The Case of Richard Glossip • Hacker News Board

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#141

Post by tajen » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 6:42 AM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #76

wtvanhest wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point about 20 years vs 1 is really important. Sentences have gotten so long for relatively harmless crimes that benchmarking becomes distorted. If anyone thinks about all the tings they will do in the next 3 years, then compare that to losing 20 years it can help show how long of a sentence that is.

Criminal sentences have their own flavor of inflation that seems rarely studied.

* in USA. The average jail time in France is less than 2 years. French people are often surprised of the length of the penalties in countries which seem similarly western, such as Luxembourg.

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#142

Post by heyrhett » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 6:47 AM UTC

Many people are also unaware of the high cost and inefficiency of the death penalty in the U.S. With 3002 (as of April 2015) inmates on death row, there were 35 executions in 2014. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf

Depending on the state, a trial with a death penalty could cost anywhere from half a million dollars more, to millions more than a trial without a death penalty.

Even at the absurdly high price of $35k per year per prisoner, life without parole is likely a cheaper option for tax payers than the death penalty.

I don't mean to say this is the only reason why the death penalty is wrong. We know for certain that provably innocent people have been put to death.

It's just that in addition to being morally wrong, it's also expensive and a waste of resources. The only reason I can theoretically imagine for keeping it around is that supposedly criminals might be less likely to commit a crime for fear of the death penalty. I think every serious study has shown that harsher penalties don't deter crime.

One of the best ways to actually reduce crime is to provide better early education for poor people.

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#143

Post by justin_vanw » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 6:51 AM UTC

So I just read whatever I could find on Richard Glossip and the case against him. On it's face it seems very likely that he is guilty.

It appears that someone had been stealing money and cooking the books at the hotels Glossip managed, and about the time his boss became aware of the theft, the boss was murdered. He admits to knowing that the boss was murdered and Glossip admits attempting to cover up the murder, his plan being to dissolve the body in acid. Glossip, as manager of the hotel the body was hidden in, reassigned cleaning staff specifically to prevent them from discovering the body. The person who is known to have performed the killing, an employee of Glossip's, says he was paid to do the killing by Glossip. Glossip also split money from the wallet carried by the man that was killed with the killer.

Glossip has had a trial and a retrial, and was convicted in both of them.

So maybe the death penalty is good, maybe it is bad. Clearly there is a serious debate there, and I am not attempting to defend the death penalty here. There is almost no chance that Glossip is innocent, and it seems clear, to me at least, that the state demonstrated he is guilty to the required standard.

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#144

Post by afandian » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 7:08 AM UTC

justin_vanw wrote: post #143

So I just read whatever I could find on Richard Glossip and the case against him. On it's face it seems very likely that he is guilty. It appears that someone had been stealing money and cooking the books at the hotels Glossip managed, and about the time his boss became aware of the theft, the boss was murdered. He admits to knowing that the boss was murdered and Glossip admits attempting to cover up the murder, his…

In all of the mistrials and cases where innocent people have been killed, someone has thought the party was guilty. The thing that makes the death penalty barbaric is that people have misplaced confidence in their opinions.

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#145

Post by justin_vanw » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 7:10 AM UTC

lisa_henderson wrote: post #69

johnnyg wrote: post #15

RE: How people are and the death penalty The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are. It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences. See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win…

About this: "Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform." How do you justify the statement that a jury is the best idea that we have? Germany has the concept of Schöffe, and some believe this offers results that stick closer to the law than the jury system: http://www.britannica.com/topic/Schoffe While any government of mortal human flesh must inevitably ha…

Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time. In all the common law countries you list, this is basically unheard of, at least in the last 400 years.

Our common law system has evolved to be resilient against many different things, rather than being designed to maximize efficiency of a few things. It is certainly not perfect, there is no doubt of that. Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.

Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder. The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries. That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#146

Post by mikeyouse » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 7:10 AM UTC

pdabbadabba wrote: post #64

gizmo wrote: post #24

I encourage everybody to read up on the horrors of how the death penalty functions in practice. Especially in combination with the plea-bargain system, that effectively robs > 95% of suspects from their constitutional right to a fair trial. Finally -- and I know this is only a minor point in comparison -- it's worth noting that pg doesn't have anything to gain by writing this, and people who stick their neck out by w…

> I encourage everybody to read up on the horrors of how the death penalty functions in practice. Especially in combination with the plea-bargain system, that effectively robs > 95% of suspects from their constitutional right to a fair trial. What do you mean by "in combination with," here? If you mean that the death penalty is used to convince people to plead guilty, I'm with you. But if you're saying that a large n…

I read his post as the death penalty can be a bludgeon that prosecuting attorneys will wield to get many more plea bargains from people accused of serious crimes. Pleading out to lesser offenses still with decades in prison is a much different calculation for the accused if the alternative is a trial with a death penalty vs. a trial with another decade or two on the end.

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#147

Post by derefr » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 7:12 AM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #113

johnnyg wrote: post #15

RE: How people are and the death penalty The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are. It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences. See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win…

"We build jails for people we're afraid of, and fill them with people we're mad at

We put the people we're genuinely afraid of in extralegal holding facilities instead. (Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.)

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#148

Post by justin_vanw » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 7:21 AM UTC

afandian wrote: post #144

justin_vanw wrote: post #143

So I just read whatever I could find on Richard Glossip and the case against him. On it's face it seems very likely that he is guilty. It appears that someone had been stealing money and cooking the books at the hotels Glossip managed, and about the time his boss became aware of the theft, the boss was murdered. He admits to knowing that the boss was murdered and Glossip admits attempting to cover up the murder, his…

In all of the mistrials and cases where innocent people have been killed, someone has thought the party was guilty. The thing that makes the death penalty barbaric is that people have misplaced confidence in their opinions.

There are two issues here that most commentary about this case seems to be happy to conflate:

- Is he guilty

- Should he be executed

These are independent questions. One is a question of fact, and there seems to be almost no credible reason to doubt his guilt.

The other is a question of ethics and policy.

As for your argument on why the death penalty is barbaric, it is not a valid argument. Reductio ad absurdum, your argument implies that every punishment is barbaric, because all punishment is the result of people's 'misplaced confidence' in their opinions. So if the death penalty is barbaric, it's certainly not because of the reason you say.

Don't take that as an attempt to justify the death penalty. I believe that almost all the prison sentences handed out in the US greatly exceed the severity of the crime being punished. I can't understand why any prison sentence would be for longer than 5 years in those cases where there is no chance of a repeat offense, no matter what the crime was. I also can't understand why we would ever want to let someone out of state supervision (prison or other) if there is a very high chance they would commit additional crimes if released.

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#149

Post by emgoldstein » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 7:25 AM UTC

nkurz wrote: post #132

emgoldstein wrote: post #128

I have to wonder: before writing this essay, did pg read anything written by anyone on the opposite side of this case? For instance, this? https://www.readfrontier.com/investigation/two-truths-and-a-... If not, it seems like a pretty remarkable procedure to arrive at such a strong conclusion, with no other information besides a brief summary by advocates for the defense. Has pg ever served on a jury? If so, would he…

Your questions (and link) are good, but I think you might be misinterpreting Paul's logic. He hasn't concluded that Glossip is definitely innocent (although he thinks he probably is), rather he's concluded that in the absence of physical evidence and with the majority of testimony being provided by a witness who has a clear motive to implicate someone else, that there must be "reasonable doubt". He may be wrong, and…

I've served on two juries. In both cases, a drunk driver was acquitted. In both cases, the defendant's guilt was obvious, and the cause was a single juror who hated cops. (Or, more indirectly, the cause was an arrogant young DA who wasn't aggressive enough in voir dire.)

On one of these cases, I was the last juror to hold out. It was like "12 Angry Men" in reverse: "12 Hungry Men And Women." It was 5pm, I wanted dinner and so did everyone else, and I didn't want to bring 11 other people back again tomorrow. So I took the easy way out, as did 10 other people.

On our way out, the DA thanked us sarcastically and noted that the defendant had two prior DUIs. If we'd given him a third, she pointed out, there might actually have been consequences. As it was... I live in slight terror of glancing at a newspaper and noting that he's erased someone's six-year-old, just because I was hungry and wanted to go home for dinner.

To put it slightly differently: a few months ago, a woman in SF suffered the death penalty. She was innocent. She just wanted to look at the sea lions, or something. Unfortunately, San Francisco had sentenced her to death.

The executioner was an illegal-immigrant drifter who'd been pulled out of ICE's deportation pipeline by "sanctuary city" policies originally intended for intellectuals fleeing El Salvador in the early 1980s. A couple of days before, he'd smashed the window on a car and stolen a gun, which he was using (according to him) to shoot at sea lions. A bullet

Is her death an accident? How about Glossip's? I know of one billionaire who cares a lot about Kathryn Steinle. I know of another billionaire who cares a lot about Richard Glossip.

It seems to me both these deaths involve the action of the State, in choosing to allow a human life to be taken -- in one case intentionally based on the determination of guilt, in another case negligently, based on -- honestly, I couldn't even tell you what this level of carelessness is based on.

Supposing Glossip is innocent -- which doesn't seem terribly likely once we read the piece above, which is far more detailed and down-to-earth than the emotional appeals that triggered pg. Then, his death would be an accident, wouldn't it? The State did not set out to kill an innocent man. It didn't set out to kill an innocent women, but it did that as well -- with far less thinking than went into Glossip's case.

Suppose our other billionaire, the one we adore here instead of laughing at for his ridiculous hair, had chosen to care about the other human life in question. Or, more to the point, the next 1 or 10 or 100 that might be sacrificed in this absurd and cavalier fashion. What would your response have been?

Re: The Case of Richard Glossip

#150

Post by bambax » Tue, Sep 29, 2015, 7:29 AM UTC

"There" is reasonable doubt doesn't mean much.

Reasonable doubt is not an observable quantity, like water on Mars; the question is whether jurors in the case doubted of the culpability of the accused. Obviously they didn't.

If they did, that may save this man's life, but do nothing against death penalty. Death penalty is barbaric; if you can make the case that guilty people should not be executed, I think it's much stronger than if you just argue in favor of the innocent.

... notwithstanding the fact that Scalia argued in 2009 that executing innocent people was perfectly fine: "This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent". (You have to love the quotes around the word 'actually').

- - -

Completely OT: inconsistent number of spaces after periods is very annoying (the second paragraph has one, the third or 7th have two for example; the 6th paragraph has both). The correct number of spaces after a period is ONE, but if you disagree, the least you can do is be consistent.