Comment by vaporstun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaporstun | Hacker News Reader

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I look at it from a financial standpoint.

When someone does something this vile, we (the people, by the courts) determine that they shall no longer have a right to their life. Whether that be by ending it via capital punishment or by keeping them incarcerated forever, they essentially no longer have a right to their life.

It costs ~$48,000 per year to keep someone incarcerated (at least in MA where I am: http://www.massbar.org/legislative-activities/mba-memo-on-se...)

If a court determines that someone will no longer have a right to their life and their remaining lifespan is, for example, 40 years, we will spend somewhere on the order of $2,000,000 to keep them incarcerated for their lifetime.

Of course, that assumes the value of the dollar is constant (it isn't) and that the price of keeping this murderer in a maximum security prison is the same as the average cost of keeping someone incarcerated. (it isn't)

When we are locking the door and throwing away the key, why not save the $2,000,000 keeping someone alive who we've deemed has no right to life anyway?

If a new method of testing evidence appears and the alleged criminal is cleared of charges, you can let them out of the prison. You can't un-kill them.

edit: I heard of countless cases of young black men being incarcerated for murder in Texas in the 60's with police going quite out of their way to obstruct the justice process.

I agree that's definitely worth consideration. I am nowhere close to being an expert on these things but I would have thought that most of the big technological leaps in the justice system are probably behind us. Fingerprinting, DNA matching, fibre analysis, ballistics... All of these things are pretty well established now.

I agree that a lot of cases got turned on their head when DNA matching became available, but what technologies do you envision providing the same sort of disruption in the future?

It doesn't always have to pivot on technology -- there will always be overzealous DA's and corrupt judges. Once again, I'm not for or against capital punishment, nor have I done sufficient research to form an opinion, but I can just imagine the Kafkaesque hell an innocent man or woman can be put through to be put on death row.

Yeah, I can sympathize with that. I definitely would not want to be in that situation. I'm sure there's a workable compromise in there somewhere.

I definitely think that most countries need to think about the crimes that they imprison people for. Imprisonment is super expensive partly because it's used so often. If only serious criminals went to prison, the social impact of imprisoning someone would be much greater and the overall cost would be lower...

Brain-scanning based lie detectors with high accuracy.

Nice one! Now that you mention it I remember seeing an article about FMRI being used in that role a while ago. Excellent example.

Even if we did develop a lie detector with high accuracy, how would we know?

There's good reason to believe that lie detectors might work much better in the laboratory, on test subjects telling inconsequential lies to experimenters and knowing they'll go home, than on real suspected criminals telling vitally important lies (or truths) for life-or-death stakes.

And if a new method of testing evidence appears and the alleged criminal is cleared of charges 20 years later, you can't give them those 20 years back. I don't see how capital punishment differs from incarceration as more than a matter of degree.

Pragmatically, I think capital punishment is a good thing to have since it causes us to give the criminal justice system an extra degree of scrutiny. I'd rather be falsely convicted of a capital crime than a life in prison crime. I lose my life either way, but more people are motivated to exonerate me if I'm facing the death penalty than for life in prison.

<i>you can't give them those 20 years back.</i>

And they still have another 20 to live. And they get millions of dollars in restitution. So, an innocent man is executed - possibly the worst injustice imaginable. Who get's to tell his children, his parents?

That's an interesting second point, a bit of a gamble though.

This is silly.

Suppose you were wrongly imprisoned for 20 years, but later freed. You could reasonably argue that you would rather have been killed (but would you?). You cannot reasonably argue that I, or your friend, or your mother would prefer to be executed rather than to live in prison for 20 years.

Second, what does the extra scrutiny matter if we still execute innocent people? If there were no capital punishment, we by definition would not execute any innocent people.

Your no-right-to-life argument is predicated on your own stated, but not proven, value judgement, but it's murderous to force this on others.

I'm not arguing that a mistaken execution is equal to a mistaken 20 years in prison. For a person with 40 years left to live, I'm arguing that 20 years in prison is half as bad as killing them (ignoring the fact that early years are probably higher value than later ones).

Extra scrutiny matters because the goal is not minimizing execution of the innocent, but minimizing punishment of the innocent. I don't see how wrongly making a person live out their life in jail is significantly worse than killing them. Extra scrutiny matters because it would reduce our error rate. I'd prefer one mistaken execution to two mistaken life imprisonments.

Note that this latter point is strictly a utilitarian one, not a moral one. In a world without assorted lawyers/activists/etc working to prevent wrongful executions, the argument would not apply.

I didn't say my system was without flaws, it's just my way of thinking.

And it is relatively rare that an innocent man is convicted and sentenced to death. We can have a system that forces all of us (as taxpayers) to pay a HUGE amount of money keeping all of the vile criminals alive for a chance that they're in the <1% innocent who were wrongly convicted. Does that make good financial sense though?

Also, I'm talking about the future, not the past. Sure there were many wrongful convictions in the past, but the same technology that is freeing those who were convicted wrongfully in the past is the same technology that will help prevent innocents from being put on death row in the future.

When you include the cost of appeals etc we spend more than that (on average) actually killing someone. In the old days of trial > hanging your argument was more reasonable, but we also killed more innocent people back then.

Are there any hard stats available on this sort of thing?

This is probably biased, but it lists several study's.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty

Thank-you! Always nice to have some figures!

That's just an argument against our current court system. We allow virtually unending appeals, even with no new evidence or reason for believing that the earlier trials/appeals were somehow unfair. Some states have (or had) mandatory appeals for capital cases, even when the defendant plead guilty and didn't contest the death penalty.

Apart from wrongful convictions resulting execution, death penalties are also very expensive, as the costs of due process through all the appeals have to be paid.

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