What I don't understand is how people can be against the death penalty but yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives. I personally know someone who, if they live to be 75, will ultimately end up being in prison for over 5 decades. How is that not "cruel and unusual"?
So I'm one of those people. It's simple really - death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't. Yes it sucks that sometimes we might have to release someone who spent 30 years falsely imprisoned - but it's sure a hell lot better than finding out that there is no one to release because the person was executed a decade ago. And secondly, I just don't see any need to execute people, the risk vs reward is not worth it.
I think the word you're looking for here is "irreversible", not "permanent." Life imprisonment is, by definition, permanent.
And yes, you can "reverse" life in prison by setting the prisoner free. But what you can't so easily reverse is the psychological damage done by the false imprisonment.
And it's still less irreversible - to them, and to family and friends - than killing them.
In practice, mistakes are made, regularly, and these mistakes are distributed unevenly, such that the poor and minorities suffer the most.
The many wrongful deaths at the hands of the government is a good reason to be skeptical of arguments which assume the death penalty can be applied perfectly. It can’t.
For a simple counter example, you can look up the Outreau case : 12 people were accused of raping and videotaping children, with multiple testimonies. And 5 years later, the majority of them were found to be actually innocent.
If death penalty was a thing in France, they would have got it for sure, as it was a very emotionnal case at the time.
You can also check the movie 12 Angry Men, which is a work of fiction obviously, but still very relevant on why counting on 'black and white cases with extreme evidence' is simply wishful thinking, and will lead to innocent people being killed
It was highly influential in the eventual abolition of the death penalty in the UK in the 1960s.
Because the cost of putting them to death using a system that has sufficient checks to (mostly) prevent innocent people from being executed (i.e. the current system, if you believe it works) is greater than the cost of imprisoning people for life.
For society's conscience, certainly. For the prisoner, I'd say it depends. I suppose most will agree that a swift death would be preferable to 65 years of extreme torture with a "sorry, you're free to go" in the end. It comes down to whether long term imprisonment, especially solitary confinement, is close enough to torture. Some prisoners apparently prefer death, the suicide rate is much higher than that of the general population, and iirc, quite a few prisoners dropped their appeals and asked to be executed, likely because they prefer a horrible end to never ending horror.
If and where you draw the line between "this is fine" and "no person shall suffer like that for decades, no matter what they may have done, ending their life is the humane thing to do" is up to you.
Death being permanent is a feature, not a bug. Is it possible that evil people can continue to negatively influence society from prison? Or even continue to commit heinous crimes in prison? I'd say this scenario happens much more often than killing an innocent.
For example, organized crime. If you don't kill organized crime leaders, they continue to spread their secret oaths among other prisoners and continue to manage affairs even outside of prison via comm links.
I agree that it's bad to kill innocents, but I think with the right policy and rigor, we could make the death penalty an efficient and painless process that has an extremely low false positive rate.
In my mind it's like "yeah, we save the extremely rare false positive at the expense of allowing all the non-false positives to continue to spread and propagate evil for decades"
For me personally, 0 is the only acceptable number. The only way to get that is to end the death penalty.
But why? Surely you must acknowledge that the "innocent people murdered by the state rate" is inversely proportional to the "innocent people murdered by criminals who should have been put to death but weren't rate"? This latter rate includes prison murders, calling/paying for hits from prison, influencing copycat killers, being released and then killing again, etc.
So basically you are trading one form of innocent death for another (not to mention introducing a host of other negative effects to society by allowing truly evil people to interact with people in said society). For me, death penalty is acceptable as long as the "innocent people murdered by the state rate" is less than the "innocent people murdered by criminals who should have been put to death but weren't rate".
> Our prison system is barbaric and the solution isn't to just kill all criminals
I never said it was. I think DP should be reserved for organized crime leaders, serial killers, and other people who have repeatedly shown that they are fundamentally incompatible with a good society.
A crime of passion such as a husband killing the man cheating with his wife does not necessarily deserve DP and would be a candidate for reform.
To be in favor of the death penalty is to accept the possibility of abuse, something we've seen occur where people are rushed to death row before their criminality can be fully presumed.
The death penalty should never be on the table because the possibility of abuse is too high and the history of it being abused proves that it can't be handled in any rational way.
I think the reversibility argument is a sloppy way of trying to say that there is some massive difference in kind between a lifetime of imprisonment and an execution. The argument seems to be implying that outright ending a human life is taking infinite value, but imprisoning someone for an entire lifespan is taking only finite value. That's the only way it would make sense to allow for the possibility of some erroneous lifetime imprisonments, but not allow for the possibility of some erroneous executions.
Secondly, and I'm sorry, but your characterization is incredibly sloppy. The overall outcome is better if even one exoneration happens and you assume equal preference for life imprisonment vs execution. However:
* Many wrongful convictions will be exonerated. There are multiple per year. There has been at least one this year: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-cases#CliffordWilliam...
* Further, while the preference might not be "infinite" you can just look at the overwhelming majority - innocent or not - of death row prisoners that exhaust all avenues of appeal to see that there is a strong preference there.
Secondly, of course I don’t dispute that there’s generally a preference for life imprisonment over execution.
From the perspective of the - potentially falsely - accused, "The difference is that you’re still alive" is a pretty fundamental distinction and "The finality of imprisonment and execution are the same" is false.
How low of a rate are you willing to accept, and how do you plan on getting there?
See my other comment
> and how do you plan on getting there?
By restricting death penalty not just to the type of crime, but the type of crime and the type of evidence. I think death penalty should be reserved for repeat offenders of egregious crimes where there is overwhelming strong evidence.
Humans are fallible and therefore incapable of creating an infallible justice system.
Allowing any death penalty means murdering some number of innocent people to "get" a greater number of bad people who you already have locked up.
So answer the question. How many innocent people are sufficiently low collateral damage and stop pretending we can only execute bad people.
"See my other comment"
Where you never answered.
1/10? 1/100? 1/1000?
Keep in mind that those statistics are very indirect, particularly since once an execution is carried out, no one has any incentive or interest in reexamining the case.
What if the rate of false positives varies by race, is that still acceptable to you?
I’d hate to overlook a 10x improvement for all because one group got a 2/10ths penalty and another got a 1/10th penalty. The alternative (to give one discriminated against group a penalty 50x worse and the lesser discriminated group a penalty 100x worse “because fairness demands it”) is worse, IMO.
I am a little worried that you are using these made up numbers actively to justify your thinking to yourself. I understand it’s just a hypothetical to explain your framework for reasoning. But you should have actual numbers before you commit to that framing, no?
The subtext of my comment was that your formulation might be immoral given the racial context (i.e. “racist”), and I think your detailed answer still probably is that, by assigning different wrongful death targets to different races. But I understand your moral position is that you just want the best possible for each race, which is.... well, racist but morally defensible I suppose.
I used a constant non-state rate in my example. If I had actual data, I’d have been happy to use it. Without that, I had to go theoretical and argue that if every group is made better off, there’s an argument to support. Surely, before such a plan is changed, it will be studied to an extent that’s impractical for news.yc commenting.
Life imprisonment is unusual? For the absolute worst possible crimes? Again, no, not really. It certainly must suck, but what is unusual about society wishing to protect itself from it’s worst offenders?
Life imprisonment has the huge benefit of being undoable if new evidence exonerates someone.
I am certainly opposed to “BS life imprisonment”, like US drug three strike laws leading to that outcome. But for murder, rape, etc? No, I personally am entirely on board with life imprisonment, provided the justice system can demonstrate the person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Forcing someone to eat a box of baking soda would be unusual to me because it's in a totally different category of punishment. Like fining, community service, or death instead of prison.
That's a blatant lie. If an innocent man ends up in jail at the age of 20 and it "is undone" when he's 40, his life is destroyed anyway: No career, no savings, no family, no prospects for ever amounting to anything. How do you undo that?
Get off your moral high horse. Life imprisonment is more cruel than death.
This entire comment chain seems to be conflating two common arguments:
1) If it's wrong to kill an innocent man, it's also wrong to imprison that same man; you can call one more unjust than the other, but (as the argument goes) you can't say that one is justified while the other is not.
2) Our society has gotten too used to locking people up in metal cages for several decades; there are many arguments in favor of moving back to flogging[1][2]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Flogging-Peter-Moskos/dp/0465...
It's sort of too bad that there aren't many mostly empty wastes that we can exile people to any longer. Remove them from society, but give them the chance to make what life they can under the sky.
But context matters. I'm really objecting to the weird notion that miscarriages of justice are sort-of okay, as long as they don't result in capital punishment. It makes little difference whether a man's life is unjustly destroyed or unjustly extinguished!
Besides the fact that execution (last I checked) is permanent, there are no methods used in the US (or most places in the world) that guarantee a quick, painless death.
Practically, the most likely methods (lethal injection) end up torturing people to death.
That’s really the kind of world you want to live in?
Imagine yourself in the situation: you are 20, you go to jail. You are 40, now exonerated. You have no friends, no skills, no job, no money. You are a failure. It's unfixable. You are likely to commit suicide.
The point isn't so much whether a messed up life is still better than no life, the point is that someone upthread glibly asserted that wrongful imprisonment can be reversed. That is a convenient lie. Those years are lost. Forever. Irreversibly.
Still not getting through? Fine, imagine a women spending her third and fourth decade in jail. That means no children. Ever. Is that enough to get the point across that imprisonment causes permanent, irrevocable damage and that it isn't markedly different from capital punishment in this regard?
I think you need more practical life experience to understand why you are wrong.
> You are 40, now exonerated. You have no friends, no skills, no job, no money. You are a failure. It's unfixable. You are likely to commit suicide.
That was me at 40. I didn't go to prison. I got sick. Lost everything and had to start over. And 15 years later life is okay.
Friend mentioned his college professor. He fled the Nazi's and went to Argentina. And then had to flee again to the US. Each time he started over with _nothing_.
In one case, you can potentially reunite a person with their family. In the other, the state has killed an innocent man and permanently destroyed a family.
I'm really having a hard time understanding how locking someone up and potentially freeing them later after a miscarriage of justice is discovered is the same as murdering that person.
Really the worst case would be to convict someone who is 60 years or older who then dies in prison because of a lack of medical attention.
Are you being satirical here? The rest of your comment, other than this line, seems like you are trying to be serious, but this is so clearly over the line into absurdity I can't tell.
> No prospectors for ever amounting to anything? Get off your high horse, he'd still have 40 years left to do that. Especially for men 40 years is a perfectly fine age to start a family nowadays.
Assuming you are being serious for the moment (and if you arne't, good on you, I honestly wasn't sure): it seems like you are not accounting for any of the realities of the scenario you are describing. What about the trauma and PTSD from living through decades of psychological torture? What about the destroyed social networks? What about the consequences of decades of poor diet and exercise?
Cruel refers to punishment which is torturous. Prison, in theory, should not be torture, despite often being so. Many aspects of incarceration in the US which are effectively torturous are commonly excused as being necessary for security and safety (e.g. solitary confinement) or medical reasons (e.g. force feeding), or being acts of other prisoners not under the control of the state (e.g. bullying). By contrast, many other countries' prison systems treat these factors as being within their responsibility.
Unusual refers to the punishment being arbitrary or not appropriate for the crime. This doesn't set a standard for what punishment is reasonable, but only requires punishments be consistent (for similar crimes). Additionally, if the punishment could not have been expected, then it can't be considered useful for the purpose of deterrence.
Crucially, the requirement that punishment not be cruel and unusual does not require the punishment to be reciprocal to the crime.
There are countries where prisons are not exploitative hellholes, and locking people up for life is not a form of punishment but an acknowledgement that society has failed them, so there is no point in making the prisoner's incarceration as unpleasant as possible.
If it's "cruel and unusual", it's your society that makes it cruel and unusual. It doesn't have to be that way.
There are cases where people have been overlooked, needed help, etc. But the evil among us should be purged. Locking up serial rapists, serial paedophiles, and serial murderers does nothing but waste taxpayer money. If someone who commits these crimes is found guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt, they should be removed from society.
Norway, for all its goodness, needed to execute that moron who murdered all those kids in cold blood. Yet, he enjoys an expansive room, cooked meals, TV, games, conversation... all like it's no big deal. I think that is an example of society failing to deal with a problem. There is no closure for all of those families who lost innocent children. They exist knowing he exists, and is enjoying life as he's able.
Yet, you take issue with a murderer being offered anything that could be considered a comfort.
Assuming he's completely severed from society, what difference is it making? I'm genuinely curious.
If we sent him out into space with a couch and a chess partner, is the "closure" of anyone victimized the responsibility of anyone other than the victims?
It's harsh, but no one can "give them closure", and it's not clear that watching the perpetrator die is the one true form of final closure.
However, there are better "prisons" (see e.g. what Norway does) and it is possible to let (dangerous) people live lives that are dignified, fulfilling and productive (when they are able to work) under the constraints of captivity.
1. It removes the cruelty of life imprisonment. If we take away someone's freedom permanently and they will never have the option to regain their freedom, they can "take the easy way out". Those who are innocent and believe they will eventually be freed can stay the course, but those who know their life is over can choose to exit early.
2. It removes the added bureaucracy and delay to execution and death penalty cases. By removing the government's ability to kill someone, we no longer need additional hearings for death penalty cases or need to hold out a very long time for possible appeals many years later. It just becomes someone's choice.
Now, there's other considerations, I think there'd still need to be a minimum time for euthanasia after being sentenced, you'd want maybe a periodic opt in period for people to elect for euthanasia, maybe every five years or so, and you'd want to have someone evaluate that the prisoner wasn't making a rash choice due to recent news from the outside or the like.
But this allows death as an "escape" for a life of misery in jail and also removes bureaucratic overhead to the government electing to kill someone.
Shouldn't we aim to give them the most freedom we can, though? The ability to ideally, in a restricted environment, continue to read and learn and grow, or if that won't satisfy them, to remove themselves from the situation?
One consequence is for the brothers Tilmon and Kevin Golphin. Tilmon was 18 and Kevin was 17 when the crime occurred. At the time, both were convicted of the death penalty for the same event. However, due to the US Supreme Court ruling, Kevin later had his sentence changed to life in prison. Tilmon is still on death row.
Their situation presents a lot of moral questions about the death penalty, morality, fairness, and so on. Justice is never going to be fair, and it is always hard for a society to determine the correct balance.
I think the Danish model is the best - but that looks out for the person and the future, rather than pure punishment; https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3dabz/adopting-denmarks-...