The real reason to end the death penalty • Hacker News Board

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#531

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #348

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…

"Beyond reasonable doubt" means it's unreasonable to doubt it. If you bet your friend (who is incentivized to say that they rolled above a 1) rolls a ten sided die and says they rolled above a 1, is it unreasonable to doubt them? No way, 10% chance of an event happening means it's very reasonable that it'll happen. Same for a d20. At what point is it unreasonable to be concerned about rolling a 1?

> Most people say 90-95%

Most people believe that the 538's 2016 presidential forecast was incompetent because it said trump only had a 1/3 chance of winning and he won. Other papers put it at 10%. People said this was a huge failure because people generally are terrible at intuitively reasoning about probabilities, which is well established.

I'd put reasonable doubt at closer to 1 in a few hundred, maybe even rarer.

Is the link you included talking about the probability of convicting a person, given that they're innocent, or the probability that a convicted person is innocent? It brings too mind the classic stats issues of testing positive for a disease via a highly accurate test, with it still being probable that you don't have the disease. Even a highly accurate test can be entirely unreasonable as evidence of the rare case. We should probably care about making the false discovery rate the unreasonable one. Of the convicted people, is it unreasonable to doubt that a random one is guilty.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#532

Post by sneak » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #488

sneak wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that to a jury, being in the defendant's seat is strike one, having a cop testify against you is strike two... it doesn't take much to convict the innocent if a DA and the police start pushing for it.

Ok, but that makes my argument stronger: if trial wins are practically a lay-up for the prosecution, you have to be prosecuting seriously dogshit cases to make going to trial attractive for a majority of your defendants.

Is your argument that marginal cases would go to trial?

I think it is the case that marginal cases would take a no-jail plea bargain. Going to trial on a marginal case with a public defender probably increases the risk of imprisonment versus taking a guilty plea that guarantees no jail time (but a criminal record).

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#533

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

impendia wrote: post #429

rayiner wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What does “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean in probability terms? When serving as a juror in a criminal trial, I asked precisely this question of the judge. Her response was that the law does not prescribe a percentage.

This is actually a really tough problem, because it's even unclear which rate to talk about. If you look at "trial by peers" as a test, what error rates are we worried about/trying to make unreasonably rare? Sensitivity? Specificity? FDR? Posterior probability under what prior? One of the many many others used in stats?

I might argue that FDR [0] is the right number, given that you want to look at the set of convicted people and say it's unreasonable to doubt that a randomly picked one of them is guilty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#534

Post by zepto » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

Another good reason, is that if there is no death penalty, or other violent punishment on the books, then calling for someone’s death is always a call to extralegal violence, and cannot be claimed to be a call for legal justice as it is today.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#535

Post by tptacek » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #532

tptacek wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but that makes my argument stronger: if trial wins are practically a lay-up for the prosecution, you have to be prosecuting seriously dogshit cases to make going to trial attractive for a majority of your defendants.

Is your argument that marginal cases would go to trial? I think it is the case that marginal cases would take a no-jail plea bargain. Going to trial on a marginal case with a public defender probably increases the risk of imprisonment versus taking a guilty plea that guarantees no jail time (but a criminal record).

What I'm saying is that in a well run DA's office, a docket consisting mostly of cases that plead out is what you'd want to see, because the alternative suggests that prosecutors are bringing shaky cases to court, which they should not do, because prosecution itself inflicts grievous costs on defendants.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#536

Post by anoncake » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

spoonjim wrote: post #117

anoncake wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the world would be better off without you.

That may be, but I can tell you without whom the world would be MUCH better off: murderers.

Which is why incarceration exists. The death penalty was necessary back when society simply couldn't afford prisons, but not today.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#537

Post by dane-pgp » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

bena wrote: post #526

dane-pgp wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the original idea that I based this on didn't mention pardons, but I thought that adding that element would make it more thought-provoking and put people off voting "Yes" in this hypothetical. Your comment suggests it has achieved both those goals. Don't you think it's an interesting quirk for a legal system to allow both execution and posthumous pardons? If the point of a pardon is to end someone's punishme…

I feel as if it's a different question with the pardons. You can pardon a guilty person. Pardons have nothing to do with innocence. Regardless of my feelings on whether or not I'd executed if an innocent man was executed, I definitely wouldn't want to be executed for a guilty person. So rather than being thought-provoking, it's almost thought-terminating. And I haven't touched on whether we should execute people in m…

> I definitely wouldn't want to be executed for a guilty person.

It sounds like you're saying that you don't think that guilty people should ever be pardoned (even if those pardons didn't lead to the possibility of you having to be executed). That's probably not what you're saying, but I'm trying to understand the significance you are putting on the distinction between "innocent" and "pardoned".

If there are times in which a guilty person should be pardoned and not have to serve a life sentence, then surely there should be times when a guilty person is pardoned and spared from serving a death sentence. Morally speaking I think it is irrelevant if the pardon comes before conviction (i.e. when they are still legally presumed innocent), or before sentencing, or before execution, or after execution.

If you definitely wouldn't want to be executed for a guilty person, and you do believe in pardons (as they exist in the US legal system), then I think you shouldn't want to be executed for an innocent person either.

I believe that previous sentence is logically consistent with your position though. You are saying that P does-not-imply Q and NOT P does-not-imply Q, and I'm saying Q implies P.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#538

Post by jl2718 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

Here’s why the ‘death penalty’ is not what you may think it is.

There’s an interesting dialectic between notions of justice and the realities of common good. From the justice perspective, a criminal is likely to face the death penalty if it can be shown that they planned, committed homicide, and then attempted evasion, all in sound mind. Whereas, if the criminal was not of sound mind, lacked the ability to understand consequence, and this condition is permanent, then sentencing is likely to be quite lax. Unfortunately, the likelihood of recidivism is the opposite of what compassion drives us to believe.

In animal shelters, this is well-understood. The goal is always safety and reform, never punishment. An animal of sound mind is reformable. Rarely, an animal has been drugged, diseased, or abused beyond hope of sanity, and must be destroyed. A human criminal in such a condition would be likely to receive clemency. Occasionally, I have known people to destroy their own dog out of a sense of justice for non-threatening bites such as on the hand when receiving food. I personally regard these people as absolutely horrendous, and they’ll never understand why. They think they are executing justice, like some form of discipline, and I really wonder who they are trying to teach.

Likewise, I believe that we, as a society, are massively deluded about the idea of justice. Everything today is about ‘justice’: social, economic, criminal. Just because it makes you feel good, doesn’t mean that it does you or anybody else any good. I am not saying that we should be lenient or rule out all use of necessary lethal force in peacekeeping, but it seems that the moral reasoning that leads to any act of unthreatened aggression ought to be questioned.

tl;dr: The ‘death penalty’ is bullshit precisely because it doesn’t function at all as a penalty. A penalty is a device for behavior modification. I don’t know exactly what ‘justice’ is either, but all I see is chaos and violence from people demanding it.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#539

Post by sneak » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 12:00 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #535

sneak wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your argument that marginal cases would go to trial? I think it is the case that marginal cases would take a no-jail plea bargain. Going to trial on a marginal case with a public defender probably increases the risk of imprisonment versus taking a guilty plea that guarantees no jail time (but a criminal record).

What I'm saying is that in a well run DA's office, a docket consisting mostly of cases that plead out is what you'd want to see, because the alternative suggests that prosecutors are bringing shaky cases to court, which they should not do, because prosecution itself inflicts grievous costs on defendants.

Sure, but that is indistinguishable in the numbers from an out of control law enforcement system where there is a high conviction rate against even the innocent that leads to higher incidence of innocent people making a guilty plea to avoid jail and expense. Of course, that percentage isn't broken out because everyone in here is innocent.

Re: The real reason to end the death penalty

#540

Post by Blumfid » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 8:55 AM UTC

samatman wrote: post #242

Blumfid wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to kill someone. I don't know if or why a person became a murderer. It could be their upbringing which should be the responsibility of the society and clearly the society failed. It could be a medical issue. A biological one. It could be that the murderer did nothing wrong in their worldview. We have to understand this as a society. We have to teach it if people don't understand it.

That's fine, just understand that your moral intuition isn't universal. If there were some device (which doesn't exist and maybe can't) which simply lights up with perfect accuracy when pointed at someone who tortured someone before murdering them, I would support instant execution of that person by firing squad. I'm not willing to accept a 4% error rate however. I'm not sure how low it would have to go, but it's low…

I thought about this topic for decades now.when I was 16 I thought you should murder a murderer.

I thought a lot about moral and ethics, the balance between being right and no right exists.

So I do believe your thinking can and might change in the future.

Your torture example still ignores the history of the torturer. Would you like to be killed after this from a society which had it easier and better then you and did not help you? Is that really fair to anyone?

Do you believe in a god? Would you assume jesus would let you in after that? (I'm not religious, I do think so that either it's a good god and it doesn't matter believing in her but your actions)

Do you believe that we are in a simulation? What if you wake up in your next life as a murderer?

There are so many potential thoughts which we haven't thought through that removing a murderer from society to prison is the best choice we have as long as it is a prison who tries to rehabilitate a person.