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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

#341

Post by kazinator »

nefitty wrote: post #336
klelatti wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK, so you don't believe in "evil", but you believe in "barbaric".

I believe that determinism and free will are entirely compatible. An algorithm has free will. More complicated algorithms have a more nuanced, richer free will. That's it.

For instance, a coin-operated machine that gives you a bag of potato chips in exchange for a dollar has a form of free will. It does that because it wants to. It is just not capable of telling itself it wants to do anything else; it's a low grade form of free will encompassing a tiny number of states.

(Killing evil is basically just terminating a buggy algorithm. If you don't like the baggage associated with "evil", maybe "defective" or "buggy" is better.)

The question of free will and determinism is made complicated by the possibility that a deterministic free will (algorithm) operates in a world that isn't deterministic. Suppose that your mind is an algorithm which will make exactly the same decision for the same inputs (including, of course, its own state: that's one of the inputs). Even if you get your mind to be in exactly the same state as when a certain decision had been made, you also need the world to be in exactly the same state. Only then is the algorithmic mind guaranteed to think the same thing and make the decision.

The world has so many states, and so does the mind, that the question of whether you are algorithmic or not makes practically no difference. Even if you are a FSM, your state space is so large, you will never be in the same state twice -- just due to the fact alone that you have life long memories that are are still accumulating, for one thing. And if you could rewind exactly a previous state, the surrounding world will not; and that has an even vaster state space.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#343

Post by adrian_b »

xdennis wrote: post #100
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…

Just because it's banned doesn't mean the debate is over: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BytxHbenQyQ/V_O2hw4mUXI/AAAAAAAA8... Some western countries have respectably high numbers: France 50%, UK 48%, Holland 42%. Not that the USA wants to be compared to us, but here in Romania it's at 91% and we still don't have it. (I suspect that romantic notions of Vlad the Impaler's time has something to do with the percentage.)

I suspect that the very high percentage from Romania has much less to do with Vlad the Impaler than with the fact that there are still a large number of people alive who remember the unusual circumstances in which the death penalty was abolished in Romania.

In Romania, the death penalty was not abolished by any democratic institution and that action was not preceded by any public debate.

The gang who seized power in 1989 in Romania abolished the death penalty immediately after killing the dictator Ceausescu to remove the competition, because absolutely everybody expected that many other people who had important positions in the Communist must be also executed immediately, because only that would have been consistent with the messages spread by the new power in the previous days.

However, the people who had seized the power could not kill any other from the Communist leadership, because those were their friends, family or accomplices, so they used the surprise trick of promptly abolishing the death penalty.

This unexpected action was the moment when many people woke up from the euphoria after the supposed fall of the Communism and they began to suspect that the people composing the new power might not be who they claim to be, but it was already too late.

The immediate abolition of the death penalty in Romania had its desired effect, of transforming the former powerful communists into rich capitalists owning what had previously been called "the wealth belonging to all the people", so it is still strongly resented by many who remember those events.

So Romania is a very special case, which explains the unusually high percentage of support for the death penalty.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#344

Post by rayiner »

It’s atypically sloppy of Graham to throw out the 4% number without mentioning that it’s just one estimate of a hard to ascertain number. One survey puts it much lower: https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&con...

> This Article challenges the seemingly developing conventional wisdom that the error rate in America’s criminal justice system is 1% or even higher. In fact, looking at the best available and current data, a conservative estimate of the error rate is somewhere close to the 0.027% posited by Justice Scalia.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#345

Post by mrweasel »

mbesto wrote: post #274
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…

What I learned from Criminology 101 in college was this: By far, the largest factor of deterrence was the likelihood of getting caught. So, people, do in fact rationalize "I'm definitely going to get caught and the consequences are bad, I won't do it". So, to your point, the punishment itself is largely a deterrence. I think because a rational human being simply cannot grok the differences in long term effects. This…

>By far, the largest factor of deterrence was the likelihood of getting caught.

Does that mean it prevents people capable (mentally and morally) from committing a planned crime or is it in general? Because everything I've seen says most people who for instance attack others almost never consider the consequences.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#346

Post by oconnor663 »

> When they find a suspect, they want to believe he's guilty, and ignore or even destroy evidence suggesting otherwise...This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with the death penalty.

There's a more charitable way to reach the same conclusion. Experienced cops must see dozens or hundreds of cases over their careers, where guys who "obviously did it" get off on technicalities or random chance. (This is an official TV Trope for a reason.) Even if we grant that that instinct is actually unreliable and often wrong, that's still a huge number of real cases where the "system didn't work". From an outsider perspective, of course, we tolerate that as a tradeoff to avoid convicting innocent people. But from an insider perspective, it's natural to come to see The System as an adversary, and to see your job as working around and compensating for that Failed System.

This is a problem, and it absolutely ruins a lot of innocent people's lives, and there are clearly ways we could address it on the margins. But at the same time, it might not be a central problem that we solve directly and completely. Rather, we could acknowledge that, to some extent, it's an expected component of a deliberately adversarial system. A lot of legal mechanisms work this way. My defense attorney's job isn't to be a perfectly objective arbiter of whether I should be in jail. Rather, their job is to make the best (most overwhelmingly biased) argument possible that I shouldn't be, and we leave it to the prosecutor (and their presumably opposite biases) to argue that I should. There are reasonable limits to this, and you can get disbarred for violating them, but for the most part everyone's biases are acknowledged and expected. That's not entirely true of policing, but it's part of the truth. Juries of our peers exist because we know it's not realistic to make the police or the judiciary solely responsible for fairness and justice. We can understand this as a normal part of human nature and system design, without necessarily taking a position on whether it represents "incompetence" or "dishonesty".

So...why nitpick these words to death like this? Because there's a symmetry here. When one group is calling another incompetent, it's a sure bet that the second group is calling the first clueless. And it goes without saying that both groups consider the other dishonest. Each side retreats to its bubble, and progress is impossible. The rhetorical habits that break this cycle are super important.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#347

Post by computerex »

I agree with the premise of this article, but there is a deeper issue at hand, how we decide who is guilty. Simply abolishing the death penalty isn't enough, there is a greater reform needed to reduce wrongful convictions.

At the end of the day if a man is wrongfully convicted, spending life in prison is hardly much better than the death penalty.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#348

Post by rayiner »

jpmattia wrote: post #316

To amplify Paul's point: The legal standard in all criminal trials is "Beyond a reasonable doubt": > The standard that must be met by the prosecution's evidence in a criminal prosecution: that no other logical explanation can be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty. And yet, DNA testing has exonerated man…

What does “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean in probability terms? Most people say 90-95%, which suggests even Graham’s 4% number (which is on the high end of such estimates, see: https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&con...) is actually consistent with the system working as designed.

Also, while you’re thinking about that, what’s your estimate of the probability that Derek Chauvin’s negligence was the but for cause of George Floyd’s death (and not some other factor mentioned by the defense expert in the case such as his health or drugs). Note that’s a scientific question—but for causation is an element of the crime. It’s not enough that what Chauvin did was reckless as to human life. His recklessness had to be the cause. Are you 99% certain of that?

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#349

Post by tstrimple »

snakeboy wrote: post #206
tstrimple wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's just kill fewer innocent people and it's fine right? Why won't you compromise with us?!

You can laugh all you want, but killing fewer innocent people is in fact a good thing. If you can't see the value in that, then politics is not for you :) I think we should celebrate that kind of incremental progress so long as it's not progress towards some kind of inescapable local minimum. And even in that case, it just becomes more complicated, not obviously wrong either.

Reducing the number of innocent deaths is an improvement. It doesn't feel like it's worth patting yourself on the back over reducing the number of unnecessary deaths cause when the process itself should be eliminated. I reject the idea that "politics" means negotiating over how much completely unnecessary human suffering is acceptable because we have to compromise with the people who want humans to suffer for one reason or another. Not every issue has two sides. Sometimes people and ideas and practices are simply wrong.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#350

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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