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shanecleveland

A take I recently heard:

You either have to believe ...

The state doesn't make mistakes.

The state sometimes kills innocent people.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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