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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

I, like pg, am against the death penalty but I don't agree with the reasoning in this essay.

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.

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You can release a wrongly imprisoned person or refund a wrongly imposed fine.

But given the existence of error rates there will always be wrongfully fined or imprisoned people. We won't ever get a chance to fix the vast majority of false convictions.

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.

There is a pretty strong line drawn at death. I was once asked to justify that line on the record as part of a jury selection process and I couldn't do it. That didn't make it untrue and it didn't convince me that the line doesn't exist.

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.

Ya, I pretty much agree.

I finally created an account so I could say this exact thing, and in the minute it took to create the account three other people said it. So... yeah, I agree.

Nice handle

You can't undo 10 years of imprisonment. You can't give back time or take away what the person had to live through.

And arguably, considering suicidal ideation of inmates and ex-inmates, may itself create death. I'd be curious to know how the rates compare with wrongful death penalty judgments.

No, but you can try to make up for it as best you can.

Other errors can be remedied. Death penalty not so much.

But that's also one of the essential points of Kant's argument in favor of the death penalty: depriving another person of life is a uniquely irrestorable offense.

Arguing with the ghost of Kant seems like something one should avoid, but here I go... isn't that also an argument for why a state should not impose capital punishment? Mistakenly taking someone's life is something a state could never remedy.

Kant did not appear to grapple with the fallibility of the judicial system in the way that we do now, and I neither intend to defend his views or put words into his mouth on that point (though I welcome someone more knowledgeable in his work than I to do otherwise and cite). My point is that there aren't easy answers to these questions, which is why I upvoted the OP comment, because it implies a mature understanding that fallibility is also a value judgment.

(Edited for grammar. I hate typing on a smartphone.)

If Kant said that then he was trivially wrong.

For example, if you blind someone, how is that not just as irrestorable?

I believe he was a pretty "eye for an eye" guy: "This is the right of retaliation (jus [lex] talionis); and, properly understood, it is the only principle which in regulating a public court (as opposed to individuals’ private judgement), can definitely assign both the quality and the quantity of a just penalty." (http://acad.depauw.edu/~jeremyanderson/old/120s05/120z_kant....)

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.

This is a different question though - one of penalties rather than one of restoration.

Death is a permanent sentence while other sentences are not.

How is taking X years out of your live not permanent? Can a state give those years back if it admits a mistake?

(Clarification: don't have an opinion on overall debate, just picking on details of individual arguments).

If you get sentenced to life in prison and exonerated after 20 years you don't get those years back but you do get to be free for the rest of your life. If you're executed and then exonerated 15 years after the fact you're still dead.

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)

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