Note that she got a death sentence for fraud. It's... rough. (In my opinion.)
- 3% of vietnam's GDP
- Roughly the equivalent of an entire city losing their livelihood to one person
- The trauma and ruin people around the victims will feel
- Orphaned children, suicides, intragenerational trauma that will last for many rebirths.
It's the same cavalier attitude I see towards victims of SBF on this forum. "Its their fault", "they were asking for it".
You have compassion for the perpetrator but not the victims who are dead and are going to end up dead.
I only pray that you will not experience the pain of being manipulated and scammed. It's truly awful because I experienced it.
I know some religions/SF bay cults try to justify it but at the end of the day its the lapse in responsibility and compassion, the same disregard for others but your own.
My perspective is: if the point is to dissuade people from committing crimes like this, it seems like a lengthy prison sentence would achieve the same thing. The harm has already been done, and killing them doesn’t fix anything. Death is just so damn final.
That said, whatever the severity of penalty you assign to direct forms of (mass) murder ought to apply to the indirect forms when they're scaled up far enough.
Like, that capital represents the real possibility of avoiding starvation for a certain percent of the population (many of them children).
Similarly, I look at folks like the Sacklers and think that whatever we do to a school shooter ought to be done to them. They knew full well what the impact of their behavior was going to be and thought, "fuck 'em. Let 'em die". That's just as bad if not worse than a troubled teen picking up an assault rifle.
Sometimes I wonder why it’s mostly poor people who are executed in the US. One reason is, we don’t punish rich people crimes with the same severity. If you look at the list of capital crimes in e.g. California, most of them involve specific circumstances around single murders. It’s not hard to imagine white collar crimes which cause an order of magnitude more damage to society.
Whether these crimes need to be punished with the death penalty is a different question I think you and I would not agree on, but I would concede if it meant stricter punishments for white collar criminals. The Sacklers are far more evil than most of the men sitting on death row now.
If you’re rich, you can afford to confer with attorneys before, and afford pretty good defense attorneys afterwards. They also typically are major contributors to the community in some way (taxes, as an employer, etc.).
Poorer folks learn ‘the law’ from TV or their cousins or whatever, and often just get a public defender with an excessive case load. They typically don’t clean up well, and won’t come across well to a jury.
Who do you think the prosecutor is going to throw the book at to pad their resume?
[https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/final-ju...]
Also, OJ Simpson?
Also, jokes from Donald Trump [https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/trump-immunity-hearing-cour...]
There is also the fact that if you’re richer, you can probably afford to solve whatever problem you have without actually murdering someone. Especially not murdering them yourself.
Because you can hire lawyers. Or can afford friends in low places. Or have power and influence to get what you want through threats. And aren’t desperate enough (usually) either to consider it a good cost/risk trade off.
But not always, rich people can be crazy too. Or actually, I mean ‘eccentric’. Crazy is when someone is poor.
If you’re criminally inclined, getting more money is always ‘worthwhile’ though, especially since it’s rare anyone can look at it and say it should be punished the same as literal murder.
After decades of propaganda, far right media has convinced a large part of the American public that social welfare programs don’t work. Of course they did this after first defunding those social programs. So of course the only option left is punishment.
But if anything, the US “war on drugs” has only proven that punishment alone isn’t enough. Thankfully people are starting to wake up to that fact.
I think it's important that we define exactly what it is that we're trying to mitigate / accomplish with drug laws in general. If it's the reduction of harm, then we're going about it completely wrong.
The overwhelming majority of overdoses are from opioids [1] and yet we treat lsd, mdma, cocaine, and a whole slew of psychedelics exactly the same as heroin. There's evidence [2] that suggests that prescription opioids drive abuse behavior.
It's known that fentanyl adulteration drives a significant portion of OD deaths [3] even if it's hard to get good numbers on how many of these ODs are adulterated compounds vs just fentanyl because of how the numbers are reported. If we legalized everything but opioids, a significant portion of these ODs could be easily avoided.
The DEA has failed it's mandate, and it's time to disband them, end the prohibition, and focus on harm reduction techniques rather than incarceration. We could also spend a little more time reigning in "legitimate" organizations like Purdue Pharma, who cause unarguable harm in the guise of medicine.
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html
2 - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6224673_Illicit_Use...
3 - https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2022/05/what-is-...
It’s always bad people who want to feel good who do these exercises imo to signal how “pure” they are to defend rapists, killers, corrupt fraudsters, etc.
Imo. Always some of the fakest people.
There are people who commit incredibly atrocious crimes, and then get away with a slap in the wrist. India _has_ the death penalty but it is very rarely enforces it. And according to her, the existence of it keeps people at least a little bit in check, as if they do something massively bad (killing swaths of people for example) they could face real punishment. Cause people with money can get away/live in comfort in prison quite successfully.
Also, poverty is so prevalent that there are plenty of people for whom prison would be a step up in comfort and living conditions from where they are.
As you’ve so eloquently put, we didn’t change each other’s positions but at least I understand much better now how some parts of the world could justify it.
The line of death being harsh punishment in any circumstance is simply not true.
I.e., by contraditory, if it is true that "death is too harsh" is true, then it should reasonably deter "bad guys".
Did that happen?
No
It did not happen in history, now; and it wont happen in any foreseeable further
Death should not be the highest form of punishment
You think it should? Then why stop there? What about death, but after weeks of gruesome torture? How many percentage points of an entire country's economy should warrant that?
What does matter is that they chose, on that scale of least to most, the most. The actions of the accused surely have and will continue to lead to death (at that scale of fraud, the downstream consequences are going to be vast and devastating to the victims). If murderers can deserve the death penalty, the abstract consequences of someone committing physical violence are remarkably less bad than the abstract consequences of the criminals in this case, so why wouldn't the same be appropriate?
Separate from the issue of whether capital punishment is moral, it's on the table whether you or I like it. At what point is the maximum punishment appropriate?