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Comment by tossandthrow | Hacker News Reader

It is funny that the sentiment that nothing excuses a murder is being circulated in the US - a country that still carried out death sentences.

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I understand what you're saying.

But a murder carried out by a random citizen is still worse than a death sentence after a fair trial and convicted by a jury of your peers.

It was not the justification of murder I was talking about. Simply the fact that murder as a solution is absolutely accepted in the US.

Murder isn't the same as homicide. By definition the death penalty isn't murder, because it's state sanctioned. Self defense, another example of legal killing, also isn't murder and most people who are against murder would consider a death in self defense to be justified and not murder.

Self defense can give mitigating circumstances in some legal systems, but it’s not an ethical joker to kill whoever we self-decreed feels as representing a threat.

For example, we can go into treacherous schemes that pushes our neighbors into paths where the only obvious option they can still perceive as a way to escape our shenanigans is an attempt to kill us, and as they come with this very real intention to kill us, press the button we had prepared to trigger some mortal trap.

When all the acceptable solutions are taken off the table, people start turning to unacceptable solutions. It's not good, because the erosion of social institutions will worsen the situation for everyone, but the only way to deal with this is to put the acceptable solutions back on the table. If we don't want to live and die through the inevitable consequences, our government needs to stop the corporate abuse of power that has led to this.

Worse... how? Shouldn't it depend on context a LOT? Like a mass murderer getting off on a technicality for example.

Considering that a lot of innocent people are murdered by the state via jury and trial in the US the distinction isn't very clear imo.

> Considering that a lot of innocent people are murdered by the state via jury and trial in the US the distinction isn't very clear imo.

~211 people were killed via trial sentence in the US in the last 10 years [0]. Presumably some of them weren't innocent. In the same time period (conservatively) 8500 were killed by law enforcement outside of the legal process [1].

Both are problematic, but calling <20 people/year (out of a third of a billion people) "a lot" is missing the forest for the tiny sprig of moss.

[0] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/database/executions?year=2024&y...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...

The Doctor Who meme here applies.

Is 5 a lot?

Depends. Potatoes? No. Murder? Yes.

Maybe. But do you have an example of a society that do both death sentence and provide fair trial plus peers conviction?

Making prevailing the idea that some humans can reach a level of certainty that is high enough to put a death sentence on some people they didn’t even knew before that is telling a lot. Like, we humans never make errors, we don’t have any kind of cultural and idiosyncratic biases, we never have conflict of interest and we can’t be manipulated by miscellaneous social forces.

Murder is bad, and murder en masse committed through institutionalized legitimating mechanisms is thus extremely bad, as as many times as bad as how many people it kills.

Legal murder through institutions never prevented a society to have "random" citizen going awry and kill other people, but it never missed to add supplementary threats to all their citizen.

You could easily argue the opposite is also possible to be true - if by "murder" you mean "killing" in general.

It's quite possible for someone to hold that a killing in self-defense is much more defensible than the deliberate execution even after a conviction and trial of someone who is "no longer harmful to society" because they're locked up.

And which is currently fighting multiple wars around the world, or justifying support of many proxy wars which are killing thousands daily.

This. The cognitive dissonance is jarring. And no "that's different!" is no argument. Like it or not, our government leads by example. And the example is not a good one.

This is because the US is not one homogenous system of thought, but rather a mosaic of people with differing views. (This goes for any other country or population for that matter.)

A more constructive observation would be to consider the overlap in groups of people who (1) hold that murder is indefensible in any case, and (2) hold that death sentences are appropriate for crimes. While not sharing that view myself, I could think of a few factors that may lead others to espouse it, such as:

- an implicit trust in authority and deterrents (follow rule, "or else");

- feeling of being mostly immune to errors in the justice system ("this would never happen to me");

- a propensity to desire revenge but only when it pertains to "others" ("I'm a good person, we must punish the bad people")...

Murder is by definition an unlawful homicide. This isn’t just pedantry; it’s the most parsimonious explanation for why someone would support the death penalty and object to something like the assassination.

It becomes pedantry of the law is not right. Eg. If the law is based on an oligarchy over a democracy.

Until the day we can point to a country that implements a direct democracy with a fair way to obtain citizenship for whoever is involved in its society, all laws will always remain a tool of a minority to arbitrarily rule a majority.

The concern is not whether laws are rights or wrongs, but which privileges and which hurts they reinforce for which classes in the society where the national myth is eager to present them as the applied rules.

> Until the day we can point to a country that implements a direct democracy with a fair way to obtain citizenship for whoever is involved in its society, all laws will always remain a tool of a minority to arbitrarily rule a majority.

There's Switzerland.

Switzerland definitely shows interesting political paths, they nonetheless don’t pretend to be a direct democracy.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/democracy/swiss-democracy-in-an...

Why the mixup of a well functioning democracy and a direct democracy?

For the same reason we might want to distinguish between well functioning government and direct democracy.

First, direct democracy is kind of a pleonasma, that is in its core democracy has to put equals duties and means to all its citizens. It's clear probably why such a system can easily attract masses, as it promises to maintain political power in the hands of those who have to obey it. Note that this definition insist more on duties and means, which is a very different promise from a populist statement on "righteous rights for everyone thanks to a turn key plan you don't even need to investigate on applicability". People certainly are interested with more democracy, so their slavers scam them with all kind of system under the label democracy which never give them these duties and means that you can expect to see attached to an effective democratic citizen.

The initial proposition was that it is pedantry to distinguish between the quality of the killing when the form of governance is not a well functioning democracy - something that would appear to be well established as the US has no issues going into other countries and kill leaders under the argument that it is not democracies.

The question is not so much the quality of the US democracy but to what extend it can even be classified as a well functioning democracy.

The US resembles an oligarchy, and when the laws are written by the rich and profit seeking that will affect how killings are perceived such as killing in the name of corporate profits will become alright.

It's a little different when a jury of your peers convicts you of a crime which was democratically passed by a legislature, versus a lone gunman who feels he is the judge, jury, and executioner.

The point here is that "democratically passed legislature" is not at people's service.

It's the least bad system.

It's legalized corruption to the max. It's the worst implementation of the least bad system.

If the U.S. is leading the world's economy with high standards of living, maybe it is only a bad implementation in some aspects but not all.

An elected legislature is a pipe dream in a country with gerrymandering.

Forget gerrymandering, a representative government is impossible as long as the Senate still gives the same weight to the 15 people in North Dakota as it does the 40 million in California.

Why? Apparently something excused murder in the death row case?

So expressing the sentiment that nothiong excuses murder and still having a death row is just I congruent and wrong.

In the death row case, the capital punishment isn't murder if you use classic definitions. If you change the definitions then it's only murder if you equate all homicide to murder.

And yes, both the will of the people and tradition can justify capital punishment.

That's fair. And in that vein the current killing of the ceo can not rightfully be deemed a murder as no one have been convicted of such.

But then again, the society apparently defines the quality of a killing - only future history will tell if this is a murder, and thst can go back and forth a lot depending on public sentiment.

America is the land of stand your ground laws in which a citizen may legally take a life if they feel endangered. Let's not forget the 1000 or so police kill every year.

It's justified when the committee is large enough and regulated enough?

Not to mention that we happily do extrajudicial assassinations outside of our borders, and the news falls all over themselves to celebrate them.

Everybody knows that plenty excuses a murder, we live in murderous states and in murderous times. The question is whether this murder is excusable, and one's opinion on it is probably dependent on whether one wishes they had that guy's job. Most people wouldn't do it for any price, but plenty would.

In the 20th century, I think the death sentence was only ever applied for first-degree murder and for treason.

A claim denial that results in denial of life-saving treatment could never be counted as either of those charges.

> A claim denial that results in denial of life-saving treatment could never be counted as either of those charges.

First-degree murder is when you willingly, and with forethought, plans and carries out the killing of a human. Which seems to me to be 100% what you described.

Denying a claim can not kill someone. Disease and injury killing a person. Claim denial prevents financial support for intervention in resolving a disease or injury. That is not the same thing, and equivocating them is sophistry.

I’d say that not equivocating them is sophistry. In both cases, someone takes a deliberate action that they know will result in an innocent person’s death. I fail to see why the exact mechanism should be so important.

If you’re shot, and I pull up a chair and watch you die without saying a word or helping in any way, especially if I get paid extra for refusing, I’m not sure if I’d call it murder, exactly, but I bet your family and friends would describe me as a killer.

Pulling a trigger can not kill someone. Bullets kill people. /s

The act of killing a human being is not inherently murder. It specifically communicates an unlawful killing, which the death penalty inherently is not.

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