You misquoted me. I said death row, which exposes them to the very real possibility of execution, not to mention the stress that entails year after year. Even that is morally wrong.
Which is irrelevant, since we were talking about people on death row found innocent. The rest of their life is still salvageable, therefore, the system works.
Seems to me that it’d serve as an effective motivator for these blatantly innocent people to prove their case.
Is that how justice works in your head? The innocent must prove their case?
Once they’ve already been determined by a jury to be guilty of a capital offense? Yes.
We know that some innocent people were saved from execution. We do not know that all innocent people on death row were spared from execution. This couldn’t be any simpler, but c’est la vie: your argument is ‘I am going to assume everything is fine because it suits my purposes to do so. I will not add two and two because I don’t want the answer to be four.’
I think 18 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1989, and hundreds of others with lesser sentences have been exonerated. Since this work is being done by private organizations who have to pick and choose their cases and it applies only to the small minority of cases where DNA evidence can be reviewed, the implications are troubling. And only on Bizarro World is it good when innocent people are tried, convicted, sentenced to die, spend years in jail, and then set free - and I note Smapti’s eerie implication that he’s not really interested in innocent people being exonerated. I guess it ruins the fun if you find yourself wondering if the guy on the gurney might’ve been innocent.
If innocent people are tried, convicted, sentenced to die, spend years in jail, and then set free, it means the system works, because we prevented the death of an innocent person. Perhaps you should be more concerned about why innocent people are being convicted at such an allegedly alarming rate than by the means which are used to punish the guilty.
It actually means the system has failed in the second-worst way possible. The justice system isn’t supposed to periodically put innocent people in mortal danger in the first place. And when the system fails over and over again in the same ways - because people who are poor and nonwhite (or whose victims are white) are more likely to face the stiffest penalties, for example - it also raises alarming questions about bias.
What a bizarre attempt at misdirection. I’m concerned about both problems, and they are strongly related.
The argument is that we can’t prove that an innocent person has been executed because the authorities charged with proving such matters refuse to do so. Private parties could investigate the cases of people who have already been executed, but all the evidence will be at least 10 years old and they won’t have subpoena power.
Smapti, we don’t want to have a Libertarian-style justice system in which innocent people have to rely on the charity of strangers to avoid incarceration or death. The system has to cover all the bases itself or it isn’t functioning (unless the plan is for certain classes of people to fall through the cracks- ‘Libertarian-style’ always seems to involve a thumb on the scales). It is ‘Justice for All’, not ‘Justice if you’re lucky’.
The Willingham case sure looks like one in which an innocent person was executed. It could have been prevented had Rick ‘ooops’ Perry taken the trouble to review the developments in that case. That’s disturbing- plenty of politicians like him get elected thanks to rank demagoguery, which introduces all kinds of bullshit motives into government that eventually resolve into bad results of one kind or other.
But in the case of Tsarnaev, it doesn’t look like there will be a question of guilt. They have him on tape placing the exploding duffel bag in the crowd. He had bomb-making materials, probably computer evidence. He was the guy at the end of that deadly chase, and I think he confessed to boot. They got the guy.
Racial bias isn’t going to be a factor as he is white as can be. Some might say there will be a bias against Muslims, but personally I don’t care about his religion- I’m horrified by the baseness of his crime and the lizard-like cold bloodedness required to carry it out.
Maybe John Mace will come back in here and demonstrate how he’d plead for Tsarnaev’s life. He has come down against the death penalty, but more or less as a bare assertion. What is behind your position, John?
For me, I return to an Alexander Hamilton quote:
Peace, war, the death penalty- whatever my opinion, they will proceed regardless. The only difference my opinion makes is in whether I make myself complicit in Tsarnaev’s death by approving it. That makes me quite uncomfortable these days- maybe with my resistance, decades down the road enough citizens will bring enough pressure to bear to end the death penalty. But OTOH, am I supposed to defend that guy? Contemptible doesn’t cut it- he’s close to being BP bad. I don’t wan’t to be complicit in assisting him either.
Help me out, John (or whoever). How do we defend this guy specifically?
Actually, the authorities in charge have already proven them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And the verdicts survived years and decades of appeals. The anti-DP groups want to retry the case over and over and over until they get the result they want.
Plus, consider the case mentioned earlier, of Roger Coleman. He was convicted and executed. After the fact, a more sophisticated form of DNA testing became available, and the evidence was retested. I will leave you to guess what the results were.
Regards,
Shodan
The same is true of some people who we now know were wrongly convicted.
How many of them were executed?
Regards,
Shodan
We don’t know. That’s not a good answer when you’re talking about a criminal justice system.
Anyone in favor of the death penalty should, in my view, spend a week reading the Innocence Project’s results.
314 people exonerated thus far through use of DNA.
Notice how in virtually all the cases, the prosecution fought against testing, then fought against admitting the test results?
Now imagine what would happen in a similar case with no DNA evidence preserved.
On preview, never mind. If opposition to the DP were based on the idea that one or two are innocent, then there would be no opposition to the DP in cases where there was no doubt at all about guilt. Since there is, that can’t be the reason.
Regards,
Shodan
Sure it can. The argument is that even if you are not opposed to the death penalty on principle, you can see there are numerous glaring flaws in its implementation.
That is one reason. Perhaps death penalty proponents have difficulty weighing more than one factor at a time. Death penalty opponents do not, which is why (for example) Bricker is able to oppose the death penalty on race selectivity grounds even though he is in favor on principle.
And yet somehow the proof failed. Note that the Innocence Project seeks new trials on behalf of people who have exhausted the appeals process.
I had no idea that using a multi-pronged argument that involves both moral and practical concerns is cheating, but you live and you learn.