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Comment by MikeAmelung | Hacker News Reader

I was just helping everyone understand that your important clarification, was in fact, wrong.

Since I wasn't on the jury, I can't say whether or not I would have been ok with the death penalty in this case, although the murder was particularly heinous.

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It doesn't matter how heinous the murder was if you have the wrong suspect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU

> Priti Patel: this is about having deterrents...

> Ian Hislop: It's not a deterrent killing the wrong people!

its not a deterrent for multiple other reasons too:

1. most murderers do not expect to get caught if they are acting at all rationally, and do not care if they do not, and, 2. unless you execute a high proportion of people committing a particular crime any one criminal knows they are unlikely to be executed.

I think the Tutu quote at the end of the video.

Most of the rest of the work world has abolished capital punishment, and most of the rest uses it very sparingly. The big exceptions are China and the Middle East. Good company to keep?

This is the second time in as many days I've seen some one use the argument that the severity of the crime meant the standards for conviction should somehow be less stringent. Sadly, I don't get the impression is an uncommon way of thinking.

Horribly, you regularly see this in supreme court cases. Some case has the conservatives denying a significant right to a criminal suspect and the decision will start with a lurid depiction of the crime they were convicted of through the denial of some right.

Sometimes the crime in case isn't actually that bad, so they have to dig for a lurid description of a different crime entirely.

This line of thinking peeks through all the time from otherwise intelligent people. Merely mentioning how heinous a crime was when we're talking about the guilt or innocence of a suspect should immediately kill your credibility. Too bad the criminal justice system doesn't care about that.

As I understand it, you have to be OK with the death penalty, to be on a capital jury.

Of all the situations within which it would be morally okay to lie..

false.

you mean, true?

This in and of itself very likely creates a bias against the defendant. For me, there is overwhelming evidence that many innocent people have been executed. To support the death penalty, you seem likely to either not believe in systemic injustice (which means you are also probably more likely to believe flimsy testimony) or accept that innocent lives are a tolerable tradeoff to ensure that some people are executed for their crimes. Both groups seem more likely to convict to me than a random sample.

Personally, I also feel that it is morally wrong to give jurors life and death decision making power. The jurors themselves can be deeply harmed by this if they later learn that they convicted a defendant on the basis of false evidence.

I think the bigger problem though is that the death penalty is too abstract. There are many people who believe that certain crimes are worthy of execution. I don't personally agree, but I accept other's beliefs on that point. But even if I grant the righteousness of execution in certain cases, it seems nearly impossible to implement justly and without heavy costs to society. This includes the costs to the people who must carry out the execution as well as the exceedingly high financial costs relative to other forms of punishment.

Indeed, it starts with the judge deciding (without trial or jury) whether capital charges can be brought. Then a capital jury is chosen.

In practical terms, it also requires an incompetent lawyer. Ruth Bader Ginsberg said "No well defended person receives the death penalty." I read that in an article about the one isolated case where she was wrong.

I also suspect that the death penalty corrupts the societies that use it.

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