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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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