Did Texas execute an innocent man?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This is a more straightforward read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Willingham
Imagine a car being hit from the air by a Predator drone because analysis wrongly believes it's full of terrorists. Intended killing. They later realise they made a mistake a killed some family. Now it's unintended killing. Not much of a difference there by my reckoning.
"Broadly defined, collateral damage is unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities."
Source: http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part20.htm#pa...
If a Predator blows up a car and the family traveling inside it because some intelligence analyst believes it's full of terrorists, that is killing, pure and simple. There's no "collateral" here. If during the same strike, another car with another family is accidently destroyed by the blast, that is, indeed, collateral damage.
To summarize, if you destroy what you're targeting, there's no collateral damage. If you destroy something other than what you're targeting, then there's collateral damage. Collateral damage is unintended killing, but not all unintended killing is collateral damage. Hence, your argument is fallacious.
DoD manual: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf
Civilian families aren't lawful military targets.
To play Devil's Advocate: this man was a citizen. A State has fundamentally failed when it has executed one of its citizens.
Capital punishment in it's current form is not a deterrence to crime, it doesn't fix the problems caused by the crimes it is punishing for (it doesn't bring back the murdered, etc), it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole, and innocents have died at the hands of overzealous police, judges, politicians, and public opinion. So the question then becomes, why do it?
Do you have a source to back that up?
Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson ... was personally opposed to capital punishment... He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas - about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years.
This guy was collateral damage of the legal system, a (retroactively) unintended killing while we all heartily support the intended ones. The only thing different is the "retroactively" and even then the analogy holds, if the army bombs the wrong people then realises its mistake later.
If you're writing code and something keeps throwing nasty exceptions, you don't remove the exception handling - you fix the code.
Death penalty isn't the problem (leaving aside the traditional death penalty debate for a moment). Innocent people being found guilty, often by highly (and unnecessarily) faulty process, is the problem.
Cutting out the death penalty just hides the problem. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to avoid putting these people to death, but the actual problem needs to be identified and dealt with.
Cases of such magnitude need rigorous scientific oversight, not just the say-so of whatever self-proclaimed "expert" was on hand to drag into court that day.
So, both faulty process and the death penalty is the problem.
That can't possibly go wrong.
You'd have to really go out of your way to read it wrong to draw any sort of "this is comparing death penalty to exception handling" conclusion.
What do you suggest in order to deter an innocent man from committing the crime that he never committed?
I'm neutral on your second point. I think there are examples of criminals with crimes that are so sick and heinous in nature to where I could see the argument that taking their life away is a just and proportional penalty.
I do think there's one thing that has to be taken into account when talking about the DP, though: it seems to be a powerful bargaining chip. Here's a paper from earlier this year that finds criminals are significantly more likely to plea to life or long sentences in states where they may face the DP compared to states where they will not: http://www.cjlf.org/papers/wpaper09-01.pdf
There are papers, though, which make arguments that come to different conclusions. This is well outside of my area of knowledge, but my point in bringing it up is to identify it as another thing that bears consideration in the DP discussion.
2) I believe that the risk of false positives should be enough reason to abolish the death penalty.
But to torture your analogy more, its like saying instead of having exception handling in your programming, or crash handling in your operating systems, simply don't make any mistakes. All that happens in reality are more serious consequences for the mistakes that do happen.
No. My "solution" is to focus on fixing the part that's really broken, not the thing that later becomes an issue from that breakage.
That doesn't result in a perfect system. However, if you're not convicting innocent people very often, then very few will ever have the "opportunity" to face execution.
Hard to do though.
Actually, sending innocent people to prison will kill a significant number of them, especially if the sentence is "life without parole".
If you're innocent, you're actually much better off being sentenced to death.
I was simply saying that the parent of my above comment was arguing that the problem is doing bad things to innocent people, and that we are focusing on a subset of that problem, rather than the problem as a whole.
And then I said that the problem as a whole is hard to fix.
You misunderstand - I'm not saying anything about quality of life.
I'm pointing out that innocent people on death row are far more likely to be released than innocent people sentenced to life without parole.
In fact, even less than life sentences are frequently fatal.
Prison life is very deadly.
FWIW, death row is safer and has better quality of life in many respects.
This reminds me of a similar story I read recently about bite mark experts being used in murder investigations... just like these arson experts, they had no scientific proof of anything they concluded. People were still convicted of rape and murder based on their "expert" testimony.
Anyone who, either knowingly or negligently, contributes to the execution of any person later found innocent, is guilty of murder punishable by death.
Now, who wants to be the first to help put someone on death row?
Did Stacy have jealous boyfriend or secret admirer? She did work at a bar. Murdering Stacy's partner Willingham and their kids could bring them a step closer. Maybe someone was targeting Stacy. Who knows?
The system went for the dad because he was an easy target, and so the system could then move on.