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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

#331

Post by greedo »

Sebb767 wrote: post #110
hedberg10 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can never 'match' the crime. Even if you go justicing around 'an eye for an eye' style, the perp will always have taken the initiative. You can never get that back. Everything you do is just a reaction. That is what makes crime so heinous. So your focus should be prevention at any cost first and foremost, then justice as prevention (= rehabilitation) as well. Murdering a murderer is pretty solid prevention though…

> You can never get that back. Everything you do is just a reaction. Yes, but you can try. I can see why the loved ones of a murdered person feel someone is 'getting away' when he is still alive. Killing them feels much more like payback. I don't that this does reasonably make sense, but I can understand where they are coming from.

As the loved one of a murdered person, I can speak to this. Nothing will bring back my loved one. Nothing. Gone forever. A hole left unfilled for eternity. Executing her killer won't bring her back. It won't help anyone "heal" or "find solace" or any other words that politicians use.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#332

Post by Per_Bothner »

chrisco255 wrote: post #269

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.

"There was a killer in Norway that murdered something close to 70 people 8 or 9 years ago."

Assuming you're talking about Breivik and the Utøya-massacre, that happened in 2011. And he is unlikely to ever "go free". He was sentenced to "containment" (sikring), which can extended indefinitely (and almost certainly will be).

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#333

Post by throw0101a »

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…

> I'd rather the burden of justification be the other way: what does the death penalty actually achieve, with a high burden of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that as a policy it actually benefits society as a whole.

In the past: societal self-defence.

Older prisons were not as secure, and so the risk of dangerous people escaping was high(er). If they got out they could do more harm to innocent people. This is less of an issue in modern developed countries which have pretty secure buildings now, especially for those classified as the most dangerous.

This may be less true in other countries where prison you may hear about prison breaks, with or without external help:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazni_prison_escape

* https://globalnews.ca/news/7740153/nigerian-inmates-freed-at...

If you think there's little/no chance of reform, then keeping someone around that will likely strike again is asking for trouble.

See also David Oderberg's book Applied Ethics.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#334

Post by cameronh90 »

spawarotti wrote: post #289
whatever1 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've heard the "1) Low Cost" is false. [1]. Mainly because it takes time and effort to actually execute someone, to give plenty of time to find evidence exonerating them. That delay and proceedings end up being way more expensive than just letting them live. 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…

Arguably the USA should be granting all those same levels of appeal to someone NOT sentenced to death too.

If 4% on death row are innocent, despite all the extra appeals and proceedings we grant them, how many people serving life are innocent?

The idea that America is imprisoning innocents left and right but it's fine because at least they're not being executed is twisted to me. I would marginally prefer being alive to being imprisoned for life, but the latter is pretty terrible too.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#335

Post by sneak »

saagarjha wrote: post #5

This is the obvious reason, but of course there are many more: executions are quite expensive, they don't seem to actually deter crime, they're fundamentally pessimistic ("this person will never be useful to society"). Plus, they're kind of unnecessarily cruel: if we wanted to execute people painlessly we could just pump a room full of nitrogen and let the person drift off into unconsciousness and death relatively qu…

I have a personal theory that the correlation between the popularity of religious fundamentalism and the presence of popular support for the death penalty in southern US states has a common underlying cause.

There seems to be a certain draw of the Sodom and Gomorrah treatment in some people that draws a straight line from modern day human culture in those places directly back to ancient desert folktales through all these thousands of years. Perhaps it is the belief that actions undertaken in the here-and-now aren't ultimately that important, a sort of cosmic nihilism with regards to the physical reality we live in.

We still have so, so far to go.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#336

Post by nefitty »

klelatti wrote: post #300
kazinator wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're reducing a human being to a single binary classification - evil or not evil - an assessment that ignores the circumstances of their life, mental state etc at a particular point in time. You're also saying that you're prepared to ignore the wider impact that the act of executing that individual has on society. On the apparent grounds that the dead victim is somehow vindicated (which I can only interpret as mean…

Whatever rationalizations people make, I think ultimately, a belief that some people are evil is what the death penalty hinges on. I don’t believe in free will, thus I don’t believe in moral culpability, this I don’t believe in evil.

From that vantage point it seems extremely barbaric to me to put anyone to death. They had no say in the circumstances that led up to who they became. I have similar feeling when I think of severely mentally disabled people being executed, which a lot of people probably share even if they do believe in free will.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#337

Post by [deleted] »

notsureaboutpg wrote: post #255
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…

>what does the death penalty actually achieve, with a high burden of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that as a policy it actually benefits society as a whole. I think the death penalty does deter people from committing certain crimes. But many many people don't. (for the record, I also believe in abolishing the death penalty where I live where many innocent people fall victim to it). The problem is this isn't somethi…

[deleted]

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#338

Post by otalp »

slg wrote: post #244
otalp wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Video isn't truly irrefutable. Two people can look at the same video and draw different conclusions. You can see this anywhere from instant replay review in sports to some people's reactions to the Chauvin verdict.

I agree that video isn't de facto irrefutable, but there are several irrefutable cases involving video.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#339

Post by closeparen »

svieira wrote: post #317
closeparen wrote: post #282

It seems to me that multi-decade prison terms are at least as severe as death. It doesn't seem terrible as long as prisoners are able to kill themselves. But a life sentence in a prison with effective suicide prevention seems far harsher than a lethal injection next week.

But a life sentence in prison with a noose in it is humane?

Once you've decided to throw someone's life away, keeping them around to experience their thrown-away life is not particularly kind, is the point.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#340

Post by Eezee »

chrisco255 wrote: post #269

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.

I have no idea why you would think that. The maximum sentence is 21 years, they much is true, but that doesn't mean he will be released. There will be extensive psychological evaluations and the sentence can be extended indefinitely if Breivik is still considered a danger to society.

This seems honestly like something you would read on a far-right conspiracy website about what a liberal hellhole Europe is.

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