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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

> 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".

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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.

> 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

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

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