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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I’m generally opposed to the death penalty on the grounds of not being able to undo mistakes but if we’re going to have it on the books, I’d have a hard time saying that shouldn’t be an option. We’ve charged plenty of people for killing a single person, and the numbers for food safety can be a lot more than that.

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The death penalty only makes sense for white collar crime, and it makes a lot of sense in this setting. Theres very little you can do to disincentivize people from engaging in crimes of irrationality or desperation, but I think if you threaten someone who is well off already with death for stealing, or failing to report accurately to the EPA/FDA etc. The number of cases will rapidly go to zero.

China uses the death penalty this way. North Korea has an even stricter system. I don’t think the number of cases have rapidly gone to zero. It seems to breed endogenous corruption and a mafioso approach to internal affairs. You have to deal with lack of proportionality—no matter where you draw the line, once you’ve crossed it there’s no reason not to keep going.

> I think if you threaten someone who is well off already with death ... number of cases will rapidly go to zero.

You can think that, but you'd be wrong. Everyone who commits a crime thinks they're gonna be the one to get away with it.

It's a very popular opinion among certain kinds of people, but history and even present day has shown, time and again - You can't slaughter your way to a peaceful law-abiding society.

That's barbaric. White collar crime is a policy choice. Economies require a certain amount of slack in order to function. If an economy had a zero tolerance policy for white collar crime than nothing would ever get done, because differentiating between fraud, incompetence, and bad luck is extremely difficult in all but the most straightforward of cases. If we wanted to de-incentivize white collar crime we have so many options that are (a) more humane, (b) more effective, and (c) less controversial. We could start prosecuting more cases of fraud, or improve regulations, or increase incentives for whisteblowing, or reform corporate governance, or any of a million other ideas.

Why advocate for killing criminals when it's far cheaper to cage them for life?

Fear of escape and second life as an evil business exec? Eye for an eye morality? Understanding death to be a greater deterrent than life in a cage? (How do you reconcile that with the popularity of "death-by-cop"?)

They might get back out and are a known quantity. The premium is for assurance. Death at the hands of the state and your fellow citizens should be an absolute last resort, but still an option depending on severity of offense and when determination of guilt is ironclad. I understand the position of people who don’t believe in the death penalty, but I don’t agree with them. There are terrible humans amongst us. Everyone makes the world a better place: some by entering it, some by leaving it.

The death penalty as a deterrent does not work in our society. Nobody thinks they will actually be executed, and it is kind of a fair assumption since there are so many automatic appeals in the process due to fear of making a mistake. This is before the monied interests buy the best lawyers for their defense.

China does not care so much about mistakes, they care about the deterrent effect.

Different ideologies on law enforcement.

> The death penalty as a deterrent does not work

Agreed, this has been studied over and over, generally punishment doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because most crimes are not planned or deliberate, especially not something like murder.

However, in cases like this, with 3M, it is deliberate. Sure they try to hide it, but they also know that the chances of anyone in management getting personally punished is practically zero. The company might get a fine and some executive will take an early retirement, if he hasn't already once the information comes to light. This is not a crime made in desperation, this is a cold blood calculation where the costs are weighed against potential profit. I don't know, but I could imagine a deterrence would work differently in these scenarios.

The death penalty works extraordinarily well in plenty of countries. Singapore, for example, has a marked decrease in drug crime post-death-penalty - interviews with dealers, mules, and criminals cite the death penalty as the reason they avoid Singapore.

Most studies citing the inefficacy of the death penalty are flawed and simply at odds with reality, in which evidence points to the opposite of what the studies theorize.

> The death penalty works extraordinarily well in plenty of countries. Singapore, for example, has a marked decrease in drug crime post-death-penalty - interviews with dealers, mules, and criminals cite the death penalty as the reason they avoid Singapore.

Thank you for confirming my talking point.

For me, it's about ensuring some kind of deterrence. Life in prison without the possibility for parole can be too soft when the crime is the intentional negligence leading to the deaths of thousands, if the punishment is life in a low security prison with access to TV/internet. If you have the connections to ensure you end up in a nice little apartment in Club Fed, you might not think as hard about the consequences as if the punishment was potentially death.

I'm also somewhat skeptical on the idea that the death penalty _should_ cost more than life in prison (assuming that sentence carries at least 20 years for the remainder of that person's life.) It would seem to me that there is a fairly obvious problem there that needs to get worked out if it's actually true (has anyone looked closely at the studies that assert this claim? Obviously there's additional time in court, but it would seem preposterous that this would necessarily lead to an increase such that paying for someone's housing and supervision for 20+ years is cheaper than additional court time.) Obviously there are other factors like how the government allows itself to get overcharged by the company that manufactures the lethal injection for some strange reason (is it actually all that strange to anyone?) And then what is the actual reason for all the time prisoners spend on death row, this would seem to just be the state shooting itself in the foot on statistics for the costs for capital punishment?

Anyway, I'm generally for the death penalty in matters where there is a clear connection between one entity and an intentional large-scale loss of human life. Proving the intention and the connection are the hard parts, for sure. But the clear benefit to the death penalty is that it's a permanent act that would-be criminals would naturally try to avoid, potentially avoiding them becoming criminals at all. If you have a study that somehow refutes this theory, that would-be criminals, especially white collar criminals similar to officials at 3M here, don't consider punishments as a deterrence at all, I might revise my opinion.

> I'm also somewhat skeptical on the idea that the death penalty _should_ cost more than life in prison (assuming that sentence carries at least 20 years for the remainder of that person's life.) It would seem to me that there is a fairly obvious problem there that needs to get worked out if it's actually true (has anyone looked closely at the studies that assert this claim? Obviously there's additional time in court, but it would seem preposterous that this would necessarily lead to an increase such that paying for someone's housing and supervision for 20+ years is cheaper than additional court time.) Obviously there are other factors like how the government allows itself to get overcharged by the company that manufactures the lethal injection for some strange reason (is it actually all that strange to anyone?) And then what is the actual reason for all the time prisoners spend on death row, this would seem to just be the state shooting itself in the foot on statistics for the costs for capital punishment?

I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding it's all the extra judicial processes that end up costing a lot. The cost of the poison used to kill the person (or bullet, or however it's done) it's probably just a rounding error in comparison.

(I'm against the death penalty, but if you're gonna have it, why invent these macabre Rube Goldberg contraptions for killing people? Just put the person up against a wall and shoot him, FFS.)

> I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding it's all the extra judicial processes that end up costing a lot. The cost of the poison used to kill the person (or bullet, or however it's done) it's probably just a rounding error in comparison.

I would wager you're probably correct. One substantial cost for the death penalty seems to be just paying a public defender for that whole time because the average person on death row cannot afford their own representation. This would not be the case, however, for company executives in the context we're discussing here at least. I'm also curious if these studies accurately pull together all the costs for life imprisonment, such as the guard staff, infirmary staff, cost of food consumed, cost of clothing, etc. There are probably other costs associated with imprisonment that I'm not even aware of because I've been fortunate enough to avoid prison so far.

> ([...] why invent these macabre Rube Goldberg contraptions for killing people? Just put the person up against a wall and shoot him, FFS.)

On this, we agree. Frankly, I'm fine without the death penalty too, though I'm not certain that it's a fair and just punishment in every case, and I would assume the potential for capital punishment would be a major deterrence for people looking into committing "white collar" life-ending crimes.

The point of the criminal justice system is to create strong social norms and taboos. Not deterrence—not to create the fear of getting caught—but rather that internal feeling that compels people to avoid wrongdoing because they don’t want to be seen as “bad people.”

Even low level criminals mentally distinguish themselves from the “really bad people.” In prison, the people who hurt children are reviled by the other criminals. When we impose the death penalty for certain conduct, we create a powerful social norm. The point is to help the majority of people who aren’t evil, but are flawed and fallible, stay on the right side of the line.

If killing criminals is more expensive than caging them, that’s an implementation detail. It’s not something to make long term planning decisions based on. If improving the economics of executions were a significant concern, it’s really straightforward to address.

That, plus there's no possible way to make executions more expensive than life imprisonment, unless the country is making incarceration profitable by using convicts as slave labor or selling their organs.

I’m generally in that camp too but there are cases where there’s no question of culpability or reform, and that’s where I’m the least inclined to argue against deterrence. I think people overstate that in general because a lot of crimes are impulse, but this kind of stuff is carefully planned over many years and I think if there is a deterrent effect you’d find it strongest there.

I’m not enthusiastic about that and would be fine jailing these guys for life, but if it’s something the state does I want guys in expensive suits to know it’s not just poor people.

It can be cheaper to kill them. One appeal allowed, to be finished within one year of the sentencing. Then, simply use a bullet rather than expensive medical death.

It's not about expense, it's about the fact that they do not deserve to live. Plenty of countries can economically work with the death sentence today, simply because it is part of their societies and law.

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