My final response to magellan01:
The problem is, no I can’t see that there are “not just a few ridiculous examples.” I’m seeing a bunch of descriptions done by groups that very much have an agenda, and therefore may or may not be the full story of what actually went down. A kid can be a good student and an eagle scout or whatever and still be trying to show off his gun. A little boy may be trying to kiss a girl on the cheek, and still forcibly overpowering her to do it. I don’t know what actually happened in any of these cases, and neither do you. The only people who know are the people who were there.
There’s a very real possibility that the adults making judgments were idiots. But there’s also a very real possibility that the situation as described is a highly incomplete, or even inaccurate, description of what actually went down. I tend to trust what the people who actually had to deal with it more than the people who have an ideological agenda and are armchair quarterbacking.
In any case, when you consider how many kids have been to school over the past twenty years and how many of these stories you’ve dug up, I’m really not seeing this as a trend. Stuff like this makes headlines, and that doesn’t typically happen because it’s commonplace.
But while the issues raised happend to use children as examples, they were about the over-zealous application of rules and regs. The use of children was strictly an appeal to emotion. And you were the one who told me to look at the cites in detail, so I did.
The interesting things is, if I’m remembering back to my psych major days correctly, they did the best they could looking at back when hangings were being used, and there was little lag time. They found, if anything, that the rise in violence associated with hangings was more profound than the rise in violence you see today in association with executions, probably because the hangings were public. Could be wrong on that, so don’t hold me to it. But I don’t think there’s any evidence to support your link between long lag and less rise in violence.
How often does that happen? And do you know how incredibly overrated eye-witness testimony is? It’s a real flaw throughout our justice system. My point is, it’s pretty darned rare that you have absolutely incontrovertible evidence that someone is guilty. There have been a goodly number of times when there was no question throughout the justice system’s collective mind that the right guy had been found, and later DNA had proven them wrong. It happens. We used to be a country in which the philosophy of “better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be found guilty.” Perhaps we can’t afford that anymore. But the death sentence is pretty darned irreversible.
I’ve long been torn on this one, because from a practical standpoint, when it seems someone is not only a heinous criminal, but an incorrigible one, why spend the money to keep him alive? (Of course these days, it costs more to execute him, but let’s put that aside for the moment) If we had exile, it would be ideal, but we don’t have any place available for exile, no Australia handy.
But in more recent years, I’ve become convinced that the risk of convicting an innocent person is too great to take the risk. I used to be a bit more starry eyed about prosecutors and police, but I’ve learned that they do (as I do) get enamored of a single answer, and apply a confirmation bias to all evidence they find from there on - not all of them, but enough of them that it matters. And we as the public tend to be very trusting - it the police and the prosecutors tell us that someone is guilty, we’re highly likely to believe them.
That’s a bit of a dangerous situation. You never know when the person they’re coming for might be you, not the guy in the slum wiping his nose on his sleeve.