In this thread, the case of a Texas man who was executed is being discussed. In the case, one of the witnesses has come forward and recanted his testimony, leading the authorities to question whether or not the case should have been brought in the first place.
In the thread, Revtim makes the following comment:
I can certainly understand being opposed to the death penalty because of the possibility of misapplication (although I’m kind of curious how he feels about it in the case of someone like Tim McVeigh - where there really is no doubt of the guilt - but that’s a separate debate). However, I would like to focus on the second half of Revtim’s statement; namely that an imprisoned person can be set free and so (at least as far as I read his position), prison is an acceptable punishment because a mistake can be rectified (unlike capital punishment, where we have yet to find a way to reverse the punishment).
However, I’m not so certain that such a position is completely logical either. After all, one can spend twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit. True, he can be released and even have his conviction expunged from the record. You can even attempt to compensate him for the time spent in prison. But, at the end of the day, that doesn’t really make up for being stuck in prison for twenty years. The punishment, in this case, cannot truly be reversed. There is no way that the person can go back and relive those twenty years - they’re gone forever - a huge whole in the middle of his life and the lives of those he loves. And that’s putting aside the enviornment that he was placed into.
In short then, if one is going to state that the death penalty is bad solely because the punishment is irreversible, then I would conclude that sending someone to prison (at least for an extended period of time) is likewise unacceptable. The penalty cannot be compensated for nor truly reversed if the accused is found innocent instead. Granted, unlike capital punishment, he still has the rest of his life to live out, but that’s not really the issue. The issue here is not whether or not the death penalty is acceptable - it’s whether given those reasons for the death penalty unacceptability, is (extended) prison acceptable either?
Nothing can truly be reversed. Time, as we experience it, works only one way.
Any argument against the death penalty has the same flaw. My objection to it, for example, is that we have imperfect knowledge and shouldn’t base someone’s life on it. Same problem. Should we be able to base someone’s freedom on imperfect knowledge?
Or another argument against the dp is that it’s inhumane. Yet, prison ain’t no walk in the park.
Another argument is that it’s state-sanctioned murder. Yet, prison is state-sanctioned kidnapping and maybe even slavery!
What all of these arguments have in common is the assumption that death is a little different in some fundamental way.
Our justice system is imperfect. We can’t read people’s minds or see into the past to know exactly what happened. There are always going to be people that get convicted of crimes they did not commit. It sucks, but that’s the way it is. Why not allow ourselves the opportunity to PARTIALLY fix our mistakes?
I think that it is unacceptable to send someone to jail for 20 years when they didn’t commit the crime. However, we don’t yet have a method of perfectly determining guilt, and we still have to punish criminals. So, we must choose the lesser of two evils.
Would you rather be put in jail for 20 years or be put to death? I think the “lesser evil” is obvious.
Where do you draw the line? If it’s unreasonable to imprison somebody for 20 years because occasionally we hear of people in prison that long who are actually innocent, do we say sentences can’t be that long? How about ten years? 5 years? Any punishment of any kind?
The problem with the anti-dp sentiment is that any punishment for any crime is inherently inhumane: you’re taking something from somebody that usually has absolutely nothing to do with the crime committed. If all you do is arrest somebody, keep him in jail for a couple days and then release him, you have made a profound change to this person, even if no charges were ever filed and a full apology is given. If it actually goes to a trial and conviction, those are things that are going to be with the person the rest of his life, even if the only penalty is the time already spent confined in the legal system. Saying that you shouldn’t kill people simply because you can’t undo it is no better or worse than saying you shouldn’t imprison people because you can’t undo the fact that the person was imprisoned.
There’s different levels of “nonreversability”. Surely we have to live with some level of nonreversable punishment if we are to punish criminals at all in society.
Where one draws the line is a personal judgement call. I feel we have to punish criminals, so we have to live with the chance of a not completely reversable punishment of the innocent at the level of imprisonment. But, I feel we should not punish at the much higher level of risking taking an innocent’s life with no hope of even partial reversal.
Even if you do not agree with where I’m drawing that particular line, do you not at least consider it a reasonable place to draw it?
Well, certain punishments are, for the most part, reversible. To use a really light example - if I get a parking ticket, pay the $100 and have it overturned on appeal, the state can give me back my money. They can even give it with interest. Monetary penalties are usually reversible.
Of course, I’m not suggesting a fine for murder. But I’m wondering if, (again, given the reason for the opposition to the death peanlty that was provided by Revtim, I’m wondering if we should put some serious effort into looking into some form of alternative punishment system.
I think there is an equivocation in the meaning of the word “punishment” as you are using it here. A punishment of death is different by several orders of magnitude from a punishment of imprisonment. Also, Revtim did not assert that freeing an imprisoned man reverses anything. It simply stops the punishment.
By your logic no punishment is valid, as there is always a chance for a mistake.
Slightly off topic, but: Are we then also against parole? Because a paroled person can (and I’m sure we can dig up plenty of cases of did) go out and kill someone - someone who wouldn’t be dead if he had not been paroled. My point being, there will always be mistakes, the best we can do is gaurd against those mistakes.
A sentence in prison also increases the odds that one will contract viral hepatitis or HIV or suffer other, ultimately fatal health consequences. One could also be killed by other inmates.
It would be hard to garner accurate statistics, but taking into account the more intensive review of death penalty cases, it is far more likely that falsely imprisoned persons in non-capital cases have died as a result of their incarceration, than it is for persons sentenced to death.
Should we shrug our shoulders and say “Well, it’s the lesser of two evils.”?
Revtim didn’t use the word “reversible.” He merely (in other words) said that a prisoner can be set free whereas a corpse cannot resurrected.
Put it this way: Imagine you were wrongfully convicted and only you knew you were innocent. Further (reaching to the fantastical here) let’s say only you knew a time-capsule would be opened in 20 years that would completely exonerate you. You were sentenced to death, but given a choice: Death tomorrow, or 20 years hard labour.
To maintain Revtim’s argument is illogical ignores the fact that where there is life there is hope. The distinction between the death penalty and any other form of punishment is that the DP alone removes all hope and eradicates one’s life, liberty, and ability to pursue happiness.
This is not to, necessarily, argue one way or the other on the DP, just to point out what appears to me to be a flaw in this argument.
Compensation does not mean time travel. It is intended to reverse inequity as far as is practicable.
For example, were I wrongly imprisoned for a single hour and given £1M in compensation, I would not complain that it did not “make up for being stuck in prison” for an hour. Obviously, there may come some threshold of time at which no amount of money would address the inequity, say being given £100Bn when you have seconds left to live. Of course, the real world sits somewhere between the two.
Death and imprisonment were discussed as both being inequitable here.
I’d suspect many on death row or in prison for life do not come from the best of circumstances. You’d need to take into account the chance of ODing, dying in a crime, or from gang warfare on the outside. So while being in prison might be more dangerous than being outside on the average, I doubt it is for those likely to be convicted.
I’m practically against the death penalty because I don’t feel it can be instituted correctly in our legal system. There is too much room for error, and I view the State executing someone incorrectly as much worse than the state imprisoning someone incorrectly.
Let’s not forget that part of the reason we have laws and incarcerate prisoners is to protect society. There is a risk when we imprison someone that we’re unjustly taking from them something they can never get back. But we could never go to a purely monetary or alternative punishment system because it would fail to protect society from people who present an ongoing threat to society (violent repeat offenders, serial rapists, serial killers, et al.)
Philosophically I toy with the idea of the death penalty being just. When you kill someone you’ve stolen all the future possibilities of their life. You’ve stolen from them the chance to live for X amount of years, that’s something pretty heinous to me. And I think the only EQUITABLE way to right that is to take the life of the perpetrator. The perpetrator has stolen all the future life from someone, even in prison this murderer has chances and options that his victim will never again have.
Morally speaking I’m against the death penalty. I’m a Catholic and that’s a big part of why I don’t support either the death penalty or abortion. I tend to agree with my church about the sanctity of human life, and it’s not for us to judge who should live and who should die.
I think the punishment should always fit the crime. So, while the death penalty might be appropriate for a premeditated murder, it would not be for littering.
But, appropriate or not, the dp differs from all other punishments, as many others have pointed out, that it is irreversible. That, alone, is sufficient for me to oppose it, although “cruel and inhuman” is pretty far up on my list, too.
So, in rare cases, an innocent man is executed. I suppose a case could be made that this is so rare as to not be considered as an argument. But I would like to suggest that this happens more than is thought. Why? Because, when a man is executed, most legal activity (DNA analysis, forensic work, searching for witnesses, etc.) will cease, since it is obviously unrewarding unless the victim’s name is Lazarus.
It seems likely that innocent people have been executed who might have been exonerated if the courts allowed more time. If this could be included in the total of innocent executed, it would inflate the number of unfortunates.
I dunno if this is different enough to warrant its own thread, but it seems to me that if we wrongly imprison someone, we ought to owe them reparations. Make it, oh, say, $100,000 per year that they were wrongly imprisoned, with an exception for those rare cretins who attempt to get themselves wrongly imprisoned.
Wrongly imprisoning someone ruins their life. A hundred grand a year isn’t going to give them back those lost years, but it can make their remaining years more comfortable. And I think we owe it to them to do so, because as a society, we’ve committed a terrible error.
Also, in some states, evidence form the case is destroyed whemn the defendant is executed. So even if there was someone out there who would rather prove the innocence of a corpse than save a living man, the evidence needed to do so would be gone.
The OP is a brilliant example of reductio ad absurdum. It proves that there is not a single subject that, with enough effort, cannot be deconstructed beyond the point of any relevance or sense whatsoever.
It makes me want to respond with, “Have you ever looked at your hand? I mean really looked at your hand?”