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Comment by ThrowAway1922A | Hacker News Reader

ThrowAway1922A

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.

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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.

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.

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"?

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.

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 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?

> 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.)

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.

The rest of the civilised world manages just fine.

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.

Is there more to a death sentence than revenge?

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