The Death Penalty, Nearing Its End
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Now, obviously we as a society cannot always guarantee these three things for all people, since criminals infringe on the rights of others and thus human rights are violated daily. In order to prevent this we choose to infringe on the liberty of criminals (by imprisoning them), in order to prevent their (greater) infringement on others. But since it is possible this way to prevent their infringement, by limiting only their liberty, there is no way to justify killing them instead, taking away not just some, but all of their liberty along with their life and their security. Yes, in order to enforce the human rights we must (somewhat ironically) infringe on them ourselves, but we cannot justify performing a bigger infringement than is absolutely necessary.
Which is part of the problem with the "abolish the death penalty" movement. The opposition was raised and impressed upon how prison is not for the security of society as a whole but for the punishment of the criminal. Except the later never works, and if you frame your law enforcement around that you end up violating a gross amount of human rights just like parents who think punishments are the optimal way to raise children most of the time end up abusing their kids.
I personally believe in middle ground (well, not exactly in the middle) - accidents/mistakes should be explained and discussed, lessons learned etc.
Intentional evil doing should be punished, ie by taking away phone/laptop/extra house chores/whatever, consequence adequate the action.
In this kind of logic it makes sense to punish criminals, since it's believed some sort of pavlovian reflex would kick in (do bad -> go to jail). it ignores the complexity of reality, ie jail creates criminals even from good people, and practically never the opposite.
But then again, you have serial killers, pedophiles, rapists etc in all kinds of horrible combinations. i don't believe these can be 'repaired', only made 'dormant'. What to do with these... people kill other people for no good reason all the time. I guess I somehow ceased to care in order to not go crazy from daily news
But it's very rarely the case that someone gets lifetime with parole, as your penalty is reduced by 1/3 if you are okay with having your sentence decided by the judge right at the preliminary hearing. In that case you can get 30 years for first-degree murder, with parole after 20 years and semilibertà after 15 years.
This doesn't apply if you are declared "totally mentally incapable". In that case you don't get a normal sentence, instead you are subject to involuntary treatment which could possibly last for life.
I don't mean to be asshole. It's just that the general moral decay from these things is the absolute worst that can happen. Most people don't think about it with all the focus in the current criminals and victims. Not the future of society.
In my understanding the future of society is exactly why there is penal code in the first place.
There would be many things to say, but I would be already incredibly happy if you would realize importance of this small aspect.
tl;dr: there's no evidence to suggest it is effective, and much evidence to the contrary.
People care about saving people from being killed by the state, they care much, much less about them having their lives totally destroyed by it. The resources devoted to exonerating people facing the death penalty dwarf those spent on helping people sentenced to life, or some lesser sentence that still destroys your life, like a ten year prison sentence.
Yes, but the assumption is not mine. It is an axiom of our criminal legal-justice system, namely: punishment deters future crimes.
> My world-view is that the death penalty is a form of punishment for serious crime. It is not meant as a deterrent, not meant as some "lesson" for others. And I, personally, see no problem with it as a form of penalty to be payed by some. (I also reject Blackstone's formulation)
Punishment without social purpose is sadism.
I suspect I misunderstand your position. The answers to the following may help me understand.
If you are advocating for punishment without a useful social purpose (like deterring future crimes):
1. Why limit the death penalty to serious crimes? 2. Why punish at all, if it achieves nothing? 3. What do you think the death penalty should achieve?
It's just a thought exercise – no real need to reply.
> The vast majority of trials
I don't. They are dead. They got unlucky. I reject the idea that we can't have capital punishment because sometimes the outcome of a trial is wrong. If you think this is a real problem then quantify it. Put down exactly what the percentage is (i.e. out of every X trials how many "go wrong" as you say). Then we can talk about a feasible upper bound. To say "If the percentage of people wrongly convicted is > 0% then we can never have a death penalty" is too idealistic. If it's 10% then it's obviously too high. Now we have a lower bound and an upper bound and can have a debate about what is an acceptable number of innocents dying. (again, 0 is infeasible).
> One person is one person too many!
This is the Blackstone principle. As I have said in the first post, I reject this. We both seem to disagree on a "first principle".
> Put down exactly what the percentage is.
One person is one person too many!
I am all for weighing risk or cost vs. benefit, but what would be the benefit of killing people, apart from "revenge feeling"? Also paart from costs, because the death penalty AFAIK is very costly to the US taxpayer and I've read actually more expensive than life in prison.
So zero benefit against killing even one innocent person.
I'm not even someone who is dead set against killing.
So what is the purpose? "Punishment" seems an overtly emotional basis for such a stance, and "the dead got unlucky" seems rather callous. In my opinion, this is an awful lot of power that you are trusting to the state for weak reasons. Historically, the death penalty has been wielded by some people in power not just for crimes like murder, but also for more awful reasons like, say, people who had different opinions or were "other" ethnic groups etc. Were they unlucky too?
Even in America, where our criminal justice system for all its lumps and flaws is still better than many, we have probably killed a couple of innocent people (the Cameron Todd Willingham case being the strongest evidence of an innocent person being killed so far). We probably would have killed a lot more innocent people had our bar for actually performing the execution not been relatively high (149 exonerated from death row since 1973 according to this CBS News article in 2015 -- http://www.cbsnews.com/news/30-years-on-death-row-exoneratio...).
Is it? It is exactly the view I hold.
I propose that if you are willing to accept a higher rate, then on each conviction let us make it equally likely that the jury and prosecutor gets executed instead. 5% chance of killing an innocent? Only fair that the prosecutor and jury faces the same odds. Let's see how many are willing to take that risk if their own life is on the line.
1) That's how it is in many first-world countries, so it's obviously not too idealistic.
2) If you don't see the death penalty as a deterrent, what is that supposed pragmatic reason why it's needed (that makes absence of it idealistic)? That doesn't make sense.
The reason it is thrown up is because it does happen.
I presume there are also miscarriages of justice in the USA.
But, even if you don't agree, it's also in no way the cheapest or most effective way to handle this punishment. Google it. Here's one page for you: http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-d...
That's what they say there. Doesn't mean that's what the society that sustains the laws believes...
For one, it gives people the message that murder, in some cases, is justified -- heck, even the state does it.
Second, after someone has done enough violent things to warrant capital punishment, every subsequent thing they do is free of any other punishment. Killed a cop during some robbery? Might as well try to shoot the whole lot down and escape, since I'm already certain to be put to death if caught.
Third, it also kills innocent people the same way actual murderers do. People that DNA or other evidence later exonerated.
The cold, calculating murderer that is happy to plan another murder is an extreme outlier.
As such capital punishment has exceedingly little effect on murder rates - most murderers don't believe they'll ever kill until they do, and are not in a state of mind to consider outcomes when they do. And once they have, the vast majority will never go on to kill again.
[1] EDIT: As in, extremely few will commit another murder.
And executing people who commit crimes for political or religious motives leads to notions of martyrdom and often encourages people of a like-mind to join their struggles.
Life imprisonment does much the same prevention job as the death penalty with much less baggage in terms of the ethics of killing people, or of the consequences of convicting innocent people, too.
Thousands of organs are transplanted every year.
The only way death penalty would make a dent would be to dramatically increase it.
But it wouldn't need to dramatically increase it to cause a massive percentage-wise increase in innocent people convicted.
Then what?
The reason there are so many on death row in the US today is that so many states have had issues with actually carrying out the executions - there are not 600 news capital convictions each year, so your supply would replenish at a much slower rate.
In other words unless you massively reduce the threshold at which you will convict, it will not provide much of a benefit. And given that we know that innocents get convicted, even a small reduction in the threshold will disproportionally increase the number of innocents convicted.
Want to solve the transplant issue? Instead of this, make people opt out istead of opt in to transplants.
And do you also propose that organ recipients be ranked according to how good they are as a person?
The thing is that many don't ever re-murder. With the proper systems in place, the majority of folks don't even wind up back in prison. IE, Norway's recidivism rate is around 20-25% :: The US hosts something like 52% at least with more than that being re-arrested for things.
Heck, the death penalty hasn't even been shown to prevent other folks from murdering folks. Neither have absurdly long prison sentences, including life in prison.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/21/polls-voters-favor-leg...
"Proposition 62, which would replace the death penalty with lifetime imprisonment without parole, has a tougher road to passage, according to the Field Poll, done in conjunction with UC Berkeley’s Institute of Government Studies.
The measure, which faces a competing state initiative, has the support of 48 percent of likely voters, while 37 percent oppose it and 15 percent are undecided. The pollsters cautioned, however, that a nearly identical proposition four years ago enjoyed a similar lead before being defeated by an electorate that wasn’t ready to soften sentences for some of the state’s most violent criminals."
We already know that Y% of death penalty cases are overturned before the victim is killed due to judicial misconduct and Y% is ridiculously large. We can assume that whatever the percentage of justice system failure is for mere life or mere 20 yrs w/o parole, its much higher than Y% due to having less attention paid to it.
The end result of getting rid of the death penalty is we'll be stuck living with (100-Y)% of really bad people, which is an inherent bad for all of us, and we'll have far more than Y% serving life and 20 yrs and so on unjustly and unexamined because those aren't death penalty cases anymore.
You can't seriously claim the people overturning unjust death penalty cases are going to transition to overturning unjust 20 yr cases.
Obviously some fraction of the (100-Y)% of those deserving the death penalty today will find a way to cause more human suffering years after they'd be dead if the penalty existed.
The net result, paradoxically, of getting rid of state killing of people, will be more total human suffering due to massive increase in false imprisonment at lesser sentences and obvious increase in number of victims of the worst of the bad guys because the worst of the bad guys won't be dead.
There are also weird cultural double standards issues, where its great and patriotic to kill brown people on the other side of the planet, but not here. Why does the dirt they stand on matter more than the flesh they're made of?
That premise for the rest of the argument warrants more evidence than a non-backed vox populi.
Apart from that, it also failed to consider the percentage of executed people that were indeed innocent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/1...
There is a peculiar similarity between foreign and domestic policy right now, in that at this time most of the minorities killed by the USA are being killed unjustly regardless of where they are on a map. Seems unfair to stop killing the locals and keep slaughtering innocent foreigners unless you invoke really weird doctrines like our folks have souls but theirs don't so they're not human, or that crossing a magic line in the dirt is the most important criteria of human rights rather than say, being human being the most important criteria of human rights.
We consistently treat life as cheap now. It'll be interesting to see what happens if we change to treat some life as separate but more equal than others or whatever ends up happening.
I suspect rather than a decline in globalist neoconservative warmongering we'll get a big dose of cognitive dissonance.
I like to give this as a counter [1] (from Franquins "Idées Noires", which shamefully I still don't think have been translated to English).
The text reads roughly (my French is rusty):
"The law is clear: Anyone who intentionally kills another loses his head. Let the executioner do his job."
"Over here my friend."
"And so a good deed is done."
"Sorry, but the law is clear: Anyone who intentionally kills another ..."
[1] http://www.funeraire-info.fr/journee-contre-la-peine-de-mort...
This is at best an argument against having poorly-thought-out laws like "Anyone who intentionally kills another loses his head", not one against the death penalty in general.
I say this not because I'm pro-death-penalty; I say it because it's a terrible anti-death-penalty argument. There's much better arguments than such word play so simple a child can see through it.
(Cards on the table: My personal position is that, actually, I'm OK with the death penalty in situations where a society can not afford to keep the murderer alive, or the society does not have a reasonably expectation of being able to keep the murderer from murdering again. But I do not merely mean "the society would be inconvenienced", I mean, the normal state through history is that the society literally can not afford to feed a murderer or have a realistic expectation of holding them; a tribe 5,000 years ago of 100 people literally can not afford it. However, in the 21st century, every major civilized society in which we might even be having this debate is very far away from that problem, having both abundant resources to feed and house them, and very realistic expectations that they can indeed keep them away from innocents. Prison breaks today are big news, and still don't happen all that often.)
For starters, if we accept state sanctioned killings, then any argument that a life is inviolable goes out the window. With capital punishment, the state is saying that taking lives can be acceptable.
> Humanity has been distinguishing between "murder" and "killing" for millennia
Yes, and a major distinguishing factor has tended to be premeditation and intent. An execution is of a nature that would fit in the worst category of murder if it wasn't for the fact that it was ordered by the state.
An execution has all the hallmarks of something that would tick every possible mark of a particularly heinous murder otherwise. Yet even when we know that innocent people get executed too, it is tolerated when carried out by a state.
Very few people argue that. Even fewer people who are pro-capital-punishment would argue that, for obvious reasons. An argument that only convinces those who already agree isn't even an argument.
"An execution has all the hallmarks of something that would tick every possible mark of a particularly heinous murder otherwise."
No, it doesn't. You're just doubling down on the sophism. Again, let me emphasize that if anything, I'm angry that this is a bad argument against capital punishment, not as a defense of capital punishment. Everyone from philosophers to the man on the street have understood the differences between cold-blooded murder, murder in the heat of passion, execution, warfare, and self-defense for millennia. Nobody who is capable of making those distinctions is going to be convinced to see all killing as equal, when even the man on the street considers it a rather unsophisticated position.
See also why the animal rights argument that "if it's wrong to murder people for premeditated reasons it should be wrong to kill animals to eat them" hasn't gotten any significant traction. Appealing to people to deliberately dumb down their morality for that to work isn't a good argument, especially when, again, it's not even that sophisticated a difference we're talking about here. We're not into weird Latin terms, reading 19th century existential philosophy, or even arguing what "begging the question" technically means, we're talking stuff that your average 12 year old could explain.
The response seems to be that that's a bad argument, they don't really believe that there's no distinction, and it would be stupid to believe that.
If I don't see a distinction of moral significance between the death penalty and, say, the CEO of a company deciding to painlessly execute one of their reports that they discover has gotten away with serious embezzling for multiple years, scorn doesn't help me understand the distinction someone else does see.
And it is one I agree with. Personally I consider juries that convict in capital cases, and prosecutors that seek the death penalty, to be no better than murderers.
I'd be fine with that. A state can confer value to some extent and still be illegitimate and immoral.
> To be consistent, you would have to argue that taxation is equivalent to armed robbery,
No, because taxation do not require the use of arrest as an enforcement mechanism. I am perfectly happy to consider the use of prison for failing to pay tax to be abusive.
I would, one the other hand, also consider it perfectly reasonable to place restrictions on most societal benefits from someone failing to abide by tax law, and to resist someones attempts to make use of them. Including denying them access to shared resources such as public roads.
If someone is able and willing to put themselves entirely outside of society, on the other hand, and so don't want to pay taxes as a result, I'd support that.
> law enforcement arresting someone is equivalent to kidnapping, and so on.
I do believe all countries massively overuse arrest and incarceration, yes.
I would tend to find it immoral except where failure to do so puts innocent people at substantially higher risk. Even then I believe we have a strong moral duty to seek the least invasive intervention, which would e.g. imply that if/when we are forced to use prisons they should restrict peoples freedoms as little as possible.
Even more so because the evidence is that strict prison systems produces more reclivism than more lenient system. As such, a lot of our "justice" systems not only harm those imprisoned but also inflicts further harm on society by doing a poor job at reducing reoffending, despite the fact that we know better methods.
We will not avoid inconsistencies, but we can seek to minimise them to only those circumstances where we have no other recourse. We have a recourse other than murder. For starters, we have prison. Most murderers that are released from prison never kill again, so the risk is minimal. Arguably low enough that capital punishment quite possibly kills more innocents than releasing murderers from prison would.
It's kind of a radical new thing for humanity that we now have the means to provide lives, even meaningful ones, to people who prove themselves too dangerous to live in open society. We should at least give it a try.
It definitely isn't impossible to have that as the average standard.
The question you might be asking is why the "bleeding hearts" like me aren't. For me at least, that would be because I believe that culpability for actions is a continuum. Hell, I even think sentience is a continuum. At some point, criminal tendencies cross a blurry line from willful malfeasance into mental disability. Because I can't reliably determine this point and I don't trust those passing judgment not to let their prejudices and biases influence their thirst for vengeance, I prefer a system that uses extra caution.
We have the material resources to provide meaningful lives to these individuals for their entire natural lives. Not "5 star" accommodations mind you, but far from the hellish gulags we have now.
Lashing out in deadly anger feels awesome, I freely admit. But how many are on life sentences for no less?
I don't see it as 'vengeance' if they aren't pampered. There is a broad range between gulag and the Hilton.
That being said, those who in short-term should have some environment suited for rehabilitation, which probably includes learning that "wow jail sucks, i will remember that next time before I punch someone". Obviously they should be given the chance for education and employment, but the latest Playstation games might not be a necessity.
Like adopting a stray god and putting them on a leash is OK, but putting some bum on a leash is bad?
What kind of silly question is this? Not everything applies to humans and/or all species the same.
A lot of things apply to humans and not other species...
What matters is that crime is not profitable in any situation. Punishment is there to reap away any profitability, but nothing more.
Murder gets you life in prison and I think that is justified. But it opens a problem here. Once you do one murder, second, third and fourth only increase your risk of getting caught. The punishment stays the same. There is specific case where death penalty would make some sense. If you are caught on the act. Killing witnesses should get you worse punishment than the original murder. But this gets tricky very quickly on many occasions.
Had he not had a job with video showing he was there, he would most certainly have been convicted of those to robberies.
If this had been a capital murder case, he could have been convicted on eyewitness testimony. Wrongly.
But it's also quite nasty that in some police sieges the perpetrator has absolutely nothing to lose anymore, except his life. So if he kills several policemen and manages to escape, it's still good deal. If that doesn't look likely, surrender and get the exact same life in prison you would have gotten anyhow.
Knowing this dynamic, the police is incentive to use sharpshooters early in the situation. Which is essentially death penalty without due process.
Also, is being shot by a sharpshooter the death penalty without due process or a reasonable effort to preserve the lives of innocent people who may be involved?
My understanding is that the ~15 years is because the convicts try everything to get the sentence repelled. Which signals that "death sentence" is really something they consider lot worse than being in prison.
There has been research that humans are unable to accurately discern more than 3 years into future. I don't think 15 vs. 30 vs. 45 years makes much difference. But 20 years vs. lethal injection, there is obvious difference in the quality of the punishment.
>Also, is being shot by a sharpshooter the death penalty without due process or a reasonable effort to preserve the lives of innocent people who may be involved?
You could claim that any death penalty is exactly that. No matter which position you take, the best situation in either case would be the perpetrator turning in and getting that due process.