Hacker News Reader

Comment by fracus | Hacker News Reader

It is worrisome someone would have to prove innocence to remain off death row.

I am firmly in the camp of the justice system should never execute anyone. It's a one way door that presumes the system is infallible and we've had proof after proof of cases where the system failed.

All sentences are a one-way door. You don't get years of your life back, or the skills that atrophy in jail if you had any before.

Indeed. But a death penalty can't even give you back your remaining ones once you're found innocent, so it's worse in some sense.

If you are sentenced falsely, would you liked to be killed or you would choose to spend some time in jail and be released when proved innocent?

What you are giving here is really false equivalence which contributes absolutely nothing to the conversation.

Are we talking life sentences, or a year or two?

If I have to spend 20+ years then my life as I know it is over because there’s no way I’m coming out the same person that went in.

But you are coming out, nonetheless.

That’s not in disagreement. The question is how traumatised that person coming out is.

Given the choice of 15+ years in maximum security US prison or death, id unequivocally choose death.

Not even sentences. I've known multiple people who have been incarcerated over a decade on allegations in pre-trail detention ("jail"). You don't need a sentence to lose years of your life.

The land of "human rights": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolutions_concerning_death_p...

The justice system relies on the concept of guilt beyond reasonable doubt. That standard doesn’t mean “proved to be impossible to be innocent.”

In a system that is in a population of millions of people, there are bound to be edge cases where there’s a lot of damning evidence and people look guilty who just aren’t.

It’s one of the many arguments against capital punishment. It can’t be undone.

>It’s one of the many arguments against capital punishment. It can’t be undone.

Neither can time spent behind bars.

The time served can’t be undone but the incarceration can.

And there's little details like $320k settlements for wrongful imprisonment to help transition back out of prison... Harder when you're dead.

I’ve seen interviews with people how have been wrongfully imprisoned for extended periods and they’re changed in irreversible ways.

Some of them are unlikely to ever integrate back into normal society.

> Some of them are unlikely to ever integrate back into normal society.

This is an indictment of the system itself. If it damages innocent people who are wrongfully jailed so badly, how can anyone ever hope it'll turn actual criminals into citizens?

That’s also true. Though I’d see it as a separate, albeit related and just as crucial, point.

> The justice system relies on the concept of guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Does it, in reality? With trials and layers being life destructibly expensive?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com