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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

It’s not cheaper, and it really can’t or shouldn’t be.

In the US you have a right to appeal your sentence, which is a good thing. If the government is going to be killing people, we want to (at the very least) make sure they have dotted every “i” and crossed every “t”. You have to pay someone to read these appeals, typically an attorney or multiple attorneys and/or a judge. There can be a backlog so it can take awhile to get through all of them.

This is inherent to how capital punishment works in the US, and anything less would be borderline tyranny, so I reject your framing of it as “aberration or some dumb policy”.

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Well I reject your framing of it being impossible. If it is cheaper to house and feed a man for sixty years than it is to kill him, that is a policy decision, not a law of the universe. Other respectable countries manage to achieve this.

Those policies are there to make sure all possible appeals can go through. And can you believe even then it's not enough to stop all executions of innocents?

At the end of the day, the death penalty's only possible justification is retribution. It does not deter crime and incapacitation of the criminal can already be achieved by locking them up. Your logic presupposes that "an eye for an eye" is a legitimate philosophy for a modern State to hold, which is reprehensible.

The philosophy of a state should be that which engenders the greatest wellbeing among its citizens. People largely feel a greater trust in the state and a greater sense of justice and peace of mind when heinous criminals are killed. Ivory tower philosophizing at the cost of social unity is not so great. Some innocents will die; we accept worse consequences for smaller gains. There have only been ~140 people in the history of the death penalty who have been exonerated from appeal. 140 people die in war every day for less worthy ends.

How do you explain the Nordic countries and Western Europe generally, where retribution has been explicitly rejected as a principle in the criminal justice system? Moreover, how would eliminating the death penalty endanger social unity?

1. Cultural homogeneity; 2. When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done, breeding vigilantes and unrest. Especially when they get released early, but even if they are never released.

Sorry, is there any evidence for point 2 or is this just vibes? Violent crime is significantly lower in these countries than the US.

There are a billion potential reasons for this, but it doesn’t appear to be that people have started dawning costumes and LARPing as the Punisher in large numbers.

Evidence for "When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done" is the history of any society prior to 1800 and basic human nature? I don't know, read history and literature and philosophy of the premodern age, or I guess you could call it vibes sure. I believe it to be true and find it self evident.

Well, good thing we don't live in any time prior to 1800! What even is that answer? Of course premodern societies would appeal to different aspects of human nature in different ways. The question is whether a society can sustain its own survival and welfare even when certain facets of human nature are frawned upon and discouraged. I see no reason for doubting that this is the case for the retributive instinct, at least when killing is involved.

It is decidedly not self evident given that it is directly contradicted by statistical evidence. Again, violent crime in most European countries is significantly lower than the United States. I would agree that there are lots of reasons for it but it certainly doesn’t appear that the lack of capital punishment is causing massive spikes in crime.

Eudamoniac is pretty clear that this is entirely about their feelings. When the state murders somebody it feels good and when it doesn’t murder people it feels bad.

> society needs to feel that the state executes justice

> People largely feel a greater trust in the state and a greater sense of justice and peace of mind when heinous criminals are killed

> people feel that justice is not being done

(and again)

> people feel that justice is not being done

They’re not going to give anybody a rational argument here because

> I guess you could call it vibes sure

It’s like asking somebody to justify why they’re really into ABDL stuff. The important part is that they just are, and won’t be talked out of it.

Correct. The value judgements (feelings) of the demos should be reflected in the policies that the democracy enacts and is governed by. That's part of what a government of and by the people means. Governing by any other system, like utilitarianism, or arbitrary moral principles like 'killing criminals is wrong' that the majority of constituents don't hold, needs heavy justification, and may not be justifiable in a democracy. If you'd prefer an oligarchy or monarchy wherein someone can impose their own minority value system on the people, even if that system objectively results in 'better outcomes' whatever that means to you, that's fine, but just be honest about it.

In brief, it doesn't matter what "is best" in some utilitarian framework if the democracy is not attuned to that framework. It doesn't matter if the death penalty actually increases crime. What matters is that the government should be doing what the people want it to be doing. If the people really want to kill criminals, any system that prevents that is non-democratic.

> 1. Cultural homogeneity

Can you elaborate on this? How does cultural homogeneity relate to the State being able to ditch retributive principles?

> When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done, breeding vigilantes and unrest. Especially when they get released early, but even if they are never released.

That just seems like a problem for education, no? If people are told by their teachers and other figures of authority that retribution isn't good, that should be enough. Again that's how the Nordics do it and it seems to be working out for them.

Most other “respectable” countries have actually gotten rid of capital punishment entirely.

I think we are at a fundamental disagreement though; I think it should be expensive and difficult to execute someone. I think the slow appeals process is a good thing. It should hard for the government to kill people who aren’t a direct threat.

I don’t know your politics but it doesn’t matter the specifics. Imagine whichever politician that you think is most stupid and tyrannical. Do you really want to give them the ability to rapidly kill people they don’t like without at least some bureaucratic checks in place?

Politicians don't convict people. It's not a political issue; the person was convicted by a jury of their peers, which philosophically should indicate something important: the body politic unanimously believes he is guilty of heinous crimes. They believe beyond a reasonable doubt that this man, for example, raped and killed a dozen infants. Then in the court of appeals it was upheld. I believe that it is better for society* in that case for that man to then be swiftly executed.

* In the sense that society needs to feel that the state executes justice and that such people are not being kept alive on their own dime. That breeds contempt for the system and for the state.

We can certainly agree that if an innocent person is executed that is just state-sponsored murder, right?

The jury system of the US is a good system but it’s certainly not immune to mob mentality. It’s certainly not immune to appeals to emotion. It’s certainly not immune to any number of the things that make humans human. This is partly why we have an appeals process. If we are going to put someone to death, I think it’s better for them to be given every single avenue possible to prove their innocence so that we aren’t murdering someone innocent.

We are just disagreeing about the ideal number or length of appeals, then. You can never be 100% sure; you could allow a constant state of appeal forever. This applies just as much to locking someone innocent away for life, which is also a big problem, but we don't allow infinite appeals for that either. I just think the current amount of appealing is too much.

If we can’t be 100% sure then I think maybe we shouldn’t have potential state-sponsored murder of innocent people.

People who are a risk to normal society do need to be separated, and for that I am willing to not be 100% sure (though with plenty of chances for appeals). If we lock up someone for a crime they didn’t commit, we at least have the option to release them and potentially pay out some kind of financial settlement as a means of punishing the state for their mistakes. If you kill someone, there’s not really much of an opportunity to even try and make it right.

Politicians literally write the laws that people get convicted of violating, and they can write those laws pretty much however they want. A juror's job is not to decide if they think an act was morally wrong, it's to judge them against the law as written. Laws can and have been written in all kinds of horrible and negligent ways.

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