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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

to be replaced with what? i'm all for making changes that are an improvement, but just burning it to the ground for the sake of it with no end game is not an improvement

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At this point, I would not be surprised if having two judges per case, randomly selected from the community, from parents who have successfully had at least three children leave the nest while still remaining on speaking terms, was a more reliable method of justice.

isn't an even number of judges ripe for uselessness?

A system that does not incarcerate anyone for any reason would be much preferable to the atrocities that are the current criminal justice systems in most of the global west (and especially of course the United States).

Interesting and unusual perspective - we have the one person in this thread who supports wildly expanding the death penalty.

Unless the person above is, of course, an anarchist who has no answer for what to do about Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Phillip Garrido, or Brian Mitchell. I would say that as imperfect and heavily flawed as our system is, "Perfect is the enemy of good."

> what to do about Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Phillip Garrido, or Brian Mitchell

Nothing. Those people are one-in-a-million anomalies. If it weren't for the media hype surrounding them, their impact on society would be comparable to the impact of deaths from lightning strikes. What do we do about people being struck by lightning? Nothing.

That’s nuts. Even if you were correct about that, and I’m not admitting any such thing, it isn’t how people work. If the state doesn’t provide justice, then the mob will.

"Justice" is an incredibly malleable idea that is largely shaped by what people are told. Until very, very recently, nobody gave a fuck about serial killers, or even knew they existed. If the hype stopped, there wouldn't be any mobs to worry about.

Define recently. There is plenty of historical hysteria around them. Ever heard of Jack the Ripper?

That's not true. We have things in place to protect people and objects from lightning strikes. For example, lightning protection systems on tall buildings.

Those protect the building, not individual people. Nobody carries around mobile lightning rods, even though they were invented centuries ago.

It protects the people in the building. Likewise, arresting a serial killer protects anyone they would have killed next.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_wick

Have you thought about moving to Somalia?

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