The real reason to end the death penalty • Hacker News Board

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#261

Post by viklove » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #174

viklove wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You've broken the site guidelines badly, even relative to the rest of this thread, with name-calling, flamebait and slurs. Would you please stop doing that? We ban accounts that post this way—it's destructive to everything this site is intended to be. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Seems like I disagree with everything this site is intended to be.

Can you please delete my account? I'm sick of this site and its biased, self-righteous mods. I even sent you an email and everything, just like you asked!

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#262

Post by umvi » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #137

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…

I think the state legitimately reserves for itself the right to resort to lethal force. National defence and effective policing can require violence when necessary. The key issue for me is necessity. It is not necessary to execute criminals, even murderers. I do have sympathy for the view that murderers deserve death, maybe many of them do, but then you get into drawing lines between cases that deserve death and ones…

What if the criminal is extremely wealthy and powerful and can continue to exert his influence even from within prison (and possibly have a corrupting influence on prison guards)? This actually happens with cartel heads and crime syndicate leaders...

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#263

Post by sneak » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

I could not disagree with this position more than I do.

The police in the US are largely incompetent, it's true. Prosecutors and police regularly get things wrong, and what's worse yet is that it is often willfully so. They've far too much power, and the whole system needs to be overhauled, because it's rotten to the core.

That said: inaccuracy is not why the state should not murder people. Even if the system were replaced and could somehow become and remain provably 100% accurate, executing human beings is an abhorrent sentence.

There are certain inalienable rights that every human must attempt to preserve for every other human. Chiefly among them are a freedom from torture and freedom from being murdered by other human beings.

All other considerations are secondary. The moment we start treating human beings like objects and simply snuffing them out in response to perceived or adjudicated crimes, we become as a society no better than the common criminal. The fact that we have codified premeditated murder into law in some insane act of mental gymnastics will possibly be the thing that our so-called "civilization" will be judged most harshly upon come the verdict of history.

We have no claim to humanity or civilization whatsoever so long as we smite the life from living, thinking brothers and sisters at will, which is what a society having capital punishment has chosen to do with their system of law.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#264

Post by whatever1 » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

klelatti wrote: post #232

I absolutely abhor the death penalty. I do find this reliance on a single rationale to stop the death penalty problematic though: - For many people I suspect that there is a combination of level of proof and severity of crime that would lead them to say the risk of erroneous conviction can be ignored. - Someone will say let's focus on improving the justice system to deal with the errors. I'd rather the burden of just…

From a practical aspect a lot of benefits for death penalties: 1) Low cost. No need for jails and their associated costs 2) Great scaling. You can kill as many as you want, but you cannot build a jail every day 3) Safe. People don’t come back to repeat their mistakes. 4) It’s the only language that many criminals speak and understand.

The downsides are of a moral nature and twofold:

1) We should not punish innocent people. As societies we consider this as a huge and irrecoverable loss (What if we executed Einstein). 2) The state should not have the right to take the lives of its citizens. (Literally numerous examples from history why this can end up really bad)

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#265

Post by kazinator » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

klelatti wrote: post #232

I absolutely abhor the death penalty. I do find this reliance on a single rationale to stop the death penalty problematic though: - For many people I suspect that there is a combination of level of proof and severity of crime that would lead them to say the risk of erroneous conviction can be ignored. - Someone will say let's focus on improving the justice system to deal with the errors. I'd rather the burden of just…

The single rationale is perfectly fine.

If we had a magic oracle which supplies us with the absolutely correct guilty or not guilty verdict, there would be no problem with the death penalty.

> what does the death penalty actually achieve

Rids the world of an instance of evil, efficiently and permanently.

Vindicates victims.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#266

Post by nickff » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

abakker wrote: post #240

djoldman wrote: post #179

On the subject of deterrence: If someone commits a premeditated crime carrying a guideline sentence of {20 years in State A, vs 30 years in State B} do we really think that they're more likely to commit the crime in State A? It's my intuition that for the most part, people committing crimes aren't thinking about potential repercussions, much less measuring them. I mean is someone thinking "Oh, only 10 years? I'll do…

I think most people who commit crimes do not believe they will be caught. Most data shows sentencing shows no deterrence. Alternatively sometimes fines do more to deter than other penalties. A theory I remember from a college class on the topic were that sentences are so unevenly applied that many people reason that they won't actually get the max sentence.

The data I've seen agrees with you, but it's subject to survivor-ship bias, and I've never seen someone correct for that bias in a convincing way.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#267

Post by thomastjeffery » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

rswail wrote: post #8

The death penalty is immoral and unethical. The state should not have the power over the life of a person. However, the problem with removing the death penalty in the US is that it will not deal with the underlying systemic racism and the misaligned incentives of police and prosecution to "get a conviction". So yes, if the death penalty is removed, there is one less barbarism. However, for those who are not on death…

So your argument is that if we stop threatening the innocent with death that we won't care enough about their situation to work to exonerate them?

I call bullshit.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#268

Post by AlgorithmicTime » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

On the contrary, the death penalty is vastly under-applied. Crimes deserving of the death penalty should be tried rapidly, within weeks, and the guilty party hanged no more than a month and a half, two months after their crime. I'm ok with up to a 10% false execution rate, after Blackstone's Ratio.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#269

Post by chrisco255 » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

I think death penalty should be abolished for all crimes except mass murder. There was a killer in Norway that murdered something close to 70 people 8 or 9 years ago. Thanks to maximum sentences in Norway being 18 years or so, the guy will be walking free in another 9 years time. I'm sorry, but some people just want to watch the world burn and those people should be put down.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#270

Post by clairity » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

otalp wrote: post #216

kelp wrote: post #188

I'm glad this is being shared widely, because I agree with it. That said, I have to snark a little about it, because I was in high school, in the 90s, when I came to the same realization about why the death penalty is wrong. So this seems pretty obvious to me. Our justice system is not reliable enough to have the death penalty.

I mean, there are cases where you have clear video evidence of murder, or mass shootings where it's obvious who the killer was with 100 witnesses. If a proposal came to redefine the threshold for the death penalty from "beyond reasonable doubt" to "irrefutable" then the arguments here would not hold.

also, given the collective (non-)evidence, we should expect that the number of people who are irredeemably and imminently threatening, and therefore truly deserving of the death penalty, to be extraordinarily small, like 5 sigma, rather than 2-3 sigma, which seems to be the mental model implicit in our justice system.

with such extraordinarily tiny incidence rates and an erroneous implicit mental model, it's no surprise that we misidentify the truly irredeemable so often. our implicit expectations simply get in the way of being impartial and objective.