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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

#381

Post by sneak »

rayiner wrote: post #377
sneak wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conviction and plea bargain rates. Most (>90%) people who are charged (in the US) end up with either a guilty verdict or a guilty plea. IIRC even the ones that don't plead out are ~90% conviction rate, at least at the federal level. Doesn't jive at all with what we know of competence and bias levels observed in police and prosecutors in the US.

Most people plead out because they’re ridiculously guilty. I’m a crunchy hippie on criminal justice, but I’ve also seen these cases first hand working for an appellate judge. Prosecutors go after cases that are open and shut. You wouldn’t believe how much evidence there is in a typical case that doesn’t go to trial. They have the guy on CCTV with stolen goods in his car and cell phone records of fencing. Innocence Pr…

> Most people plead out because they’re ridiculously guilty.

I know many innocent people who plead out to avoid jail because they're looking at $250k in legal bills and a ~90% trial conviction rate. Juries, being amateurs, are not very good at avoiding bias, as they are completely untrained.

I'm not so sure that plea bargain rates are indicative of guilt either way.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#382

Post by chrisco255 »

sneak wrote: post #295
chrisco255 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. Self defense is moral and justified. And some people are more dangerous alive than dead. Worse, some people develop a cult-of-personality and a following that they can even control or influence from jail. You telling me a mafia or gang leader or a former dictator guilty of genocide doesn't deserve the death penalty? Naive, to say the least. You know little of true evil, which does exist and no amount of…

Someone held securely in prison does not pose an imminent threat to you, and thus an argument from self-defense is void. The fact that you move on so deftly to the word "deserve" suggests that it's vengeance you seek. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

> Someone held securely in prison

I already mentioned the cult-of-personality example above and you breezed over it. Gang leaders are fully capable of executing kills from jail. They have influence that extends beyond the 4 walls they're contained to. Some of them have access to a vast array of money and dangerous people who they can delegate to. They can also actively influence or harm other prisoners in jail.

Treating true psychopaths with kid gloves won't make the world a better place.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#383

Post by jandrese »

tobr wrote: post #214
asperous wrote: post #209

I believe the “real reason” to end the death penalty is that it’s so much more expensive the alternative [1]. If it doesn’t deter crime, and doesn’t save money, there’s really no point. [1] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs

Sure, killing innocent people isn’t great, but wasting tax money, that’s where you have to draw the line!

You'll move more state legislatures with money than innocent lives.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#384

Post by [deleted] »

pseudo0 wrote: post #136
_hl_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not from the US, so my knowledge on the death penalty is quite limited. But I clicked on a link posted below listing executions in Texas, and I was shocked to see that the most recent execution was last year for a crime committed back in 1993 . Why?? You've already locked the guy up for almost three decades, what possible benefit is there to executing him now? I get that he ruined (well, ended) someones life, but…

It's the result of a decades-long lawfare campaign by anti-death penalty activists. The more protracted and expensive it is to carry out the death penalty, the easier it is to argue for abolishing it on the practical grounds of cost rather than convincing Americans of the ethical case. A rather messed up byproduct of this is cases like the one you highlight, where the convicted person is left on death row for decades…

[deleted]

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#385

Post by lapetitejort »

ludocode wrote: post #278
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 agree. Some of the most violent criminals can't ever be re-integrated into society, so the only alternative is life imprisonment. I've seen many arguments that this is preferable to the death penalty because "We will accidentally execute some innocents", as Paul Graham's here, as well as "It costs more to execute someone due to the higher standard of proof required". In all such cases the corollary is "We can accep…

> Some of the most violent criminals can't ever be re-integrated into society, so the only alternative is life imprisonment.

I have to question this. Determining whether someone can be reintegrated into society cannot be determined during the sentencing process. I would rather prefer a Norway-like system where the max imprisonment time at the start is 21 years. At the end of that initial time, 5 more years can be added on if the prisoner has not reformed. The process repeats until the prisoner is released or dies. A small percentage of people will still die in prison, but I wager that that percentage will be less than the percentage of life imprisonment sentences currently.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#386

Post by JimBeans2131 »

sneak wrote: post #368
JimBeans2131 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By a strict logical interpretation, execution by death penalty is not murder. Dictionary definition of murder: "the _unlawful_ premeditated killing of one human being by another."

Violation of one's inalienable right to life (as written in the US declaration of independence, as well as the UN's universal declaration of human rights) is unlawful, regardless of any state legislation. States can't legislate you out of your human rights. One day the US federal courts will notice this error that they've made and fix the glitch. As Churchill famously said, "You can always count on Americans to do th…

Someone who violates an innocent persons inalienable right to life, thereby forfeits their own right to life.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#387

Post by snakeboy »

tstrimple wrote: post #349
snakeboy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

> Sometimes people and ideas and practices are simply wrong.

Of course, and I agree with you on this particular issue. All I mean is that if we can act today to chip away at the problem rather than just talking about the ideals, that's good, and in a democracy, that's what we accept as we work towards the ideal.

> 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.

Life's too short, I'm happy to celebrate progress. I'm proud to see the end of it in my home state of Virginia this year, even if it's not nationally outlawed.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#388

Post by sneak »

chrisco255 wrote: post #382
sneak wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone held securely in prison does not pose an imminent threat to you, and thus an argument from self-defense is void. The fact that you move on so deftly to the word "deserve" suggests that it's vengeance you seek. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

> Someone held securely in prison I already mentioned the cult-of-personality example above and you breezed over it. Gang leaders are fully capable of executing kills from jail. They have influence that extends beyond the 4 walls they're contained to. Some of them have access to a vast array of money and dangerous people who they can delegate to. They can also actively influence or harm other prisoners in jail. Treat…

If prisoners are able to lead criminal organizations whillst inside, that's very obviously a rather trivial-to-fix bug in the design of the jail, not a reason to murder someone for vengeance.

We have more than adequate technology to keep such hopeless cases from harming themselves or others.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#389

Post by dan-robertson »

ludocode wrote: post #278
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 agree. Some of the most violent criminals can't ever be re-integrated into society, so the only alternative is life imprisonment. I've seen many arguments that this is preferable to the death penalty because "We will accidentally execute some innocents", as Paul Graham's here, as well as "It costs more to execute someone due to the higher standard of proof required". In all such cases the corollary is "We can accep…

I struggle with arguments that criminals are calculating people who make decisions in their best interests. There are surely exceptions (say pickpockets or confidence tricksters) but I don’t believe that things like typical sentencing have an effect on the impulsive decision making of a typical criminal (and I think policy should be targeted much more towards the typical criminal than the atypical one)

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#390

Post by ixacto »

jandrese wrote: post #353
ixacto wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death penalty should not be abolished because to some criminals in society the threat of force is the only thing they respect.

They don't fear prison at all? It's not like the options are limited to killing them or letting them go.

For some people prison is 3 meals a day and a place to sleep, paid with your tax dollars.
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