you owe my family my life, instead of being housed, clothed, and fed on my family's dime.

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THose defending him are doing so because the evidence available almost certainly indicates that he was convicted solely on the lies of someone under threat of the death penalty himself.

If he legitimately didn't do what he is almost certainly falsely accused of, that makes your bloodthirstiness even more uncomfortable and unjust.

Are you comfortable with your judgment to take someone's life on the desperate accusation of a meth-head avoiding death himself?

Straw man. The innocent are punished for crimes they didn't commit regardless of the crime or punishment. It's irrelevant to my issue of how the guilty are to be punished.

One key difference being that the death penalty removes the ability for later appeals and compensation if they are found to be innocent. According to one study the wrongful conviction rate of prisoners on death row could be around 4.1% [1] - that equates to around 120 innocent people currently being on death row.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/many-prisoners-on-...

Why doesn't that argument apply to all punishments? Isn't it better to let the guilty go free than falsely imprison someone for life? There's more than an estimated 20,000 innocent in prison who are not on death row. Why are the innocent good enough to be spared the death penalty but not life in prison?

If an imprisoned man is later found innocent, you release him.

If an executed man is later found innocent, you can... uh...

Solution: forced cryonics, with elements of Demolition Man thrown in as desired.

Have you read through the facts of the case? Glossip did some things that indicated that he knew the victim was dead in the room. There was testimony from others that he was planning on leaving town immediately after being brought in for questioning. And the "hitman" had no real motive for killing the victim, but Glossip did, because of the $6000+ dollars that were missing from the motel over time.

There are far more convincing anti-death-penalty cases than this one.

The death penalty only further erodes our respect for life. It coarsens our culture and diminishes our humanity. Simple like that.

"our respect" or "our culture" is too many people.

It does not erode MY respect for life.

It does not diminish MY humanity.

The victim's family has no say in the matter beyond the indirect proxy of the judicial system. Bringing it up is a red herring, unless we're speaking of vigilantism.

>If you take my life you owe my family my life

How does executing your murderer return your life to your family?

It's not about forgiveness, but using an imperfect system to do something that is impossible to undo.

$500 can be paid back. Your life can't.

So not being able to pay something back is your standard of justice? Why punish the murderer at all?

I never said that, I was just pointing out that your analogy is fundamentally flawed.

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