Texas man sent to death row over junk science denied US Supreme Court appeal
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
And after listening to Josh Dubin on Joe Rogan a few years back (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROU7G0d4iyE) its pretty clear the US has a fairly high error rate for death row.
(Also I'm not a big fan of joe rogan, but this might be one of his better podcasts)
The problem is a judicial review system that's extremely hesitant to consider exculpatory evidence following a conviction... and here we have an edge case where the conviction was gained by discredited scientific means. Science adapts quickly to new evidence and new methods, and quickly discards old ones; the courts don't work that way.
And we also need to get rid of elected judges.
The developed world do just fine wuthout a jury system.
I'm unfamiliar with the laws and jurisprudence on bench trials in the US, but the impression I have is that judges are either required to simply follow the law, or are at least bound by custom to do so.
You can have multiple judges decide over a case, which will work even better if you don't allow fake science into the courts.
We don't drag someone off the street at random for most jobs now do we?
Here in Germany we have a system were "volunteer" judges are elected from the general public. On lower levels there then are two volunteer and one regular judge*, where the regular judge is leading the trial, but volunteers got same right to ask question and votes are equal, thus the two volunteers could overrule the regular judge, (both for deciding whether guilty or not and the punishment) while in most cases they probably follow the suggestion of the regular judge.
If the verdict is challenged upper courts only have regular judges.
Goal is to have, both the legal expertise, but also the "common sense" in the ruling.
* in some cases the numbers may be different, there are sometimes 3 regular and two volunteer or something in between
This isn't a normal job. We don't hire 6 to 23 people for a single job, and jurors aren't random. Yes, jury summons are sent randomly, but they'll have hundreds summoned and then jury selection starts. It's not unlike a job interview. If someone is on the jury who's going to be biased or unreasonable, that's a failure of their legal counsel.
But such a trial has nothing to do with justice. It relies on the dark arts of psychiatry.
As far as I know, they get a lot of money, funny hair and get to do whatever they want with no checks.
It's a mystery why it would work even part of the time.
With juries they are completely free to ignore any and all evidence but because it's a jury, you get 12 people agreeing on something together, it's so much harder to get an appeal because "you were judged fairly by your peers" and all of that nonsense.
And of course, lastly - there are many countries with no jury systems or where juries are only used in the worst of crimes, and I have never seen any stat suggesting that these countries are less just than US is.
Judges are no better than juries of one. Worse, for consider what type of person becomes a judge.
...You must become a lawyer. But note the fact that judges earn 10-20x less than top-decile lawyers at an equal stage in their careers. The best lawyers can actually make 100x. (About $20M/year.)
...So you're either a failed lawyer who absolutely can't cut it in private practice, or the type of twisted personality who values status and power over your fellow man FAR more than you value money. Most of the time, the latter; in some cases you are a "covert politician" who wants to legislate from the bench.
Given the financial and status incentives, it's an extremely strange person who becomes a judge. I'd trust a jury, whatever its composition, before I trust an American judge to fairly determine my fate.
Let me ask it this way - why are nurses doing what they do, even though it's a grueling job that pays very little? Is it fair to conclude that they must all be psychopaths because only a psychopath would agree to these conditions?
Trust me on this, "justice" is somewhere down its list of priorities; it cares more for tradition, ritual, and form. In civil court, just causes very frequently (indeed, almost as a rule,) lose -- and often because one side doesn't have deep enough pockets to engage proper representation and survive the expensive process of discovery in Federal court.
A noble-minded judge, as you describe, wouldn't last a year. He'd quickly end up looking like the stereotype of the beleaguered public defender: Harried, exhausted, and unable to do a good job as he sees it.
The people who do survive as judges are a very, very strange breed.
I know a few judges, albeit not federal ones. They’re generally the philosophical type. The ambitious ones are keenly aware that their decisions will be re-hashed for the rest of their career. Also, judges being bound by “tradition, ritual and form” is an important part of the rule of law. Respecting that is a major component of justice.
> Trust me on this, "justice" is somewhere down its list of priorities; it cares more for tradition, ritual, and form.
I think is somewhat true, and is a generally applicable criticism of law and lawyers. I don't think values like justice are far down their list of priorities, but I think tradition etc. are just given too much weight. Lawyers constitute a tribe and collective which takes itself too seriously, at the end of the day, and don't value self-correction and improvement enough.
There are plenty of noble-minded judges. The reason why litigation becomes expensive, and thus poses fairness issues, is a multi-faceted problem that boils down to a lot of boring things. Most people in law haven't had what I would consider a real job, and the culture of law is too obsequious and deferential for people to understand that the way lawyers have been doing things is usually stupid. They don't have a culture of thinking about how they work, and their personality types are very geared towards external validation, which means they will do things very stupidly if they get accolades and very meager financial bonuses for it, and they mistake such things as markers of actual progress and productivity.
I could go on, and I reckon you have more experience in law than I do (I have been a software engineer for longer than I worked at law firm), but I think at the end of the day, I would remind you and others reading of the adage that one should not jump too quickly to ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
> a failed lawyer
Isn't there anything in between? And, the lawyers who make $20 million a year might only be able to do so by serving a lot of slimy clients, so not necessary a category to admire.
That's a feature of the system. If we had perfect information and judgement we wouldn't even need courts in the first place. It's also the case that the law itself can be unjust, should it be blindly applied, or is it good that the jury can declare someone not guilty anyways?
> At the end it's a matter of which side can build a more passionate argument to sway the juries
Right. So it's interesting that the prosecution gets a regular plus a "rebuttal" closing argument that the defense never gets. It's interesting the way courtrooms are laid out. It's interesting that the state in many circumstances cannot supply exculpatory testimony on your behalf, even if they have it.
My point being, there are so many more worthy things to consider before presuming juries themselves are the problem. Those who have made these arrangements are happy that you see it this way, though.
> rather than what evidence is actually presented and its rational meaning.
Do you have some evidence that this occurred in this case? We are examining it more than 20 years after the fact. At the time the jury thought it had the best explanation, and it might have even been "common knowledge." I certainly remember the "shaken baby" period in the zeitgeist of the time.
> So yeah of course the American judicial system is not willing to review past convictions based on scientific discoveries
Quite the contrary. His first execution was halted and he was granted review under a Texas law commonly called the "junk science law." He quite literally got this exact review.
All that being said capital punishment is amoral and especially irreconcilable with all the above facts. In no sense am I defending it, just our system of jury trials.
Ok, I didn't know that - should have read up more on this case before I commented.
>>or is it good that the jury can declare someone not guilty anyways?
Maybe. I find it much more troublesome that the jury can be presented with literally undeniable evidence that someone is innocent and still vote guilty anyway. Not that a judge couldn't do that of course - but like I said in my other comment, such a conviction would be a lot easier to appeal against, compared to a conviction made by a jury.
Usually that's not really what happens. It's often woefully inadequate defence (either due to incompetence or because the public defender is juggling 19 other cases), misconstrued evidence, bad evidence (which is more or less what happened here), and things like that.
- Law enforcement needs to raise the issue to a prosecutor
- A prosecutor needs to pick up the case
- A grand jury needs to indite you
- A petite jury needs to find you guilty
- A judge needs to sentence you with a penalty (as opposed to stern talking to)
Each of those is intended as a check-and-balance in the system. All of those have been steamrolled with misaligned incentives, mandatory minimum sentencing, etc., but that's how it's supposed to work.
Tangent: it’s spelled indict, not indite (but it is pronounced as if it were indite)
Really? How do you mean?
See the Post Office scandal in the UK for a terrible example of justice gone badly wrong, due entirely to juries allowing technical "evidence" (which turned out to be fraudulent) to overrule common sense everyday right-feelings.
https://becarefulwhatyouwishfornickwallis.blogspot.com/2013/...
legally this has come to mean that "machines do not make mistakes" ie if a mechanical device has done the same thing hundreds or thousands of times in exactly the same way, it is not a defence to say it must have started doing something differently. This idea was conceived well before anyone started programming computer software, and was meant to represent basic mechanical devices (say, a cash register), rather than the interlinked electronic eco-systems we depend on nowadays.
Thirdly, there is a widespread public perception that electronic evidence is infallible, hence the readiness of juries to convict on computer records alone.
Every time this common opinion gets posted, it seems as though the people making this point are largely unaware the defendant always has the choice of a bench trial, which is decided only by a judge. In fact, the judicial system would much rather defendants choose a bench trial rather than a jury trial, because it's quicker and much cheaper, and the system is overloaded.
Defendants and their defense lawyers are choosing jury trials because they think they have better odds than with a bench trial. That is, you're proposing taking away what defendants like this choosing jury trials perceive to be the better route.
And it seemed pretty clear that juries aren't really operating at 12 independent people with critical reasoning skills. Overwhelmingly there are always a few people with real reservations who vote to convict anyway. Those people always justify it to themselves with various reasons. And the reasoning they uncovered were things like "if he is innocent this will get overturned on appeal" or "everyone else on this jury is convinced of the evidence they cant all be wrong" or lots of other internal justifications people use to live with themselves.
I was on a jury once for a murder case and we had the opposite problem. One juror kept repeatedly arguing that she thought the guy was guilty of one of the charges, but she couldn't explain why. Everyone else voted not guilty, because the evidence just wasn't there. We had to repeatedly explain to her that she was the textbook example of reasonable doubt. Eventually she decided to vote not guilty but it cost us several hours because it had to be unanimous in either direction.
Actually this is great news, those juries can stand against big companies.
A jury of twelve is democratic and those people can put themselves in your shoes.
Is it? One obstinate person can upend the whole process.
> and those people can put themselves in your shoes
Unless you happen to not be of the same demographic as the majority of pool the jury is drawing from.
I know, I know, "Well, what do you suggest?". I'm not sure, but I don't think that the jury system is democratic, nor do I think it guarantees that you're going to have people who are empathetic.
Sure. We’re dealing with life and fundamental freedoms. This fundamentally comes down to the value of innocence.
Juries are democratic in that they devolve power to a body of citizens, not the government. The unanimity requirement is a check on the mob, alongside various court procedures and the appeals process.
The jury is the democratic organ. The value of innocence is what motivates the undemocratic check of a unanimity requirement. You complained about one person upending the system. That’s the cost of valuing innocence.
> the tyranny of the minority is largely considered undemocratic
Yes, supermajority requirements are not perfectly democratic. Nobody argued juries are perfect democracies. Just that they’re more democratic than systems in which a judge decides everything.
The value of innocence is technically orthogonal; you could instruct a judge to bias one way or another. But that’s structurally guaranteed by a jury in a way it cannot with bureaucrats, even a panel of them.
However, the French government is now increasingly pushing for the replacement of juries by judges ("cours criminelles"), in some criminal cases, particularly child abuse ones. Acquittals are becoming harder to obtain in these cases.
Juries can declare you guilty, but it's the judge that sentences someone to death
The problem with the death penalty is masked slightly because of the US’s lengthy appeals process and the Innocence project which delays a lot of these death penalties from being carried out which has meant that in many instances they have succeeded in delaying the death penalty long enough for the science that could acquit the innocent to be established.
And in states which care about justice, as opposed to bloodlust, it’s saved innocent lives (and equally importantly, in some cases, helped nab the actual guilty party).
But these stories are becoming increasingly rare because the states that care about justice as opposed to bloodlust have increasingly joined the first world by abandoning the death penalty altogether. Imprisonment for life still allows for innocence to be proven. The death penalty eliminates that option and it’s impossible to know at the time of sentencing whether new evidence would turn up.
There are a number of recourses to rectify wrongful imprisonment - none for death.
For example, there's elections every two(?) years - a new president or governor could commute the remaining sentence?
Given the choice between death and two years in prison - I know what I would prefer...
To expand on that, appeals are not intended to re-litigate the facts. They are there to fix procedural mistakes during trial, or wrong argumentation of how the law should be applied.
The question of 'what happened' is generally not up for debate during appeal, and is generally not grounds for lodging an appeal. Instead, appeals are meant for when the law was applied wrong. Or when a trial was unfair due to a judge's mistake. Effectively, it is meant to protect you against judge's mistakes and unscrupulous prosecutors. There is much less protection against experts that happen to be wrong.
It seems to me that a system like that is fundamentally incompatible with a death-penalty, since it leaves a decent amount of space for mistakes that go uncorrected.
IANAL, but I understand certain kind of "evidence" are inadmissible in court due to unreliability/being junk science (e.g. lie detector results). I think it should be possible to classify the admission of unreliable evidence as the judge's mistake, even if that evidence (or type of evidence) was found to be unreliable after conviction.
Basically, the standard should be that judges are supposed to be perfectly reliable when evaluating evidence, and should have been expected to catch any issue that was later discovered, so a later standard of inadmissibility is retroactive.
If it isn't the, the rules ought to be changed (and this change seems narrow enough to me that it shouldn't cause any problems).
There is no way to correct a mistake that deprives a human being of years of liberty, either. If anything I find it more horrifying that we're willing to say, "Eh, at least you're alive", at apparently leave it at that.
I'm not calling for infinite appeals and suchlike denial-of-service attacks on the courts. But it seems that we've simply written off the notion of being just entirely, and the highest court in the land seems comfortable with that.
Any money that either side spends on legal resources, 50% goes to your lawyer and 50% to opposing counsel. You can spend $1,000,000, or go pro se, but the other side gets the same resources.
Another way to make this work is to cap expenses for both sides (I believe Germany does this for many types of cases).
The deeper issue is that there have been no serious efforts at reform. The system basically needs to be re-invented from the ground up. A lot of disputes which should not be adversarial (such as family law) are made into such, and there are misaligned incentives all over the place.
That must vary a lot by jurisdiction. In San Francisco and neighboring Alameda County (Oakland, Berkeley), prosecutors are facing criticism for their insistence that they will not bring charges unless they believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, even when there appears to be a lot of evidence in that direction. Essentially, they are pre-empting the jury's job. It's so bad that Alameda D.A. is facing a possible recall just a year after being elected, for not bringing charges that in the past would have been routine.
Once a case is under trial, that’s their job, isn’t it, just as it’s the job of the defense to get an acquittal, even if they think or even know you did it?
I think the problem is pre trial, with trials getting started even though there’s no good evidence.
We are confusing diligence and factual reporting with incentivized persuasion.
Statistically, minorities are much more likely to be sent to death once convicted. The state has unlimited resources to convict someone and the defendant usually only has an overworked underpaid public defender.
Only? That’s 140 cases a year, or one every two working days. Sounds like an extremely high number to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_U.S._Supreme_Court_c... says it’s ≈70 per year. That’s less, but IMO still very high.
I'd have all the time in the world to accept bribes from billionaires and take fancy trips on their private jets and yachts too!
Innocent people can be freed once errors are discovered. Dead people can't.
Arkansas executed an innocent person. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/us/ledell-lee-dna-testing...
By contrast, someone innocent where DNA evidence was available but untested for 21 years and was left to languish in prison. If the death penalty had been applied, there's no "undo" button.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/l-man-wrongly-imprisone...
"“I am not standing up here a bitter man, but I just want to enjoy my life now while I have it,” Hastings said."
As an American citizen, who has spent time in prison (abroad) and just came out recently, I tell you I have no idea how this guy survived this. He seems to be an incredibly strong person and his smile shows kindness.
I wonder if Kenneth Packnett knew someone else was serving time for his crime, and if so, why he didn't fess up. If he did and it was to avoid a few extra years tacked onto his sentence, truly scumbag behavior.
People often seem to say this about exonerees. Perhaps there's a selection bias at work here?
Something like, those unjustly convicted who are not strong and determined never get exonerated. And nor do black men who don't present as calm and full of forgiveness?
The death penalty is barbaric. There is no acceptable argument for it's existence.
A full confession that is never retracted?
What about cases where an innocent person is coerced into thinking they are guilty?
In a world where we accept the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, where does this certainty of guilt arise?
There's no "undo" button for wasting away for 40 years in prison either
To me it looks like a glitch of the human cognition to think that losing almost/everyone you love, being dropped into a vastly different world than you knew, having your financial and social prospects thrown in the trash, living in shitty conditions for decades, is oh so much better and moral than killing them
There are people who kill for fun, kill for money, people who rape, people who torture for fun.
Many if not most of them can be prevented from ever becoming like that in the first place by eliminating poverty, which is a massive and omnipresent source of stress and trauma for people the world over.
There are sadists, psychopaths, and even pedophiles (defined as "those who are sexually attracted to prepubescent bodies", not "those who commit actual acts of child sexual abuse") who live mostly-normal lives and if they ever desire to hurt others, do not act on those desires. This is a pretty clear signal that the existence of these types of people does not inherently lead to them becoming violent, dangerous, or otherwise causing harm.
Is this a short-term project? Hell no. If a majority of the people in all the countries on Earth decided today to commit to a project to abolish the carceral state, I'd be surprised if we'd see it reach a stage where it's fully abolished within our lifetimes. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't set it as an aspirational goal, and start taking steps toward a world that doesn't have to worry about making a decision between executing innocent people and allowing people to walk free who are genuinely likely to harm others.
There's payouts, at least. And it doesn't have to take 40 years.
The conclusion would be that those people are "suicidal", rather than admit death might be preferable for rational reasons.
If someone uses 1+1=3 as an argument you don't need to figure out an actual answer to point out their argument is bollocks
>What you're implying is just letting criminals out as the only alternative
I'm implying no such thing. I'm saying that specific moral argument is bullshit if they find the current punishment ceiling acceptable
But when something happens in a home, with just one surviving witness being the suspect, I don't think they should be so quick to sentence someone to the death penalty.
It should exist as a deterrent, but only in extreme and very clear cut cases.
When Breivik was aged 4, and living in Oslo's Frogner borough, two reports were filed expressing concern about his mental health.[47] A psychologist in one report made a note of the boy's peculiar smile, suggesting it was not anchored in his emotions but was rather a deliberate response to his environment.[48] In another report from Norway's National Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (SSBU), concerns were raised about how Breivik was treated by his mother: "[s]he 'sexualised' the young Breivik, hit him, and frequently told him that she wished that he were dead."
See also https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/norway/959...
See also his Psychiatric evaluation under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
Whatever he did, I have doubts that he was sane. But the question is, which problem does the death penalty really solve? Deterrence? Most death penalty countries have very high crime rates. Prevent another crime from the same individual? Life without parole has the same effect.
PS: Reading about Breivik, he was probably insane or at least on the border of insanity during his crimes. Judging by his actions in prison, he is at least insane by now. I doubt that he well get released after 21 years served and will get preventive detention. So basically, since he is mentally sick now he can't get released from prison, a place where he likely should not have been held in the first place.
A rate of occurrence so low it is best described in terms like 'extreme outlier', 'vanishingly rare' or 'unprecedented'.
Extreme outliers are often used to justify extreme measures. The question is, should they? In an EU country we had just a murder case, a teen was murders by two girls, aged 13 and 12. Since this is below of the age of criminal responsibility for the country, where they were committed, people argued the age for criminal responsibility should be lowered to 12 or even below. Are extreme outliers a good basis for this? And if age of criminal responsibility is lowered to 12 or 10, should not the "age of consent" be lowered to 12 or 10 too?
In this case the well-being of the minors is being allowed to slip below the quality of legal machinations.
That said, I feel downvotes without explanations are unhelpful here.
I disagree.
Keeping him alive sends a message to every right wing nut out there that it doesn't matter how many children you massacre beause you'll be kept alive in a humane norwegian prison for the rest of your life as a symbol to all your followers.
That is not what they're saying. The claimed deterrence from the death penalty is to give pause to would-be murderers such that they don't actually commit murder. Putting Breivik to death obviously does not serve as a deterrent to Breivik's past crimes and, while it can ensure that future crimes also do not occur, so can putting him in prison.
Instead he keeps re-appearing in media whenever he complains or tries to get a case going. And even if he didn't, his followers till know he's there and can continue praising him for his sick ideas.
Of course in the real world that's not always the case, but are you going to take two Guilty verdicts and say "A is kind of Guilty but not enough for the death penalty, however B is extremely Guilty and should be put to death"?
Or add a new verdict? Not Guilty, Guilty and Definitely Guilty?
For an alternative approach, in Islam we have a rule that Ḥadd punishments are to be averted by rejecting doubtful evidence. The point is to deter people from crime, and have a stable society, not to apply the punishment for the sake of the punishment as some seem to think. As such, practically all cases that are brought up in these discussions would not have had the penalty applied.
A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 September 2023 (1012 points)
> he has already exhausted appeals through Texas state courts and must now rely on the mercy of the Republican governor Greg Abbott
This is not what a justice system looks like. This is a step up from "justice" under feudal systems, but the gaping holes like this make it a small step. Even though it "works" sometimes (often?), the "worst case scenario" is so bad that the entire system must be measured by it.
None of us are in this man's shoes through absolutely no action taken on our part (beyond not having kids for those of us that don't).
As his lawyer says, this is a nightmare situation, but that's the reality of the USA "justice" system.
I agree that this is an example of State violence exercised arbitrarily over the individual but I don't attribute agency to the State here, I think it's more mundane in this case. This to me is more a symptom of the overall degradation humans in the USA and reflective of decreasing respect for human life in that country, and in general the modern world.
IMO it's worth considering why this kind of blatant injustice, and similar ones, hasn't led to more outcry. To me that's an alarm bell that the majority of people have successfully been cowed, and more dramatic restrictions on our human rights are to come (we can see various governments and bureaucracies fighting an unending war against our technological freedoms).
[0]https://www.supermanhomepage.com/the-history-of-supermans-tr...
1) You might want to search on "civil asset forfeiture" and compare that to the history of the Bill of Rights.
2) Also talk to a few residential landlords, about the innumerable rights of deadbeat and destructive tenants, the various COVID evictions moritoriums, etc.
I’d guess quite a lot of babies were born outside of hospitals back then. Getting a birth certificate for a baby probably wasn’t terribly hard.
The Nationality Act of 1940 basically says if someone presumably under 5 is found in the US, theyre a citizen unless theyre proven to be from another country. In a couple stories he's granted honorary citizenship.
Of course it depends on the storyline. In one, Superman renounces his American citizenship while Clark Kent kept it.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/6kgr6r/d...
The flying and susceptibility to kryptonite is a dead giveaway.
https://whynotcomicbooks.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/action-...
https://manshoorylaw.com/blog/difference-between-1st-2nd-and...
It seems they have portrayed him as a cold, calculating murderer.
Second degree murder implies at minimum extreme indifference to human life if not intent to harm whereas he took her to the doctor then the hospital and gave her medicine then deemed medically appropriate and only now known to be harmful.
Where are you seeing the extreme indifference to human life?
Noting here that using 'child killing' in this context loads the term. It unhelpfully stirs intended and unintended deaths together and conflates murder with awful mistakes made by poorly equipped, poorly informed or overpressured parents.
Parents who've lost infants after rolling onto them while sleeping - they ought not be lumped together with people who've killed a child thru a planned, horrific act.
Personally, I find the concept of life in prison to be one of the greatest injustices made by man, and would vastly prefer people to be killed under false premise, or by outright mistake, rather than wasting away for decades under harsh conditions, surrounded by misery, despair, and hopelessness. This modernist quirk of "'life' behind bars" comes off with some strange stink of clinically accepted torture, under the understanding of the ineptitude of a system of justice run by human beings.
Just my two cents though, I know some would strongly disagree for various reasons.
The arguments were:
- There's no correlation between death penalty abolition and a reduction or increase in criminality curve
- The most death penalty-able crimes are crimes of passion or folly. People are not rational actors in these case, and have a death penalty
- "Cold-blooded" criminal (trafficker, pimp, maffiosi and such) would never put themselves in a situation where they could get death penalty
- "Criminal passion are no less stopped by the fear of death than other more noble passion. If the fear of death would dissuade people to act, then we would have neither great soldiers nor great sportmen. We admire them, but they do not hesitate in face of death. Nor will other people, taken by other passions. It's only for death penalty that we think that death will prevent people in their most extreme passions. This is not true."
Not really. Locking an innocent person up for the rest of their life is high stakes enough, and plenty of people care about it. That's why we don't only ever overturn the sentences of people who are on death row. There's no requirement that we take a lax attitude towards innocent people being caged for any length of time.
While life behind bars might sound like torture, it doesn't have to be. It's unfortunate but there will always be some people who need to be kept apart from the rest of us for our safety. There's zero reason for those people to be kept in "harsh conditions, surrounded by misery, despair, and hopelessness". We can treat all prisoners humanely and allow them to live a decent (if heavily restricted) life locked away from the rest of us.
If we did that, any innocent person we mistakenly locked up would have zero reason to choose to die rather than stay locked up while fighting to get their sentence overturned. We'd still have every incentive to make sure we don't screw up.
Corporal punishment is physical pain, capital punishment is death - corpus meaning body, capitalis meaning head (as in, losing your head).
It's still atrocious, but given how easy negligence could lead to death and how an infant is not really a person in my eyes, I'd consider a special category for it.
Surely if it's a matter of mental aptitude, you've considered the ramifications of mental retardation, etc. Is it just a size thing, or something else? Genuinely curious.
Note: I'd probably still expect some emotional responses if this receives a lot of interest.
At 6 months a child feels mostly like an instinct-driven animal, but at 2-3 years for instance they clearly have awareness of themselves and the world. Somewhere a switch happens, and in this gray area I don't know.
Adults with mental retardation still have a consciousness, but if you're a braindead vegetable you don't, so the line is somewhere there.
Just for my own edification, are you religious at all? I'm asking, not as "an opportunity to preach" or finger wag or whatever, but just because I've found this kind of position to generally be followed by unbelievers more frequently than not. I try not to assume to know too much about complete strangers though, so I try to challenge various assumptions I form about others.
I do find a deep alignment to the core Christian values of forgiveness and love of others. I would risk my life for my family members, including my spouse and love them dearly.
I don't see a way for this man to have the case properly reevaluated. So he's trapped in the worst possible situation.
It seems to me like it is really hard to make room to recant in a justice system. Mostly because if allows already convicted people to pressure experts to recant. But also because it lets people get out of intentional perjury (not that these doctors were intentionally wrong).
Besides that, I imagine they really don't want the publicity. Or perhaps they feel like they are morally covered by their original testimony being phrased like "according to the state of the art", or "to the best of my current knowledge", so that new insights don't make the statements false.
> At trial, witnesses also testified that Roberson had a bad temper and would shake and spank Nikki when she wouldn’t stop crying.
>Its argument cites testimony from Teddie, Roberson’s estranged girlfriend, who said he had a bad temper and would yell at Nikki and hit her. Roberson’s legal team counter that Teddie was not a credible witness. Her own sister testified for Roberson, insisting she had never seen him mistreat Nikki and telling the jury Teddie had a problem with telling the truth.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/texas-death-ro...
If you don't have evidence a crime exists its pretty meaningless to speak to someone's motivation to commit it.
Do you know more about this case than was written in the article? Because as far as I know, shaking remains a possible explanation for our observations -- what was "junk" about the science was that it jumped to conclusions too hastily.
>If you don't have evidence a crime exists its pretty meaningless to speak to someone's motivation to commit it.
This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny. We don't know if a crime exists, because there are multiple possible explanations for our observations, but that certainly doesn't imply that a crime did not occur. Motivation is important here. (Based on other comments, the defence claimed the partner is unreliable, which is also important here, if true. But the point remains that if a credible witness made such a claim about him, that would be important in determining the likelihood that a crime took place.)
This means the standard to investigate and gather evidence. The standard for conviction is beyond a shadow of a doubt. The question was never ever can we reverse the burden of proof and prove that he is innocent. The point is we never proved his guilt because we initially met that standard based on pseudoscience.
> This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny. We don't know if a crime exists, because there are multiple possible explanations for our observations, but that certainly doesn't imply that a crime did not occur.
Again this is the standard to investigate a crime and you are affirming my claim that we don't know that a crime occured.
>if a credible witness made such a claim about him, that would be important in determining the likelihood that a crime took place.
Again no this is completely backwards. It WOULD be relevant if and only if the child has a cause of death wherein we had to decide if he could have done it. If the question was did the child fell or did he push her it would be extremely relevant but if we can't convince ourselves that something happened it is meaningless to ask why something happened.
They are properly independent questions. Lets make it simpler if we weren't sure he was actually in Texas would you say a witness to his character was relevant to the question of his location like his motivation could go back in time and teleport him in space to another locale?
I'm not asking for your fuzzy judgement where we just stack positives and negatives on either side and user our gut to figure out which side is heavier I'm asking for you to exercise logical reasoning. Logical reasoning is that we never met our burden of proof in the first place and covered over that lack with prejudice and pseudoscience.