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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

The death penalty is plain hypocrisy, because it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment. It is not also about preventing dangerous individuals from causing harm on other people because again, that is already plainly achieved by incarceration.

The death penalty is 100% state-mandated revenge against the perpetrators of heinous crimes. It is been known for centuries (at least since the 1700s) as being completely ineffective as a deterrent, and it has been shunned by most of the western world, the USA remaining the last holdout of such a barbaric practice. Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not.

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> it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment

It's only hypocritical if the justice system claims to be solely about re-education. But you point out two other goals—deterrence and isolation—and there really are people out there who believe punishment is a moral good and a necessary component of justice.

As I've said in my other post, a penal system that focuses on punishment and not on rehabilitation is not positive for a society, because it doesn't actually help reducing the causes behing crime (and thus stop it from happening), and often degenerates towards being unfair to certain groups and minorities.

"strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment."

Well... duh. The death penalty being a punishment is a feature, not a bug. Nobody says the death penalty is about re-education. It's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime. If somebody molested my prepubescent daughter, I would say that person should _die_, as _punishment_, and that would be fair and just.

You are operating from the premise that justice is only about re-education. There are plenty of people who reject this view and say that justice is about both re-education and punishment for the crime. And that yes, justice involves punishment, not re-education.

"Would have it be possible for the USA to keep executing prisoners if it wasn't the most powerful country on Earth? IMHO, probably not."

What planet are you living on? There are lots of countries far less powerful than the US who execute far more prisoners than the US. The US executed 22 people, Egypt 32, Iran 251, Saudi Arabia 184, China over 1000, and Iraq over 100 in 2019.

The problem of lifetime state issued punishments that are designed to make people feel really bad is their economic insanity. Applying the death penalty in the US involves spending millions in legal and incarceration fees. It also seems to have no deterrence effect on mass murderers, which the US has a high concentration of.

The cost of lifetime imprisonment or execution is outright massive, in the millions over the lifetime of imprisonment. When you look at it in terms of economic output, these sentences are a calamity. For $2m USD spent on achieving a death penalty outcome, you could buy over 600k healthy school lunches for $3 each or pay the salary for one extra school teacher per year over a lifetime.

In my mind, that would be a problem with the justice system, rather than the death penalty as a concept.

Also, as for why it seems to have no deterrence, how many people in the whole United States were killed? Only 22 in 2019, and you probably have never heard the names of even one of those people. If the fact of who was dying, for what crime, was highlighted more often in the media, the statistics may be significantly different.

Like, imagine if CNN and FOX had a simple image of who was dying each day with a two-or-three-sentence description of the crime, each time someone was put to death. To most people, that would be about every 2 weeks. Public awareness would explode. And criminals would have a far greater awareness that they could die for crimes.

Or bring back public-square and courthouse executions.

> The US executed 22 people, Egypt 32, Iran 251, Saudi Arabia 184, China over 1000, and Iraq over 100 in 2019

None of those countries are neither Western nor democracies. All western democracies have been pushed by the influence of the others to abolish death penalty (for instance, it's a mandatory requirement in order to join the EU), the US being the only outlier. What if the situation was different, i.e. the US was an abolitionist country and only a small country like Luxembourg was the only remaining Western democracy to execute its citizens? It would quickly become a pariah among its peers.

> it's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime

The basic problem with this is that it _does not work_, and it does not accomplish anything than pleasing the victims of a crime. Killing convicts has been the default punishment for millenia and still it hasn't deterred anyone from doing crimes. It simply creates a state where people are harshly punished for what they've done, and that often is used as a way to avoid doing absolutely nothing to fix the issues that caused the offense to occur in the first place. Europe has abolished executions decades ago, with some places like Italy doing that in the '800s. Still, Europe has a much lower crime rate than the US, where prisons are much harsher and the worst convicts may face an execution for their crimes.

Why would there need to be appearance of re-education? The society doesn't owe anyone a re-education. It's not really about punishment either... If someone doesn't respect others' life and property, why would theirs be respected at all? There's no more revenge here than in drowning a tick that bit you instead of releasing it back into the wild. In abstract, I'd apply it to many more crimes with an unambiguous victim and selfish intent, even minor ones.

The only problems I have with death penalty is potential for abuse (to be clear, I don't believe it's the present danger, more of a future danger if the death penalty was normalized), and wrong convictions (and that I think would mostly be solved by requiring multiple separate convictions before it's applied).

Maybe not vengeance, but there is passionate cruelty in drowning an ant if you had a vision of the world where the ant was no longer dangerous. What's wrong with indefinite imprisonment over death? Now you can figure out if you accidentally killed people, at least; you don't need abuse to accidentally put people to death.

And on the matter of death penalty, does one lead with an attitude of "Why should we help unless we owe you?" Is that the right moral motivation for death penalty? I mean, that's the attitude of big business in commerce.

I'd argue it's a minor component. Especially with something like a tick, that will go on to bite someone else.

I am morally indifferent between life imprisonment and death, but life imprisonment costs more and can fail. On the other hand, the original comment framed death penalty as "hypocrisy" of "justice being about re-education"; I am saying justice doesn't have to be primarily about re-education, no supporter of death penalty argues that; there's no hypocrisy. I think the removal is the most important component. Punishment and re-education should be prioritized depending on the crime, but in any case both are just nice, optional perks.

> Punishment and re-education should be prioritized depending on the crime, but in any case both are just nice, optional perks.

Again there is this framing about what is deserved and what is owed.

This is in contrast to the framing of what is best for society — if your prevailing theory is that some people are safe and some people are dangerous (as opposed to some people are criminals and some people are owed), then those individuals who still have a good future story ought be candidates for rehabilitation. From this perspective, it is not a matter of what is a "perk" and what is owed, but rather what the state has to gain.

Well, is re-education better for society than removal? It's expensive and unreliable, whereas if you only consider the society of people whom we owe the respect of their negative rights (based on reciprocity), incarceration is cheaper and more reliable, and death penalty is cheaper and more reliable yet.

1. Execution absolutely guarantees that the criminal will not hurt anyone ever again. In prison, criminals can still hurt prison guards and other prisoners. They can also escape or be freed by mistake. There is a clearly benefit in terms of risk to innocent people. There are certainly innocent people that have been spared harm or death by virtue of executions.

I don't view execution as punishment or revenge. I view it the same way I view putting down a rabid animal. I would never take pleasure or vengeful satisfaction in it, even if the criminal had hurt me or someone I knew.

2. It's not significantly more ethical to keep someone that is innocent locked up in a prison for their entire life. Someone being freed after 50 years in prison has had their life stolen from them, even if they were not actually executed. The stakes for life imprisonment are just as high as execution. Arguably, the torture of prison makes it worse than execution in many cases.

3. Execution makes sense in some rare cases, where the criminal is very clearly guilty (e.g. video evidence of them murdering multiple people) but only as a way to prevent them from hurting people in the future. Not as a deterrent, punishment, and not for revenge.

4. If I was a sociopath serial killer that couldn't help myself, I might view execution as a relief. Even if outwardly I was begging not to be executed, I might appreciate that my society had the courage to kill me instead of leaving me to rot in prison for 50 years.

5. Ultimately, we need to be able to cure these people and release them back into society. Science just isn't there yet, so for now we have execution and life imprisonment as our primary tools. No one should be satisfied with either option. They're both terrible options that are not as dissimilar as some portray them to be.

"Arguably, the torture of prison makes it worse than execution in many cases."

This. Whenever somebody says we shouldn't abolish the death penalty, I ask them how it would feel to be locked in a cage for 23 hours a day for up to 60 years (which in most Supermax prisons for people who committed atrocious crimes, is very much the case). If they admit that would be torturous, I then point out that the death penalty is death, abolishing the death penalty is torture and death. Which one is preferable? Which one is more humane?

I think that when you consider how much it costs to house a prisoner in a Supermax prison for that long, the sense of justice on behalf of the victims, and just for the prisoner's own sake to avoid being mentally and psychologically damaged by being solitary for so long (which we scientifically know will happen), the death penalty makes more sense than people give it credit for.

You can't make a human being feel psychological pain since the perception is individual. Once in a prison where their medical, food, and financial needs are 100% assumed by the state, they might find their lives better.

If they believed the world was so unjust that they went out and committed horrible crimes in the name of self-satisfaction or their personal beliefs on how to make the world just, they might just sit in a cell and feel good about what they did in perpetuity.

People like the Unabomber continue to sit around and pen manifestos justifying their own actions because of their political beliefs.

This too. And what's odd is that I hear people who say "Oh, in prison, they're safe from society." That's not true historically. Some of the most dangerous people in history were imprisoned, multiple times, and not killed for fear of public anger - only to get out of prison and wreak havoc.

Hitler was found guilty of treason, but was given a more humane 5 years in prison instead of the death penalty that would have historically been applied to treasonous people. He wrote Mein Kampf, got out of prison, started World War II, and killed millions.

Stalin was exiled to Siberia multiple times for his crimes including bank robbery, kidnappings, and extortion instead of being given death. He came back to Russia for the February Revolution, overthrew the Russian empire, started the Gulag system, and caused the deaths of millions.

For all we know, the Unabomber is in prison right now, but what happens if he escaped? It is not historically impossible, or even implausible, that he couldn't repeat history like many revolutionaries who were arrested, got out, and took over.

There is zero guarantee historically that people in prison are 100% totally safely isolated from society and can't do harm in the future.

>For all we know, the Unabomber is in prison right now

For all we know? What is your information that he's not?

What a weird argument for the death penalty. If you worry about this aspect surely you can just ask the convict if they prefer to stay in prison or if they prefer to die. And not in a philosophical thought experiment way, but in the most direct way possible: “You have been found a very bad egg by the rules of the area you are in. We decided to never let you out again. Since this decision you have been in this facility for x days. Do you want to die today or do you want to die in a future uncertain date?” And see what that particular person thinks instead of some armchair philosopher on some random website.

"You have been found a very bad egg by the rules of the area you are in."

If a person is being sentenced to death, this is a ridiculous statement and it betrays your worldview. It implies that they are only being put to death because of the rules that somebody came up with, rather than for having done things that are objectively, unspeakably, bad.

You don't get the death penalty for stealing purses at Walmart, protesting in the streets, or even killing somebody. You get it for unspeakable crimes that are far more broadly condemned than just the "rules of the area." You get it for bombing planes, child molestation, genocide. People that society should not pity as having a good heart in there somewhere.

These are people, who, frankly, we shouldn't sympathize with. We shouldn't feel bad that they are being put to death as if that is some miscarriage of justice. We should put them to death humanely, quickly upon conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, and resign that justice has been done the same way you would a rabid dog. You don't hate the dog or seek revenge upon it, but you know it must be done for the safety of everyone.

> it betrays your worldview. It implies that they are only being put to death because of the rules that somebody came up with, rather than for having done things that are objectively, unspeakably, bad.

No betrayal there. That is my worldview. Cultures through history varied a lot on which crimes were deemed worthy of capital punishment. Even now as we speak there are people who has been sentenced to death because someone saw them tear pages out of a book. Where I am from that is either not a crime or minor property damage. So clearly we as humans can’t agree on what is “objectively bad”. Even if we argue that those other cultures got it wrong and we have it right on who is objectively bad our processes are not deterministic. The same person if tried again with a different jurry might get acquited. Not always, and not and not every case, but often enough to undermine the notion that we are dealing with some kind of objective badness.

> it must be done for the safety of everyone

The idea that we have these dangerous criminals who cannot be contained safely in any other way than by killing them is a comic book plotpoint not reality. We have the technology and the resources to keep any humans safely contained if we choose to. We can even do this in a non-cruel way if that is what we want to do.

You're assuming that the person was rightfully convicted, under an article implying potentially redeeming evidence was overlooked in a case that ended up with a death sentence.

Well now you're just devising your own methods of psychological torture.

Sounds like a false dichotomy. It's not like the only two options are cage vs death penalty.

If you think life in prison is more inhumane than death then I could be convinced that prisoners with a life sentence should be allowed to voluntarily choose euthanasia.

If you are concerned about cost then it's worth noting that execution (in the US) is more expensive than life in prison.

That leaves the "sense of justice". Given the high likelihood that the government already has killed innocent people, and the likelihood that it will continue to do so, that seems insufficient to me.

1, only applies if you are right about the verdict, which we can never be sure about. In fact execution almost guarantees that the criminal will re-offend if he is watching an innocent man being put to death for his crimes.

2, Its significantly more ethical to potentially give some of an innocent persons life back and make some restitution. Than none.

3, There is never cases where we are sure; There can always be new evidence or a new way to look at old evidence that changes the amount guilt or innocence. To think you can be sure for all time about a set of events, even if you were there, is just wrong. If we replace reasonable doubt with no doubt at all then No one would be convicted of anything.

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