nerdanel wrote:This is only a tenable position for an abolitionist (which, of course, you are). Otherwise, most of us can accept that (1) people who are genuinely mentally retarded should not be executed, and no longer can constitutionally be executed and (2) a significant majority of our society is not retarded, able to accept responsibility for its actions, and thus death-eligible where significantly egregious murders are committed. There will, then, always have to be a dividing line, and some people will always fall close to it. If the IQ cutoff was 75, thus exempting Lewis, the next "sympathetic" capital defendant would proffer a 77. If it was 120, someone would have a 123. Since she fell on the correct side of the threshold, this is not a significant issue for me in her execution.
But it is not like the threshold is scientifically precise. It is a matter of degree. I just don't see how it can be considered just to execute this woman in this circusmstance, and not the man that actually shot her husband and stepson, and apparently admitted later in a letter that he had manipulated her into agreeing to this plan.
... and in my view, your approach itself would create an injustice by not allowing the death penalty in those sufficiently egregious cases (for which I view LWOP as an insufficient penalty). All justice is imperfect; my view is that death is different only in degree.
In theory, I agree with you. It is very easy to see that it is just to execute the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world. But I find it impossible to imagine a test that determines what is sufficiently egregious without allowing situations like this one when someone is, in my opinion, exectuted unjustly. Or the much worse situation of executing an innocent person. So while I agree in theory that not applying the death penalty in some egregious cases is an injustice, that is outweighed by the greater injustice of allowing the state to kill someone who should not be willed. Or even the possibility of doing so.
However, I do agree with your response to vison.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
V - we just cross-posted again, but I had edited my previous post to add an additional thought, not knowing you were also responding to me. I'll post the new content below, and respond to your most recent post later.
I had added this thought after my assertion that all justice is imperfect, and death is different only in degree:
In fact, the injustices I'm most concerned about are those created by our federalist system, which I was busily defending in a different context earlier this week. For instance, under California's three-strikes system someone might get 25-years-to-life for a relatively minor, non-violent third felony offense; in another state, someone might only serve months for the same offense. Many rapists convicted in state court walk free in a matter of a few years, while some non-violent drug offenders languish in the federal system for decades. These staggering sentencing imbalances are of far greater concern to me than the idea that some aggravated murderers will get death, while some will get LWOP.
I won't just survive
Oh, you will see me thrive
Can't write my story
I'm beyond the archetype
I won't just conform
No matter how you shake my core
'Cause my roots, they run deep, oh
When, when the fire's at my feet again
And the vultures all start circling
They're whispering, "You're out of time,"
But still I rise
This is no mistake, no accident
When you think the final nail is in, think again
Don't be surprised, I will still rise
To an extent I agree with that. However, I am concerned that a black or brown man is far more likely to get sentenced to death in virtually all states that have the death penalty than a white man. Still I am certainly no crusader for the cause of saving the lives of some aggravated murderers.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
vison wrote:That post makes me almost inexpressibly sad. The whole vast machinery of a great nation's laws brought down to this sordid level!
The "death penalty" is barbaric, no matter the crime, no matter the method. Whether the criminal is stoned to death or gently put to sleep by lethal injection, it is all the same.
I suppose I can modify my remark that "barbarism breeds violence", or whatever precise phrase I used. It is not, of course, that simple.
There are myriad causes for violent crime, and I don't really think "the death penalty" causes it. On the other hand, it doesn't reduce the occurence, either.
The Jeffrey Dahmers of this world are rare. The laws of a nation should not be bent only to dealing with them, the laws should be meant for everyone. Not all murderers "deserve" death. (Didn't some guy named Gandalf have something to say about that?)
Monsters such as Dahmer can be kept out of society. It's simple enough. And if the prisons weren't so full of people who shouldn't be there, it would be even simpler.
Worse than the realization that the US still allows the death penalty is the fact that the US has more people in prison than any other nation on earth. The rate of incarceration is more than 6 times that of Canada.
I have to admit, my first thought on capital punishment as it’s applied in the United States is – what’s the point? Like this character in California, most people executed in the U.S. spend decades fighting the legal system with whatever spurious appeals their lawyers can concoct at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money, often making themselves minor celebrities in the process. Then, in the end, if they don’t succeed or die of natural causes first, they’re put to death with a convoluted method that resembles a medical procedure and has a repeated history of going wrong, taking hours or not working altogether. That’s because swift and sensible methods like hanging and shooting that other retentionist jurisdictions use are ‘cruel and unusual punishments’. And, of course, it can only be applied to people who commit aggravated murder, as the Supreme Court ruled in Coker v. Georgia that executing a man who raped multiple women, committed at least one (non-aggravated) murder, committed aggravated assault and armed robbery several times and broke out of prison to keep re-offending would be ‘disproportionate’. Similarly, it ruled in Kennedy v. Louisiana that it would be ‘disproportionate’ to execute a man convicted of the repeated brutal rape of his eight-year-old stepdaughter. And twenty years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later for each defendant, there’s no evidence that capital punishment has any deterrent value. Certainly U.S. states that use capital punishment don’t seem to have less serious violent crime then those that don’t. And it’s only ever applied to people who would otherwise be kept in prison for life without parole.
I’m not opposed to capital punishment in principle. I think that the victories allies were absolutely right to execute the Axis war criminals, and Indonesia seems to have made the world and undeniably safer place by shooting the Bali bombers. But I don’t think that it can be made to work in a modern western democracy, and the risk of executing innocent people simply doesn’t justify its benefits. And outside certain political cases, I think that its benefits are largely illusory anyway.
The U.S. is an obvious example – the only way I can describe the situation as it stands today is that the American legal system is simply too squeamish for capital punishment. The interference in the use of the death penalty under state law by the Supreme Court has made it a labyrinth that few navigate. That is, incidentally, another reason why I think that the U.S. Bill of Rights, while it was and is a great idea, doesn’t actually work in practice. In most states with capital punishment statutes it’s applied so rarely it may as well be abolished. It makes a sharp comparison with countries like Japan and Singapore, where capital punishment enjoys overwhelming public support and hanging faces no constitutional challenges, and capital punishment is applied swiftly and consistently for capital crimes (only aggravated murder in Japan, but a range of offences in Singapore).
I think that, if you are going to execute people, you need to have a very clear idea why you do it. And I don’t believe that the U.S. legal system does. Is it meant to be an ultimate punishment? Then why so much focus on making it so humane as to amount to nothing more than a shortening of a prisoner’s sentence by a few decades? Is it meant to remove dangerous people from society forever? Then why is it used as an extremely expensive alternative to life without parole? And why is it not used on repeat rapists and pedophiles, who have very high recidivism rates, but quite frequently on young offenders who commit capital crimes under the influence of drugs, amongst whom rehabilitation rates are far better?
That’s not to pick on the United States, even though I think that its legal system is hobbled by the Constitution. Any other western first-world country would have similar issues. That is why, I believe, despite making odd noises about it, no Australian state has re-introduced capital punishment after abolishing it (the last in 1984). It’s just too much trouble.
Lord_Morningstar wrote:...and the risk of executing innocent people simply doesn’t justify its benefits.
This has always been my biggest issue with this the death penalty. It trumps every other consideration in my mind. I don't think I've heard a meaningful counter-argument to it.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
I agree with every word Lord_M posted. Very, very excellent post.
I can name, without having to stop to think, 4 Canadian men who would have been hung for murder if we still had the death penalty - and all 4 have since been exonerated. David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, and Steven Truscott. Steven Truscott was 14 when was convicted and he WAS sentenced to hang. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. I remember all 4 cases very clearly.
Lord_Morningstar wrote:...and the risk of executing innocent people simply doesn’t justify its benefits.
This has always been my biggest issue with this the death penalty. It trumps every other consideration in my mind. I don't think I've heard a meaningful counter-argument to it.
Here is also where I have a problem with it. You can release a prisoner. Bringing back the dead is a whole other story.
That said, this thing we have for lethal injections and other "humane" ways of killing someone irks me. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, humane in ending a healthy person's life (we'll leave the terminally ill for another thread).
yovargas wrote:And Liddy's post reinforces my thought that the death penalty is mostly the pursuit of revenge, not the pursuit of justice.
I'm not so sure. To forfeit one's life because you took another seems as balanced, fair and just as it can get. Symmetry. You cause someone USD 1,000 loss, you pay USD 1,000 (minimum).
Lord_Morningstar wrote:...and the risk of executing innocent people simply doesn’t justify its benefits.
This has always been my biggest issue with this the death penalty. It trumps every other consideration in my mind. I don't think I've heard a meaningful counter-argument to it.
Here is also where I have a problem with it. You can release a prisoner. Bringing back the dead is a whole other story.
Same here.
Once, when we were having this discussion, R asked me - what if there was a person who was recorded murdering, had 10 eye witnesses and so on - undeniable proof - is death penalty okay then? And I had trouble answering yes.
'You just said "your getting shorter": you've obviously been drinking too much ent-draught and not enough Prim's.' - Jude
River wrote:Here is also where I have a problem with it. You can release a prisoner. Bringing back the dead is a whole other story.
You can release him, but you can't give back the time you took or the psychological harm inflicted. We're not elves; we only get so years to be here, and both false incarceration and false execution take some finite number of them away forever.
River wrote:Here is also where I have a problem with it. You can release a prisoner. Bringing back the dead is a whole other story.
You can release him, but you can't give back the time you took or the psychological harm inflicted. We're not elves; we only get so years to be here, and both false incarceration and false execution take some finite number of them away forever.
True, but you can pay a released prisoner monetary compensation.
Unless he's already died, or the experience has physically or psychologically scarred him for life (in which case paying him monetary compensation isn't much different from paying his heirs monetary compensation). Money can't make everything better; any time you punish anyone, you run the risk of doing permanent harm to an innocent person.
Dave_LF wrote:Unless he's already died, or the experience has physically or psychologically scarred him for life (in which case paying him monetary compensation isn't much different from paying his heirs monetary compensation). Money can't make everything better; any time you punish anyone, you run the risk of doing permanent harm to an innocent person.
Not sure what you're driving at. Is it "better" to be wrongly executed than wrongly imprisoned?
There's a pretty big difference between permanently making your life worse and permanently making your life non-existent. You can at least try to fix the former.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
vison wrote:Not sure what you're driving at. Is it "better" to be wrongly executed than wrongly imprisoned?
No, they're both bad. What I'm driving at is that you can't outlaw execution (just) because of the possibility of doing finite harm to an innocent person, because you then have to outlaw almost all other forms of punishment as well (certainly including life sentences).
yovargas wrote:There's a pretty big difference between permanently making your life worse and permanently making your life non-existent. You can at least try to fix the former.
If I'm sentenced to life in prison and released four years later, nothing anyone tries is going to give me those four years back. And if I die after two years, you've got the same exact problem you'd have had if you'd executed me.
I find it strange that the "but what if he's innocent?" question invariably surfaces when this type of punishment is discussed, but is practically never heard with respect to any others.
