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>>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.

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.

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What if the prisoner states they'd prefer the death penalty? ie execution becomes assisted suicide for life sentenced prisoners

That's a choice that the prisoner has, rather than one that the legal system makes.

> death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't

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.

You can certainly mitigate and compensate in cases of false prosecution. This doesn't usually happen, but it could.

And it's still less irreversible - to them, and to family and friends - than killing them.

You can give monetary compensation (like that's gonna fix it all, but that's another debate) to a living person.

Yes, of course. You can also give monetary compensation to a dead person's family. Whether either option actually makes things right is debatable.

It doesn't make things right. Nothing ever will, but it's better than the alternative.

Depends on which alternative you're talking about. One alternative is not to execute people or lock them up in inhumane conditions at all (the Norwegians do this). It's not at all clear to me that writing checks when you get it wrong is better.

Someone consciously chose to permanently end another’s life. There has to be decisions made.

Well, if the legal system was completely infallible in deciding who is guilty then that might be an argument. But I'm not aware of any legal system in any country that can make that particular claim.

The actual murderers chose. The people accidentally mistaken for murderers didn’t choose anything at all.

In theory, if applied flawlessly, maybe nothing is wrong with the permanence of the death penalty.

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.

> In cases where it’s black and white with extreme evidence why even allow them to continue living on everyone’s dime.

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.

Well that just means the current system needs some changes. Just because that's the way it currently is doesn't mean that's the way it always has to be or always was. Some laws and policies may need to change, but treating this like an immutable fact is like being content with a super inefficient piece of code that's bottlenecking your application.

There's no such thing as a black and white case.

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

The case of Timothy Evans, who was wrongfully convicted and hanged in the 1950s in the UK (classic case of him being in the wrong place at the wrong time) is even more appropriate. After his execution the actual killer (a serial killer) went on to kill several other women.

It was highly influential in the eventual abolition of the death penalty in the UK in the 1960s.

And you want to hold that up as something immoral by...repeating it?

> 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.

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.

At least the prisoner still has a choice he can make.

"Extreme torture"?

Many death row prisoners spend years in solitary confinement, and are driven insane in the process.

In a hypothetical scenario, imagine whatever torture you consider the absolute most cruel. Would you prefer somebody suffer that torture for 50 years or be killed tomorrow? If you choose the latter, we've established that death can be a preferable alternative to otherwise horrible circumstances. I'm not saying that imprisonment is the most extreme torture imaginable, but it's probably not the best thing ever either. It's somewhere in between, likely closer to the torture end of the scale.

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.

You don't think that death row conditions are tantamount to extreme torture?

> It's simple really - death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't.

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"

What "false positive rate" is acceptable to you? And shouldn't we refer to it for what it is: a "innocent people murdered by the state rate"?

For me personally, 0 is the only acceptable number. The only way to get that is to end the death penalty.

> For me personally, 0 is the only acceptable number.

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".

It turns out a lot of those issues you call out are only a real problem in America. Our prison system is barbaric and the solution isn't to just kill all criminals, it's to reform and rebuild our prison system to match our EU counterparts.

I generally agree with you, but

> 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.

Yes, but there were people here in this very thread wanting to use the death penalty for varying level of offenses. And your definition of people that are 'fundamentally incompatible with society' leaves a lot of room for interpretation considering there are those that believe color or identification is enough to make you incompatible with society.

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 personally prefer to have as few murders on my own conscience as possible.

It's crude to try to compare how awful one murder is to another, but it does feel in some ways worse if the murder of an innocent person is funded by taxpayer money and performed by people claiming to have the legitimate authority to govern me.

What’s your acceptable number of innocent people imprisoned by the state, and if it’s greater than zero, then why?

I'm not the person you replied to, but is this supposed to be a gotcha? I assume the answer would be zero. But if you accept that the criminal justice system makes mistakes (between 100k-200k in current prison population per https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-018-9381-1) then it's obvious it's better to be able to have reversible punishments. Unless you are suggestion the complete abolition of incarceration for all crimes?

I suppose what I'm rejecting is the dichotomy between imprisonment being "reversible" and execution being "irreversible." Neither are reversible, of course. You can't give someone back the time they were unjustly imprisoned.

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.

First, you relying too much on semantics. "Reversible" is understood to be "I can reverse taking away someone's freedom". They were in prison, but now they are not. You can't give back the lost time, and everyone understands that. Also, it comes from "reversing a conviction" which is a legal term.

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.

First, I don’t think I’m playing semantic tricks. The finality of imprisonment and execution are the same. You don’t get time back if you’re released from prison. The difference is that you’re still alive, but of course that’s already the difference between imprisonment and execution. The fact that the death penalty involves killing someone is just definitional, it’s not a justification for why the death penalty is bad.

Secondly, of course I don’t dispute that there’s generally a preference for life imprisonment over execution.

The finality of eating an apple is the same if you are an external observer and just judging it by the direction of the time arrow.

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.

> 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.

How low of a rate are you willing to accept, and how do you plan on getting there?

> How low of a rate are you willing to accept,

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.

"> How low of a rate are you willing to accept,

"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.

I can't name a hard figure, because it's a relative figure. The rate is sufficiently low enough if it is lower than the rate of innocent deaths caused by not executing exceptionally bad people.

The standard is already beyond a shadow of a doubt and requires the prosecution, original judge, jury, several rounds of appeals overseen by more judges. After which the governor or president can weigh in.

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.

The rate is sufficiently low enough if it is lower than the collateral damage caused by not executing exceptionally bad people.

The number of people for whom this is true is probably so low its not worth bending our laws, ethics, and souls into knots to try to get these people.

So you’re willing to accept a low rate of false positives...

What if the rate of false positives varies by race, is that still acceptable to you?

If you’re making a Pareto Optimization, it’s reasonable to think that if the probability of being murdered by the state is still much lower than the probability of being murdered by an incompletely reformed criminal for each subset of the population, there’s an argument that every subset of the population was made better off.

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.

If you lock someone up forever they are less likely to murder you.

I kind of see your answer, so thank you for that.

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 believe you introduced the “what if the state murder rate was racially biased?”

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.

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