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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely abhor the death penalty. I do find this reliance on a single rationale to stop the death penalty problematic though:

- For many people I suspect that there is a combination of level of proof and severity of crime that would lead them to say the risk of erroneous conviction can be ignored.

- Someone will say let's focus on improving the justice system to deal with the errors.

I'd rather the burden of justification be the other way: what does the death penalty actually achieve, with a high burden of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that as a policy it actually benefits society as a whole.

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I agree. Some of the most violent criminals can't ever be re-integrated into society, so the only alternative is life imprisonment. I've seen many arguments that this is preferable to the death penalty because "We will accidentally execute some innocents", as Paul Graham's here, as well as "It costs more to execute someone due to the higher standard of proof required".

In all such cases the corollary is "We can accept a lower standard of proof because we're not actually killing them. We're just locking them in a room forever and waiting until they die." I don't honestly see much difference between these outcomes. Why is one so morally superior to the other?

There are much better arguments against the death penalty. One is that if the death penalty exists, it's much easier for the state to execute political dissidents. If the death penalty is abolished (and there are strong controls on extra-judicial killings, like police murdering civilians during arrests), it's much more difficult for the state to silence critics. Even if they are locked away in jail forever, they will still have a voice.

Another good argument is that if the death penalty is a possibility it gives criminals nothing to lose which makes it more dangerous to apprehend them. If you want your police to be able to more peacefully arrest criminals, it makes sense to abolish the death penalty.

>I don't honestly see much difference between these outcomes. Why is one so morally superior to the other?

One of them gives you your remaining lifetime for evidence to be found or overturned; one of them doesn't.

> Some of the most violent criminals can't ever be re-integrated into society, so the only alternative is life imprisonment.

I have to question this. Determining whether someone can be reintegrated into society cannot be determined during the sentencing process. I would rather prefer a Norway-like system where the max imprisonment time at the start is 21 years. At the end of that initial time, 5 more years can be added on if the prisoner has not reformed. The process repeats until the prisoner is released or dies. A small percentage of people will still die in prison, but I wager that that percentage will be less than the percentage of life imprisonment sentences currently.

I agree that we shouldn't accept a lower standard of proof. However, life in prison isn't absolute in the same the death penalty is. There's always a small chance of the evidence changing and the justice system being able to rectify the mistake. There have been several convictions overturned because witnesses changed their story or were later found to be not credible, sometimes decades later. Once the death penalty is carried out, there's no going back.

I struggle with arguments that criminals are calculating people who make decisions in their best interests. There are surely exceptions (say pickpockets or confidence tricksters) but I don’t believe that things like typical sentencing have an effect on the impulsive decision making of a typical criminal (and I think policy should be targeted much more towards the typical criminal than the atypical one)

From a practical aspect a lot of benefits for death penalties: 1) Low cost. No need for jails and their associated costs 2) Great scaling. You can kill as many as you want, but you cannot build a jail every day 3) Safe. People don’t come back to repeat their mistakes. 4) It’s the only language that many criminals speak and understand.

The downsides are of a moral nature and twofold:

1) We should not punish innocent people. As societies we consider this as a huge and irrecoverable loss (What if we executed Einstein). 2) The state should not have the right to take the lives of its citizens. (Literally numerous examples from history why this can end up really bad)

I've heard the "1) Low Cost" is false. [1]. Mainly because it takes time and effort to actually execute someone, to give plenty of time to find evidence exonerating them. That delay and proceedings end up being way more expensive than just letting them live.

Re 2): Again from [1], I've heard executions are actually quite expensive. Thus, it doesn't scale well.

Re 3): It doesn't make me feel safe if somebody can frame me and get me killed. It makes me feel safer knowing I have time to prove my innocence.

Re 4): I am very skeptical of this claim. Any solid evidence for this being true? Anecdotal evidence shows the opposite. Most criminals don't have good long-term thinking skills, so they won't recognize the tradeoff between 40 years in prison and death, and use that to not commit a crime.

[1] John Oliver on death penalty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kye2oX-b39E

Arguably the USA should be granting all those same levels of appeal to someone NOT sentenced to death too.

If 4% on death row are innocent, despite all the extra appeals and proceedings we grant them, how many people serving life are innocent?

The idea that America is imprisoning innocents left and right but it's fine because at least they're not being executed is twisted to me. I would marginally prefer being alive to being imprisoned for life, but the latter is pretty terrible too.

The death penalty is extremely expensive ($1.26 million is the median [1]) and not low costs at all, where do you find it being cheap? I'm assuming you're referring to the United States?

[1] https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt....

Can be done for free if you are a good demagogue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_drug_war#Early_mo...

If the US us worried about cost, maybe they could stop throwing people in jail for non-violent drug charges -- particularly marijuana? That would reduce our prison cost a heck of a lot more than executing murderers, even if execution was much cheaper than lifetime imprisonment (which as others have pointed out, it's almost certainly not).

As much as I dislike the idea of a government killing someone for a crime, the cost and potential elimination of future trouble with an individual is tempting.

Assuming that we absolutely know that someone is guilt (ignoring how that would happen), it doesn't need to take years and millions of dollars to simply shoot someone.

Then there are the people who are not only a financial burden on society, they are actively making it worse, much worse. Sometimes we just sit back an wonder why even spend resources keep this person terrible person imprisoned for decades. People who have killed, raped or tortured and been in and out of jail multiple times, no we really need to keep them around?

Regardless of how much we may hate the idea of the death penalty, there is some cold, brutal logic to simply shooting someone.

> Sometimes we just sit back an wonder why even spend resources keep this person terrible person imprisoned for decades.

Because they're a human. Humans are capable of change. And killing a human "because it's expensive" is a barbaric mindset.

> Assuming that we absolutely know that someone is guilt (ignoring how that would happen), it doesn't need to take years and millions of dollars to simply shoot someone.

The years and the millions of dollars are spent establishing your premise.

Is there there, though? It might justify someone's perverted sense of justice but that's about it. There are many other people who might be considering not contributing anything to the society, but they haven't yet done anything egregious enough to warrant a death penalty, following this logic it's only logical to "just shot" them as well.

Maybe going against the grain here, but I'm not on principle opposed to the death penalty. There's lots of strong practical arguments to make, like the fallibility of the court system, but yes, I do believe that there are some crimes (of mass bodily harm) for a which a state could rightfully determine to forfeit someone's right to live. My sole moral objection to the death penalty is that no one should have "end someone's life" as his job description.

However, my version of the world in which the death penalty would be admissible is a lot different from what we have now. In that version, a death sentence would never be executed on first conviction; the verdict would contain a suspended death sentence, more or less. After serving time, a criminal could be put to death only when convicted a second time for a similar offense. I'd also want to see the burden of proof reversed for that punishment: not only must the crime be proven in court (not by plea), but the government must show it provided adequate support and rehabilitation to avoid relapse.

That would be the only world in which I would defend the use of capital punishment. I don't think I'll ever see it happen.

> I'd rather the burden of justification be the other way: what does the death penalty actually achieve, with a high burden of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that as a policy it actually benefits society as a whole.

In the past: societal self-defence.

Older prisons were not as secure, and so the risk of dangerous people escaping was high(er). If they got out they could do more harm to innocent people. This is less of an issue in modern developed countries which have pretty secure buildings now, especially for those classified as the most dangerous.

This may be less true in other countries where prison you may hear about prison breaks, with or without external help:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazni_prison_escape

* https://globalnews.ca/news/7740153/nigerian-inmates-freed-at...

If you think there's little/no chance of reform, then keeping someone around that will likely strike again is asking for trouble.

See also David Oderberg's book Applied Ethics.

Or rather it was simply cheaper to execute someone, pre modern societies simply couldn't really afford keeping a large number of people imprisoned for significant periods of time.

Considering that during some periods a fine or monetary compensation to the victims family was considered to be reasonable punishment for murder and that on the (on the opposite end of the spectrum) during other periods people were often hanged for what we would currently consider to be petty theft, one could argue that pre modern societies were much more concerned about presereving their social order rather than protecting innocent people from harm.

> petty theft

Petty theft to us now, but in previous ages there was much more scarcity, so any particular item would have been a higher percentage of a person's 'wealth' (property).

Further remember that labour is the use of one's most precious resource, time (spent living), for either money or goods (if one crafts something themselves). By stealing a possession, you are stealing a portion of a person's life (that they use to earn/make that possession).

>what does the death penalty actually achieve, with a high burden of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that as a policy it actually benefits society as a whole.

I think the death penalty does deter people from committing certain crimes. But many many people don't. (for the record, I also believe in abolishing the death penalty where I live where many innocent people fall victim to it).

The problem is this isn't something you can really prove with scientific evidence. You can't do a double blind trial in separate societies with and without the death penalty.

Not every social policy can be proven before it is enacted. Life just doesn't work that way. Evidence isn't always available for every possible option.

The single rationale is perfectly fine.

If we had a magic oracle which supplies us with the absolutely correct guilty or not guilty verdict, there would be no problem with the death penalty.

> what does the death penalty actually achieve

Rids the world of an instance of evil, efficiently and permanently.

Vindicates victims.

You're reducing a human being to a single binary classification - evil or not evil - an assessment that ignores the circumstances of their life, mental state etc at a particular point in time.

You're also saying that you're prepared to ignore the wider impact that the act of executing that individual has on society.

On the apparent grounds that the dead victim is somehow vindicated (which I can only interpret as meaning that someone else feels that they have been vindicated).

Whatever rationalizations people make, I think ultimately, a belief that some people are evil is what the death penalty hinges on. I don’t believe in free will, thus I don’t believe in moral culpability, this I don’t believe in evil.

From that vantage point it seems extremely barbaric to me to put anyone to death. They had no say in the circumstances that led up to who they became. I have similar feeling when I think of severely mentally disabled people being executed, which a lot of people probably share even if they do believe in free will.

If you think there's no free will, then how is it barbaric to execute people? No free will means the supporters of the death penalty didn't have a say in the circumstance that led to them supporting it, so there is no moral culpability to thinking some people should be executed. It's no more "barbaric" than thinking it's okay to kill rats and other pests for the good of society.

The realization that free will is an illusion ideally allows compassion to develop in an individual. If a society shed its belief in free will, then it would act more compassionately, eg the opposite of barbaric.

That's an interesting hypothesis you have there, but it seems rather self-evident to me that there are many philosophical pathways toward compassion, not necessarily involving specific theories of free will. Not all pathways are heavily intellectual.

OK, so you don't believe in "evil", but you believe in "barbaric".

I believe that determinism and free will are entirely compatible. An algorithm has free will. More complicated algorithms have a more nuanced, richer free will. That's it.

For instance, a coin-operated machine that gives you a bag of potato chips in exchange for a dollar has a form of free will. It does that because it wants to. It is just not capable of telling itself it wants to do anything else; it's a low grade form of free will encompassing a tiny number of states.

(Killing evil is basically just terminating a buggy algorithm. If you don't like the baggage associated with "evil", maybe "defective" or "buggy" is better.)

The question of free will and determinism is made complicated by the possibility that a deterministic free will (algorithm) operates in a world that isn't deterministic. Suppose that your mind is an algorithm which will make exactly the same decision for the same inputs (including, of course, its own state: that's one of the inputs). Even if you get your mind to be in exactly the same state as when a certain decision had been made, you also need the world to be in exactly the same state. Only then is the algorithmic mind guaranteed to think the same thing and make the decision.

The world has so many states, and so does the mind, that the question of whether you are algorithmic or not makes practically no difference. Even if you are a FSM, your state space is so large, you will never be in the same state twice -- just due to the fact alone that you have life long memories that are are still accumulating, for one thing. And if you could rewind exactly a previous state, the surrounding world will not; and that has an even vaster state space.

This is why we leave judging to the judicial system, and don't hand it over to developers who will try to treat life or death decisions as an undergraduate algorithm design exercise.

Right, so we instead hand matters over to people who do things like hide phone call records that would prove that someone should not be put on death row.

> You're reducing a human being to a single binary classification - evil or not evil

That is correct.

> You're also saying that you're prepared to ignore the wider impact that the act of executing that individual has on society.

That must specifically not be allowed to cloud our judgment. "Society" is word which refers to collection of people, the vast majority of whom have no connection to the case.

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil."

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you invoke Solzhenitsyn this way in a capital punishment debate, it basically amounts to a tu quoque fallacy.

Suppose I'm evil because I park in handicapped stalls.

That doesn't mean I'm not in a moral position to send someone to hell who kidnaps and kills children.

> our judgment

Who is 'our'? Hopefully not just everyone who agrees with your definition of evil...

Speaking as someone who has experienced a family member's murder, the death penalty would in no way "vindicate" anyone.

I'm not sure what definition of "vindicate" you're working with, but when I use that word (in this specific context), it doesn't refer to anything like a complete restitution as if nothing had happened, which is obviously impossible.

I think you should reconsider the use of "vindicate" since none of the definitions I can find seem to apply at all. And your latest reply doesn't seem to clear up what you mean in your usage.

>Rids the world of an instance of evil, efficiently and permanently.

That sounds like a motive for murder.

For someone acting alone, deciding who and what is evil, it could well be. That's why the state and its courts need to control that instrument.

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