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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Life sentence for a 15 year old who didn't provably kill someone seems excessively harsh. Heck, the teen that did provably kill someone throwing a rock over an overpass didn't get life (he got 3-20)[0].

I have a slightly unpopular stance that death penalty is appropriate if there is overwhelming evidence of an unrepentant killer. I don't see any value in keeping them around in prison, especially if they will continue to have a negative influence on peers in prison for decades.

But other than that, I think even life is inappropriate in most cases, and especially for teens who don't really understand the impact of their actions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Interstate_75_rock-throwi...

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>Life sentence for a 15 year old who didn't provably kill someone seems excessively harsh.

Excessively harsh for a _white kid_. Ligon getting life without parole in 1953 is not at all shocking. Ligon is just lucky that a white girl wasn't involved or he would've gotten the chair.

Teenage black boys are still having their lives disposed of in 2021 because they dared to be dumb teenage boys while black.

Fellow peasant, I think you may be confused. It isn't so much because he's white but more of not poor. Please refrain from race baiting and focus on the true reason. I know it's difficult to understand because the rich have certainly done a great job at implanting such an idea to our collective society. This is 100% sincere and I'm tired of what I've been seeing in society. This is my effort to make a change and raise awareness.

>It isn't so much because he's white but more of not poor.

It says a lot that you don't acknowledge any systemic connection between these. Sure, rich people with their idea-implants can be referenced collectively. Society making you tired, also a reasonable grouping. But implying that white people have been visiting injustice on black people, including having intentionally kept them poor? How dare you, sir.

Many people here in HN are both rich and good individuals

Even when controlling for other factors like education (a proxy for income) and criminal history, Black male offenders receive a sentence 20% longer on average than White male offenders for the same crime. They're also convicted at a higher rate for the same indictments, and arrested at a higher rate in the first place.

https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...

Now, how do you think you can clean the judicial system of racist judges, and in at large the whole legal fraternity?

Outright, publicly known racists get protection of judicial immunity, and only near impossible judicial impeachment can do anything about them.

What is the solution?

You're not going to find the solution buried in a random hacker news comment thread.

But step one is to acknowledge that systemic racism exists in the first place. Half of the voters in the country explicitly deny the existence of systemic racism and the need to change anything at all.

Do you have a poll for that claim, or are you just stereotyping based on party?

https://www.uml.edu/Research/public-opinion/polls/2020/Race-...

"Democrats, liberals, Americans under the age of 50 and those who score low on the racial resentment scale are all far more likely than Republicans, conservatives, Americans older than age 50, and those scoring high in racial resentment to think that Blacks are treated less fairly than whites by the police."

"A majority of American adults think that policing in this country is not fair – 51% say that Blacks are treated less fairly than whites in their interactions with police, compared to 41% who say they are treated the same. Another 7% say whites are treated less fairly than Blacks."

I see that 48% of American adults view it as not a problem or a problem in the other direction. Granted this is only a 1000 person study based on subjective experience. I wonder if they have larger studies, or any studies on objective evaluation[0] of if someone was treated differently based on race. I know I've been treated poorly by police but I don't believe race was a factor.

[0] seems like the 20% harsher sentencing could be an indication, but I'll have to look at that more

Here's some background reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow

It's a great book, with copious references and research behind it.

Bryan Stevenson's book 'Just Mercy' is also well worth reading, and directly relevant to this discussion. Stevenson was the lead in the supreme court case that led to death and LWOP being off limits for juveniles.

I've seen some stuff about the idea of the new Jim crow, but not that book specifically. There are a lot of issues in the justice system. They do allow injustices to be perpetrated on a racial basis, but not only on a racial basis. I'm currently dealing with a situation that involves rights violations by both the state police and a magistrate. There's straight up corruption going on and the system doesn't care.

Most states have a judicial conduct board. You can file complaints against them for any misconduct and mistakes they make. If enough people do this, you might be able to cross reference complaints to show that they knowingly violated someone's rights, which fits into official oppression.

I've had a similar experience with a magistrate who was a former cop and retired police chief. He was biased the entire time, violated due process, and made false claims. The complaint is still ongoing. I doubt it will result in much, but it could be useful for future civil cases.

The problem is a judge can be a 100% bigot, and yet be 100% legally safe for as long as he isn't openly proclaiming himself as such, and follows the process to its utmost.

You can't have a review board, or impeachment do anything with a judge with 100% black prosecution record just because it is such.

That's the paradox. Either you subject judiciary to political judgement, or you can't do anything about judges who are not politically impartial.

But the thing is that they had to apply the law differently to interject that bias/persecution. If you can show that they applied it differently based on race or some other factor, then it should be sufficient... if you have police and a DA that are willing to do their jobs (they aren't, cause they're all buddy buddy). Doing it this way (looking for discrepancy in fact of law without explaination) shouldn't involve politics.

And those sentences are excessively harsh, so I think calling it “excessively harsh” still stands.

It’s horribly cruel, but as our disgusting Supreme Court has declared of similar violations of human life, it is “not unusual”, and so it still stands and it still is done.

It is excessively harsh, and the only way we’re ever going to fix it is by calling our representatives and calling out our representatives to change this.

Or you can serve 8 months for killing two people https://www.dispatch.com/article/20121220/NEWS/312209689

My childhood friend got hooked on drugs, broke into some empty houses when no one was home and stole some electronics. He got 15 years. It was his first offense.

Let’s also not forget that you can also kill two people and have a political party bail you out so you can continue to terrorize locals.

The judge or jury will always have a great deal of discretion in manslaughter or reckless/negligent homicide cases. They are often frustratingly sad in a way that more straightforward murder cases are not.

Do you have another link? From here in the UK, your link just redirects to http://eu.dispatch.com.

Google Seth stonerock circleville ohio

https://archive.is/y31i6

Regarding the sentencing differential: Joe Ligon, the subject of the article, is black, while Kyle Anger, the “mastermind” behind the fatal rock-throwing incident you linked, is white.

Who would have guessed?

"This never would have happened if you were white"

Said my lawyer when I had to deal with stacked charges leading to years of incarceration for the mildest of subjective crimes.

Why? So they could have me plead guilty.

Never happened. Fuck the system.

I learned from the documentary 13th (which I HIGHLY recommend) that something like 97% of people incarcerated in the US have never had a trial, because they're persuaded, manipulated or otherwise cajoled into making plea bargains.

97%!

What this means is that the US has replaced its common-law adversarial criminal justice system, with something completely different. Almost completely, and with very little debate. No referendum, no constitutional amendments. The old one sticks around for occasional ceremonial use.

It would be interesting to understand better why. My theory is that part of it is to do with rising standards of criminal trials. IIRC the average murderer went from arrest to dead in something like a month, 1950s. Most had no appeals. Certainly no expert witnesses to explain the DNA evidence to the jury. Today the default seems to be decades of appeals, thousands of hours of lawyer-time. That doesn't scale.

> I have a slightly unpopular stance that death penalty is appropriate if there is overwhelming evidence of an unrepentant killer. I don't see any value in keeping them around in prison, especially if they will continue to have a negative influence on peers in prison for decades.

This isn't an unreasonable thought, but (a) I would prefer to have a bright-line international rule that that killing prisoners is always unacceptable to make it easier to condemn countries that use it to violate human rights and (b) in the American system, the death penalty inevitably leads to more time and expensive of appeals, more publicity for the convict, and more expensive than life sentences.

And I agree that life sentences are really just death by another, longer means. I would also reserve them for the most extreme cases, where you are really convinced that someone will never be able to live in society again without causing serious harm. There are definitely some cases out there that meet that, but many nevertheless tragic cases that don't. Even them I'm not sure that there is any need for "life without" as the whole purpose of a parole board is to make these decisions--if the individual continues to behave poorly in prison and does not accept responsibility, he will not get parole.

I don't actually object to the death penalty too much from a moral perspective, but I'm no fan of it because - occasionally - it does seem like we might get it wrong. And if you get it wrong there's no undoing it.

If you falsely imprison somebody, even though you can't give them the time back, you can at least give them their freedom for the time they have left, and enough compensation to set them up for a decent life.

Certainly imprisoning a juvenile for a whole life term does seem to me the very definition of cruel and unusual, and especially if they weren't directly responsible for any murders.

How do you justify the death penalty morally?

If you don't believe that people have a right to life, I suppose that being murdered by the state is just another notch on the spectrum of "acceptable punishment".

It's an odd contradiction to me that people who support the death penalty are mostly not ok with the state using, for example, punitive rape as a punishment, but killing is somehow okay, if the crime is severe enough.

I could not agree more. It is barbaric and sends an incongruent message to society. How are we to teach people the value of a life by taking one?

There is a broad spectrum of value that is up for debate. There are amazing human beings, but also vile human beings.

How are rape and the death sentence related? You could just as well say that it's weird how people can support taking someones's freedom and locking them away, but are not okay with raping them.

Because we as a society have generally reached a consensus that premediated killing of human beings is one of the worst crimes possible.

The fact that it is regarded by some as an acceptable punitive measure carried out by the state, whereas other, lesser crimes against human beings are deemed "off limits" for such purposes, seems to me to expose an inherent contradiction. To avoid the contradiction, either both should be acceptable, or neither.

Presently there seems to be a slight majority consensus on Earth that the correct answer is "neither", with the overall trend suggesting that the rest of the planet will get there in another couple hundred years.

I'm not quite sure what I think about the death penalty. But it is not obvious to me that it is a worse punishment than life in prison. In fact I think that personally, given the choice I would choose death.

> In fact I think that personally, given the choice I would choose death.

I, too, am not sure that I'd prefer life in prison over death, but in practice it takes decades to execute a convicted prisoner in the US, and since you're considered a particularly dangerous prisoner (since you have nothing to lose) you're held in particularly isolated and unpleasant conditions during those decades. If I thought I was going to get the death penalty I might prefer to just blow my brains out quickly and easily before they have a chance to slap the handcuffs on.

I can't be arsed to fact-check it, but I'm pretty sure I've read that death row inmates are more likely to die of natural causes while awaiting execution than they are to actually be executed - that's how long the legal process waits.

I can't, and I also find it hard to justify life sentences for all but the most horrific of crimes (and for those who pose too much of a danger to be allowed back into society.)

Norway doesn't even have a statutory penalty of "life without parole" except for military offences. The maximum prison sentence it's possible to receive in 30 years - although it's still possibly in practice to be imprisoned for longer, because your release after 30 years is conditional and the sentence may be extended. Even Anders Breivik, the terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011, didn't get a "life sentence" as that term would be understand in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Norway

There can be some morally justifiable scenarios. For example, someone who is a political or religious leader who has used that position to kill people. If they still have followers, their very existence can continue to cause issues. Think Saddam, Hitler, or Bin Laden.

History has shown us time and again that the risks associated with improper use of the death penalty clearly outweigh the benefits (cost savings?).

And even the reduced cost associated with the death penalty is arguable, as many of those sentenced remain on death row for quite a while.

In practice, executing a prisoner in the US is far more expensive than imprisoning him (and it's usually a "him") for life.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs

> death penalty is appropriate if there is overwhelming evidence of an unrepentant killer

The problem with that is that it is impossible to tell the difference between an unrepentant killer and a falsely convicted innocent who will not admit to something they didn't do.

I would also hazard a guess that the average 'unrepentant killer' is someone who killed their abuser.

>overwhelming evidence of an unrepentant killer

what, like someone saying "I'm glad they're dead"? I mean if the rule was that only unrepentant killers were executed everyone would do their best to appear repentant - unless of course they were crazy or suicidal or something, in which case executing someone like that would not seem that gre3at.

My opinion is probably unpopular too.

With the cost of execution these days, I'd like to see life with hard labor used more as a replacement. You know, earn your keep.

Humans are cruel when left unchecked.

Did you really need to look at the article to know he was black?

Another example - Kyle Rittenhouse - is out on bail and he travelled from another state with a gun then killed 2 people in Kenosha. He's not yet been tried (or found guilty, but ... come on) but I think we all know he's not going to serve anything like 68 years in prison.

These aren’t even remotely similar cases and mentioning the Rittenhouse case here is an unnecessary and unhelpful distraction.

Why? We are discussing that one kid got 68 years for not killing someone, and another kid is probably not going to get anything close to that for killing two. Now, I know there are more things involved in crime and sentencing than whether someone killed anyone but it should be crystal clear that these are very worthy of comparison.

On the other hand you are right in one respect - they're not remotely similar in that one boy was white and the other black. I know we're not going to "solve" racism in the comments section of HN but I think it's important to confront the fact that race is an overwhelming factor in how these cases play out.

The question in the Rittenhouse case isn’t what sentence people get for murder. It’s whether he committed murder at all, or killed in self-defense after having the horrible (and probably ethically unsound) judgement to travel armed to an obviously violent event. It’s not an example of what’s being discussed.

There’s more than enough cases that legitimately make the case for racial sentencing discrimination. Quoting this ridiculously politicized case will only harm the cause by providing ammunition to the other side.

I mean, I personally think that 68 years in prison for almost anything is a horribly abusive practice. Acceptable for some few instances of violent crime. But since I also believe that killing in self-defense can sometimes be justified with no punishment, it’s not a very good point to use for discussing.

This is way off topic, but I’m very curious to the outcome of the Rittenhouse trial. There is no doubt he killed those people. There are multiple videos of it. Whether or not the court finds it falls under ‘reasonable’ self defense according to Wisconsin law will be interesting.

They will have to decide that he A) He used only the force necessary to prevent or terminate interference with his person. And B) He reasonably believed that such force was necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself.

I don't think it is offtopic or if it is then my mention of Rittenhouse in the first place was. I am very curious too. I have a pretty bad feeling that he will get off extremely lightly and that as a result the US will see renewed unrest. Given the original topic that kicked off this thread, the unrest will be entirely justified.

My guess at this point would be that he gets convicted for having violated firearms laws, but not for murder. It's an interesting case, but the political climate surrounding it spans much more than just the shooting, and is (seen with international eyes and an attempt at staying impartial) completely bonkers.

He shouldn't have been there in the first place, and there shouldn't have been any incentive for anyone else to be either. The fact that there was a remotely plausible rationale for a vigilante policing force in the first place is just insane. That the police didn't roll up and say "go home, this is our job" is ridiculous. Then, of course, pouring fuel on the fire, the whole situation attracts a lot of people who want to commit violence - maybe including Rittenhouse himself. None of this should happen in a first-world country, and it's not something that will be solved with a murder trial. Regardless of its outcome.

There seem to be deep and persistent currents in American society that form the basis for events like these, and every honest assessment and candid dialouge attempting to fix them is a good thing. It might be off topic to a degree, but people getting life sentences willy-nilly is definitely part of the same web of causal relationships.

Dude kills two people while wearing a certain color hat matching other people he's spending a lot of time with...

Most of the time under those circumstances, the question of self defense isn't going to enter into the following discussion.

Why would you invent a detail about an event that was captured on video and so easily refuted? He was wearing a white hat.

It sounds like the "color of hat" is a metaphor here

It very clearly was not, but I hope I can at least rest my case on what a pointless distraction this subthread was destined to be.

You seemed pretty keen to take part in the more pointless parts - like talking about the colour of someone’s hat - so I’m not sure you get to play that card.

Just because a person is killed does not mean that a crime has been committed. There are lawful reasons, such as self defense, defense of a third person, etc.

Not American, but the Wikipedia entry on the incident suggests that the two aren't in any way comparable.

At the same time, sentencing a 15-year old kid (who hasn't even committed murder) to life in prison and not reconsidering it so far into the 21st century - that's cruel and unusual punishment. Boggles my mind.

I'm not sure why people are having a hard time with this one. But let's try it this way - switch the positions of the 17 year old white kid and the 15 year old black kid. Do you believe the outcomes would be the same? Do you think the black kid would get bailed after killing two people and then have (in addition to support among various gun rights groups) numerous people on HN hand-wringing and explaining that technically killing someone is actually not a crime in every circumstance? No, we'd see pics of the black kid presented as menacing, everyone would talk about him as a "young man" instead of "a little boy", any and all indiscretions he'd committed would be dug out and published everywhere and ultimately used against him.

Of course we're dealing with hypotheticals so people will play dumb and either pretend I'm being absurd or just say they'd treat both the same because that's the easy way out. But I think deep down we all know the truth.

There's a difference between a bail and being declared not guilty. Anyway he was supposedly defending himself, while Ligon was robbing and assaulting people, so the cases are different.

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