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Tookie Williams: clemency denied

ImaginalDisc said:
This is not so. The government only does two things which specifically target people for death; The Death Penalty, and War. Everything else which may be risky has accidental deaths. Fortunately, the governments tends to go through a lot of trouble to prevent accidents of that nature. In the case of the death penalty, the government is specifically killing people, some of whom are innocent.
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To the innocent dead person, what difference does it make whether he was specifically targeted by the government, specifically targeted by an agent of the government but not by the government itself or not targeted at all? He's still a dead innocent person, whether he died on a gurney in a prison, an alley at a crime scene or belted into the front of a '96 Buick. If anything, the person specifically targeted by the government had more opportunities to prevent becoming an innocent dead person than the other people. None of those toddlers had the governor and the Supreme Court of the United States specifically review their circumstances before they died.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
You claim that the death penalty is an effective deterent to crime. Care to open a thread asserting that more fully?
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For the record I do not claim that, any more than I claim the swine flu vaccine campaign prevented an outbreak of swine flu. I claim that people claim that, which they do.
 
Jocko said:
Would you forego your car because of innocent deaths on the road? How about getting rid of your medication because one person in a million has a fatal reaction to it? Perhaps you'd like to abandon heart surgery because there isn't a 100% success rate.
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You are stretching more than stretch armstrong and you know it. Do a benefits/risk assessment on the death penalty will you please? Start by listing the benefits.
 
manny said:
To the innocent dead person, what difference does it make whether he was specifically targeted by the government, specifically targeted by an agent of the government but not by the government itself or not targeted at all? He's still a dead innocent person, whether he died on a gurney in a prison, an alley at a crime scene or belted into the front of a '96 Buick. If anything, the person specifically targeted by the government had more opportunities to prevent becoming an innocent dead person than the other people. None of those toddlers had the governor and the Supreme Court of the United States specifically review their circumstances before they died.
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I invite you to read "Unsafe at Any Speed", the book which spured American public awarness of the dangers of automobiles. Our legislators, mayors, governors and sometimes even our presidents spend a great deal of time debating the risks of such and such an automotive safety measure, or such and such a vaccination policy. Our government is obligated to safeaurd our welfare and usually invests a tremendous amount of time in doing so.

Coutless hours of time have been spent by legislators and governors over the risks to toddlers from air bags. To claim otherwise is dishonest.
 
Jocko said:
Oh, and thanks to Godwin's, I just won this thread. ;)
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Godwins law says nothing about winning it merely states that as the size of a thread grows the chance of a nazi reference approaches 1. Its assumed by many that means the end of usefull discussion in the thread but thats not actually part of Godwins law.
 
Tony said:
1 person is too many.
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Its a poorly implemented system. I just want the "three strikes" rule revised to be termination versus incarceration. I want to clear defective people out of the population even if one of their three felonies is a mistaken identity. I don't hold life especially sacred or anything. I kill germs every day when I wash my hands. I think humans have a cool thing going on here with science and technology and summary executions for people convicted of three unrelated felonies is a nice way to thin out the defectives. We can always re-process their bodies into nutritious foods for the poor.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
Coutless hours of time have been spent by legislators and governors over the risks to toddlers from air bags. To claim otherwise is dishonest.
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I don't claim otherwise. I'm sure they agonized over the regs. But they still screwed them up. It happens. That's pretty much my point here -- governments make life and death decisions all the time and there's no call (by sane people) to have them entirely stop because there is the possibility for error. With the benefit of hindsight, the swine flu campaign was a poor one which cost lives. But at the time and with the information at hand, the government made a good-faith decision to go ahead with the program and I for one won't claim that they were wrong to do so.

Likewise, countless hours of time have been spent on the death penalty appeals process. The difference is that in death penalty cases, not only are countless hours spent on the process, but another countless hours are spent on each and every individual person who might be subjected to it. That's a luxury not given to the 8,000 people gunned down by police officers over the same time period.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
I invite you to read "Unsafe at Any Speed", the book which spured American public awarness of the dangers of automobiles. Our legislators, mayors, governors and sometimes even our presidents spend a great deal of time debating the risks of such and such an automotive safety measure, or such and such a vaccination policy. Our government is obligated to safeaurd our welfare and usually invests a tremendous amount of time in doing so.

Coutless hours of time have been spent by legislators and governors over the risks to toddlers from air bags. To claim otherwise is dishonest.
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That misses the point. Regardless of how much government tries to mitigate the loss of innocent life it can't absolutely gurantee it. On the other hand, by your logic as long as government invests tremendous amounts of time to mitigate the death of innocent people sentenced to death then that is ok, right?
 
Nyarlathotep said:
Now that I would agree with. However I think the years and years of appeals that we give them before applying the death penalty comes as close to that standard as humanly possible.
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No, it doesn't. Most of the Illinois cases were only resolved because students at Northwestern U. battled Illinois repeatedly in attempts to get DNA tests and such. And usually (some lawyer will hopefully fill in the details) appeals aren't based on evidence (because such appeals are often not allowed), but on procedures.

Basically, if the prosecution manages to convict through deception, witholding of evidence, feeding information to witnesses, etc. at the first trial a conviction is extremely hard to overturn on appeals. IIRC, you can appeal on procedure but not on the facts found in the 1st trial unless a very high bar of misconduct is reached.
 
To Manny and Randfan both,

I am poiting out that in the case of the death penalty, the killing that is going on is avoidible. The innocents deaths can be averted. All we have to do is stop the death penalty. In every other activity the government is involved in, we reduce the number of deaths caused. In this case, a "good" job necesitates deaths. It's completely unlike anything else the government does.
 
Everyone here should browse this site to see what can go wrong, and that results in an innocent getting on death row.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
To Manny and Randfan both,

I am poiting out that in the case of the death penalty, the killing that is going on is avoidible. The innocents deaths can be averted. All we have to do is stop the death penalty. In every other activity the government is involved in, we reduce the number of deaths caused. In this case, a "good" job necesitates deaths. It's completely unlike anything else the government does.
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I'm not impressed with the argument that it is unique. The point is that government must make decisions that cause the death of innocent people regardless of the reason for that decision. You are arguing that the fact that innocent people die as a result of goverment actions is a reason to stop government action, but only in the case of the death penalty.
 
manny said:
All I'm saying is that it is nonsensical to oppose the death penalty for the single reason that it might, theoretically, cause some tiny number of innocent people to die if one also believes that it is legitimate for government to do those other things which undeniably cause many innocent people to die.
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I think the difference you are glossing over here is that there is/was at least some reason to believe that vaccinations and air bags saved more lives than they terminated. So reasonable people could have thought them to be justified on a straightforward cost/benefit basis.

Whereas the death penalty doesn't save any lives at all compared to solitary confinement for life without parole. It is also more expensive and you can't take it back it if a DNA test proves that the executed person was actually innocent. So on a cost/benefit basis the fact that the death penalty will claim innocent lives (in a particularly horrible way) cannot be justified in the same straightforward way.
 
Just to get at the root of the argument, just exactly how many proven cases of inoccents being executed are there?
 
manny said:
The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office recapitulates the case against Mr. Williams and adds some comments in their response to his clemency petition, here . (57 page .pdf file)
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Wow. I just finished reading that. "Tookie" is a piece of trash, good riddance.
 
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