Hacker News Reader

I used to be, for most of the same reasons as you. What ultimately convinced me was realizing that our judicial system can never be 100% perfect, so we would always have a non-zero number of innocent people executed as long as capital punishment is on the table. To me, I think the cost of keeping people incarcerated is worth the cost of accidentally executing innocent citizens.

Put a bit more personally: would you support capital punishment if you had to pull the trigger, and you would be killed if you executed an innocent inmate? Most people I speak with would be fine pulling the trigger, but no one I’ve talked with would be okay with taking responsibility for mistakes.

i think you missed my last line. That should answer your question. The government can never be perfect, and killing and innocent is a tragedy. However, you cannot cripple the whole system for this vanishgly small chance or you have an equal chance of success across the system. If you keep making those compromises, putting systems in place to correct the errors of past systems; it quickly becomes a losing game. Put more simply, If you lose trust in the system, you can't rely on the system to fix it.

So why not just select random citizens by lottery and publicly execute one for every 50 or 100 convicts executed?

You're willing to accept that if the random citizen is labeled as guilty even if they're not. If it's acceptable for innocent people to be executed, what's the difference in having a random death lottery?

That's the whole point of the system is it not? We accept that there is a vanishigly small chance that a innocent person may be locked up and imprisoned. The point i was making is that we are already making that choice by the allowance of jails and prisons. So if we accept that, the sentencing does not matter. They were proven guilty in the court of law. There is a handful of studies, i'm sure someone could pull up about such cases where people on death row were found innocent after 20 years. However, those are exceptions and 99.99% of cases are not that way and are mostly because we "discovered" dna evidence as a thing.

It's death by a million cuts as soon as you start second guessing the system and trying to use the same system to fix it's inherent imperfections. Proven guilty by the court of law needs to mean something.

I think put yourself in the shoes of someone about to be executed innocent of their crime. Then make your argument. It sounds like “some of you die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” otherwise.

> what's the difference in having a random death lottery?

Due process?

Perhaps I misunderstood it, but I read that as you not finding the value of avoiding accidental executions as worth the cost to avoid them. And if so, then I think that’s a perfectly valid position. But it’s subjective, since others may find the value worth it.

I’m curious though: is there an error rate where you would feel like capital punishment would be off the table? For instance, if 90% of people executed were innocent, would you still want it for the 10% who deserve it? I admit that if we had a 100% success rate, I would be open to capital punishment, so we may actually agree that there’s a threshold where the system shouldn’t be allowed to use that as a form of punishment, and only disagree about about the percentage.

This argument always falls flat because those that claim state-sanctioned killing of innocent citizens is a necessary tragedy, never seem to say that they’d be willing to be murdered themselves in that scenario. It’s more like “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

I used to think that false convictions were rare. In capital cases like this one it is close to 4%! That made me think, is it worth killing 4 innocent people to avoid having to imprison 96 guilty ones for the rest of their life? If I went out with a gun and killed 100 people, 4 innocent and 96 justifiably, I may as well be number 97.

I'm curious what percentage of false convictions are caused by LEO and DA omitting or destroying evidence.

I suspect, ignorantly, that it's north of 70%. If anyone should be getting the death penalty, it should be those that abuse power granted to them by the people.

I guess false confessions are a huge issue. In addition, our system is mostly designed to around the needs of the rich and corporate interests. Prosecution for crimes against the poor and disenfranchised is critically underfunded. Public defenders offices are even worse off.

Another way to frame it:

Assume the justice system is perfect and only guilty people are executed. However, by law for every five or ten guilty executions, a random innocent civilian is also executed.

That system is obviously abhorrent and unjust. However, that's how the system works right now. For every N truly guilty people executed, there's a truly innocent person executed. The only difference is we justify it by calling that person guilty even if they aren't.

This is true of any punishment, though: if we want to hold people in prison, we're going to have innocent people in there too. Why draw the line specifically at "death"?

Right? Like if you run with the argument that people are making then we can't give people a life sentence because they may die in jail when they're innocent.

With capital punishment, we remove the possibility of fixing our mistake if someone is innocent. But if we lock someone up for 30 years, they have the opportunity for justice to be served, and we have mechanics to _try_ to make it right.

So, it's better to potentially completely ruin the life of an innocent instead of killing him. From a humanity standpoint the first option is much more barbaric.

Besides, what is the chance an innocent gets out if he was convicted in the first place?

I believe it's so low that the mistake is not giving a decent out (and avoiding large costs to society) to problematic peoples on the off chance that you might get an innocent released 10 years earlier. If he was truly innocent, his life is ruined already, he would have to live with the consequences for the rest of his life...

>So, it's better to potentially completely ruin the life of an innocent instead of killing him.

Yes clearly it's better. Killing him definitely ruins his life as well and isn't reversible.

There is an approach that works, see i.e. the Islamic Judicial system. Hudud (Penal laws) are immediately waived with an ounce of suspicion.

The right way to reduce the cost of incarcerating people is to end mass incarceration, not to kill people. Just shooting everybody on LWOP in the head won't do nearly as much.

Further, I think that we should have a high expense per prisoner. It should cost society something to imprison somebody, since crime is in many ways a product of society's systems and choices. A world with mass incarceration and a focus on reducing the cost of the prison system is a world that basically necessitates abuse.

> If i ever get falsely accused of a crime that would send me to jail for life i would beg for the death penalty.

That's your life and your choice, which I think should be respected.

Doesn't the US privatized incarceration so it's basically a _free_ market, where shady deals are made to funnel more public money to private entities, and many people are incentivized to have as many people in prison as possible?

In that case, the cost on citizens for incarceration of people shouldn't be taken into account in the discussion around capital punishment because it's another issue altogether?

> Doesn't the US privatized

Isn't that less than 10% of the market (i.e. most prisons are not private)

But how many services in prisons, like being able to be in a call with loved ones, are private?

"Better a thousand innocent men are locked up than one guilty man roam free."

To clarify, I vehemently disagree with your post and think that the pursuit of innocence is an imperative function of the state.

Funny enough, i think i agree with you. the pursuit of innocence is an imperative function of the state. And that's why we have innocent until proven guilty.

But I think we disagree on our trust of the legal system. Once proven guilty under the court of law that must be upheld. If you locked the doors and burned your grandma alive because you thought she was satan you should be executed, not put in a cushy hospital to be "Rehabilitated". If you caused harm to society in such a violent way, justice is not the tax payers paying $2.7m and to forver bear the burden of one who cannot function in our society.

I disagree, on the basis that retribution should simply not be a state penalogical goal at all. When you say someone "should be executed" you're conjuring up innate feelings of the desire for vindictiveness. A modern state should not have that in consideration at all.

Either they're so dangerous that no matter what you do or say to them they will never change their ways, or they can be rehabilitated. Neither of those posibilities justifies the kind of cruel treatments that plague America's prisons today, much less the death penalty.

What if you didn't do that but someone said you did?

Executions speed up evolving bad traits out of humanity. Short term bleeding hearts hurt us long term.

I am for the death penalty.

Unfortunately cases like this come along where it is not applied correctly, forcing us to have to face the reality that we are not capable of using it as a proper tool.

Probably not. I am just not in favour for putting them in hospitals. You won’t “fix” a Taoist or murderer.

Put them in prison for life, make them work for food and housing.

I believe that people against it are either incredibly annoying idealists (who fail to understand that perfect is the enemy of good) or full-on barbarian who rejoices at the idea of wasting someone's life in a much worse way than just killing him.

I believe long-term imprisonment is much worse than death, especially since there is no real life possible after so much time in prison. It is truly worse than death from a humanity point of view.

I don't believe the nonsense about potentially innocent people, if justice isn't completely certain, then they can put them in prison awaiting more evidence.

But I think it is actually pretty rare, the problem is mostly lack of evidence; you don't get trouble with justice when you are a good citizen and juste mind your own business.