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Comment by Legion | Hacker News Reader

Focusing on the death penalty is completely missing the point.

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.

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While I still agree with your main points, it should be pointed out that any process that can be actually executed by real humans will throw up false positives. For that matter, any process actually executable by a benevolent AI will throw up a certain number of false positives, too. We need to be ready to deal with that.

So, both faulty process and the death penalty is the problem.

Well then you need a benevolent AI and universal surveillance nanotechnology.

At that point, it'd probably be more economical to just have the universal nanotechnology modify humans to be unable to commit crimes, indeed, unable to think them.

That can't possibly go wrong.

Better, both of the above and the AI is bright enough to contrive that a crime fails when it isn't targeting a willing victim or a sockpuppet.

You're solution is to have a perfect system? That's not possible.

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.

>> You're solution is to have a perfect system?

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.

I'm not sure I follow. If you admit that you'll still end up with innocent people being sentenced to death, you haven't fixed anything. You can work on not convicting innocent people and remove the death penalty, they aren't mutually exclusive.

Summary: Eliminating the death penalty without fixing the trial process will still send innocent men to prison for a very long time.

Hard to do though.

> Eliminating the death penalty without fixing the trial process will still send innocent men to prison for a very long time.

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.

People have their opinions on what sort of life is worse than death, so I won't argue with you.

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.

> People have their opinions on what sort of life is worse than death, so I won't argue with you.

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.

Comparing death penalty to exception handling is the most distasteful metaphor ever. The real problem is that death penalty does not serve as deterrence. That is the problem.

Luckily, the analogy had nothing to do with the death penalty, and was simply about focusing on the symptom instead of the root problem.

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.

> The real problem is that death penalty does not serve as deterrence.

What do you suggest in order to deter an innocent man from committing the crime that he never committed?

That was not my point. My point was that death penalty does not prevent actual criminals from murdering people. Hence, I don't see what is the point of capital punishment. Moreover, I don't think that judges and juries should have the right to play God and decide who lives or dies.

I agree with your comment about the DP not being a deterrent. People who murder people aren't thinking, "I can handle life without parole, but gee, I can't handle that death penalty!". Thoughts about consequences only begin for them after getting caught.

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.

According to Freakonomics it does. But the deterrence isn't the only aspect important to the matter. The risk of false positives alone is enough to forget about possible deterrence value. And that's not even about the ethics of the matter.

1) Economics is called the dismal science for a reason. I don't care what Freakonomics says.

2) I believe that the risk of false positives should be enough reason to abolish the death penalty.

I absolutely agree that the risk of false positives is enough reason. I can't understand how people think that can be acceptable under any circumstances. I'm just not sure that the death penalty is not a deterrent.

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