Ok, why should *this* guy live?

[AvalonXQ]

It does kind of make me wonder, though. The whole argument for killing someone so they don't kill again, kinda looks silly when applied to some people who hadn't actually killed anyone. Being the guy who's outside in the car when the actual killing happened, and had no say in it, doesn't exactly put me in a frame of mind that says "we should prevent him from killing again." There is no "again" if there isn't a first time to start with.

I'd say that knowing that if I'm part of robbing a bank I'm going to be a murderer if anybody dies, regardless of whether I pulled the trigger or not, is definitely going to impact my consideration of whether I want to be Bill the Frequent Killer's lookout or getaway driver.
Telling people that if you engage in a violent felony, and someone dies, you killed them, seems to be a great way to deter people from engaging in violent felonies (or getting them to be more careful when they do).

 

[HansMustermann]

Yes, but the way I see it, it does take the "proportional" and the "commensurate" part out of punishment, if you kill X for just driving Y to a drug-deal-turned-shootout and not even being present when Y pulled the trigger. Which was more or less the case of the first guy in that random list of 3.

It's nevertheless killing someone who didn't kill anyone, didn't try to kill anyone, and didn't plan to kill anyone. There is nothing proportional or commensurate about that.

I can't see how any of the usual arguments in favour of the death penalty, be it the "an eye for an eye" kind or "preventing him from killing any more people" kind, apply at all to someone who just drove someone to a drug deal.

And it being a deterrent is a bit of a silly argument anyway. Sure, a disproportionate punishment may or may not be a deterrent, but it's not how we understand justice in most of the western world.

 

[AvalonXQ]

It's nevertheless killing someone who didn't kill anyone, didn't try to kill anyone, and didn't plan to kill anyone. There is nothing proportional or commensurate about that.

Until you understand that the person was part of a concerted effort -- a group that was in the process of committing a violent crime.
When you commit armed robbery, or armed assault, or kidnapping, or any of the crimes for which felony murder exists, you're putting people in danger of being killed. The risk of innocents dying is exactly the reason that these violent crimes are elligible for felony murder charges in the first place.
When a group decides to put others at risk in that way, we as a society have decided to hold them accountable when the risk happens and someone dies.
You robbed a store with guns; someone got killed -- which is something that often happens when people rob a store with guns. And yet, you decided to rob the store with guns anyway.
We don't care that you didn't decide to be one of the ones inside with guns; you were part of the robbery, and that makes you responsible when someone dies because of the robbery you decided to be a part of.

 

[Daide]

We don't care that you didn't decide to be one of the ones inside with guns; you were part of the robbery, and that makes you responsible when someone dies because of the robbery you decided to be a part of.

Again I fall back on the defense of we can never be 100% sure that 100% of the people on death row are guilty. I don't care if we know for sure in some cases, there are others where people may be sure but it turns out the convicted are actually innocent and it's this that I cannot support. I am totally fine with putting these people in jail for the rest of their lives with no chance of parole. We do not need to put people to death for justice to be served.

Can people who most certainly commit the crimes escape, be released and then commit the same crimes? Yes, and that's a failing in the justice system that should be worked on but does not immediately make the solution of putting people to death the correct answer.

 

[HansMustermann]

Can people who most certainly commit the crimes escape, be released and then commit the same crimes? Yes, and that's a failing in the justice system that should be worked on but does not immediately make the solution of putting people to death the correct answer.

Actually, I'm not buying even that argument from the pro-death camp.

And you know what's the easy test there?

Well, they're already kept in prison for half an eternity anyway. The same criminals are kept on the death row up to 20 years. Just look at the difference between conviction year and execution year for some of the examples I gave here. And off the top of my head, at least one guy was exonerated after 22 years on the death row: Nicholas Yarris.

(BTW, Yarris is another fine example of injustice. The prosecutors already had evidence that he can't be the killer, but (A) prosecuted anyway, and (B) withheld the evidence that would have exonerated him. Roll that around in your head. They pushed to get a 20 year old executed, not by mistake, but knowing full well that he's innocent.)

But anyway, they'd have plenty of time to either murder more in prison, or escape and murder again, if that was really a problem. We're talking decades.

Plus, if death is the only deterrent that works there, surely these guys have nothing more to lose. They're going to be killed anyway, right?

But, really, how many murders have happened on the death row? I don't know of any. How many escapes? I know of one escape of two guys from the Texas death row, and that was in 1935. And they were captured right back anyway. If anyone has better data, please do supply it.

So it seems to me like the penal system already knows how to keep them harmless in prison. I don't know how they do it, but they do. They're not murdering anyone while in there.

So taking the extra step and killing them is solving exactly nothing.

 

[jdp]

Yes, there have been people exonerated post-mortem. For example Cameron Todd Willingham, which I've mentioned a couple of times in this thread. Other probable innocents executed include:

-Carlos DeLuna, Texas, Conviction: 1983, Executed: 1989.

Evidence after his execution pointed at someone else as the probable killer.

- Ruben Cantu, Texas, Convicted: 1985, Executed: 1993.

Considered innocent after it turns out that the key witness was coaxed to the police to testify against him, and had to be showed Cantu's picture 3 times before he could actually point him out in a lineout.

- Larry Griffin, Missouri. Conviction: 1981, Executed: 1995.

Both a survivor of the shootout for which he was accused, and the first policemen on the scene actually said it wasn't him. Convicted and executed anyway. Based on that and new evidence pointing at someone else, he's considered one of the most categoric examples of an executed innocent.

- Joseph O'Dell, Virginia, Conviction: 1986, Executed: 1997

He actually asked repeatedly for a DNA analysis to prove his innocence, and it was denied. It was done only after his execution, and, what do you know, the blood wasn't his after all. Pretty clear case of innocent, for lack of other evidence against him.

- David Spence, Texas, Conviction: 1984, Executed: 1997

The police lieutenant who supervised the investigation and a detective involved were already convinced he's innocent before it even went to trial. All witnesses against him were inmates who had been promised favours in return for testifying against him. No physical evidence or anything else connected him to the murders.

- Leo Jones, Florida, Convicted: 1981, Executed: 1998.

The confession was extracted under torture, he later tried to recant it but it just earned him the dirt nap. Both cops who interrogated him were discharged from the police. New evidence points at someone else.

- Gary Graham, Texas, Convicted: 1981, Executed: 2000

One witness claimed to identify him after having seen him briefly from a distance and through a window. Two others who saw the killer up close said it was _not_ Graham. For some reason (incompetence? malice?) Graham's lawyer did not use either of them as witnesses. The jury never even knew those two witnesses existed.

So, yes, we _do_ know. It already happened.

I had no idea that there were confirmed executions that were later exonerated. With that in mind does anyone here change their position on the issue? What would be wrong with life in prison instead?

 

[Rolfe]

Good grief, you honestly didn't know?

What about the many convicted murderers in Britain who have been released from prison after reviews of their cases or fresh (often DNA) evidence? Some of these would undoubtedly been executed if we hadn't abolished the death penalty.

Worryingly, it does seem as if the fact these people were still alive (and had legal representatives working for them), kept the quest for the truth alive too. If they'd been executed, maybe the cases wouldn't have been re-investigated so thoroughly.

Rolfe.

 

[GreNME]

Do you support taking a thief's hands for stealing as well?

To be short, no.

By all means, be longer. Could you explain why you don't support such a thing? Can you distinguish how the principle is different from that of a death sentence?

 

[GreNME]

Until you understand that the person was part of a concerted effort -- a group that was in the process of committing a violent crime.
When you commit armed robbery, or armed assault, or kidnapping, or any of the crimes for which felony murder exists, you're putting people in danger of being killed. The risk of innocents dying is exactly the reason that these violent crimes are elligible for felony murder charges in the first place.
When a group decides to put others at risk in that way, we as a society have decided to hold them accountable when the risk happens and someone dies.
You robbed a store with guns; someone got killed -- which is something that often happens when people rob a store with guns. And yet, you decided to rob the store with guns anyway.
We don't care that you didn't decide to be one of the ones inside with guns; you were part of the robbery, and that makes you responsible when someone dies because of the robbery you decided to be a part of.

What about this do you feel is any different whatsoever for those who do not support the death penalty? It's like you're pretexting in order to follow this up with the false dilemma that those who don't support the death penalty somehow don't expect murderers and accessories to murder to be held accountable-- which would be the furthest from reality you could get.

 

[jdp]

Good grief, you honestly didn't know?

What about the many convicted murderers in Britain who have been released from prison after reviews of their cases or fresh (often DNA) evidence? Some of these would undoubtedly been executed if we hadn't abolished the death penalty.

Worryingly, it does seem as if the fact these people were still alive (and had legal representatives working for them), kept the quest for the truth alive too. If they'd been executed, maybe the cases wouldn't have been re-investigated so thoroughly.

Rolfe.

No, I didn't. I was aware that there were exonerations of death row inmates but I don't recall any posthumous exonerations. I had simply figured that if some occurred before there must be some that got away. But no I didn't. It might be as you say, once they're dead there is not a lot of effort but into reexamining iffy cases, certainly not by the state.

 

[HansMustermann]

Good grief, you honestly didn't know?

What about the many convicted murderers in Britain who have been released from prison after reviews of their cases or fresh (often DNA) evidence? Some of these would undoubtedly been executed if we hadn't abolished the death penalty.

Worryingly, it does seem as if the fact these people were still alive (and had legal representatives working for them), kept the quest for the truth alive too. If they'd been executed, maybe the cases wouldn't have been re-investigated so thoroughly.

Rolfe.

In all fairness, in his previous message he made clear that he knew about people released from the death row, just not about people who turned out to be innocent after they had already been executed.

 

[River]

By all means, be longer. Could you explain why you don't support such a thing? Can you distinguish how the principle is different from that of a death sentence?

Certainly... Reason being that not every murder case would be worthy of a death sentence, or every crime of the same nature deserve the exact punishment regardless of the details. Capital punishment should only be invoked in the most heinous of those. For instance - a 10 year old caught stealing a pack of gum from the local convenient store does not deserve the same punishment as someone caught stealing an entire warehouse full of electronics, or a truck load of luxury cars etc. There are differing degrees of severity apparenty with all types of crime. There should also be in the punishments...

With the most heinous of crimes, such as murder and child rape (or numerous accounts of each, just to give an example that applies to this thread) the punishment should meet the crime. I personally feel like someone commiting this type of crime (that has been convicted with substantial evidence. ie: DNA or confession along with corroborating physical evidence) does not deserve the chance at life they took away from another. I do not feel one bit of sympathy at the loss of their life. Perhaps they should've reconsidered taking the life of another in such a heinous way. If we give passive punishments (which of course is completely subjective to ones taste) to severe crimes such as this - we're not doing all that we can to discourage it from happening again.

Hypothetical question here: If you had to face either fate, which would you choose for yourself? Life in prison? Death penalty?

Lets make no mistake about it, any life is better than none... especially one where you are given everything you need to survive. You even have certain privileges concerning visitors and educational opportunities. A lot of those same things someone commiting heinous acts should not have the privilege of enjoying any longer. After all, that child that was raped and murdered never got the chance to enjoy those privileges did they?

I'm just not passive enough to agree with life in prison being enough punishment in some cases. That being said, not all murder cases are deserving of capital punishment. Only the most heinous acts deserve the most heinous punishments. (IMHO)

 

[Ambrosia]

Hypothetical question here: If you had to face either fate, which would you choose for yourself? Life in prison? Death penalty?

it depends. If I am allowed to choose a painless death I'll take the death penalty please.

Lets make no mistake about it, any life is better than none... especially one where you are given everything you need to survive.

Is it? I'd make the case for life in prison being more of a punishment potentially than the death penalty.

You even have certain privileges concerning visitors and educational opportunities. A lot of those same things someone commiting heinous acts should not have the privilege of enjoying any longer. After all, that child that was raped and murdered never got the chance to enjoy those privileges did they?

So deny the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes, crimes where there is no possibility of them ever being released and where prison should serve society as both a punishment for the criminal and a deterrent to would be criminals, any access to educational materials, visitors, pleasant food, etc. All of those things can be withdrawn without taking away the life.

Why should society spend money on these people that we could better use to improve the lives of the people in the society?

The $x million each year spent by states who pursue capital punishment is money that that state can't spend on say roads, or infrastructure, or hospitals, or education.

 

[Daide]

River, what you are describing is varying levels of guilty. If they can find someone guilty of a crime then the punishment will be based on the severity of the crime and not so much on the type of evidence provided.

And still, there could always be people who are put on there who could be innocent. Your solution can still have cracks even with a 'super guilty' verdict. The most heinous of crimes could lead to an innocent person being accidentally railroaded into jail (see David Milgaard)

 

[HarryHenderson]

Although pro 'death penalty' as a punishment, I can't/won't argue the insanity of genuinely innocent people being put to death. And a big problem I have with that is less about the death penalty and more about the process - literally years and years of 'appeals' a typical death-row convict goes through, a process established specifically to make sure he doesn't get 'punished' improperly, yet his actual innocence isn't discovered until (sometimes) years after his death? There's not enough adjectives to describe how ****** up that is.

Maybe they should institute severe penalties like long jail sentences and/or the death penalty for the brain-damaged prosecutors who go ahead and try DP cases they either know aren't legitimate, or they investigate/prosecute them so piss-poorly as to be illegitimate. I'll bet dollars to donuts that 'somebody has to die because Fred Garvin District Attorney doesn't have enough time' isn't quite the righteousness the original creators of the act intended.

And I still think this thread's (OP) la loo la zer needs to be whacked.

 

[HansMustermann]

I'm not sure how much better the process can be, given that it's based on humans.

For a start, humans are emotional. Put a heinous crime before them, and they'll want to see the scumbag fry. It can cloud judgment as to whether the scumbag is actually guilty.

Second, humans are emotional. Put someone who's perceived as a scumbag, and maybe even is a scumbag, even if not actually a murderer, before them, and their judgment is already skewed against him.

Our species doesn't deal well with multiple variables. If you really like someone, your judgment of them in all aspects goes up. You actually start finding excuses for them. If you really dislike someone, the opposite happens. You actually start discounting or finding fault even in their positive qualities.

You're not going to get a fair trial if, for completely other reasons (previous convictions, tear-wringing description of the supposed crime, behaviour, etc), the jury really dislikes you.

Third, groupthink runs deep. Humans often care more about fitting in the group than about abstract concepts like justice. That goes for DAs and for jurys and for the guy on the street.

A DA might push for DP on shoddy evidence just to be perceived as the guy who's all uncompromising and tough on crime. A juror might vote "guilty" just so he doesn't come across as the guy who condones that kind of behaviour. (E.g., in a child rape case, since you mention those.) The actual question of whether those guys are actually guilty can become quite the secondary consideration, way behind whether you want to make the headlines as the guy who sent a child rapist to the chair or as the guy who frees child rapists.

Fourth, we're a selfish species, to various individual degrees. Sometimes getting a promotion, making the headlines, having lots of solved cases to brag about, etc, may be way more important for some people than whether that guy lives or dies.

Fifth, sad to say, we're a species that even in the "healthy" state skirts with paranoid schizophrenia. We confuse our own leaps of faith and imagination for reality entirely too often. A cop or DA can follow a "gut feeling", "instinct tells me...", "I just know it", "just look at him", etc, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Even though, really, they boil down to no more than his own imagination. The guys who coaxed a witness and had to repeatedly show him a photo of who he has to identify before he could actually do so, probably weren't doing it out of malice, but just following a misguided gut feeling that they must have the right guy and they'll see to it that justice is served even if they have to essentially manufacture evidence.

Sixth, once you bought into the idea of deterrence value, essentially executing an innocent is as much of a deterrent as executing the right guy. It can help put one's conscience to sleep about whether it's the right guy or not.

Seventh, but probably most important, information is imperfect and often little more than conjecture. You have some blood on the victim's nails and it matches the blood type of the last guy seen at her home. Or you have some pubic hair and it matches the colour of the victim's boyfriend. Or you have some cigarette in an ashtray and it matches those the accused smokes.

That's the kind of evidence RL trials have. And in fact they're verbatim evidence from some of the examples I gave before.

Even witnesses can be horribly fallible. As a roundabout example of human fallibility, here in Germany at one point a guy stabbed a woman right in court. The cop on the scene actually shot the victim's husband, who was trying to protect her, instead of the aggressor, thinking that the husband is the aggressor. You'd think it would be hard to mistake who's stabbing and who's trying to get her out, but that one cop screwed that up fair and square. Do you have any doubt that a witness seeing a similar crime briefly from a passing by car, could make the same confusion?

You have to have actually a pretty low standard of evidence to be able to prosecute at all. There is no way to make a process that delivers bulletproof, 100% accurate verdicts, without requiring so much and so accurate information that most cases could never make it to court at all. So we have to accept that we'll just have to do the most of what we can get.

But that also means accepting that errors _will_ happen, by design.

Basically it's not "****ed up", it's just the normal process. That's how good it can possibly be, when run by and with humans.

 

[DC]

Capital punishment is medieval.

 

[River]

Perhaps this is getting a little off topic with the original scheme of the thread but I'm curious as to how many feel about varying degrees of punishment per the same crime. For instance someone kills another person by accident, or twelve people by accident do they receive the same punishment? How about if a serial killer is convicted of 30 killings/rapes/thefts in comparison to a wife shooting her husband because he cheated. Do they receive the same punishment?

Certain who decides, and how its decided is a debate of its own. I would hope that capital punishment would only be invoked in the most extreme cases. Certainly any form of "justice" is open to mistakes or wrongly punished individuals. People are killed by accident every day in our society. Do we need to change our society because of it? How many rights do you have after you've commited a crime killing/raping many innocent people? (not by accident, but with intent)

The man described in this thread certainly isnt someone I would feel any guilt or regret about should he be terminated under such a law. Too bad his victims didnt get the same consideration hes getting.

 

[JcR]

Perhaps this is getting a little off topic with the original scheme of the thread but I'm curious as to how many feel about varying degrees of punishment per the same crime. For instance someone kills another person by accident, or twelve people by accident do they receive the same punishment? How about if a serial killer is convicted of 30 killings/rapes/thefts in comparison to a wife shooting her husband because he cheated. Do they receive the same punishment?

No they shouldn't. Laws will distinguish between the differences.

Certain who decides, and how its decided is a debate of its own. I would hope that capital punishment would only be invoked in the most extreme cases. Certainly any form of "justice" is open to mistakes or wrongly punished individuals. People are killed by accident every day in our society. Do we need to change our society because of it? How many rights do you have after you've commited a crime killing/raping many innocent people? (not by accident, but with intent)

Capital Punishment is reserved for only the extreme cases.

How many rights do you have after you've commited a crime killing/raping many innocent people? (not by accident, but with intent)

Many rights, and rightfully so. They should have the right to appeal till the end of their days incarcerated.
Emotionally I might feel that someone who has perpetrated murder should receive the same. If one bombs my house I will have no mercy on them. I just need the state to sanction my shock and awe I will do to them..
I feel even once case of wrongful execution is too many. The Justice system can avoid these accidents. A dead person has no appeal. Guilty or not.

 

[AvalonXQ]

What about this do you feel is any different whatsoever for those who do not support the death penalty? It's like you're pretexting in order to follow this up with the false dilemma that those who don't support the death penalty somehow don't expect murderers and accessories to murder to be held accountable-- which would be the furthest from reality you could get.

I don't have any moral issue with the decision to make life in prison without parole the capital punishment. To me, it's very much a question of deterrence. If we believe that life in prison has the same deterrent effect as execution, then if there are exterior reasons to exclude one or the other (consequences of mistake, cost, etc) then that makes sense to me.