Did Manuel Ramírez spend years in prison for murdering a man who is still alive? | Hacker News Reader

Did Manuel Ramírez spend years in prison for murdering a man who is still alive?

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Answer: it's conceivable, but they couldn't find the guy who was supposedly murdered, so maybe he's actually dead. But the body examined for the autopsy clearly wasn't his; it was someone else who was murdered.

Could this be used as an argument against capital punishment? If it takes 20 years to exonerate someone, then while you can still compensate them financially if they're still alive, you can't make up for killing them.

It can and is used as an argument. Unfortunately, the people who believe in this argument generally do not have enough power to end capital punishment.

It depends on how rigorous the standard of proof is. The US spends a big amount of money proving that someone sentenced to execution is guilty of their crime.

> The US spends obscene amounts of money proving that someone sentenced to execution is guilty of their crime.

I feel like you’re implying that this is a bad thing to rigorously prove whether a crime has occurred?

I'm saying that many would want to execute the commandant of Auschwitz, especially if the evidence for their guilt is overwhelming. I think a standard of proof high enough can sometimes be met, and the crime sufficiently deserving.

On a purely emotional level, I would want to punish a war criminal more severely than a common murderer.

On a more rational level, executing the commander of Auschwitz does nothing but provide short-term satisfaction, but treating even the monster to a humane standard affirms the values of democracy and sets an example for future generations.

Think of how the American prison scandals of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib affected the global perception of American justice. It was just a massive loss of international goodwill and credibility accumulated over a century. All the torture and kidnappings delivered very little practical return in the end.

I put human welfare above every priority, so I don't see why 'crime sufficiently deserving' would be something I should care about.

Ultimately, I want less people to be murdered, incarcerated, or otherwise undergoing human suffering.

We should inflict the least amount of suffering for the purpose of preventing moral harms. Our goal should be to prevent someone like the commandant of Auschwitz from existing, or failing that, address the reasons why it came about.

Death penalty with proper trial is more expensive than life-without-parole sentence, at least in the US currently [1]. I'm not sure if this means that non-death-penalty crimes are not inspected properly. In such system the only reason for the capital punishment is revenge.

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

Have you read https://innocenceproject.org/the-innocent-and-the-death-pena... ? It is hard to square with what you wrote.

The US spends a lot on health care, too, but it’s the results that count, not the amount of money spent.

And the results aren’t all good, and that’s saying it kindly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_i...

Capital punishment isn't a thing in many parts of the world. Have a look at this map [1]. The people opposed to capital punishment have managed to win the argument in a majority of the countries in the world.

[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

Or this can be used as an argument to increase scrutiny for murder conviction without body?

Yes, I think so.

The state can never really be sure in 100% of cases so we have to take the moral high ground and keep people alive but incarcerated.

Since it doesn't deter murder, i.e. murders still take place in places with the death penalty there's no loss of law and order by keeping murders alive and serving life.

Finally, it takes years but sometimes a convicted murder reveals detains of an earlier, unsuspected crime. This provides some small closure to the victim's family.

All of that is a compromise against retribution but nothing will bring the victim back.

Yes and in all cases where the convicted may be innocent. No process is infallible, including those that lead to conviction.

What? This is one of the two main arguments against capital punishment (1: it's wrong even for the guilty, 2: it's irreversible for those later exonerated) and these two arguments together have gotten capital punishment banned in countries comprising 60% of the world's population.

> 1: it's wrong even for the guilty

What about an example I gave above: The commandant of Auschwitz? On a purely emotional level, I find the point of view that a pitiless mass-murderer deserves infinitely more mercy than what he granted others morally reprehensible. You get what you give, in my view.

You're preaching to the choir. I believe that 100% of murderers should be executed; I just don't trust any justice system to be 100% accurate in ascertaining who is and who isn't a murderer. Thus I am opposed to capital punishment as public policy, in all cases (except perhaps those where the level of doubt is infinitesimal).

This is an interesting example.

It would take a seriously deranged person to subject Auschwitz' commandant to what he subjected his prisoners. Unless you advocate applying all sorts of barbaric acts of torture on him, you are not really pushing the "you get what you give" credo. There is some level of odious behaviour that we all are unwilling to justify.

I don't think it's fair to characterise this as "deserving mercy".

I'm actually okay with the capital punishment _in principle_. I just don't trust the prosecution (or the legal system in general) to get it right _every time_.

There's also the problem of the death-qualified jury. The problem with that is, as a defendant, the deck is stacked against you since day 1, because the very people who are going to determine your fate, are already screened to be okay to be willing to render a verdict that would kill someone.

Maybe this is the wrong forum for this, but the Talmud says that A Sanhedrin that executes someone more than once every 70 years is bloody. If you think about it then, you could simply limit the frequency of executions, and scale it up or down per capita (depending on the number of people the Sanhedrin had jurisdiction over when it existed).

And how is that going to solve anything?

Nobody is going to get wrongully convicted and put to death just because we limit the number of executions?

(I'm not a proponent of capital punishment)

It's actually a better argument FOR capital punishment.

How much money is 20 years of life in prison worth? There's the lost income, lost opportunities for once, that's a rather large sum.

But what is the price for 20 years of not having a life, 20 years of waiting, being trapped and not free to enjoy living.. That must be worth much much more than merely the lost income..

What's a day of freedom worth in dollars?

It's too expensive to risk having to compensate people.

This implies that there is nothing lost when someone is executed unfairly, or at least that the compensation might be worth more than their life.

Perhaps you could argue that people would rather die than be locked up for 20 years, but I'm not so sure.

I'm not saying nothing is lost, but to a state, what is lost is only the potential tax income from that person along with whatever the socioeconomic consequences of their execution may have on relatives.

On a human level, it's deeply tragic, I don't know what's worse.. The positive value of a year well spent, the negative value of a year spent unfree..

Thus spoke Gandalf:

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.

> Could this be used as an argument against capital punishment?

If it is, it's equally applicable to any other situation where an innocent person dies in a legally-preventable situation, e.g. drunk driving (let's eliminate driving, that will 100% eliminate tens of thousands annually of those innocent drunk driving deaths). Or that < 1 guy on death row annually, in the case of capital punishment.[0]

Here on Earth, with people, we understand that mistakes happen, that people are fallible, and that everything has both positive and negative tradeoffs—including capital punishment.

[0] Yes, I treat ultra-rare capital punishment mistakes in the same mental category as innocent drunk driving deaths. It's sad that it happened (in both cases) and in a perfect world, neither would occur—but we do our best. (And as the case of drunk driving shows, literally no one believes in "if it saves one life" rhetoric consistently. There's more to life than safety.)

Yes, it was historically too. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet used this argument to be against the beheading of the French king while also being for imprisonment for life. This position made him unpopular with both the royalist and the revolutionaries and it might be responsible for his untimely death at the hands of the revolutionary government.

It's a weak argument: Can you actually compensate someone for 20 years of lost time? And do we (plenty of states don't depending on circumstances). If there is a problem with whether people found guilty are actually guilty, that's a problem irrespective of the punishment...

That is one hell of a waffle.

I don't mind long form journalism, I just wish inexperienced writers would include a couple of paragraphs of summary before they head off into the multi-page Grampa Simpson stuff.

We can't bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my...

TL;DR Someone framed the guy using a body murdered by someone else.

Tldr: yes

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