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The real reason to end the death penalty

paulgraham.com

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Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#151

Post by viklove »

ruph123 wrote: post #78
tompccs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

49% of Brits would support the reintroduction of the death penalty. I suspect that the same is true across Europe and that you are living in a bubble. [0] [0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/should-the-dea...

> 49% of Brits would support the reintroduction of the death penalty ... for murdering a child. You forgot that part didn’t you? If you pull up the poll if death penalty should be reintroduced for all murderers only 32% are in support [0]. Please don’t pick and choose sources to make an argument which wasn’t even captured by the source. Also please don’t extrapolate to other countries like that. Us Europeans left the…

Us Americans left behind the death penalty as well, so you are being a bit nationalistic (racist?). The death penalty is against the law in nearly 1/2 of US states.

Even in the states where it is "legal," many have not carried out the procedure in several decades. They simply reserve the right to do so in the case where a child is murdered.

> The rest of the civilised world decided on this a long time ago.

But please, go on continuing to believe Europeans are superior to the rest of the world. I remember that working out really well for you guys back in the 1930s.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#152

Post by viklove »

capableweb wrote: post #130
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how prude the US is when it comes to sexuality This hasn't been true for decades.

No? As far as I know, nipples are still "banned" on most US social media platforms, but only if they are female. Male nipples are fine. Then children are usually shielded from anything remotely sexual in both real-life and from media while violence seems to be fine even for the youngest.

Yes, because corporate policies are the best picture of the current state of American culture.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#153

Post by ruph123 »

viklove wrote: post #151
ruph123 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 49% of Brits would support the reintroduction of the death penalty ... for murdering a child. You forgot that part didn’t you? If you pull up the poll if death penalty should be reintroduced for all murderers only 32% are in support [0]. Please don’t pick and choose sources to make an argument which wasn’t even captured by the source. Also please don’t extrapolate to other countries like that. Us Europeans left the…

Us Americans left behind the death penalty as well, so you are being a bit nationalistic (racist?). The death penalty is against the law in nearly 1/2 of US states. Even in the states where it is "legal," many have not carried out the procedure in several decades. They simply reserve the right to do so in the case where a child is murdered. > The rest of the civilised world decided on this a long time ago. But please…

> But please, go on continuing to believe Europeans are superior to the rest of the world. I remember that working out really well for you guys back in the 1930s.

That is unnecessarily snarky. The comment I was replying to was suggesting that basically the UK and the other Europeans would happily welcome back the death penality. Which is not true. I only said that "we" - the strawman used by gp - left it behind and made no statement about other countries.

You are the one getting all nationalistic.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#154

Post by advisedwang »

ck425 wrote: post #125

Can someone explain the logic behind District Attorney's being elected? I'm not from the US so don't understand the reasoning. Why are certain crimes prosecuted based on decisions of an elected official? That just seems obviously highly manipulatable to me.

The theory is that democracy allows the people to hold the DA accountable to the public good, vs an appointed DA who can use their power for political ends and is only accountable to the person that appoints them (who they can do favors for).

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#155

Post by ehnto »

true_religion wrote: post #139
ehnto wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trap you are both falling into is the thought that political discussions centre around trying to understand the other persons point of view. It is almost always the other way around, one person trying to persuade an unwilling party that they are wrong. So as the poster said, as right as you are, you would still lose the political argument if that was how you tried to argue for your view. You can be correct all da…

It’s all good and well to try and persuade someone, but like the GP sometimes I like to simply state my ideological viewpoint. The problem with narrowly arguing based on someone else’s ideals, is that any agreement isn’t a true meeting of the minds. For example people, once tried to end the deal then penalty by talking about to pain involved in hanging. Proponents agreed and eventually came up with the electric chair…

I do agree with you, I think we're also kind of discussing two separate points. Of course just stating how you truly feel is perfectly fine, I don't disagree with that at all. A meeting of the minds as you put it requires people are candid, agreement and compromise isn't really required for that kind of discussion.

Additionally we're also discussing whether or not that approach can be effective at bringing in good policy, and I think that's often not the case. A hard stance with a binary argument is just very difficult to work with, you end up giving the opponent no opportunity to compromise and so they don't, you end up with no policy being written and things don't change.

Policy making is very intentionally an attempt to make a vast array of different views from across a nation coalesce into something that can be made into law, so it requires compromise.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#156

Post by helloworld11 »

wideareanetwork wrote: post #2

I think no other justification is needed to end the death penalty than “it’s inhuman and barbaric”. Even discussing other factors arguments and considerations dilutes the core point that’s it’s straight up wrong unethical and inhuman to murder others in the name of the law. Paul Graham has a valid point, but if you say “it’s wrong cause it’s inaccurate”, implies it’s right if it’s accurate. And it’s not... the death…

Countries regularly kill others in the name of international laws about the preservation of peace and security. This has been the case since at least the Second World War, when many countries allied together to crush the Nazis and Imperial Japan. This was wholesale killing on a global scale for the sake of preventing certain states from doing more of their own vast killing while breaking many international norms, agreements and laws. Much of it was unjust, yes, but would you argue that an absolutist stance of it being wrong to kill others in the name of the law justified doing nothing while these ruthless empires conquered more territory and enslaved millions more people into a slow death?

Or how about self defense? If a person is protecting their lawful rights, home, property and family and in the process must kill an aggressor to do these things, should they just not do so out of a certain absolute ethical posture about the wrongness of killing other human beings? Just to clarify where your own fundamental posture on killing in the name of the law this draws some lines or exceptions.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#157

Post by bjourne »

mattmanser wrote: post #43
rswail wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "debate" has been over in all other nations that the US likes to be compared for years. It is similar to the "tough on crime" incarceration "debate" in the US, where perverse incentives and political expediency has led to the US being the highest-per-capita incarcerator in the world. Framing the death penalty debate around "innocent people get killed" will not change the partisan/class perceptions. The US crimin…

It isn't really over, even now it pops its head up now and again. There's probably more people who believe in it than you realize. For example in the UK 58% of people believe that the death penalty should be allowed for some crimes (e.g. terrorist attacks). Only 32% oppose it (presumably with 10% undecided): https://yougov.co.uk/topics/legal/articles-reports/2019/10/0... So far from being the majority view, often ant…

Not disagreeing with your stats, but it seems that the long-term trend is decreasing support for the death penalty in the UK: https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media-centre/archived-press-rel...

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#158

Post by [deleted] »

wideareanetwork wrote: post #2

I think no other justification is needed to end the death penalty than “it’s inhuman and barbaric”. Even discussing other factors arguments and considerations dilutes the core point that’s it’s straight up wrong unethical and inhuman to murder others in the name of the law. Paul Graham has a valid point, but if you say “it’s wrong cause it’s inaccurate”, implies it’s right if it’s accurate. And it’s not... the death…

[deleted]

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#159

Post by dang »

cies wrote: post #36

This is very US-centric. > at least 4% of people on death row are innocent. I expect in Scandinavia these numbers are different. But they dont have death penalty. From the news I learn that US cops also kill innocent people in the street. And it's military wages illegal wars killing 100s of 1000s overseas. I think the US has a weird relation with violence. The death penalty and how it uses it is merely a symptom.

This is a classic generic tangent of the sort the site guidelines ask people not to post to HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). You're changing the topic from a specific argument about death-penalty convictions to a generic, inflammatory point about how $country has a "weird relation" with $badness. This is how we get less interesting discussion, and also flamewar—in this case nationalistic flamewar, which we definitely do not want here.

If anyone wants more explanation, I wrote a detailed post yesterday about a similar case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894739

Edit: not only that but you stoked the flamewar downthread with posts about regime changes and putdowns about "civilized society". This is what I'm talking about. Please don't.

Edit 2: not only that but you did the same thing yesterday, and to judge by recent history it looks like your account has swerved into using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. Please don't—that's against the site guidelines because it destroys the curiosity this site is supposed to exist for. You're a good HN user so this should be easy to fix.

If anyone's worried about us being biased in favor of $country—here's an example from yesterday that went exactly the other way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26892927. We couldn't care less what color the flames are—we just want to have an internet forum that doesn't suck. When people starting arguing about whose country isn't "civilized" or whose there should be a "bloody war" with, we have dangerously high levels of suckage.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#160

Post by harshreality »

wideareanetwork wrote: post #2

I think no other justification is needed to end the death penalty than “it’s inhuman and barbaric”. Even discussing other factors arguments and considerations dilutes the core point that’s it’s straight up wrong unethical and inhuman to murder others in the name of the law. Paul Graham has a valid point, but if you say “it’s wrong cause it’s inaccurate”, implies it’s right if it’s accurate. And it’s not... the death…

Improper or mistaken convictions, where reasonable oversight would have detected the error, are barbaric. If you want barbarism, you can find plenty in the way the criminal justice system is run for all offenders.

Prison is inhumane and barbaric, and has the opposite of the intended effect most of the time. Many ex-cons have become hardened criminals through their time on the inside, and even for those who haven't and want to reintegrate productively, the outside world does its best to prevent reintegration.

How many innocent people are killed in prison, not by the state, or have their lives ruined? You can say as long as they're alive there's hope they'll achieve something and be happy, but statistically those prospects are dimmer every year they spend inside.

The only remaining good thing prison does is keep bad people from causing problems in society for some number of years. Which is the same thing the death penalty does.

I don't know if the most productive way to use political capital to reform the criminal justice system is to abolish the death penalty. Unjustified state-sanctioned death might be terrible, but so are things like the drug war which probably do more aggregate harm. In an ideal world we'd get rid of prisons somehow, too.

In addition to ending the drug war and trying to fix neighborhoods that have been broken by it, fixing misaligned incentives for prosecution and law enforcement to prosecute cases would have a massive impact, far greater than any squabbles about the death penalty. Too often the prosecutors and law enforcement have desire to convict someone, and the defendant is the best chance they have, so they go ahead. More neutrality has to be introduced somehow. Judges being allowed to direct questions to witnesses might be a place to start.

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