Gov. Inslee signs bill to remove death penalty from Washington state law | Hacker News Reader

Gov. Inslee signs bill to remove death penalty from Washington state law

kptv.com

158 pointsrunarberg210 comments

> Some argued that if the death penalty is eliminated, prosecutors will lose what little leverage they have to get murder suspects to cooperate with police.

This seems like a trivially testable hypothesis. Civilized countries outlawed the death penalty for murder a long time ago, do their murder suspects in fact simply refuse to cooperate with police since death isn't a possible penalty? I would assume the answer is "No".

Many European countries don't even have life-without-parole as a possible sentence. All criminals in those countries can in principle be paroled, it's just that if you're an unrepentant murdering nazi, the parole decision is really easy, "Hmm, do we want this nazi to kill a bunch more people as he's repeatedly insisted he will if given a chance? No".

Even if it does remove a bit of leverage ... IIUC generally this kind of deal hinges on the state's discretion over whether to pursue a greater or lesser charge or ask for a greater or lesser sentence, and so we're talking about the state's ability to threaten and coerce someone who has not yet been convicted of anything through discretionary prosecution. Maybe that's leverage they shouldn't have?

Gary Ridgeway confessed to killings in exchange for a life sentence.

I am not a lawyer, but... realistically sentiment has been moving away from the death penalty in Washington State since the 1990s such that even someone like Ridgeway was unlikely to be executed. I don't recall the last execution (I think I was a teen...) but even in those last few the appeals went on for years.

Last person executed was Cal Coburn Brown in 2010 for murdering Holly Washa in 1997. He and James Homer Elledge are the only two people executed by the state of Washington this century, Elledge was lethally injected in 2001, for murdering Eloise Jane Fitzner in 1998.

Gov. Inslee set a moratorium when he came to power in 2014, and the state supreme court found the punishment to be racist and hence unconstitutional in 2018. It has been illegal ever since. This law basically just removes an unconstitutional law from the legal code.

There is 0% chance that Gary Ridgway would ever have been executed by the state. There is also high chance that he would have given the names of his victims regardless of the plea bargain.

This reasoning unfortunately just invites the same sort of silly American exceptionalism that we see everywhere else.

> Civilized countries outlawed the death penalty for murder a long time ago

What do you have against Japan? I would consider Japan arguably the most civilized country.

And Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. And while India isn’t as developed as those countries, it’s the world’s largest functional democracy and I’d argue at least meets the threshold of “civilized.” I’d probably concede that China is also “civilized.”

From the perspective of crime, as much as I love visiting Europe I was disappointed at the amount of petty crime that goes ignored there.

Such crime is virtually nonexistent in most of the Asian countries listed above.

If you think petty crime is bad in Europe, don’t even think about visiting Americas. US cities are so much worse than almost of Europe it’s pretty shocking.

But then again, we're already starting from the assumption that the US isn't a civilized country.

I disagree. The US has an entirely different level of crime issues (see guns), but I feel safer about petty crime (pickpocketing, scammers, etc) walking about a typical American city downtown than most European capitals.

Case in point: I have designer brand backpack I frequently carry during traveling. I carry it without a second thought through the US and Asia. I don’t bring it with me to Europe because it’s likely to be a pickpocket magnet.

Take a walk on Mission Avenue in San Francisco then and see for yourself (actually, don’t do that).

Crime is extremely rampant in US cities, and I’m not even talking about shootings here. Assaults (verbal and physical) by mentally ill (or drugged out of their minds) hobos are extremely common. Car break-ins, constant shoplifting, carjackings, etc. For more petty stuff, public drug use and homeless camping on the streets are very common (these are crimes in Europe, and are very actively prosecuted there, unlike in US). I have been a victim or personally observed every single thing I mentioned above (except carjacking) in US multiple times, but have not observed or experienced this in Europe (despite living there longer), and have only once been verbally assaulted there by drunkards on a night bus.

Most of US is very safe, but portions of large US cities are literal hellholes.

> And while India isn’t as developed as those countries

While India has the death penalty, it uses it a lot more sparingly than the US does. Last year, US executed 18 people, India 0. 2021, US executed 11, India 0. 2020, US 17, India 4. Since 2000, India has carried out 8 executions, US has carried out almost 1000. And consider India's population is over 4 times that of the US. On a per capita basis, the US execution rate since 2000 is something like 500 times that of India.

I'd like to see the death penalty abolished, but I think it would be a big improvement if the US simply decided to use it no more than India does.

US murder rates since 1990 have consistently been around double those of India:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/murder-homic...

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...

The US still has proportionally more executions though. I don’t know what the homicide clearance rate is in India, but that is another factor to possibly consider.

Another thing (that might also be true of India) is that the US is a federation of fifty states, each of which have their own laws. Many states have no death penalty, and some of the states that still do probably have rates comparable to India. Any national rate for the US is mostly an aggregate, plus the relatively small federal death row.

> Another thing (that might also be true of India) is that the US is a federation of fifty states, each of which have their own laws

India is a federation of states too. So is Canada (Canada's provinces are just states by another name), Mexico, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, etc. Many Americans seem to think the US is somehow unique by having states, but it is far from uncommon. Invoking it to explain America's unusual features only makes sense when you don't know that many other countries have similar systems.

In both India and Canada criminal law is a federal responsibility, so criminal law is the same across all the states. Indian states and Canadian provinces still have the power to make their own laws in other areas. This means the formal abolition of the death penalty in Canada had to be done at the federal level, and any future such abolition in India would have to be at the federal level too. But in both countries, while the letter of criminal law is federal, state/provincial governments handle the majority of implementation of it, so even with death penalty on the books they still had a lot of lee-way in deciding how much it gets used. Although, in the case of contemporary India, India’s Supreme Court has made clear they will only uphold the death penalty in the rarest of cases, which is a big part of why there are so few executions, meaning that right now state differences in policies/attitudes mean less than they did in the past

Whereas Australia, like the US and unlike Canada and India, has separate state and federal criminal laws, which meant (just like the US) some states abolished the death penalty decades before others – Queensland abolished it in 1922, it was abolished federally in 1973, but New South Wales became the last state to abolish it in 1985 (although they'd already abolished it for murder in 1955, so the complete 1985 abolition was only for rare offences such as treason). In 2010, the federal Parliament passed a law which bans any state from reintroducing the death penalty (using the treaty power, since Australia has ratified an international treaty to ban the death penalty)

> Many Americans seem to think the US is somehow unique by having states, but it is far from uncommon. Invoking it to explain America's unusual features only makes sense when you don't know that many other countries have similar systems.

I was aware of this; there's no need to be patronizing. The point I was making was that the American states are as distinct from one another as many countries are, particularly in the application of the death penalty.

> In both India and Canada criminal law is a federal responsibility, so criminal law is the same across all the states.

So you acknowledge that in the specific context we were discussing, the US system is different from those countries after all.

> I was aware of this; there's no need to be patronizing.

I’m sorry you experienced my comment as patronising, that was not my intention.

> The point I was making was that the American states are as distinct from one another as many countries are,

But heaps of non-American states are as distinctive from each other as many countries are in all sorts of ways (this included)-so what? I mean, when the Australian state of Victoria carried out Australia’s last execution in 1967, the death penalty had already been abolished in Queensland for over 40 years, and the last execution in Queensland was over 50 years earlier. How is that in any way different from the US?

You seem to be arguing the US is somehow distinctive in this regard, when it isn’t. And then when I point out it isn’t distinctive, you claim to already know that. I’m not sure what argument you are making then.

> So you acknowledge that in the specific context we were discussing, the US system is different from those countries after all.

In terms of federal-vs-state distribution of powers in criminal law, Australia and the US are rather similar - not exactly the same, but I can’t see how the differences are relevant here.

We can speak of two different criminal law models in a federation - the Canada/India model and the US/Australia model. In each case, we have one country with that model retaining the death penalty and one abolishing it, suggesting to me that the difference between these models has little to do with the retention or abolition of the death penalty.

Even in the case of India having few executions and the US having many, I don’t think this difference in model actually explains it. In India’s case, it is because their federal Supreme Court is semi-abolitionist - it doesn’t want to ban the death penalty completely, but it only wants to allow it occasionally. The exact same situation could occur in the US if there was a US Supreme Court majority with the same attitude. Whereas, if the Indian Supreme Court decided to take the same “hands-off” attitude SCOTUS does, you’d likely see some Indian states with many executions and others with de facto abolition-not hugely dissimilar to the current US situation

> You seem to be arguing the US is somehow distinctive in this regard, when it isn’t.

I’m not arguing that at all. If you look closely I actually guessed that India was likely federalized as well.

My point was more that it’s not useful either way to look at this as a US issue when in reality, you have some states like Texas with very high rates of execution and others like Washington with none at all. My point is about how you’re framing the issue in the first place, in other words.

> I mean, when the Australian state of Victoria carried out Australia’s last execution in 1967, the death penalty had already been abolished in Queensland for over 40 years

I would say that Australian national death penalty statistics from the 1950’s aren’t particularly meaningful either.

> We can speak of two different criminal law models in a federation - the Canada/India model and the US/Australia model. In each case, we have one country with that model retaining the death penalty and one abolishing it, suggesting to me that the difference between these models has little to do with the retention or abolition of the death penalty.

That is a mile beside any point I was making.

> My point was more that it’s not useful either way to look at this as a US issue when in reality, you have some states like Texas with very high rates of execution and others like Washington with none at all. My point is about how you’re framing the issue in the first place, in other words

But it absolutely does make sense to look at it as a US issue. The US is one country with a great deal of shared national culture - yes, there are cultural differences between different parts of the US, but they are rather small by global standards. Every US state has English as its primary language - that’s a very different situation from Canada (with Quebec and French), to say nothing of India, in which the majority of states have their own language. The US has a single two-party system nationwide, unlike many other countries where different parts of the country have completely different party systems (e.g Canada, India, the UK, Spain). State-based politics in the US is highly influenced by national politics and actually far less distinctive than in many other countries. Indian state-level politics is far more distinctive and independent from Indian national politics than US-state level politics is

And why should people outside the US care about the difference between different US states, any more than people in the US care about different Indian states, or Mexican states, or Swiss cantons? To focus on a country as a whole is the standard framing everyone uses to compare different countries, and even Americans adopt that framing when it comes to countries other than the US. There is no reason to treat the US specially here

Good. Capital punishment is an embarrassment to the USA, both for morality and because our legal system has proved to be sometimes inaccurate in convictions. Too high of an error rate.

Right. It's also outrageously expensive.

The expensive part is largely the (comparatively) exhaustive appeals process, which means counterintuitively the innocent may be even worse off now that they won't be on death row.

Here you probably mean the innocent wrongfully convicted, but I wonder how an exhaustive appeals process affects the innocent living victims and innocent family members of victims of a rightfully convicted criminal. That they’re forced to relive the trauma of passed crimes again and again every time the death sentence is appealed for over a decade in most cases. It cannot be good for them.

Much better for all involved to reopen a case if and when new evidence of wrongful convictions become convincing enough.

Though I'm not advocating for the death penalty, it's high cost was created by the opponents of death penalty. I don't think "unfair" is the right word, but it sure is dirty.

Doesn’t high cost just mean there’s an extensive process in place to try to prevent killing innocent people (and yet it still happens). Not sure why that qualifies as “dirty” — wouldn’t killing without the process to save money be dirtier?

I think the parent was implying most of the extensive process is there in the first place because of the same opponents insisting on them.

Activists against the death penalty raise costs by frivolous litigation and then claim that the death penalty is too expensive. The same thing they've done with other things they don't like, e.g. nuclear power. It's circular logic.

No, proponents of the capital punishment attempt to create process that attempts to mitigate complaints made by abolishionists.

Nice attempt at shifting the goalposts and shifting blame. And making a false equivalence with nuclear power.

Abolishionists want capital punishment abolished because capital punishment is inhumane, cruel, and morally objectionable.

Agreed. It also means that the justice system cannot ever make a mistake unless one is ok with "legally killing" an innocent person.

Right, which I might be if it was one in a thousand or maybe even one in a hundred, but even with an insanely lengthy appeals process it's one in twenty or even higher. Not acceptable.

From a purely practical perspective, the death penalty is bad because of inaccuracy in the legal system.

From a morality perspective, how is the death penalty materially different than using lethal force in a war?

> From a morality perspective, how is the death penalty materially different than using lethal force in a war?

Very few of the moral arguments in favor of killing people in war time have anything to do with killing people for punishment.

If you have a captured criminal, they pose no threat to ~anyone and no threat to your society at large.

> If you have a captured criminal, they pose no threat to ~anyone and no threat to your society at large.

Is that true? Prisoners attack guards all the time. Prison guards actually have a statistically shortened lifespan as a result of stress presumably because of the danger. Prisoners can also attack other prisoners. A captured criminal could also be a famous or powerful person like Osama Bin Laden or a cartel boss and they could still run things from the prison or foment violence and revolution from supporters outside the prison.

They at least have a very reduced ability to hurt anyone, to the point where most of the moral arguments seem like a _big_ stretch. Some random guy who's just vaguely unpleasant to be around is almost certainly damaging society more than the worst prisoner. Should we kill them too?

Prison guards do badly mostly because our prisons are shit. Too few guards, too little pay, too few resources, no societal will to improve anything.

> A captured criminal could also be a famous or powerful person like Osama Bin Laden or a cartel boss and they could still run things from the prison or foment violence and revolution from supporters outside the prison.

In that case, the moral arguments start to be similar maybe, where prison isn't effectively stopping someone's evil actions enough.

> prison isn't effectively stopping someone's evil actions enough.

Yes, I think this is the crux. There are a number of edge cases. I also don't mean to muddle issues but there are actually more homicides in prisons per year than there are capital punishments[1] but this issue doesn't get much attention. I am not arguing that capital punishment would prevent this issue (although I am very interested in knowing the likelihood of people with life sentences murdering behind bars versus the rest). That is why I have made this argument. I don't see how it's possible for a prison to stop someone who is motivated and dangerous (or has a dangerous following). I also don't think a crime should give you notoriety and fandom esp. in particularly bad cases like with serial killers . These cases are very rare though so I am not making any argument about how often capital punishment should happen just that there are cases where I see it as being perfectly moral and this assumes specifically that it is very difficult or impossible to totally isolate someone from the world, too expensive to do so, or possibly even that is a worse punishment than just executing them. I don't know that this has really been achieved ever.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/220920/number-of-state-p...

> From a purely practical perspective, the death penalty is bad because of inaccuracy in the legal system.

I've always thought that from a purely practical perspective the death penalty was bad because however vile a person is, and no matter what horrible thing they've done, a living person is more likely to be of some use to society than a corpse, which a convicted person will inevitably become at some point anyway.

It may be that we'd be monsters ourselves for extracting whatever value we can out of the living convicts, and only later the dead, but the logic still makes it seem like a waste of opportunity/resources.

> From a morality perspective, how is the death penalty materially different than using lethal force in a war?

It's not that different. In fact, you will find plenty of people arguing that war is indeed always unethical and immoral.

The difference is captivity. For example it is illegal (a violation of international law and norms) to kill prisoners of war. Even if you know they were killing your soldiers right before they were captured.

pg's reason for ending the death penalty is conclusive to me.

http://www.paulgraham.com/real.html

The crux of PG's argument

"This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with the death penalty. We don't even reach the point where theoretical questions about the moral justification or effectiveness of capital punishment start to matter, because so many of the people sentenced to death are actually innocent. Whatever it means in theory, in practice capital punishment means killing innocent people."

If you've ever seen some of the background info when death penalty cases are overturned, it is extremely clear that a lot of people have a very scary definition of "beyond a reasonable doubt". I was in jury duty once and one of the attorneys went around and asked "What do you think about the statement that 'It's better to let 5 guilty men go free than put 1 innocent man in prison.'" The majority of people said they disagreed, that was too many guilty people going free. I'm thinking to myself "So these people are all OK with ~16% of prisoners being innocent? Are they all sadists?" I realize a lot of it is that people are just bad at math, but it general it's clear to me that, in a lot of trials the jury doesn't really differentiate between the "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "preponderance of the evidence" standards.

I've wondered to what extent the death penalty is useful so that people can send an innocent person to life in prison while patting themselves on the back for being so civilized and compassionate that they didn't literally kill them.

As a former engineer and manager whos partner is a lawyer I'll almost certainly never be empaneled to a jury, but I've heard from plenty of people who were.

One instance comes to mind where a (ordinarily) bright coworker returned from jury duty and told me about how they convicted someone of a lesser charge which was logically impossible to be guilty of without being guilty of the more serious charge. The jury were convinced he was innocent but was also convinced that he was a bad dude and it didn't feel right that he'd get off. My understanding is that no one in the jury thought he was guilty of the crimes he was accused of (the lesser or the greater), but the prosecution had successfully (and perhaps rightfully) smeared the accused's character.

I didn't talk about it with him further have hearing his description because I didn't know how to be civil about it, my coworker sent an person to prison who wasn't guilty. Not a jury, but him: 'cause a single person could have hung that jury and he didn't. I get that the social pressure can be intense, and I try to have sympathy for people who are trying to do the right thing in such situations... but... damn.

  I get that the social pressure can be intense, and I try to have sympathy
  for people who are trying to do the right thing in such situations... but...
  damn.

If you're curious, you should talk to him. I was a juror on a murder case, voted to convict one of the defendants. While he did, in fact, kill the victim (affirmative defense), I'm unsure that I would class his actions as murder or manslaughter. And I'm sure I'm not comfortable with the sentence a murder conviction carried, although my peers were quite confident (again, affirmative defense).

Sure, there's peer pressure, but there's a lot more pressure from the legal system to adhere to archaic definitions of truth and guilt. Pressure from the legal system carries a much bigger stick than pressure from the other jurors. Don't even think about jury nullification or you'll be on a judge's shit list. Trust that the police translated things into English correctly before the official translator arrived. Trust that there aren't any mitigating circumstances in the undocumented gap in time. Trust that the judge is not withholding material evidence. I rationalize my behavior because I followed the letter and spirit of. the law, but yeah there's a fair bit of shame and regret that tends to stick with me. Personally I'd aim for empathy were I you because nothing in our legal system is so cut and dry.

It's been well over a decade-- so no contact now. I did talk about it enough that I was pretty convinced that they thought they were innocent of the charges. It's can be much harder to understand someone's position when you're not under the pressures yourself, I surely didn't at the time though I was aware but being aware doesn't mean getting it.

I think at the time I perceived him as being kind of glib about it, bragging that they didn't give the person a worse conviction. In hindsight, he may have been feeling bad and looking for validation or an escape from his doubts. But I couldn't be too helpful then because I didn't get it. Maybe I get it a little more now, or at least I'm less prone to think that individuals doing the "right" thing (though they should!) is a meaningful fix for systemic problems. ... and a lot less enamored with the idea that anyone should be rushing into making trouble for themselves out of some principle.

That jurors take their role seriously and make their best effort as they understand it is all we can fairly ask of anyone.

Thank you for stepping up to mention your experience and for your service. Had you not been in seat it would have been someone else, perhaps someone who'd suffer the same regrets you've suffered (so you spared them), or someone who would have taken it less seriously and suffered no lingering regrets (unfair to accused, their victims, and the public-- regardless of the outcome).

> Don't even think about jury nullification or you'll be on a judge's shit list.

Curious what that means in practice? What can a judge do to a juror?

At the very least hold you in contempt.

I mean... A solid half of the US population has demonstrated that they think the death penalty is reasonable punishment for using a forged hundred dollar bill. Not surprised those same people would ensure "guilty" parties are punished to the fullest extent, collateral damage be damned.

I can't speak to Washington, but in California it's well beyond jurors being unable to grasp "beyond a reasonable doubt" because jurors, not judges, determine the sentence (life v death). The sentencing guidelines use verbiage that a lot of lay folk are not familiar with (e.g. mitigating) and jurors are not allowed to use a dictionary to define words they don't understand. Judges are not obligated to allow jurors to ask questions or for clarification during any phase of the trial. It's been a while since I've thought about capital cases but I believe written copies of the sentencing guidelines aren't provided to jurors. Given that we're talking about the ultimate punishment here, the system is (in California at least) a colossal mess.

> jurors are not allowed to use a dictionary to define words they don't understand

Is this the "no outside information rule" ?

I just asked the oracle and it explained a bunch of stuff that I won't reference because I can't fact check it right now, but it sounds like the amount of "discretion" a judge has over what the jurors can do and ask is utterly illogical.

Not a lawyer, but I just looked up juror selection and found this hot pocket.

https://californiaglobe.com/articles/new-california-laws-on-...

US law is such a mess. "Standing" is IMO the biggest one for blocking the removal of bad laws.

I should probably clarify (and I'm not a lawyer either). In California jurors in are not guaranteed the right to ask questions regardless of the charges. This actually caught one of the defense attorneys by surprise at the trial I was a juror on (well after I'd studied this shit at uni). In capital cases, jurors determine the sentence – this is unique to capital cases. Different states do things differently.

  Is this the "no outside information rule" ?

My understanding was that this was due to the law wanting laypeople (nee jurors) to use precise legal terminology. Whereas no outside information feels more like "don't do outside research on the facts of the case".

It sounds like, and it should be confirmed but ...

The court decides what information the jurors have, and it wants them to use precise legal terminology, yet there is no guarantee that those terms will be defined and they are not allowed to use dictionaries to define terms, nor is there a guarantee that a jurors questions will be answered.

Sounds like the default should be a mistrial. Sounds like a situation ripe for making things that are "only true in a court of law" and no where else.

Yeah that's more or less my take. Essentially the court wants a jury of laypeople who are able to understand legal terms that professionals spent years in school studying. They also want jurors to render opinions on things completely without contextual knowledge – the case I was on involved alcohol so having strong opinions on alcohol was a nearly instant dismissal, I've never seen so many teetotalers in my life.

There are people working to change this, and I think the ability to ask questions is a relatively new development, but it's slow going as anything with our legal system generally is.

I don't think this really iimplicates the death penalty specifically. Those 4% would still spend their lives in prison, and prison is a terrible place to be.

I think the argument he's making is a good one, specifically for changing the way things are done with regard to prosecutions. Punishing innocent people is unjust, regardless what the punishment is.

First and foremost, I think prosecutors who can be definitively proven to have lied or withheld evidence to get a conviction should be handed the same sentence they attempted to get in the prosecution. Same goes for police, investigators and non-coerced witnesses. This would eliminate a good degree of the perverse incentive in the system, death penalty or no.

Beyond that, I think we have too much faith in forensics and expert witnesses.

I believe in the death penalty, and generally speaking corporal punishment. But I don't believe in using the death penalty as punishment, only as a way to remove otherwise uncorrectable violent people from society. So I'd support rules that only allow it on a second or later offense. But I do believe it should apply potentially to all haenous violent crimes, including rape, unlawful detention, armed robbery and the like, given repeated violations by the same individual. I also happen to believe that prison is barbaric and should be abolished.

> Those 4% would still spend their lives in prison, and prison is a terrible place to be.

You're missing the point. If someone is incarcerated and later found to be innocent, they can be released. If someone is executed and later found to be innocent, nothing can be done.

nothing brings back their lost years, family, health, or occupation

Don't death row inmates get the most exhaustive appeals process of practically any class of prisoners? Honestly if I were innocent I think I'd prefer to be on death row which has the most costly (to the state) and exhaustive of all the appeals processes.

This change could counterintuitively condemn more innocent people.

> I don't think this really iimplicates the death penalty specifically. Those 4% would still spend their lives in prison, and prison is a terrible place to be.

You can set a prisoner free and try to compensate them for being wrongfully imprisoned. You can't un-kill someone.

Yeah, the whole “death is the only irreversible punishment” is pretty weak. 60 years in prison starting at age 18 is pretty darn irreversible too.

Yeah, what I always try to bring up when people point out the possibility of executing innocent people is that the people on death row get the best shot at proving their innocence that society is willing to give them. No one else in prison gets more legal representation made available to them, both from the state and various non-profit groups.

If somebody can't get off death row, it's not a matter of could, it's that they would have spent the rest of their life behind bars. So while, yes, convicting innocent people of crimes is evil, and absolutely must be avoided at all cost, it's not really a compelling argument against the death penalty, unless you have a really sunshine-and-roses view on rotting in a jail cell.

My personal view is that the death penalty should mostly be reserved for cases where the question of a trial isn't so much "did this person commit this act" as much as it is "did the act this person commit constitute a capital offense". War criminals are the quintessential example. It's public knowledge that the suspect was in charge of a group of soldiers, and those soldiers took certain actions. The war crime tribunal isn't trying to figure out if you did it, they're trying to figure out if they should kill you for it.

Why can't we just admit we don't need any war tribunal? We won we get to kill your King and anyone else we like. Right by conquest.

It's a compelling rationale for the US certainly, but I'd argue that it's orthogonal to the important reforms to stop convicting innocent people of crimes.

Examples of things America could do to improve on that, unrelated to executing people:

- Forbid cops from lying when interviewing suspects. A fraction of people when confronted with bullshit accusations will shrug in resignation and let it wash over them. But many more get confused. If the cops seem sure I threatened a farm owner with a gun, then I guess maybe I did? They have CCTV footage after all, they say the tyre tracks are like fingerprints, nobody else in the world could have left those tracks...

- Abolish cash bail. Either people are too dangerous to let loose, too likely to flee, or they're not. If anything being rich makes you more able to flee than poor people. But cash bail makes people choose false confessions because it's cheaper, which is not only unjust it creates a perverse incentive to accuse poor people of crimes they didn't do.

> it's orthogonal to the important reforms to stop convicting innocent people of crimes

This is a good ideal. But in practice unachievable.

Realizing that, we should have mechanisms for double checking our work, correcting mistakes when found, implementing procedures to prevent it from happening again and minimizing the degree to which irreversible consequences are dealt.

But I'm not talking about setting the unachievable as the requirement, I'm talking about doing these really easy trivial reforms to take a step towards this ideal.

It's the difference between "We can't entirely rule out insect fragments in flour" and "I reckon we ought not to let 'em dump diseased livestock in the flour silo".

Americans think it's normal that their police get to lie to suspects. I guess this is cheaper than teaching them literally anything about interrogation, but it means all interviews are worthless by a reasonable person's standard. And yet because this is legal, and not only legal it's normal, the US courts will accept this as somehow evidence. Not evidence that the police are corrupt and incompetent, but evidence that the person being interviewed is guilty!

I agree and it's also cheaper to house them in prison for life without parole than to do a murder trial, get them convicted and executed.

So the system might be wrong about the conviction which is just an absolutely terrible thought and it's cheaper to skip the death penalty.

So the only real possible benefit is that it could be 1) a deterrent and 2) closure for the family.

But it seems life without parole is a pretty strong deterrent in itself. And part of the closure that the family perceives in an execution is, just a guess on my part, the fact that it takes so long and is emotionally draining that the family is also going through the long laborious process of a capital punishment conviction and execution.

If you don't have a death penalty, what's the sense of closure a family gets knowing they got life without parole?

I don't like death penalty because humans err and innocent people get killed, but I'm curious if the closure aspect of the death penalty is actually related to that process and not the closure they might get if they know they got the best possible conviction in a life without parole situation.

In other words - if the death penalty is removed, it seems plausible that a family could get the same or more closure with a life without parole sentencing as they avoid the emotional and mentally draining death penalty case and process.

I have to imagine that any closure from the execution is theoretical at best. To sit and watch the life drain from someone, at your behast, with your input, and for your benefit?

At least you don’t have to go to parole hearings every couple of years in fear that they’re going to be released again.

Shouldn’t the policy response be really-actually-your-natural-life-without-parole sentences instead?

A family can get closure watching an innocent man die. How does this moral calculus work out?

Well I'm trying to think about it like this - hypothetically... if there were NO innocent people convicted, the process itself of the death penalty may not even provide more closure than just life without parole.

Solid argument, but it's funny to call it "pg's reason" when it has been at the forefront of the capital punishment debate for literally hundreds of years.

I mean I call plenty of things "so-and-so's reason" for something, even if they're not the originator of the idea but just the person I and whomever I'm talking with happen to know about it from.

This seems like a silly linguistic nitpick to die on.

Took me five seconds even as a young college student to realize why the death penalty was absolutely ludicrous. You can reverse a life sentence in the event that new evidence comes to light exonerating the defendant, you can't reverse death.

A take I recently heard:

You either have to believe ...

The state doesn't make mistakes.

The state sometimes kills innocent people.

The death penalty isn't common at all. I'm seeing 18 individuals for 2022 and also that 2022 was the eighth consecutive year with less than 30 individuals served the death penalty. I'm finding it hard to believe that many mistakes were made with that few number of individuals (the data was kinda tough to find so I welcome better data if anyone has it).

[0]https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/2021

What is "many" here? How many times is it OK for us to execute you for a crime you didn't commit? Is it alright so long as we only kill you once?

It took a matter of minutes to find that Toforest Johnson was successfully convicted of murder based on somebody claiming they overheard him confessing. The prosecution had concealed from the defence the fact that they paid this witness a substantial sum of money. That sort of bullshit shouldn't work to give somebody a traffic ticket, never mind a death sentence and yet sure enough US courts thought that was good enough.

The very website you link has data about exonerations[0]. From a quick look, it looks like this is about people who are still alive, not dead people found innocent after the death penalty was carried through (I'm having a hard time finding that specific datapoint). Given the exoneration data though, I'd have a hard time believing that number is 0.

[0]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence

EDIT: Oh boy that rabbit hole is deep. So here's some _potentially_ innocent people who have been put to death[1]. None of those are actually proven to be innocent, but there is at least some amount of evidence that spells reasonable doubt on their conviction.

[1]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence/execute...

Is nobody here aware of the Innocence Project?

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

>> "I'm finding it hard to believe that many mistakes wee made ..."

So you are OK with a a few mistakes, as opposed to many?

Point is also that it is possible that a mistake will be made. We know wrongful convictions have occurred, including for those on death row.

I’m not a huge fan of the death penalty myself but I don’t see a meaningful difference between the death penalty and life imprisonment. I’m quite confident that there are far more frequent errors in incarceration with life imprisonment than with the death penalty. Just seems like bikeshedding to focus on a thing that can have at max 18 errors a year.

It isn't even a hypothetical. There is a long list of people who were proven to be innocent after they were executed, using DNA testing, someone else confessing or however else.

I don't doubt it, but I had a hard time finding a list last time I looked. I only found people that were probably innocent and not proven innocent. Is there a source I missed?

This is just a small portion of the people who we have good reason to believe were either unjustly executed by the state or who were executed too quickly to allow for new information to come to light

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence/execute...

Note that the time between sentencing and executions vary wildly, 6-20+ years, and all of these people deserved to have a second chance to prove their innocence given that now we can see where the legal requirement of guilt "Beyond a shadow of a doubt" might have left these potentially innocent people go free.

This can be addressed by simply raising the bar for delivering such a sentence however. “Reasonable doubt” is a moderately high precision bar. It’s intentionally not higher.

People want the bar to be raised to a point where there is a 0% error rate. This effectively means abolishing the death penalty.

I disagree. There’s a difference between basically never used and not actually possible.

Exactly. If you kill someone in front of two surviving witnesses and it is caught on a well-lit good definition video, sure, that's beyond any reasonable doubt, execute away.

Short of that? Nah, let's err on the side of caution and not go around executing potentially innocent people, please.

What if the two witnesses were lying? What if the video was deepfaked? Plenty of executions and imprisonments from a few decades ago that were judged "beyond any reasonable doubt" at the time were found to be wrong as soon as DNA testing became a thing, and the racial and other kinds of bias in the justice system became immediately clear. What is the guarantee that the same thing won't happen for any executions done today?

You are adding layers of doubt. If there is doubt, then you’re not above the bar. It’s as simple as that.

Yes I recognize the post above me used the term “reasonable doubt”.

Raise that bar however high you want; you cannot completely eliminate the possibility of a mistake.

The defendant has been recognized by no less than 15 people. His DNA was found all over the crime scene . The victim's blood was found at his clothes. A video recording made by a surveillance camera depicts the whole murder. He himself confessed.

Yep. That’s what I’m saying. Starting with a required confession is a good start. You could make it as hard as requiring the jury to fail to come up with any other believable narrative.

It’s ok if a criminal can avoid the death penalty by blatantly refusing to confess in light of obviously incriminating evidence.

Confessions are fake all the time, including in many existing "they were executed despite being innocent" cases!

The murder has been staged. Organized crime found a doppelganger, made him wear the victims clothes and kill the other guy on cctv. They contacted the victim and told him to either confess or they will kill his children and parents.

I think society is ok assuming that won’t happen

Since we're on completely unrealistic scenarios anyway: that could still be a set up with a false confession.

The real murderer was his long-lost twin, who had previously kidnapped him in a cell, performed the murders and the confession, then snuck out and swapped them!

That’s not a problem with the sentencing

It is. The point is that there can always be more information later. And you can't go back on the death penalty.

I responded to this saying yes, but I think it left too much room for nitpicking. Although I do think this is above the bar, it’s also worth noting that in this scenario, the criminal did in fact seem to leave the crime scene. The much more obvious case is the one where they are caught mid act with many crowd sourced perspectives of the crime, like random shooters.

I actually don't believe that the videos people will use will live up to the standard even if they claim they do. Observing average people, they model probability as a binary 0/1.

They'll look at the video and be like "Yeah he's wearing Carhartt. It's him. He wears it" or whatever. And some other equally clueless nitwit will convince himself it wasn't me because I have 3 blue items and the killer had a red keychain.

Essentially, it is crucial to me to prevent the state from exercising power over me because the agents of the state are frequently morons. And there's nothing worse than morons with power over you since you cannot reason them out of idiocy.

I’m not convinced that you can meaningfully raise the bar beyond “beyond a reasonable doubt” (or even that you can get juries to consistently apply “beyond a reasonable doubt”.)

Regardless of jury instructions, I think what you normally get in practice is “beyond the point at which you are convinced the accused should be treated as guilty”.

That won't be sufficient for a few reasons. First, in a significant number of cases where people have been exonerated for crimes, they were convicted based on the police coercing testimony, hiding evidence of innocence, and even fabricating evidence. Based soley on the evidence presented, the jury should have convicted, even with a higher standard.

Secondly, the more serious a crime is, the less likely that jurors are willing to let the accused off on a "technicality". Even if they are told they need to judge to a higher standard, their inclination is to judge to a lesser one and this will subconsciously influence their weighing of the evidence.

> Based soley on the evidence presented, the jury should have convicted, even with a higher standard.

That’s an arbitrary assertion you can’t possibly defend.

I’m not arguing the defendant is not found guilty. I’m arguing the defendant is not sentenced to death specifically.

Now here is the thing. And this is the reason the death penalty was already illegal in Washington state, even before Inslee signed this bill earlier today.

However high we put this reasonable doubt, it is bound to be pretty arbitrary, and when you have an arbitrary marker, biases are quick to step in. The supreme court of WA found this arbitrariness to cause racial bias in who gets sentenced to death in the state. And this racial bias was deemed unconstitutional in the state, so the death penalty was abolished in 2018.

Interestingly the bias was actually found and published in a regression analysis study which the justices used when backing their ruling.

The bill Inslee signed was merely a removing of this punishment (as other unconstitutional laws) from the legal code.

So, no, this cannot simply be addressed by simply raising the bar, that is unless you find a way to remove biases from jurors, or otherwise find an objective framework in a messy world, or else you risk having a punishment which discriminates against racial lines, which is unconstitutional.

This is a straw man designed to appeal to people who are distrusting of government. Almost all states which have the death penalty deliver it by jury sentencing, and all but one require it be unanimous. In most cases this issue has nothing to do with the state.

I believe "state" is ambiguous here. The "state" brings the charges and recommends the penalty.

Replace "state" with "legal process" and the point still stands.

It bothers me how much the state chooses to defend the idea that it doesn’t make mistakes. All while the actual perpetrators are still in society.

They’re trying to defend their decision to keep someone in prison, just so that it doesn’t change bootlickers perspective, instead of protect the public.

Once AI powered brain scanning is good enough to see images in people's heads, we can eliminate the possibility of wrongful convictions

Ah, yes, because the AI will surely never misrepresent what a person is thinking.

The Death penalty has actually been abolished in Washington state since 2018 when the state’s supreme court ruled it unconstitutional as a punishment. Reasons cited was that the punishment was issued arbitrarily and with racial bias. The court’s decision was directly based off of a regression analysis study.

https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/death-penalty-washin...

https://files.deathpenaltyinfo.org/legacy/documents/WashRace... (PDF)

I feel like America's big prison problem is rooted on a deeper issue than mismanagement/corruption.

The fundamental idea that "retribution" needs to be a component of the criminal justice system is erroneous and the big issue here. As long as the country legally recognizes that those who wronged others need to be wronged to "get their just desserts", the prison system will not reform to a sufficient degree as to stop the excessive incarceration and recidivism problem.

> fundamental idea that "retribution" needs to be a component of the criminal justice system is erroneous and the big issue here

It's irrational. But probably necessary for broader buy-in. The other purposes for prisons are reformation, incapacitation and deterrence. Deterrence and retribution are tightly linked.

They're only linked insofar as they both use prisons as "weapons", i.e, undesirable places to be in.

> only linked insofar as they both use prisons as "weapons", i.e, undesirable places to be in

They're linked in that "a sense of morality transcend[s] immediate self-interest and fear of punishment" [1]. Retribution links the justice system to our sense of morality. That deters crime.

The research on punitive damages tends to be more clear-headed than anything I've read on criminal law in this matter [2]. (For example, punitive damages provide "aggrieved parties with an attractive substitute for revenge.")

[1] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/deterren...

[2] https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1185&...

> Deterrence and retribution are tightly linked.

This is very much not the case.

"Deterrence" solely operates on future actors. "Retribution" on those who have already transgressed. We know that the vast vast vast majority of crimes are not committed with a cost-benefit analysis. So no matter how badly you punish the criminals will you prevent most crimes. No man willing to kill his cheating wife thinks "Well, I could 15, 17 tops, sure, but 25 is too much. Okay, I need a new plan".

There's a wide spectrum of behaviors in relation to future penalties. Some people are so far gone that they don't care about death. This includes people who livestream their murder sprees or are willing to commit suicide bombings, for example. There's no prospect of deterring them. At best you can permanently isolate surviving perpetrators from the rest of society. Until we invent slap-drones [1] I wouldn't trust them to roam free again.

Other people won't violate minor rules even when there's nobody watching. Some people will come to a full stop at every stop sign, even when there's perfect visibility and no cross traffic, even when there's no cameras or police cars around.

In between these two extremes you do have people who are deterred by enforcement. My sister didn't come to a full stop at a certain intersection on the way to work until she was ticketed for it. She stopped completely every time afterward. For this in-between set of people who respond to deterrence, likelihood of facing a penalty is more important than the severity of a penalty [2].

The problem I have seen repeatedly is that catching more violators is more expensive/difficult than increasing the severity of punishment, so lawmakers are tempted to increase penalties to "make up" for rare enforcement. Fining $1 for littering and catching half of litterers seems mathematically equivalent to fining $5000 for littering and catching 1 in 10000 litterers. It's also a lot cheaper to catch only a handful of people. But the rare-enforcement, high-penalty approach has a much weaker deterrent effect because most people are not mathematically rational agents and fail to consider long tail events. The deterrent effect of extreme penalties is even weaker for murder. Most people are not interested in murdering anyone even in circumstances where they would get away with it. The remaining subset of people with a non-negligible propensity to murder is enriched in people who behave erratically and cannot be deterred by rational means.

[1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone

[2] "Frequency of enforcement is more important than the severity of punishment in reducing violation behaviors" https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108507118

Do you have any references to support that “no matter how badly you punish the criminals will you prevent most crimes”?

I would expect that more strict sentencing has diminishing returns. The difference between no crime, versus a crime and a fine, versus a crime and jail or prison time, are steep escalations, but the difference between 15 and 25 years in prison seems much smaller. I agree you probably won’t prevent many murders by raising the minimum sentence on murder, but other less severe crimes/sentences don’t present the same obvious conclusion to me.

For deterrence it doesn't matter what the tariff (the potential sentence for a crime) is because the vast majority of criminals don't know exactly what the tariff is, so it can't deter them, the same reason that they can't be deterred by other things they don't know like the lyrics to the Shriekback song "Going Equipped" †

† Going Equipped is reference to an English crime, I don't know if Americans have it, in which it's illegal to have with you things whose purpose is to help you commit burglary or various similar offences. Prosecutors need to show that you had things which were obviously useful for these crimes (e.g. bolt cutters, a ladder), and show intent and that you weren't at home..

> deterrence it doesn't matter what the tariff (the potential sentence for a crime) is because the vast majority of criminals don't know exactly what the tariff is, so it can't deter them

This is not true. I may not know the specific punishments for some crimes. But I know they’re tough, and that has deterrence value.

The deterrence element of punishment is often overstated. Punishment is a really poor behavioral modifier. For punishment to reliably modify behavior, it has to be immediate and consistent. The criminal justice system is neither. It is not only behavioral scientists that are aware of the flaws, criminologists also look at the data, and there seems to be no indication that the severity of the punishment is negatively correlated with the frequency of the crime, neither across time, nor between jurisdictions with different penal code.

What criminologists have found however is that racial minorities are often given the harsher punishment when available (the reason WA deemed the death penalty unconstitutional back in 2018; and they had the data to back it up). So the deterrence value seems to be primarily used to discriminate against minorities, not to reduce crime rate.

> there seems to be no indication that the severity of the punishment is negatively correlated with the frequency of the crime, neither across time, nor between jurisdictions with different penal code

This is literally why I flagged the link between retribution and deterrence [1]. Retribution is the moral layer that communicates deterrence.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35646549

Lots of countries don't have this, at least to the same extent. Americans are exceptionally focused on retribution and the effects are deleterious. Also they really don't like the messy reality of justice, hence not only modern shows like Law & Order, but even Columbo. If you can imagine real justice is always like Columbo, then when you hear that cops arrested a person on suspicion of murder, you know they're guilty - why else would cops arrest somebody?

> Americans are exceptionally focused on retribution

What is your basis for this? I thought we're obsessed with incapacitation.

Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life. Now the punishments inflicted by the civil authority, which is the legitimate avenger of crime, naturally tend to this end, since they give security to life by repressing outrage and violence. Hence these words of David: "In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land, that I might cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of the Lord." (Ps 101:8)

– Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part III, 5, n. 4 (1566)

– http://j.mp/CatechismTrentDeathPenalty

Even when it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of the individual's right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of the enjoyment of life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already disposed himself of his right to live.

– Pius XII, Address to the First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System (14 Sep 1952)

This is already continuously tried. All it creates is a lack of trust in the justice system. If you remove the ability of the justice system to make the people feel that justice has been served, people will revert to vigilante justice. You need confidence in the system.

It's all well and good to say that that's irrational, and has no place in a logical society - but this isn't a logical, rational society. That's why we need a justice system in the first place.

Ultimately, until you can change human nature, some amount of tangible consequences that make the victims, their family, and the public at large feel that justice has been served, perpetrators have received appropriate consequences, and vigilante justice is unnecessary.

Finally, has the infinite-empathy approach been shown to work anywhere where there is an existing, significant crime problem, and where it's liable to being abused - that is, most of the world? And working is about more than empathy towards violent criminals and the reduction of crime statistics (though anecdotally I doubt it would achieve the latter).

Ultimately the justice system's number one priority should be victims, their interests and welfare, and reducing the amount of new ones. Criminals have made their decision; victims are innocent.

I'm not saying the American justice system doesn't have issues. I'm not American personally, but it appears to have a lot of problems. However, I don't think incurring consequences for people's actions is the root problem here.

>This is already continuously tried. All it creates is a lack of trust in the justice system. If you remove the ability of the justice system to make the people feel that justice has been served, people will revert to vigilante justice. You need confidence in the system.

Sorry, but that's just ignorant. Countries with non-retribution based justice systems fare much better in lower crime than the US. So much better it's not even funny.

>I'm not saying the American justice system doesn't have issues. I'm not American personally, but it appears to have a lot of problems. However, I don't think incurring consequences for people's actions is the root problem here.

"Incurring conseqeuences" is orthogonal to the issue here. Going to jail and being kept there is already a consequence.

The US system turns "inflicting medieval/biblical conditions and systemic revenge" into the consequence.

There's a chunk of the population that should be warehoused for the safety of the vast majority. Consider the 327 people that commit 1/3rd of NYC theft (https://nypost.com/2023/01/05/327-crooks-made-up-30-of-shopl...) or pedophiles. You're never going to fix some people.

The world is not as soft as people hope. If the system doesn't provide justice, people will - consider the enormous adoration for Jason Vukovich.

The goals should be rehabilitation, and in the cases you mention, containment. Retribution should NEVER be a goal of the state.

Don't state an opinion as fact. There's many examples of the state letting people off, then the family taking matters into their own hands, with public approval. Retribution is important for those who hurt others.

> Don't state an opinion as fact.

> Retribution is important for those who hurt others.

Maybe try to be a little consistent? At least within the bounds of a single three sentence comment.

I’m not sure there is a justification for your point, but I hear the point.

The counterpoint is that retribution MUST be a goal of the state, because if the state does not provide a sanitized replacement of what some surviving victims of crime will naturally want to do.

Put it this way: if someone killed my son, I would quite naturally want them dead. But then I would be killing someone’s son, and I’m sure you can detect the problem there.

If the state provides an implicit contract to everyone that the result of citizen on citizen violence will contain some sanitized version of retribution that substitutes for eye-for-an-eye justice, then overall violence will be reduced by the severance of the cycle.

It's not about retribution or revenge, but costs (which are way beyond just monetary).

That's also why it's not up to the wronged personally to decide, but the State (the process; but other people, their peers).

If the victim of a horrific triple-homicide (let's say their family) decided to "forgive and forget", and let someone truly destructive free (which letting them live out gives the risk of, like when violent criminals were released due to overcrowding and COVID), they would be externalizing all the associated costs/risks of having that person live or be free onto us and the rest of society.

Yes, it needs serious controls around it (the few times the option is actually used). But like we see with some officials, the pendulum has swung so far the other way where even violent crime is sometimes downplayed out of "tolerance" and "empathy", pitting the value of his rough childhood against the expectation of safety of your child.

I understand that some people are troubled by retributive justice (I am not). But the idea that criminality in the US stems from retributive justice isn't true. Japan has low crime and executes people regularly. Russia has a high crime rate and hasn't executed anyone since the 90s.

I don’t think retribution is the main goal.

The point is to keep demonstrated antisocial people who cause significant disruption and harm in our society in a place where they can’t hurt us.

Starting life in (or getting eventually out of prison back to) a highly individualistic society, where "you're on your own", and one where gun ownership is trivial, doesn't help either.

Good. The state should not be able to kill its citizens, and even if you support it for "criminals", the state sometimes gets it wrong, and the state has murdered innocent people.

It sort of does. If something truly heinous pops up the DoJ will be more than happy to throw the petite policy into the trash and drag the suspect into federal court under the most tenuous of circumstances where they will be executed on behalf of that state that abolished the barbaric practice.

Is the title here editorialized, or is Axios doing some weird AB testing? The article I'm seeing is about the bill passing the Washington House, and concludes with:

> What's next: To become law, the bill must clear Inslee's desk. But a veto looks unlikely.

Or OP just put the wrong URL. A quick search of Google News indicates Inslee has indeed signed the bill now.

Maybe that's just the wrong link? Apparently it was really signed.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/gov-inslee-signs-bill-repea...

Headline for me is: Washington Legislature votes to repeal death penalty

And good riddance.

OP's link is a week old. Inslee singed the bill an hour or two ago.

https://www.kptv.com/2023/04/20/gov-inslee-signs-bill-remove...

I couldn’t find a news source I liked, so I just posted the same link as Inslee did in a tweet after he signed[1], while borrowing the headline from a more current news source[2]. Using the same headline would have been posting old news.

1. https://twitter.com/GovInslee/status/1649115596465008645

2: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/gov-inslee-signs-bill-repea...

By posting that article, you did post old news. The solution was not to rewrite the title, but to post an article that contained the significant new information.

I realize that local TV news affiliate websites aren't always appetizing sources, but it's more important to have up-to-date information.

Ok, we've changed the URL to that from https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2023/04/11/death-penalty... now. Thanks!

If there's a better URL, we can change it again.

To the advocates of the death penalty:

You are arguing that you want to kill people who pose you no harm. Think what that says about you

Lots of people here who are against the dealth penalty. Why is it so hard to empathize with the victims yet so easy for them to empathize with the murderers? Murderers go on death row, not petty criminals. What's the margin for error? How many of these murderers do you think are innocent? "One is too many" is not enough to justify a complete abolition of the death penalty. Life in prison sentencing ought to be used more, in consideration of those in the margin of error.

> Why is it so hard to empathize with the victims yet so easy for them to empathize with the murderers?

Because it's not a zero-sum game. You can feel bad for both.

Because biasing in favor of false negatives over false positives is a fundamental tenet of our system of justice?

I don't believe in the death penalty because I believe taking a human life, no matter the context, is amoral. A murderer may have already committed that injustice, but it does not mean they deserve the same. To me there is no imbalance in empathy just an alignment with that core belief.

> Why is it so hard to empathize with the victims yet so easy for them to empathize with the murderers?

It's not hard. It's in fact very easy to empathize with victims and difficult to empathize with criminals. I just find it very much worthwhile to be empathetic towards all humans, even the ones that do terrible things because doing so allows us to understand humanity better and in turn may help prevent people from doing terrible things in the future.

> "One is too many" is not enough to justify a complete abolition of the death penalty.

Actually, it does in fact, do just that. Why do you think it doesn't? You're basically saying the value of a person who deserves to die's death (or many of their deaths) is more valuable than an innocent person's life. To me it's quite clear that's not the case.

I don't empathize with victims' desire for blood sacrifice, knowing that the accused may be innocent, and the real murderer may still walk free. I absolutely empathize with them for their trauma and their loss, but killing people is not an acceptable response to grief.

> Why is it so hard to empathize with the victims

How is a tit-for-tat killing "empathizing with the victims" in any way?

hm? one can oppose the death penalty on entirely practical grounds without recourse to empathy.

It's extremely expensive to use the death penalty. It must be because it's not acceptable to murder too many innocent people, which I think you would agree even if we might debate the threshold. But even at the current astronomical level of expense many people are falsely convicted and on track for execution before they're exonerated, so it seems unlikely that we could make it significantly more economical. (and many would argue that the high failure rate is because we're already compromising on ethics just to make it economical at all)

As far as empathizing with the victims, sure: Some victims feel bloodlust. This can be an understandable response, though seldom a healthy one. But the same can be true for murderers: some were driven by an understandable bloodlust, at times distinguished only by the quality of the judgement justifying it or the surrounding social standards. It's not an appropriate use for the state to indulge anyone's bloodlust, particularly at considerable expense. The potential that the death penalty is sometimes motivated by survivors's bloodlust is a reason to eschew it, not to embrace it.

People feel anguish due to all manner of causes. That is an unfortunate, but it's also an fact of life. Many causes of anguish have no possible remedy. The anguish felt by the surviving victims of a murder's crime is one such example. It can never be righted by any external process, because no one can undo the murder. It's folly to think otherwise. The resources we current spend on the death penalty could be better employed to prevent murders in the first place and/or to help victims cope in more productive ways.

I empathize with victims, not their blood lust.

I don't have faith in the state’s ability to remove the actual perpetrator from the streets. They pick someone, and defend that choice.

> "One is too many" is not enough to justify a complete abolition of the death penalty.

Yes it is.

It seems like a mistake, the role of the justice system should be to protect the public first and foremost. For serious cases this means they should never be released - the potential risk vs. reward just isn't worth it.

Also the death penalty can allow some reimbursement of victims (via blood and plasma donation, etc.), without forced prison labour that causes issues by undercutting normal workers.

> Also the death penalty can allow some reimbursement of victims (via blood and plasma donation, etc.), without forced prison labour that causes issues by undercutting normal workers.

One of the craziest takes on here, really saying something

Yeah, no kidding.

Might as well start harvesting organs, why not? /s

> Also the death penalty can allow some reimbursement of victims (via blood and plasma donation, etc.), without forced prison labour that causes issues by undercutting normal workers.

Among the more minor reasons this is an insane take is that you can steal and sell body fluids from prisoners (and more of them, because they regenerate) as well as people you murder without forced prison labor, too (of course, if you are willing to steal and sell body parts, you probably are also willing to steal and sell labor, but doing one doesn’t require the other.)

> It seems like a mistake, the role of the justice system should be to protect the public first and foremost.

No. The role of the justice system is to find truth and render equitable punishment. State-sponsored killing is a one-way door and no court can rule with such complete surety of sufficient guilt and motive to make walking through that one-way door something that can be on the table.

I would support capital punishment for elected politicians and law enforcement, to represent the higher stakes of their breach of the public trust, but that's because those jobs should not be aspirational and the retributive framework for them necessarily differs. But the cases that go to death row in America? It's nonsense.

> Also the death penalty can allow some reimbursement of victims (via blood and plasma donation, etc.), without forced prison labour that causes issues by undercutting normal workers.

This is a deeply ghastly sentiment and deserves no further address.

> without forced prison labour that causes issues by undercutting normal workers

Isn't the solution to charge prison labour employers the federal minimum wage?

why not market wage? Prison inmates often have spouses, children, elders, and also need to save for their own retirement

If we want to rehabilitate people, we have to consider their financial wellbeing so they can reenter society when they are released, otherwise, we are just setting them up for continued failures

> why not market wage

There would be zero public support for giving prisoners free food and housing for building up a nest egg. Market rate is fine, but I imagine a deduction for prison costs would be assessed.

And would almost completely kill the profit motive of prisons that we know for a fact has been used to put innocent people behind bars.

https://www.npr.org/2014/03/08/287286626/kids-for-cash-captu...

It seems prudent to remove perverse incentives when possible.

> without forced prison labour that causes issues by undercutting normal workers.

I agree, we should abolish slavery and pay a fair wage for prison labor.

> the potential risk vs. reward just isn't worth it.

the world is a dangerous place, always has been, and unless we invent mind uploading or whatever it always will be.

Take care to not let the little bubble of temporary safety around you mislead you about what risks are above or below the noise floor.

Without having done the math, I believe all the prisoners in your state could probably be one-time released today while causing you personally no more marginal risk of serious harm than you already experience from a couple long car trips.

This isn't to say that I don't think prisons have an important place, but I think some perspective is important. People attribute much more concern to risks that have a narrative inspiring human cause than they do to risks that kill many more people.

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