Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can always become a matematician in prison and solve one of millennium problems. That's one thing that you can't do if you're dead.
and how often does it happen?
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Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
51–60 of 69 posts
Re: Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only downside to capital punishment is that it's possible to wrongly convict someone. Other than that... For many, myself included, there is no "other than that." My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible and there's too many documented cases where executed prisoners were likely wrongfully convicted. I could perhaps support capital puni…
> My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible Ah, this meme again. I have no problem with the reasoning "it's irreversible" in itself. However, I wonder how many of the people repeating it are just mindlessly parroting something they heard, sounded good, and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds. Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years i…
> What about 20 years? What about 1 year? Those are all irreversible.
You are using linguistic tricks to make a bad argument.
The fact that the past is immutable doesn’t mean that things can’t be reversed.
If you’re planning your day in the morning and you decide you’re going to have chicken tonight, you can never change the fact that you decided that you’re going to have chicken, but you can choose to not have chicken.
One way to stop yourself from making these sorts of bad linguistic arguments is to ask yourself, “does my argument mean that a word has essentially no use or meaning?”
That applies here, because your argument basically makes “irreversible” a nearly useless word. Any time your argument is effectively making an adjective tautological, there is a problem. Because otherwise, why does the word exist?
> but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?
And now you have moved to making a like kind argument that the death penalty is essentially the same as a slap on the wrist, since the past is immutable.
Here is another opportunity for a sanity check on your argument.
When the state has executed someone, that person can never be apologized to. That person can never receive any sort of restitution. That person went to their death, very often in extreme physical agony. (Both electric chair and lethal injection have horrific failure rates on this. Firing squad, hanging, and guillotine are all much more humane). That person dies while a roomful of people who hate them watch through a pane of glass, sometimes cheering. They die, knowing that most people think of them as an awful person undeserving of pity, sympathy, or love.
“””It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.”””
To make an argument that this is essentially the same as any other punishment, even life in prison, is really kind of gross.
> and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds.
Sometimes more than 2 seconds is good, too.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
#53Re: Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of good comments. For me the data on wrongly convicted inmates is a strong argument against the death penalty. “ Since 1973, at least 190 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). A 2014 study estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent.” https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-and-the-death-penalty... . We will never…
The death penalty is irreversible and so convicts receive an automatic appeal and most states have extremely strict standards for execution. What this means is that if anything is even remotely out of order, it's entirely possible to get the convictions overturned - even when the person in question is guilty. The Eastburn Family Murders [1] are a perfect example of this. The murderer/rapist was initially convicted an…
> most states have extremely strict standards for execution
And yet evidence of actual innocence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrera_v._Collins) isn't enough to stop an execution.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
#55This is a heartbreaking story. I love playing D&D, and I can only imagine how important it is to these people in a setting like this. I hope the United States joins the rest of the western world and bans capital punishment soon--preferably yesterday.
Tell that to their victims. The only downside to capital punishment is that it's possible to wrongly convict someone. Other than that, there are crimes that people commit where you can never trust them to be safe around people again. In that case, capital punishment is perfectly justified in my mind. The idea that keeping them in prison for life is somehow more humane is silly. The rest of the world is letting crime…
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Re: Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only downside to capital punishment is that it's possible to wrongly convict someone. Other than that... For many, myself included, there is no "other than that." My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible and there's too many documented cases where executed prisoners were likely wrongfully convicted. I could perhaps support capital puni…
> My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible Ah, this meme again. I have no problem with the reasoning "it's irreversible" in itself. However, I wonder how many of the people repeating it are just mindlessly parroting something they heard, sounded good, and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds. Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years i…
> Ah, this meme again.
Ugh. This comment starts out in bad faith and delivers the full way through using linguistic tricks as some sort of "gotcha". I actually find your comment kind of disturbing, even. The word "irreversible" seems to be sticking for you, so instead let me be more precise: the death penalty precludes the state from acting on new evidence which may change the course of action the state takes against the convicted person.
> Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years is also irreversible
Here's what you don't have to do: remind me or anyone else that we're all bound by time. Of course time lost cannot be recovered, this is not some great revelation you've stumbled upon. But until death there is an opportunity for the state to make a better decision - not undo them, not "make them right". A wrongfully-convicted person isn't dead, they still have a life to live.
> Are you also against life in prison?
I am against life sentences without the possibility for parole, and I am against any system of justice that does not allow for new evidence to be reviewed in favor of the convicted.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible Ah, this meme again. I have no problem with the reasoning "it's irreversible" in itself. However, I wonder how many of the people repeating it are just mindlessly parroting something they heard, sounded good, and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds. Putting someone in prison wrongly for 40 years i…
> Ah, this meme again. Ugh. This comment starts out in bad faith and delivers the full way through using linguistic tricks as some sort of "gotcha". I actually find your comment kind of disturbing, even. The word "irreversible" seems to be sticking for you, so instead let me be more precise: the death penalty precludes the state from acting on new evidence which may change the course of action the state takes against…
> Here's what you don't have to do: remind me or anyone else that we're all bound by time
So you ARE aware that nothing is reversible? Bad faith.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The death penalty is irreversible and so convicts receive an automatic appeal and most states have extremely strict standards for execution. What this means is that if anything is even remotely out of order, it's entirely possible to get the convictions overturned - even when the person in question is guilty. The Eastburn Family Murders [1] are a perfect example of this. The murderer/rapist was initially convicted an…
> most states have extremely strict standards for execution And yet evidence of actual innocence ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrera_v._Collins ) isn't enough to stop an execution.
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Re: Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is the bad person you're referring to? I read the article twice and saw no mention of anyone bad.
so "death row" is a label with no other information attached?
I grew up living with a chaplain who worked death row at a large prison, so I have considerable hands-on experience interacting with death-row inmates, and no, the label "death row" does not provide enough information for judgement.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons players of death row
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
so "death row" is a label with no other information attached?
I grew up living with a chaplain who worked death row at a large prison, so I have considerable hands-on experience interacting with death-row inmates, and no, the label "death row" does not provide enough information for judgement.
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