The Death Penalty in Louisiana
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
That is so, so fucked up. An attorney, someone whose job it is to impartially argue the law, equally to everyone, saying "Yeah you know, we kill people FOR REVENGE." Not even, you know, hey if we have the death penalty it'll maybe make people think twice about committing a serious crime, but straight up saying "We're gonna get REVENGE on anyone who dares defy the law!" JFC.
*Edited to change judge to attorney
Which, in my book, does not excuse his attitude at all.
http://tomkow.typepad.com/tomkowcom/2012/07/a-few-short-step...
Note: I know absolutely nothing about the author of this piece. The writing stands on its own and is a series of interesting thought experiments attempting to justify revenge.
Obviously this is not directly relevant to the posted article, but just on a philosophical level.
One of several, and in civilized countries it is considered probably the least important, but it is still lurking out there.
And not in some disturbed mind's weblog. In serious legal literature.
Punishments are ... punitive, of course!
Suppose you break into someone's house and steal 50 bucks. You aren't just forced to return 50 bucks; you go to jail for a while.
Even in civil suits, there are "punitive damages": remedies awarded to a plaintiff beyond actual damages.
If you kill someone, then killing you is not even punitive really; it's like taking 50 bucks from someone who stole 50 bucks. The revenge is less than punitive. It's not true revenge. True revenge has a punitive aspect: it goes beyond the original offense. Killing is only revenge if the method is more fearsome and painful.
If a killer tortures someone to death, but is given a quick and merciful death, that falls short of revenge.
Anyway, deterrent value must never be the focus; that is a pseudo-intellectual liberal angle which detracts from the morality of the situation, which is about justice.
If a punishment's ability to deter is considered important, that leads to injustice. For instance, big punishments are handed down for small crimes to "make an example" which discourages others. E.g. six month prison terms aren't deterring petty pickpockets in some area, so we crank it up to five years.
You can say you don't believe in deterrents, but you surely cannot believe that it's good to have punishments that encourage to commit more crimes.
For what is worth I agree with you that deterring from committing crime is not the primary purpose of legal punishment, but I think that the primary purpose should be reeducation and reintroduction in society. You'll probably call that a crypto-socialist intellectual angle, but I don't think a just society can exist with both death and life penalty.
But your example is precisely of a deterrent gone wrong.
They clearly tried to deter kidnapping by making it a capital offense, and it backfired.
It is also unjust: an extreme version of my fictitious example of giving petty shoplifters five year sentences.
Zeal to create a deterrent resulted in a horribly unjust law, which backfired on top of that.
> I think that the primary purpose should be reeducation and reintroduction in society
Reeducation is more suitable for exhibitionists, shoplifters, embezzlers, ...
The risk of re-offending is there, but nobody dies, and there is a chance for improvement.
When it comes to violent crime, the focus of the criminal justice system must be to protect people.
> if you killed one person why not kill 50?
The simple fact that you can only be executed once already encourages multiple murders. However, you have a very valid point here in that some killers would be otherwise satisfied in perpetrating a single murder that involves torture might, out of fear of a tortuous execution, opt for "quantity over quality" and kill more people in a quick and clean manner.
If I read your comment, with my best guess as to what it said before the edit applied, it makes sense.
As it stands now, with the edit applied, it reads as if you don't think attorneys are supposed to express opinions on the philosophical issues or societal goals behind the laws, which is a bizarre notion.
And since HN does not report edit times on comments, I cannot tell which responses were pre-edit and which post-edit. (Not that reporting edit times would help much, since HN stops reporting minutes on comment times once they are an hour old...).
Several responses I agree with if they were posted before the edit, and strongly disagree with if they were posted after. And several more I agree with if they were posted after, and strongly disagree with if they were posted before!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incarce...
Tis truly a messed up place.
Hard to control for the different atmosphere in New Orleans though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Louisiana has the highest murder rate in the US (double the national average):
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...
Any analysis of # of people in jail which ignores the underlying crime rates is deeply flawed.
Try again?
From my reading it seemed the colleagues questioning his stability were colleagues by profession, not employer. Or they'd worked together many years earlier. Some suspected that he'd become inundated with the culture in the local DA's office, in which case he might not be so unstable compared to the rest (where they put up pictures of KKK founders). The checks, in this case, are with the voters of the parish, which seems unfortunate because they also elected his predecessor who was obviously satisfied with Cox's work to keep him on for so long.
Ideally, offenders eligible for the death penalty should perish in exactly the same circumstances as what they inflicted. Someone who starved an infant to death should be starved; someone who strangled ought to be strangled and so on.
(By and large it's good enough to have them permanently gone by any means. That's the important thing: erasing the mistake.)
Moreover, this isn't a throwaway account; you can deduce my identity without much effort.
People who disagree with your views on crime and punishment, or anything else, aren't necessarily trolls.
Democracy's a bitch, ain't it?
In countries where assisted suicide is legal people just swallow a pill and go peacefully to sleep. Yet in the US there is this "crisis" of not being abel to source the injections needed.
Pets are also put down very easily with a single injection which makes them go to sleep and the heart beats slower and slower until it stops in a few minutes.
Many medical doctors (persons with legal authority to prescribe drugs) and pharmacists (persons with legal authority to dispense drugs) object to capital punishment, and thus will not supply prisons with drugs that have the sole purpose of killing someone.
Also, allowing people to opt out on supplying the drug on matters of conscience is a slippery slope. What about letting people opt-out of providing abortions? Or marrying gay couples? A case could made for people refusing to do these as matters of conscience as well.
There also numerous reasons to be against the death penalty but not abortions, but something tells me I'd rather not have this discussion here and now [1].
[1] for what it's worth, an example not related but relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770221
If you bake a cake for a gay couple, you are part of a chain of actions that sort of, kind of, indirectly might offend your sensibilities.
Those two outcomes are vastly dissimilar - equating them because they are both "doing things you object to as a matter of conscience" is too reductionist by half.
But even the magnitude cutoff is arbitrary. At which point is the result "bad enough" that ethical reservations start to apply?
Yes, because you want politics on HN, but only the politics you agree with. All political articles should be flagged.
On what do you base this assertion? It's not like the parent poster submitted this article.
As I obviously need to spell it out to you:
- Some people's belief systems are against Gay Marriage
- Some people's belief systems are against the Death Penalty
Which set of personal beliefs is valid? Who decides which one should be allowed?
But gay marriage is now legal in all states, so representatives of the states are obligated to perform those services. The clergy aren't representatives of those states and so they can refuse, without legal consequence, to perform services they object to.
The death penalty is legal in most states, so some one within that state is obligated to execute people, though they could potentially refuse (at the likely cost of their job, perhaps more). But a pharmacist, as a private party, is not obligated to sell the tools of execution to the state. It's their own choice.
Not always, at least not in the UK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-32065233
Again, not commenting for or against. I just think that the philosophical arguments of where freedom of conscience butts up against other people's rights is an interesting topic.
They already can to both your examples. No doctor (excepting, perhaps, military doctors stationed overseas, or so I've been told but not confirmed) can be forced to perform an abortion. Similarly, no member of the clergy is forced to marry gay couples. The only people required to do so, now, would be state officials (justice of the peace) whose job it is to perform weddings and who work for the public (rather than being part of a private, though religious, practice).
No doctor, hospital, or medical facility has _ever_ been forced into providing abortions. Ever. None.
> Or marrying gay couples?
No private organization has or ever will be forced to marry gay couples. Ever. None.
> A case could made for people refusing to do these as matters of conscience as well.
They don't have to make a case. They can just do it. Now. And forever.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/19/death-penalty-b...
It's pretty crazy that drug companies are more ethical than telecoms. Especially considering all the problems with reproducability that we're seeing on the cancer treatment front and plummeting drug effectiveness.
The US company that used to make them "suspended production because it was suffering commercially as a result of having its drug connected to executions," not exactly based on moral principles.
There's also the difference that telecoms have (if secret) court orders mandating them to do so, while drug companies only have a few sales to lose (even at the peak of 300+ executions/year, it's probably not a very lucrative business).
It's so incredibly horrifying to me that it almost becomes an abstract concept, but then you read an article like this and - guilty or innocent - the true human cost and all that associated suffering comes right back to you.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/14/boston-maratho...
Reaction to the sentencing was swift with praise for the difficult work of the jury in making a decision that many said was just.
"My mother and I think that NOW he will go away and we will be able to move on. Justice. In his own words, 'Eye for an eye.' "
Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said after the decision that Tsarnaev's crime was not motivated by religion; it was motivated by politics. She said the gravity of the crime, the murder of a child, a police officer and two young women merited the death penalty.
"Check them off," she told jurors in her closing statement. She explained there should be no doubt his crimes met the aggravating criteria because they were premeditated, cruel, depraved and especially heinous.
Sweden can't afford cancer medication for certain people, but has no issues containing violent sadists.
http://www.svd.se/effektiv-cancermedicin-anvands-inte http://www.sydsvenskan.se/skane/hon-fick-ny-cancermedicin-ut...
Some people in the middle east tortured children, women and committed other atrocities while laughing and recording it.
Whats your take on that?
If the US didn't imprison so many people they'd easily be able to afford to house the actually violent criminals.
I don't disagree with the second statement, frivolous prison sentences cause all sorts of problems, but I disagree that life sentence costs are insignificant.
For the record, I'm very happy that people on death row get so many appeals. I'm very happy that some of those appeals are automatic (all states I'm familiar with automatically appeal any death penalty sentence to the state supreme court).
But given that the average death row inmate lives 20 years or so in custody, and that the average life sentence prisoner lives two or three times that long, and assuming that the people on death row don't get incredibly expensive food, it seems that the only reasons for a difference would be increased security costs (are life sentence inmates less likely to try to break out?) or costs not directly related to jail, such as legal appeals.
We could save a lot of money by simply denying appeals to inmates on death row, but I don't think that would be an improvement. If anything, the difference in cost between death row and life imprisonment suggests that life sentences aren't getting the same scrutiny that death sentences get, and we probably have more innocent people serving life sentences than awaiting execution.
Since the costs of appeals dwarfs all other relevant costs, it's just as true to say "under the current legal regime, appeals for death row inmate cost much more than appeals for life sentence inmates." That's a very different statement, and not necessarily something we want to fix.
If we did want to fix it, we could either spend less money on appeals for death row inmates (make it much harder to get off of death row/get exonerated), or spend more money for appeals for life sentence inmates.
Indeed, it might just be that we aren't doing everything we should to find wrongfully convicted inmates who weren't given the death penalty.
But that's certainly not the message people seem to be trying to make with the statement. The message I've always heard was "it would cost less to put him in jail for life." Or "it would cost less to get rid of the death penalty altogether." The first message has less impact when you realize that the costs involved are nearly all about legal appeals, not about running a prison, feeding the prisoners, etc. The second message is provably false: in a regime without the death penalty, the resources currently used to get people off death row would be used to get people out of life sentences.
'Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves. For 200 years everybody has been saying, "Prisons are failing; all they do is produce new criminals." I would say on the other hand, "They are a success, since that is what has been asked of them." '
https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/foucault-pri...
Frankly, I'm so weary of the problems in this country being justified by money. We trash the environment because it would cost money to do better. We underfund schools because we don't want to pay more property tax. And we try to kill convicts because it is cheaper... or we privatize the prisons so it becomes a profit center for somebody.
Even on HN, wealthy founders are hero-worshipped, and investors are treated like kings. There is some talk about meaningful work, but a lot more talk about monetization of <insert trendy app here>.
This is not a healthy, moral society in which we currently live.
Life in prison without parole is cheaper than the death penalty. In fact, it's 10x more expensive to put someone to death than to imprison them for life. [1]
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/05/01/cons...
...at the moment.
I bet if you ran the numbers for the 1930's, for instance, when the average time from conviction to execution was 14.4 months (the range was 4.6 months to 46.1 months) [1], the death penalty would come out cheaper than life without parole.
The cost argument is a risky one for death penalty opponents, since the cost can be fixed either by getting rid of the death penalty or by making it more efficient.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=8cYom4BacjMC&lpg=PA164&ots...
Not really. Because the precursor to the cost argument is that there is a trade off between between swift and being sure. The quicker you execute, the less certain you can be of guilt.
People are constantly being set free after being on death row for years.
The only way reconcile that with any concept of justice is to put more resources into gaining higher certainty. And even if you assume 100% certainty could, somehow, be gained...you then run into the cost wall.
Fact is, being pro death penalty is being pro arbitrary execution of innocent people....and spending a lot of extra money to do it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImQoyRs5cWc
It's easy, safe, cheap and humane to suffocate a delinquent with Nitrogen.
Those features are also obvious - so of course there are people in charge how do want the condemned man to suffer while dying.
That being said, abuse by the legal system of those who cannot afford to defend themselves properly has gone on for far too long and its not just a Southern thing. From the bail bond market to the plea bargain junket of Federal Courts, justice isn't the goal, successful prosecution is.
So until the goal posts are moved we are not going to fix this situation.
- it never really acts as a deterrent
- often the person on death row is basically in solitary confinement. So even if they are released, they are released crazy
- the penalty is quite final. there is no appealing afterwards
- it is mostly about revenge
- ripe with abuse
Currently the rate is roughly for every 10 guilty people who are executed, 1 innocent person is executed.
I don't care how you cut that statistic, it's too much.
Parent covers this essentially in this point:
"the penalty is quite final. there is no appealing afterwards"
The reason we have an appeal process is because an initial sentence can be wrong or inappropriate.
http://deathpenaltycurriculum.org/student/c/about/arguments/...
Since 1973, at least 121 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged. During the same period of time, over 982 people have been executed. Thus, for every eight people executed, we have found one person on death row who never should have been convicted.
The death penalty isn't the problem and never has. There are far too many people who have no place in society and there is zero benefit to society to continue their existence.
The jury system seems badly flawed and the whole system seems badly stacked against minorities. Especially blacks and latinos.
Then again, currently Sweden (all of Scandinavia) is on the extreme but on the other side.
That's the sort of rhetoric that normally preceeds genocides.
If not, then the fact that it has, doesn't make it false.
(I make no judgment about the claim itself, just about the argumentation.)
(anti-blasphemy commentator): How do you decide which half of the country gets to be the executioners?
This is not connected to crime and punishment in any way; merely not benefiting society in any way isn't a crime, let alone a capital one.