Dungeons and Dragons players of death row | Hacker News Reader

Dungeons and Dragons players of death row

nytimes.com

61 pointsreaperducer60 comments

Many prisons don't allow dice. And some don't allow DnD books ("too stimulating"). This leads to many interesting and remarkable adaptations to play. As an example, I heard from a guy that they rolled a d20 by drawing paper lots with the numbers 1 through 20 written on them. He also memorized the entire PHB. Cool dude.

This is a heartbreaking story. I love playing D&D, and I can only imagine how important it is to these people in a setting like this.

I hope the United States joins the rest of the western world and bans capital punishment soon--preferably yesterday.

Some crimes deserve no less. I can somewhat buy arguments about not trusting the government, but I can't buy arguments that capital punishment is actually bad.

Is there more to a death sentence than revenge?

The rest of the civilised world manages just fine.

I'm going to step outside the political fight about whether or not the state should be able to kill people. I don't want to get into that. So, whether or not capital punishment should exists depends mostly on your theory of incarceration.

If you believe prison and the law exists to remedy a wrong inside the person committing the crime, via rehabilitation, capital punishment serves no purpose. If prison exists as a holding cell (ha) until individuals within the system are rehabilitated and provided with supports to reintegrate into society, killing them serves zero purpose.

If you believe prison and the law exists to remedy wrongs by punishing the person who committed the crime and allowing victims legal means of retribution/revenge, then capital punishment is absolutely necessary for some crimes.

I'm not honestly sure where I fall on that scale. I believe we (the US) is failing in our duty to individuals who are in prison, via piss-poor rehabilitation services. But I also believe some crimes deserve the death penalty.

Not sure what to do with that.

There are more justifications for punishment though as deterrence and incapacitation are also discussed in the model penal code. Now, some certainly argue that deterrence isn't effective but I think it's a better justification than retribution.

FWIW, keeping prisoners on death row is also more expensive for tax payers than even life imprisonment. This money can be put to better use than pumping it towards lawyers and legal fees, for sure, whether it's prison reform, or anything.

allowing victims legal means of retribution/revenge, then capital punishment is absolutely necessary for some crimes

How can you be so sure? Dennis Shepard famously didn't want the death penalty for his son's murderer. You also hear of stories of the families of victims not getting any closure after a convict is put to death. The victims themselves are often dead and can't obtains things like retribution or revenge. It's not as "absolutely necessary" as you're painting it here.

Some of the countries that do have death penalty, like India and Japan, reserve the death penalty for "the worst of the worst" (intentional mass murder etc). Neither of the guys profiled here qualify, and it's particularly shocking that Ford was sent to death row purely on circumstantial evidence.

Here [1] is his court case. The NYTimes is not reporting the events in a remotely fair way. It was an attempted mass murder. After tormenting a family of 4 who gave them everything he demanded, he then declared his intent to murder them all and started shooting them one by one. Those that survived did so only by good grace. One survivor, for instance, was shot point blank in the head. Another was able to fake have been shot after lunging at him.

And it wasn't circumstantial. Ford was a local who was immediately identified by the family during the act. The surviving family members all identified him, and their story also matched perfectly with that of the accomplice - until he later started creating overtly fabricated tales. Ford was also offered a plea deal that would have spared his life. He instead decided to try his luck with this whole 'I was just in the car, honest' story.

That he felt people would just believe him is what you get from sociopathy + narcissism. He was convicted after less than 7 hours of deliberation. Notably Texas isn't as fast and loose with the death penalty as its reputation either - in those 7 hours they had to determine if he would likely be a continuing threat to society and whether there were any possible mitigating factors that might otherwise yield preference to life imprisonment.

[1] - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...

Your source says Ford's cohort was identified as a local, not Ford himself.

Excellent correction. I'd misread that paragraph as it has that one statement about his cohort while the rest is exclusively about him. Thanks.

Even if you think that the crime deserves it, the justice system isn't perfect. How many innocent people are executed in pursuit of "justice"?

It's not just the government. Do you trust every single link in that chain? The prosecutor, jury, judge, every lab worker, consulted experts, witnesses, forensic knowledge at that point in time, ... Every single piece of this puzzle can fail in a way that others will be happy to follow.

I have several reasons for opposing it.

One is that being an irreversible punishment, it precludes any possibility of remediating injustices. There have been many cases where it seems highly likely or even proven that executed prisoners were innocent.

The second is that particularly in the US it has become highly politicised. The possibility that condemned inmates might be found innocent, and the damage that does to the credibility of the system, has lead to the system doing whatever it can to obstruct and prevent investigations that might exonerate condemned prisoners, regardless of the strength of any evidence.

So for me it's not so much that the punishment is bad, it's that it seems to be extremely hard to set up a process around it that is fair, and the US in particular has failed to do so.

I have same opinion but I still want it to be abandoned. Price of even one life ended vlby mistake or corruptio is too big price to pay.

I wonder why this mentality doesn't apply to other parts of society, like our police forces (i.e. shut a department down when an officer kills an innocent), or corporations that cause death/disaster? Is it because in those situations, the deaths aren't too big a price to pay?

Lots of good comments. For me the data on wrongly convicted inmates is a strong argument against the death penalty.

“ Since 1973, at least 190 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). A 2014 study estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent.”

https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-and-the-death-penalty....

We will never know how many innocent people have been executed, but even one is more than I am comfortable with.

> Since 1973, at least 190 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S...

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I'm wondering if you know if "exonerated" in this case means "found clear evidence that they were not guilty" or just(?) "the conviction was overturned." To me, those are two different things.

To be clear, I don't want anyone in prison (or on death row) that didn't get a fair trial -- even if they're guilty. But I do think there is a difference.

The death penalty is irreversible and so convicts receive an automatic appeal and most states have extremely strict standards for execution. What this means is that if anything is even remotely out of order, it's entirely possible to get the convictions overturned - even when the person in question is guilty. The Eastburn Family Murders [1] are a perfect example of this.

The murderer/rapist was initially convicted and sentenced to death. Effective defense was able to get his conviction thrown out. Normally this would mean you walk free, due to double jeopardy protections. But in this case the murderer was a military officer. Once DNA testing was refined, it was proven conclusively that he was indeed the murderer/rapist. So he was tried in the military court system, which is independent of the double jeopardy protections provided in the civilian court system, and convicted to death - again.

The point I make here is that many of those 190 probably are guilty, and I think this is generally not a bad thing. My main concern with the death penalty is an innocent man being put to death. But if the standard of conviction is sufficiently high that even a guilty man can walk free, at least on occasion, then that gives one some degree of assurance in the ability of an innocent man to prove his innocence.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastburn_family_murders

> most states have extremely strict standards for execution

And yet evidence of actual innocence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrera_v._Collins) isn't enough to stop an execution.

For me an acceptable false positive rate would be somewhere around one in a thousand. The actual false positive rate is one in twenty-five or greater, despite the justice system spending more money ($1.26 million) per executed prisoner than it spends per life sentence prisoner. Since we are incapable of meeting a decent standard of surety I believe the death penalty should be abolished.

> Some crimes deserve no less.

If you believe in deserved individual punishment then wouldn't incarceration for life be a harsher punishment than execution? The imprisoned person experiences the personal consequnces day after day after day until the eventually die. Whereas the executed person experiences literally nothing at all. They may have lost the experience of living the rest of their life, but they're not even aware of that.

(fwiw I'm anti death penalty for ethical as well as peactical reasons, but i live in a country that is unlikely to ever reinstate it.)

This is a weird idea, what someone "deserves" is a concept entirely made up in your head. We can talk about hard data, statistics about various punishments and their effects on factors such as crime deterrence, but there's simply no reasonable discussion to be had about what someone "deserves". I could tell you that I don't believe anyone deserves to be killed, regardless of their actions, and that is one hundred percent true to my internal morality, and that I think it's immoral to kill people to sate your violent sense of justice, but that doesn't advance this discussion in any way either.

Tell that to their victims. The only downside to capital punishment is that it's possible to wrongly convict someone. Other than that, there are crimes that people commit where you can never trust them to be safe around people again. In that case, capital punishment is perfectly justified in my mind. The idea that keeping them in prison for life is somehow more humane is silly. The rest of the world is letting crime run rampant on their streets through lenient sentencing, and destroy their society (you're starting to see this in big US cities as well). So, I think I'll pass on this idea that the rest of the western world has it figured out.

Do you think that all or most the crimes condemned prisoners in the US are currently convicted of actually rise to the level where you agree that it's appropriate?

>The rest of the world is letting crime run rampant on their streets through lenient sentencing...

There is extensive evidence that the severity of punishment has very little to no effect on crime rates. It's simply not something criminals generally consider when actually committing crimes.

that's because most of the "criminals" who end in prison are really victims of their society which failed them; their actions are usually impulsive, not calculated, so deterrence is largely useless. True criminals (those who do shit in cold blood for money and power) rarely go to prison.

How much of the increase in violent crimes is not due to a leniency of capital punishment, but due to no effort in actual rehabilitation due to city/state/federal cost-cutting measures?

Privatizing prison builds an economic model that incentivizes creating repeat offenders. Withholding or making rehabilitation unattainable for the majority benefits the prison, but offers zero benefit for America as a society.

> The only downside to capital punishment is that it's possible to wrongly convict someone. Other than that...

For many, myself included, there is no "other than that." My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible and there's too many documented cases where executed prisoners were likely wrongfully convicted.

I could perhaps support capital punishment if we had a higher level of guilt we could establish in our legal system reserved only where the evidence is entirely(!) unequivocal for particularly heinous crimes. I don't know exactly what that means, and is probably just another bad idea.

There are so many systems where some innocent people dying are just accepted and expected that it always confuses me why this one is so special. What is it about the justice system that makes you demand perfection where medicine, the military everyone else can just shrug and say sometimes an innocent person dies.

Justice was supposed to be blind and oh well, -just-

For me, it's the incompetence and level of corruption in the US justice system starting at the police level on up. I have very little faith in it.

Because in this case its the government killing its own citizens. Medicine is human error, one person with no more legal power than the victim made the mistake. The military kills people but they are not citizens (that sounds terrible and it very much is, I am not excusing the deaths of innocents). With death row mistakes, you have the full weight of the United states government using its power to kill one of its own citizens. In addition, its a long process where the person that dies for a crime they did not commit has to witness their life taken from them one step at a time due to compounding failures. It can also happen to anyone which is the frightening part, a government actor (police, prosecutor, judge, etc) can just decide that you fit the bill and take your life from you.

I am very much in favor of executing the worst criminals but I find myself generally against the death penalty due to the risk of executing an innocent person. I am conflicted and find myself moving back and forth on this topic.

I agree. I feel ok for the John Wayne Gacy’s, Richard Spec’s and Ted Bundy’s of the world. I have a problem when it’s a mentally deficient person in Texas who may or may not have murdered someone and was represented by ineffective counsel.

> My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible

Ah, this meme again.

I have no problem with the reasoning "it's irreversible" in itself. However, I wonder how many of the people repeating it are just mindlessly parroting something they heard, sounded good, and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds.

Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years is also irreversible. There is nothing you can do to reverse the fact that you unjustly stole 40 years from someone's life. Are you then also against prison terms of 40 years, given that they're irreversible? What about 20 years? What about 1 year? Those are all irreversible.

Now you can say that it's a matter of degree. Sure it is, but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?

> What about 20 years? What about 1 year? Those are all irreversible.

You are using linguistic tricks to make a bad argument.

The fact that the past is immutable doesn’t mean that things can’t be reversed.

If you’re planning your day in the morning and you decide you’re going to have chicken tonight, you can never change the fact that you decided that you’re going to have chicken, but you can choose to not have chicken.

One way to stop yourself from making these sorts of bad linguistic arguments is to ask yourself, “does my argument mean that a word has essentially no use or meaning?”

That applies here, because your argument basically makes “irreversible” a nearly useless word. Any time your argument is effectively making an adjective tautological, there is a problem. Because otherwise, why does the word exist?

> but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?

And now you have moved to making a like kind argument that the death penalty is essentially the same as a slap on the wrist, since the past is immutable.

Here is another opportunity for a sanity check on your argument.

When the state has executed someone, that person can never be apologized to. That person can never receive any sort of restitution. That person went to their death, very often in extreme physical agony. (Both electric chair and lethal injection have horrific failure rates on this. Firing squad, hanging, and guillotine are all much more humane). That person dies while a roomful of people who hate them watch through a pane of glass, sometimes cheering. They die, knowing that most people think of them as an awful person undeserving of pity, sympathy, or love.

“””It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.”””

To make an argument that this is essentially the same as any other punishment, even life in prison, is really kind of gross.

> and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds.

Sometimes more than 2 seconds is good, too.

> Ah, this meme again.

Ugh. This comment starts out in bad faith and delivers the full way through using linguistic tricks as some sort of "gotcha". I actually find your comment kind of disturbing, even. The word "irreversible" seems to be sticking for you, so instead let me be more precise: the death penalty precludes the state from acting on new evidence which may change the course of action the state takes against the convicted person.

> Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years is also irreversible

Here's what you don't have to do: remind me or anyone else that we're all bound by time. Of course time lost cannot be recovered, this is not some great revelation you've stumbled upon. But until death there is an opportunity for the state to make a better decision - not undo them, not "make them right". A wrongfully-convicted person isn't dead, they still have a life to live.

> Are you also against life in prison?

I am against life sentences without the possibility for parole, and I am against any system of justice that does not allow for new evidence to be reviewed in favor of the convicted.

> Here's what you don't have to do: remind me or anyone else that we're all bound by time

So you ARE aware that nothing is reversible? Bad faith.

I don't think it's that clear cut. Imprisoning someone for 40 years and then exonerating them can be reasonably considered a far crueler punishment than death sentence.

This is the same argument as there may be valid reasons to curbing free speech. Once you start going down that route, there is no end. You say death penalty is reserved for the worst of the worst and only if we are 100% sure they committed the crime, the next one in line would say it may be suitable for more and when we are 90% sure of the crime. How come it is different from Sharia law, which demands a hand for theft and eye for infidelity - some can say those are also justified. All punishment that's irreversible and violates one's body should be banned.

On your second argument - if death penalty had the very least effect of turning people away from crime, USA would have much better crime stats than "rest of the western world". Most criminals operating at that level (murder, rape etc.) operate on the assumption that they will never be caught.

I'd say that extinguishing the sense of hope in a reformed human being is also a downside, but that's because I have a shred of empathy.

The rest of the world is letting crime run rampant on their streets through lenient sentencing, and destroy their society

LMAO

Some types of criminals (mafiosi, gang leaders, etc) can and do continue to run their criminal enterprises from within prison. This is a big problem in organized crime infested countries. You can't keep running your mafia if you are dead.

Is the US one of those countries?

Sadly, yes. This isn’t a statement about the death penalty, just a confirmation that gang leaders have been known to continue to operate in a leadership capacity even when incarcerated.

and yet, how is death sentence any worse than life in prison? if it were me, I'd just want a quick exit rather than rotting in a cage for decades

You can always become a matematician in prison and solve one of millennium problems. That's one thing that you can't do if you're dead.

and how often does it happen?

You can certainly do mathematics and publish your work while in prison.

See Christopher Havens https://www.christopherhavensmath.com/

Because the criminal justice system gets things wrong, and we can't undo the death penalty.

That's a choice you might make for yourself, rather than a choice the state makes for you. There's a big difference.

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