281–290 of 546 posts
One of the crazy parts of his story was how the state dug in its heels and did everything possible to prevent him from being acquitted, long after the new evidence was introduced.
Here's a simple question: "would you trust a random politician with the life of your loved one if said loved one's life stood between the politician and greater political ambitions?" If your answer is yes, then by all means, support the death penalty. If you don't trust ambitious politicians, then you can't trust the process for selecting who is to be put to death by the state either, because DAs and AGs are politici…
I heard another interesting thought experiment on this topic recently. It said there should be a referendum about whether to keep (or adopt) the death penalty, but the names of everyone who voted for allowing the death penalty would be recorded in a list. Then, whenever someone sentenced to death was later found to be innocent (or pardoned), a random name on the list of "Yes" voters would be picked to be killed in pl…
If society converges on spontaneously destroying some human entities it deems a threat, it seems that this behavior arises from the chaos and can not be stopped (since it is found in every human society in past history).
The alternative is to treat murders equivalent to the Bernie Madoffs of the world, which some people might find unjust.
In any given year, there are relatively few executions in the US — in recent years it has been around 25. [1] If we assume the 4% figure as correct, then every four years there is one innocent person who is executed.
That is a terrible outcome. But it's quite possible that eliminating the death penalty completely would cause at least 2 more deaths every four years.
I'm not advocating for or against the death penalty — just pointing out that if the goal is to minimize the death of innocent people, we might want to consider second-order effects. I will admit that state-sanctioned killing of innocent people seems worse than general killing of innocent people. At the same time, if the government makes a decision that it knows will result in a net increase in the number of innocent people killed, the fact that they're not sticking a needle into the arm of the innocent people who will die is somewhat less of a salient distinction.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...
If this had been written by anyone but pg, the headline would've been changed to "A Reason to End the Death Penalty" :D
If we did that, commenters would complain "yet again, the HN moderators completely change the meaning of a title with their invasive and random editing. It's infuriating." And in this case they'd be right, because in this case the definite article and the word "real" are essential—the article's argument doesn't really exist without them.
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 p…
[1] https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt....
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 p…
Re 2): Again from [1], I've heard executions are actually quite expensive. Thus, it doesn't scale well.
Re 3): It doesn't make me feel safe if somebody can frame me and get me killed. It makes me feel safer knowing I have time to prove my innocence.
Re 4): I am very skeptical of this claim. Any solid evidence for this being true? Anecdotal evidence shows the opposite. Most criminals don't have good long-term thinking skills, so they won't recognize the tradeoff between 40 years in prison and death, and use that to not commit a crime.
[1] John Oliver on death penalty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kye2oX-b39E
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.
This position is, from my viewpoint, indistinguishable from that of a mass murderer, as that is literally what you are calling for. By a strict logical interpretation, you might consider executing yourself as you have met your own stated criterion for being eligible for execution.