This year we can end the death penalty in California
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Other important work done:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/
edit: sad to see this thread flagged off the homepage.
Neither does killing people with drones...
It is a war crime. That doesn't mean any drone wielders will ever be brought to justice, but the same goes for all those Blackwater (oh, sorry 'Xe', oh, sorry 'Academi', it's hard to keep track of these scumbags) contractors during the Iraq war.
War crimes as a rule will only see their day in court if they are committed by relatively powerless people on the losing side of some conflict. Otherwise you're probably in worse shape shoplifting or stealing a car.
Heck, America doesn't even subscribe to the international tribunal for warcrimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Internat...
And they're the main users of drones for killing people in countries they are not formally at war with.
This is just the tip of the criminal iceberg in the US. But crime is really the wrong word when the people who commit and order the crime and those who protect them are the same people who write and enforce the laws.
Why, in your view, is it much worse for the state to jail an innocent person for a long time (say, their entire adult life) instead of killing them?
Don't succumb to the Nirvana fallacy here - for sure, the American justice system has many more serious flaws than just the death penalty, and those won't be fixed right away. But this is a step in the right direction and worth taking even if many other problems still remain.
People coming out of jail after 10 years of imprisonment are used to the original iphone as the only smartphone. They don't know about Uber, Venmo, Bitcoin, Amazon and Google have both changed dramatically. Now you need an EZPass for most roads, healthcare laws are different, they missed the whole Snowden ordeal. Weed is borderline legal, gay marriage is legal, etc etc.
Things have changed a lot in the past 10 years. If you weren't allowed to keep up with it, you probably don't know how to navigate society anymore.
Their failure to adapt is our failure as a society to prepare them. By imprisoning them we become their guardians and stewards, we are responsible.
Yes, this costs money but it helps to reduce recidivism and in general is a good thing to do.
You don't know of anybody who has never been imprisoned who is managing to live their life without interacting with any of the things you've mentioned?
If not, I would recommend enlarging your circle of contact.
This isn't trolling. If you don't know how to use modern tech, it's going to be harder to socialize, especially if you are in a city (as they tend to adopt tech faster).
If even a person has successfully rejected some tech (maybe Facebook, maybe smartphones), it's doubtful that they've rejected all tech and if they have they've developed skills for living without it among people who otherwise expect them to have it.
I might be overstating this on a timeline of one decade, but it gets much worse on a timeline of 20 years.
20 years means you were likely using Windows 95. Texting wasn't a thing. Phones didn't have "apps". Banks didn't have websites. The average person's job had a lot less tech in it.
Can you survive? Sure, but your options are a lot more limited compared to someone who knows how to use the tech of the 21st century.
There are far worse consequences to being jailed for 10 years or more than not to be able to use a cell phone or the latest social media fad.
How do you compensate someone for being imprisoned (and likely raped) from the age of 28 to 45?
In many cases, the death penalty is more humane.
The you might as well kill all prisoners because it is more humane, after all where would you draw the line, 5 years, 10 years, 15 or 20, it's all time that has passed.
Compensation should be of such a magnitude that it incentivizes society to make sure it happens as little as possible.
But the degree to which it is worse (and whether it is enough to ban the death penalty) seems quite subjective.
Seems to me that you could use an identical line of reasoning to conclude that prison sentences longer than N years should be banned.
Is it a matter of degree? Or is there something fundamentally different about the death penalty that warrants a ban?
After someone has been executed, nobody pursues the case anymore.
If you want to gouge a society's level of civilization, look at their prisons. What sets humanity apart is the ability of reason to control instinct. It has taken us from beast to philosopher to The Weather Channel, and its measure is how we treat those everyone hates.
In other words: those over which society wields a lot of power who do not have much power of their own.
While the innocence project has saved many innocent people, it's important to remember that they also are wrong sometimes.
Your life was taken, and no one can give it back.
It's a difference of degree only, not kind.
That kind of incident makes the problem much more complicated. The typical argument against the death penalty is that sometimes innocent people are executed. And it's true, and it's horrible. But if you don't execute them, then the alternative is that they should be in prison for the rest of their life. If they're innocent, that's still pretty horrible. The real objective is to keep innocent people from being convicted in the first place.
But like many other situations, the false positive rate and the false negative rate are inversely correlated. How many guilty people should we free to avoid sending one innocent person to prison? The obvious answer is "as many as we have to" - it's not acceptable to have innocent people in prison. But if we're talking about serial killers, that question becomes "How many innocent people do we want to see dead on the streets to avoid sending one innocent person to prison?"
Back to the death penalty. Sometimes guilty people escape, too, and sometimes they kill people after they escape. Executed people don't kill anyone ever again. So, how many innocent people are you willing to execute in order to prevent innocent people dying on the streets?
This stuff is very difficult. But given less-than-perfect prisons, I can see a case for keeping the death penalty for serial killers.
4% innocents on death row is a higher number than those killed by escapees, I will agree. But where do you stop? That means at least 4% of those sentenced to life without parole are innocent. Now what? Is leaving them to rot in jail for the rest of their life really that much better than executing them?
When people exit the prison system un-rehabilitated they will hurt more people.
I think this is a more important question. Why is revenge given priority over avoiding new victims?
Also if one actually cares about life, why are prisons such overcrowded hell holes that prisoners get shanked and killed on a regular basis?
This is my issue with this sort of reasoning as it easily becomes cherry picking of issues to support harsher justice system while ignoring all the related issues which speaks for a milder system.
Here in Colombia death penalty was banned about a century ago, unfortunately, it has done more harm than good, because criminals (even very bad ones, the kid rapists and stuff) are not scared of prison, prisons are so crowded that sentences are short (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Garavito is a good example, I don't think a lifetime of prison would forgive all he did, he should be condemned for 1800 years) and this has led to crime rise.
There is a common belief that politicians banned death penalty long ago to be able to be corrupt without any risk, in the long run if they're not dying, they could steal a lot of money and then use half of it to get out of prison early.
I know US corruption is not as bad as Colombian corruption. Unfortunately we have to deal with our system, and the ban of death penalty has kept terrible people in our country for a long time. It may be unethical to kill someone, but in the end is the lesser evil, because it will never compare to the harm that this person does to the society. As a Colombian I feel that corruption and crime is going down now, and we are proud for it, but I also feel that if we took the 'evil' decision earlier, we would be much better now.
and two epistemic questions, how many innocents X are executed per guilty person, and how many victims Y are saved on average by the disincentive caused by executing one guilty prisoner?
Per guilty person executed, we save Y lives and we are penalized W * X. Is Y > W * X? If so it seems reasonable to keep the death penalty, all things being equal (ignoring the cost of litigation vs. prison time, etc)
Does anyone have sources for what the values of any of these numbers should be?
Therefore, if you're opposed to the death penalty and intend to vote yes on both measures--reasoning, for instance, that the reforms on 66 such as expedited appeals for death row inmates are an improvement regardless of whether 62 passes--you're undermining your own vote.
That's not entirely true. In the event that both propositions pass, whichever proposition received more yes votes will supersede the other https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_66,_Death_Pen...
In that case, voting Yes on both makes sense. Either death row will get cleared out by getting rid of the death penalty or it will get cleared out by killing them faster. Either way, it's a cost savings. I find that logic to be cold and impersonal, but I imagine there are plenty of people who think that way.
This is rather an arguments against prisons to me.
> We say it's wrong to steal, but we use fines as punishment.
Objectivists would indeed argue this is an argument against taxes.
I know all the arguments against the death penalty, but I just can't manage to get myself upset that there is a death penalty for such things.
I know, constitution and all. But still, that sounds a bit mercantile.
I have read of prisioners being upset when given a life sentence as they know that no one will help them appeal their conviction. If you are innocent you want to be given a death sentence since you will have so many more people helping you get your conviction overturned.
I know if I was innocent and poor and had been convicted of a crime that was either life in prison or death that I would want a death sentence.
>A child could answer that one for you.
http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm
N>25 [0]
[0] Graham, 2016
I think your probabilistic reasoning is a bit off (by confusing P(I|DS) with P(DS|I)).
But the actual issue is about the punishment, not the guilty/innocent determination. So in other words, PG doesn't seem to be making any claim about the size of the group of "n guilty men" -- but rather about the way they can be punished.
>Commandments for man can be found in the book of Exodus, by the same Author(s), where God rejects the tradeoff between convicting the guilty and convicting the innocent, and simply commands, "the innocent and righteous slay thou not." 32 One can take this to imply an infinite value of n, at least in capital cases. The twelfth-century Judeo-Spanish legal theorist Moses Maimonides, however, interpreted the commandment of Exodus as implying a value of n = 1000 for execution. 33 He refers to it as the "290th Negative Commandment" and argues that executing an accused criminal on anything less than absolute certainty would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof, until we would be convicting merely "according to the judge's caprice. Hence the Exalted One has shut this door" 34 against the use of presumptive evidence, for "it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death once in a way." 35
There may be multiple ns required, one for conviction and one for punishment, but the underlying structure is the same.
>To unpack, you seem to be arguing that since 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent, then about 1 in 25 people are wrongly convicted, and PG is saying that ratio is unacceptable. I think your probabilistic reasoning is a bit off (by confusing P(I|DS) with P(DS|I)).
I'm not sure what you mean. If 25 people are sentenced to death, and one of them is innocent, then PG is arguing we should let 24 guilty men escape death rather than allowing 1 innocent man to be killed. I guess maybe I should have said n>24, then, but the overall point remains.
It's all fun and games until you are that innocent person.
Are you arguing for n=infinity?
The problem is that no matter how small the ratio gets in absolute terms there is only the possibility of killing an innocent person or not killing an innocent person. Even if you assume that everybody is guilty I'd still make the argument that people can genuinely change and that no matter what you do you will not be bringing anybody back that's already dead.
Think of still having the death penalty as a black mark on a civilization. As a nice example have a look at the Philippines and try to work out for yourself if you feel that even if society will be better afterwards it is worth it to kill this many people, many of them in serious trouble already.
The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it?
That may be (and I agree with it), but I'm critiquing PG's argument (in particular his assertion that it's obvious), not his conclusion.
>The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it?
You need different punishments for different crimes, or someone who commits a small crime has no more deterrence against big crimes. I'm not sure what point you're making with this.
Deterrence and punishment have very little to do with each other (but deterrence and the chance of being caught do have a lot to do with each other).
So fundamentally the justice system is not about punishment at all, though from the victims perspective that might seem to be the case.
No. PG's piece leaves open the option for punishment by other means, even if they do turn out to be innocent.
For instance, to take the extreme case, nothing in PG's article says he would have a problem with punishing everyone accused of murder with one year imprisonment, with probability one.
I get that you want to tie PG's piece to the Volokh article, but PG's piece is about this particular form of punishment.
[edited to add: since we're going in circles, I'll stop now]
The Volokh article allows for multiple levels of punishment as well. The quote from Maimonides doesn't mean we simply let them go free if we aren't absolutely sure that they are guilty, instead we would lock them up.
Since being reinstated only 13 people have been executed. And none in the past 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Californ...
Meaning that, there are certain cases where we are 100% certain of a persons guilt and can mostly agree that that person should die but how do we ensure a death penalty is used exlusively in those cases?
Though it might be considered poor policy, since it would discourage people from accepting a plea bargain or confessing.
False confessions are a common cause of incorrect convictions.
https://courses2.cit.cornell.edu/sociallaw/student_projects/...
[1] - https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Paradise-Lost-The-Child-Murder...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost:_The_Child_Murde...
I weigh that measure of justice as less meaningful than the potential execution of innocents.
The will of the people is the ultimate mandate in a democracy. In 1972 this mandate was for the death penalty. We'll see next week whether the mandate has changed.
Until a small group of judges say otherwise.
Charles Manson and other 106 inmates on death row in 1972 were all convicted killers who were relieved from the death penalty.
Many victim's family members were upset by the courts decision.
That qualifies more as 'revenge' than as 'justice'.
Unfortunately, the US has long since decided that punishment is the purpose, that these people are getting what they deserve. It's a very frustrating culture to be surrounded by.
According to whom?
> But executing them makes 'us' just as bad as 'them'.
So you're saying that, for example, the state executing a mass murderer is just as bad as mass murder?
And even if you don't accept that, just consider: most crimes aren't murder. They don't get people sent away for life, but for a period of 1-a few years.
They will be released back into society. If we do not rehabilitate them, we can expect recidivism from either failing to counter the errant impulses, exposure to similar or worse criminal elements while incarcerated, or failure to reenter society (due to ostracism, failure to adapt to changes, lack of social structure like family and friends). We are literally creating the problem by failing to rehabilitate criminals, and instead focusing on "punishing" them.
Justice is supposed to measured and balancing for society as a whole, meted out by an impartial judge and jury of peers.
Revenge is completely subjective and ruled by emotional responses by the aggrieved party. It's almost always going to be more destructive disproportionate than it needs to be.
The last people that should decide the fate of those who have harmed them are the victims. That just leads to pure chaos.
I could decide that if someone threatened my life that I would achieve justice by circumventing law enforcement and the justice system by murdering the person in question plus their whole family, whether they meant it or not. I could state reasons of personal/family honour and whatever other bullshit would justify those actions in my mind. That doesn't make it right, or just. It makes it a response borne of unchecked emotion.
You might say that is okay, but it would quickly lead to pure anarchy if we all followed that ideal. That's why we have a justice system in place that doesn't (or tries not to) focus on revenge.
And thus the state protects the convicted from the vengeful desires of the victim's family members and doles out the justice the community has deemed appropriate. Just because the victims pay the state to "string 'em up!" instead of doing it themselves doesn't mean it's not mob justice.
So 'the people' will want both, depending on whether they have the long or the short term view and those two views can and do contradict at times.
nobody was impeached. It was a normal judicial retention election.
If people require revenge for emotionally healing then that is because society has promoted this as justice.
I've never heard of victims desiring death for killers in my home country, but we are not so big on revenge and don't.
The American justice system frequently paints a trial as some sort of game, where the victims family score more points in the competition for every year extra the perpetrator gets in prison.
What about helping victims in meaningful ways instead? They might need mental health care, time of from work, economic support etc. America tend to do little in this regard.
It reminds me of the conservative desire to ban abortion, but unwillingness to actually help a family in a difficult situation giving birth to a child. Instead of making it easier to have a child so people themselves will chose to keep it, instead they want to intimidate parents to keep it threatening with prison and fines.
It is a fundamentally negative and cynical perspective on humanity. I guess that is what you get when people follow a faith which teaches that people are only good because the fear eternal punishment in hell.
Where did you get this idea, that pro-life people are anti-help, pro-intimidation people?
> It is a fundamentally negative and cynical perspective on humanity. I guess that is what you get when people follow a faith which teaches that people are only good because the fear eternal punishment in hell.
That's not what Christianity teaches. Christianity teaches that people are sinful, period. It is only through the redeeming sacrifice of Christ that we can be washed of our sins and be seen as holy in God's sight. We should then be motivated to lead holy lives primarily in gratitude and love, not out of fear. For example, I John 4:18: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love."
At the very least, any rational person should see that compared to armchair speculation of medical interventions, organ extraction offers real value! And not to mention, think of all those who die or suffer because of the pace of medical research. With these worthy prisoners, we can change that! This mindset that values convicts' lives as so trivial is troubling and wasteful.
TLDR: Who cares if a family didn't get the speculative relief they wanted from somebody's execution? That's a perspective that treats life as absurdly trivial, and I doubt the medical community believes this as a serious intervention to clinically significant distress.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/10/19/three-states-t...
So why is the discussion to eliminate the death penalty instead of ensuring more oversight or limitations?
Something like:
- Not applicable when only one murder committed
- Bigger burden of proof for the DP to be applicable (not only relying on witnesses, for example)
The Supreme Court has gradually been mandating more and more oversight and limitations on death penalty cases since 1976. It doesn't seem to have made a major dent in the false conviction rate or the arbitrariness of when capital punishment is used, especially with regards to race. And while I don't think cost should even be relevant to the discussion, it's worth noting that these limitations and oversight requirements- which still aren't good enough- are the main reason why it costs 10 times more to execute someone than to put them in prison for life. Combined with the death penalty's demonstrated lack of deterrent effect - simpler and better to just get rid of it.
And of course, prosecutors that push dubious cases should be punished as well.
No, this is just an update, for Graham's California readers, most of whom can safely be assumed to agree with him, that they should take special care to vote this year.
I'm glad California has a chance to end the death penalty this year. You'll catch up to Illinois soon enough, Silicon Valley!
But this isn't the kind of post that finds a good home here on HN. This is the kind thing you want to post (repeatedly) to Twitter. Here, it's just more flame war stimulus.
I flagged this post --- and, because it's a PG post, did so vocally this time. You should too!
I once believed in the death penalty. I once believe in God. I was once a libertarian. Of course a single person didn't change my mind on these points, but being exposed to alternatives by many people over time changed my perspective. Although I guess often simply seeking information is what eventually does most to change opinions.
I also think that your flag-marshalling is in pretty poor taste, flagging it yourself for whatever reasons you have is fine but to call on others to do so as well is really not good.
Generally, if all I have to say about a submission is that I flagged it, I'll refrain from saying that. But that's not all I had to say here.
So arguably, any sentencing is unfair when it's wrong. Death only makes it more obvious. Then, what's the acceptable error rate in a judiciary system? The author mentions 4% being unacceptable. What about 0.1%? 0.0001%?
Crime can not be left unpunished, can it? And yet I doubt it is possible to always be absolutely sure of either guilt or innocence.
After all, doesn't the Law talk about "reasonable doubt"? Doesn't that also mean by contraposition that below a certain threshold, it becomes unreasonable to consider unlikely circumstances or extraordinary events that would prove a defendant non-guilty?
The wrong people can be executed and unlike a prison sentence, there's no going back.
Appeals can last for decades and waste enormous amounts of time and money.
End the death penalty. It's just not worth it.
Of course it is effective. If only because it reliably and permanently removes the dangerous person from the society.
Why have a penalty which 1) Can never be reversed if you kill an innocent 2) Cost a lot more than life in prison.
Now why it might be argued that a killer has no right to life, what about those close to the killer? Killers might have a wife, husband, brother, sister, friends, mother and a a father. By killing the killer you inflict hardship on these people. To what purpose? In prison this person can't hurt anybody else, so why unnecessarily reduce the life quality of somebody else.
I see it being argued that the victims families deserve this, but I think that has been learnt and conditioned in society. E.g. in my own country Norway, I hardly ever read about victims and relatives who desire a death penalty or any particularly harsh or painful punishment. I think the desire for revenge is something which is simply promoted by conservative christian groups.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/05/01/cons...
The issue is that the appeals process is extremely expensive and time-consuming. You could conceivably simplify and streamline it (to the extent permitted by the Supreme Court, which has been mandating ever-stricter requirements for capital punishment cases), but that would make it even more unacceptably error-prone than it already is.
"Cost a lot more than life in prison" - death penalty opponents have driven up the cost, so if cost was a real reason you oppose the death penalty, then we could keep it and focus on reducing cost.
"By killing the killer you inflict hardship on these people"- in your opinion. I think it would be a bigger hardship to have to have a living murderer as part of the family.
"I think the desire for revenge" - Why is incarceration not revenge? Justice flows from the notion that punishment is proportional to the crime. Taking a life should mean losing your life Whether is is lifetime imprisonment or the death penalty, you can call it revenge or punishment or justice.
I've noticed a strange pattern where wealthy elites like Paul Graham are obviously very disturbed by things like the death penalty, animal rights, and tragedies they see overseas but can hardly be bothered to care about the great suffering poor people face generally.
The only issues that they care about are ones that directly affect their own conscience and mental well-being.
"The death penalty is bad because it makes me feel bad"
Whereas people who don't live such privileged lives can see so many worse problems in everyday life, like being hungry, suffering from bad/no medical care, to being victimized by street crime.
Is it not a prerequisite that a wrong begin to effect your conscience before you want to do something about it?
Why are so many rich celebrities obsessed with animal rights, the death penalty, and climate change?
Because those issues affect them personally in some way. They gnaw at their conscience in a way that the extreme suffering of hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens does not.
Rather, I would say rich celebrities are obsessed with animal rights, the death penalty, and climate change because those ideas are fashionable among rich celebrities, not because they're relevant to rich celebrities for any fundamental (i.e. would still apply if no one knew what the celebrity believed) reason.
One doesn't have to be affected by rape to oppose it.
I can reflect that there are others whose opinions I value. And thus throw support behind issues that, if left to my own opinion in a vacuum, would be of little concern.
Empathy springs, in part, from conscience.
My hope would be that people would consider their utility vs. the utility of all those who also want something. I've certainly supported modest tax increases because my neighbors were passionately in favor where my own view would be to oppose it.
Is it too much to hope that people will consider broader societal interests and not just their own narrow ones?
The agenda is:
1. End the death penalty.
2. Assume someone else will help innocent people, which they largely won't.
3. Go bad to enjoying blissful ignorance.
PG thinks the death penalty is bad, but PG isn't worried enough about other things you think are worse, therefore PG is wrong? (???)
I honestly don't see where you're going with this other than cheap sniping.
He's anti-death penalty in the same way. The orders of magnitude more suffering in our prison system can't get a tweet but the nearly disused California death penalty urgently bothers him...
It does seem to bother Paul Graham as he writes "The police often arrest the wrong person. Defendants' lawyers are often incompetent."
It's also clearly an argument intended for Other People who need pragmatic reasons for ending the death penalty. He is against it on purely ethical grounds, or in my opinion, because it makes him feel bad about himself.
We can't undo killing them. We can't give them back their years, either. But depriving someone of their life entirely is worse than depriving them of a portion of their life. At least in the latter case they have a chance to go out and do something, reconnect, however painfully, with loved ones, or make new connections.
(Also, let's fix the jails and prisons!)
Doesn't that sound insane?
Let's fix the prisons, and let's have something like a basic standard of living, below which we only let people live if they want to. I.e. so-called Universal Basic Income, or something. I think we should literally give people housing, food, water, and health care, just because.
Being 20 years in jail destroys you live, innocent or not, I agree. But by killing people you are not giving them a choice either, so your argument can be negated with the same message.
(Not that I am for the choice of death for prison inmates either, a terrorist for example should not be allowed to become a martyr and escape prosecution.)
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer",
But, in practice, we will never get it 100% right. Probability of killing an innocent person will always be >0.
For that reason alone, we should get rid of it.
If you put a serial killer to death, you can be 100% sure they won't kill any more people. If you put him in prison, you can't. He may escape, or he may get released early and kill again. Or as often happens, he'll kill other prisoners whilst in prison.
It's a question of whether you value potential victims, or potential falsely convicted innocent people. IMHO the former is a far bigger problem.
We have different tolerance for accuracy depending on the context, and my assertion was that in this case 100% would be necessary for, at least me, to feel comfortable carrying out the punishment.
If you don't put them to death, can you be 100% sure saving that life isn't going to cause more people to die?
It's not simply a case of "punishment". It's preventing further crime and deaths.
The importance of that I think is clear with respect to the dynamics for terrorism and war. People who experience their loved ones dying easily get vengeful and radicalized.
If I lost somebody dear to me, I don't think the execution of the killer that my increased satisfaction from this would likely pale compared to the sadness inflicted on those who cared about the killer.
This is a fundamental thing in human psychology. We react more to losses than gains. If e.g. the boss takes money from you and gives to me as a bonus, then my joy from this will be significantly less, than the dissatisfaction you will feel from this loss. The sum is lesser than its parts so to speak ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...
Of course there are error rates in our judicial system. It would be impossible to not have them. But these errors are not confined to death penalty cases. We surely wrongfully imprison some people, and wrongly fine others. That does not mean that we shouldn't have fines or prisons.
I don't see a good justification to apply this reasoning to the death penalty but not other forms of punishment.
(Edited for grammar. I hate typing on a smartphone.)
For example, if you blind someone, how is that not just as irrestorable?
But you have to realize, this is not to be read in isolation as a rehash of Hammurabi''s code. There is significant axiomatic and theoretical foundation that brings Kant to this conclusion, which has significant influence in modern ethics.
So even though you're partially(1) right about reversibility it doesn't really matter given that this won't actually come up most of the time. There will still be wrongfully penalized people.
1. I would argue that you're only partially right because wrongful imprisonment can be compensated for but not really undone.
I'm pretty far down the scale of "logical justification". At least enough to make Jesuits blush, and I personally cannot justify my line that is right before "killing someone". I'm happy to consider that one of the many areas where logic fails us and move on.
(Clarification: don't have an opinion on overall debate, just picking on details of individual arguments).
I think you can also get awarded up to something like 50-100k per year of wrongful imprisonment (though that hardly comes close to compensating you for the damage that would have caused)
I recently watched the documentary 13th from Netflix. It really puts into perspective our pro-incarnation justice system. While capital punishment and death row is a section of our justice system, it has the highest stakes in outlining where our ethical limits reside as a society.
Be careful how you read this number.
This is NOT the proportion of convicts wrongfully killed. This is the number that have wrongfully received a death sentence.
A death sentence is nearly always appealed, and usually multiple times.
The number of convicts sentenced to be executed that subsequently fail every single appeal is likely far, far smaller than that statistic.
Now that I'm older, I worry about the possibility that banning the death penalty is an implicit acceptance of the policy of locking people away for life. According to the article 4% of people who are sentenced to the death penalty on death row are innocent. He doesn't offer statistics for the number who actually receive the punishment however given that not all people on death row are executed, and the significant resources devoted to the appeal process, the percentage of innocents who are executed must be lower than the 4% who are sentenced.
I must ask how many innocent people are sentenced to life in prison. I can't imagine anything worse than an innocent person sentenced to life in prison -- and eventually dying in prison.
If we are to make decisions about punishment taking into account the possibility of an incorrect sentence, I believe we need to be more realistic with regard to the hierarchy of punishments that we are inflicting. A sentence of Life in Prison carried to term is a worse punishment than Execution.
This isn't an objective fact. Even some prisoners would certainly prefer to live their life behind bars than lose it completely.
If we're worried about punishing innocents, we should address that problem, not proxies for it. If the justice system can't be trusted with execution, then it can't be trusted with imprisonment or even fines.
The other question is if execution of an actually-guilty person is just. I hold that it is, and that not to execute certain criminals is a miscarriage of justice, just as not imprisoning certain criminals is a miscarriage of justice.
Certainly, we should err on the side of the innocent, but at the end of the day we're going to have some people who must be isolated from others, and we're going to have some people who must be killed.
It's wrong to believe we can (or even should) have a justice system that doesn't make mistakes. Human fallibility exists.
"some people who must be killed."
That's a moral opinion.
I think I'd prefer to be executed at the end of the month than be released after a decade in prison. I'm almost certain of it, to be honest.
That doesn't mean that some crimes shouldn't be punished with decades (or life) in prison: they should be. Even if we don't think of it as punishment, there are people who should not be released back into society. But if we have imprisonment, then we will imprison innocents.
As you note, our justice system will always be fallible. But, fallible as it is, we need it: the alternative is worse. We live in an imperfect world, and everything we do will have at least a few downsides along with the upsides.
> > some people who must be killed
> That's a moral opinion.
Of course it is. 'We shouldn't kill people' is also a moral opinion.
From today's NYT article on the Greek property-tax issue[1]:
> Greeks were stunned in 1987 when the police uncovered a gang that had killed at least eight rich elderly people after forging their wills. The plot’s leader was a lawyer and former mayor of an Athens suburb; accomplices included a notary public and a gravedigger.
I think it's pretty indisputable that people who forge folks' wills and then murder them deserve to be executed.
[1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/opinion/in-greece-prope...
Maybe I'm a limp wristed liberal, but 'Three strikes' has always seemed utterly barbaric to me. Even its name being based on a sports metaphor seems totally inappropriate for something so serious.
I really wish we could do something to dramatically change the prison system in the US -- its insane how much horrible inertia guides its current trajectory ... Given how much more we know about humans than we did 200 years ago, why aren't there better ideas on the role of prison and the justice system disciplining their mutual evolution than were available in the past?
If a politician does come along and try to change the system, he's got to convince a lot of his colleagues that don't have a lot of reason to do anything, and he's got to worry someone else will come along and tell voters he's worried about making life good for criminals instead of better for good people.
There's just no incentive.
I see the death penalty as almost more humane than life imprisonment (and--this rationale is a little cold--also much less of a tax burden.)
The US really needs to get its shit together in terms of figuring out how to rehabilitate criminals and get them back into society.
Regardless of where you stand on either issue, supporting one but not the other seems like hypocrisy.
Killing someone as punishment is simply not fault-proof and the whole idea behind a justice system worthy of the name is that it tries very hard to protect the innocent even if that means some of the guilty will go free or will escape punishment. 'Perfect' evidence rarely is, and even confessions are not always true.
Preventable deaths are a step or two removed from state inflicted and sanctioned murder.
How is spending a lifetime in prison coddling?
> The derrent of death alone would save far many more people.
That isn't true, criminals as a rule have a hard time tying consequences to their actions, have a high incidence of mental issues. If deterrence would work at all it would be nice but it rarely does.
But you're welcome to your own opinion, but 'you reap what you sow' applies to societies just as it does to farmers.
Violence projected and practiced by the state will not help in moving society to a more peaceful quadrant.
It does if they're found innocent after conviction, as has happened at least 347 times so far[1].
It should also be noteworthy to the true law and order types that false convictions mean the real perpetrator is still going unpunished. If you kill everyone who does something you dislike, the pressure applied by those bleeding hearts at the Innocence Project will go away, which means now not only have you killed someone innocent, but you've pointed blame away from the guilty and basically assured they'll get away with it. I must confess my failure to understand how this outcome is supportive of law and order.
And with regards to the comment about surveillance and DNA testing, you might benefit from a bit of reading about the history of forensics. It is a history of foolproof methods being rather less than foolproof. Of if you really can't dismiss the idea that we've achieved the pinnacle of physical evidence analysis, at least do some reading on what is actually involved. Remember that with, e.g., DNA testing for legal purposes, you're not looking at just the test: you're looking at the whole "stack", from our understanding of biology to the lab performance to the chain of custody to jurors' understanding of science. Not going to point to anything specific; there are a ton of explainers out there about this waiting for the interested.
I'll end with a simple question: do you believe that Blackstone's famous ratio is false?
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer[.]"
A) Guilty people who don't deserve to be put to death.
B) Guilty people who deserve to be put to death.
C) Innocent people who don't deserve to be put to death.
D) Innocent people who deserve to be put to death.
D is empty, so let's just consider A, B, and C.
I agree there are people in B. At the same time, it seems very hard to design a death penalty system that selects any of B without selecting any of A or C.
I'd be very curious to hear what system you propose that is able to limit false positives more for A and C than death penalty abolition would. Unless you're able to, I, and a whole lot of other people, are more willing to support Charles Manson spending the rest of his life in a cell than murdering someone--or dozens or hundreds of people--to satisfy mob rage at the existence of Charles Manson type people.
Keeping a violent offender removed from society for the duration of their life DOES all of us a lot of good.
State murder is an ugly business that has no part in any modern society.
I'd consider being in long-term or life prison to be the next closest thing to those examples; a life without freedom, friends, family, with the potential for a wide variety of suffering beyond that - poor medical, poor food, guard abuse, fights, solitary, rape - what in this is worth living for? Prison is specifically meant to be a punishment, not a rehabilitation. And then maybe you get out a couple decades later, everything has changed, no one will hire you, everyone has moved on...