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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Does it matter if you are on the death row? Some of those who are there will be executed, and waiting for decades if you hang or not is pretty inhuman. Once there is a legal sentence of death on you, it is a matter of policy if you actually hang or not, and policy may change with a different PM/governor etc.

That feels very bad to me. If a retentionist country wants to hang people, it shouldn't add endless insecurity on top of the punishment.

Edit.: interesting that this is controversial enough to be downvoted. Remember Trump signing the death warrants of 13 federal death row inmates during the last 6 months of his presidency? Yeah, once you are legally condemned to death, your actual execution is a matter of electoral random walk, which is pretty nasty.

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You should understand, that of those 488 currently in DR, only a small fraction will ever be actually executed. It's practically the same as life term. I hope you are not against that either? The "endless insecurity" is actually deliberate, because people (majority) will actually oppose the abolition of capital punishment.

Tangentially, how should a country (read US) deal with terrorists (in the strictest possible sense of the word) who planned and carried out significantly impactful attacks against their citizens?

Its probably not being downvoted for that reason. Rather because you're just being plain wrong here.

" only a small fraction will ever be actually executed"

How can you know? It is entirely possible that a change in policy will result in all of them hanging within a month. Once you are condemned to death, the only thing between you and the gallows is policy that can be unilaterally changed by whoever decides to carry out the executions or not. The court has spoken, you won't be sentenced again. You are a dead person walking and someone in the executive branch can always decide to let you actually hang. An election of a politician who wants to look tough on crime may result in precisely that.

Tangentially, more than half of the world abolished the death penalty even though terrorism does not spare them. Spain lets Basque butchers live behind bars, so does France with its jihadists.

>It is entirely possible that a change in policy will result in all of them hanging within a month.

It seems to me you dont have the faintest clue how the Indian justice system works, I'm not even sure you're aware that India does have law and order like a civilized democracy. It has major problems within it, but it's not entirely nonexistent.

About the second point, I'd just add again, that public opinion matters.

OK, so if I am a condemned person sitting on an Indian death row, who can order my actual execution?

As far as public opinion goes, yes, it matters, but it may not be decisive. Quite a few European countries would probably re-introduce the death penalty if the question was left entirely to the population (via a referendum). I am sort-of glad that they don't go down this road; not even Ukraine sentences Russian war criminals to death.

Practically the president. The appeal process is deliberately long, except in cases with strong public or international pressure.

A series of more or less automatic appeals ends up at the desk of the President. It's a deliberate act of commission by the President of the time to actually order an execution. And overwhelmingly, they tend to commute.

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