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This 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.
and yet, how is death sentence any worse than life in prison? if it were me, I'd just want a quick exit rather than rotting in a cage for decades
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This 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.
Some crimes deserve no less. I can somewhat buy arguments about not trusting the government, but I can't buy arguments that capital punishment is actually bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some crimes deserve no less. I can somewhat buy arguments about not trusting the government, but I can't buy arguments that capital punishment is actually bad.
I have same opinion but I still want it to be abandoned. Price of even one life ended vlby mistake or corruptio is too big price to pay.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some crimes deserve no less. I can somewhat buy arguments about not trusting the government, but I can't buy arguments that capital punishment is actually bad.
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 murderer/rapist was initially convicted and sentenced to death. Effective defense was able to get his conviction thrown out. Normally this would mean you walk free, due to double jeopardy protections. But in this case the murderer was a military officer. Once DNA testing was refined, it was proven conclusively that he was indeed the murderer/rapist. So he was tried in the military court system, which is independent of the double jeopardy protections provided in the civilian court system, and convicted to death - again.
The point I make here is that many of those 190 probably are guilty, and I think this is generally not a bad thing. My main concern with the death penalty is an innocent man being put to death. But if the standard of conviction is sufficiently high that even a guilty man can walk free, at least on occasion, then that gives one some degree of assurance in the ability of an innocent man to prove his innocence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some crimes deserve no less. I can somewhat buy arguments about not trusting the government, but I can't buy arguments that capital punishment is actually bad.
Some of the countries that do have death penalty, like India and Japan, reserve the death penalty for "the worst of the worst" (intentional mass murder etc). Neither of the guys profiled here qualify, and it's particularly shocking that Ford was sent to death row purely on circumstantial evidence.
And it wasn't circumstantial. Ford was a local who was immediately identified by the family during the act. The surviving family members all identified him, and their story also matched perfectly with that of the accomplice - until he later started creating overtly fabricated tales. Ford was also offered a plea deal that would have spared his life. He instead decided to try his luck with this whole 'I was just in the car, honest' story.
That he felt people would just believe him is what you get from sociopathy + narcissism. He was convicted after less than 7 hours of deliberation. Notably Texas isn't as fast and loose with the death penalty as its reputation either - in those 7 hours they had to determine if he would likely be a continuing threat to society and whether there were any possible mitigating factors that might otherwise yield preference to life imprisonment.
[1] - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
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 is also irreversible. There is nothing you can do to reverse the fact that you unjustly stole 40 years from someone's life. Are you then also against prison terms of 40 years, given that they're irreversible? What about 20 years? What about 1 year? Those are all irreversible.
Now you can say that it's a matter of degree. Sure it is, but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?