21–30 of 50 posts
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How is this any worse than the collateral damage of war?
Woah - have you stopped beating your wife yet? To play Devil's Advocate: this man was a citizen. A State has fundamentally failed when it has executed one of its citizens.
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The death penalty is far to permanent of a punishment to be wielded by organizations with such high false positive rates. We wouldn't put up with it with an anti-virus program or a SMART-esque hardware monitoring program, why do we put up with it when the price is not a few easily replicated digital files or some computer hardware, but rather an innocent persons _life_. Capital punishment in it's current form is not…
> it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole Do you have a source to back that up?
This reminds me of a similar story I read recently about bite mark experts being used in murder investigations... just like these arson experts, they had no scientific proof of anything they concluded. People were still convicted of rape and murder based on their "expert" testimony.
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The death penalty is far to permanent of a punishment to be wielded by organizations with such high false positive rates. We wouldn't put up with it with an anti-virus program or a SMART-esque hardware monitoring program, why do we put up with it when the price is not a few easily replicated digital files or some computer hardware, but rather an innocent persons _life_. Capital punishment in it's current form is not…
> it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole Do you have a source to back that up?
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The death penalty is far to permanent of a punishment to be wielded by organizations with such high false positive rates. We wouldn't put up with it with an anti-virus program or a SMART-esque hardware monitoring program, why do we put up with it when the price is not a few easily replicated digital files or some computer hardware, but rather an innocent persons _life_. Capital punishment in it's current form is not…
> it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole Do you have a source to back that up?
Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson ... was personally opposed to capital punishment... He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas - about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years.
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Woah - have you stopped beating your wife yet? To play Devil's Advocate: this man was a citizen. A State has fundamentally failed when it has executed one of its citizens.
So... it only count as human if it is a citizen?
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While I still agree with your main points, it should be pointed out that any process that can be actually executed by real humans will throw up false positives. For that matter, any process actually executable by a benevolent AI will throw up a certain number of false positives, too. We need to be ready to deal with that. So, both faulty process and the death penalty is the problem.
Well then you need a benevolent AI and universal surveillance nanotechnology.
That can't possibly go wrong.
Yes, they did. It is time for a national death penalty moratorium. This is not the first time. This is a more straightforward read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Willingham
Focusing on the death penalty is completely missing the point. If you're writing code and something keeps throwing nasty exceptions, you don't remove the exception handling - you fix the code. Death penalty isn't the problem (leaving aside the traditional death penalty debate for a moment). Innocent people being found guilty, often by highly (and unnecessarily) faulty process, is the problem. Cutting out the death pe…
Hard to do though.
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Focusing on the death penalty is completely missing the point. If you're writing code and something keeps throwing nasty exceptions, you don't remove the exception handling - you fix the code. Death penalty isn't the problem (leaving aside the traditional death penalty debate for a moment). Innocent people being found guilty, often by highly (and unnecessarily) faulty process, is the problem. Cutting out the death pe…
You're solution is to have a perfect system? That's not possible. But to torture your analogy more, its like saying instead of having exception handling in your programming, or crash handling in your operating systems, simply don't make any mistakes. All that happens in reality are more serious consequences for the mistakes that do happen.
No. My "solution" is to focus on fixing the part that's really broken, not the thing that later becomes an issue from that breakage.
That doesn't result in a perfect system. However, if you're not convicting innocent people very often, then very few will ever have the "opportunity" to face execution.
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You're solution is to have a perfect system? That's not possible. But to torture your analogy more, its like saying instead of having exception handling in your programming, or crash handling in your operating systems, simply don't make any mistakes. All that happens in reality are more serious consequences for the mistakes that do happen.
>> You're solution is to have a perfect system? No. My "solution" is to focus on fixing the part that's really broken, not the thing that later becomes an issue from that breakage. That doesn't result in a perfect system. However, if you're not convicting innocent people very often, then very few will ever have the "opportunity" to face execution.