C.Y.T.A.D.P.T? (Can you take Another Death Penalty Thread)

Great Debates
1

::insert standard disclaimer about not finding this particular question asked before, apologies if it has been hashed out over and over again on the boards, and apologies for any lack of originality found within::

[hypothetical]After many years of false starts and dead ends, NASA makes some astonishing breakthroughs in cryogenic hibernation. They unveil to the public a machine that can put an astronaut to ‘sleep’ that meets the following standards: It is extraordinarily inexpensive to run - that is, very little energy or materials are needed to maintain the person within. It is very reliable, so that it can be left relatively unattended for years at a time. It is relatively painless, and when ‘awoken’ from hibernation, a person suffers no noticeable physical or mental damage.[/hypothetical]

Where this post is leading should be quite obvious. Would this be an acceptable compromise / substitute to the death penalty? Pro-DP advocates would still achieve the goal of having a person removed from society. Maintaining a person in such a freeze would be cheaper than keeping someone in a conventional cell for twenty years. Anti-DP advocates would not have to worry (as much) over the loss of an innocent life, because the person could be ‘restored’ fairly easily, should innocence be found. Also, it is not death, per se, so the state is not committing a ‘crime.’

If the consequences of ‘freezing’ an innocent are relatively small, will this make the ‘death’ penalty more prevalent in society?

How long should a person be kept in storage? The rest of their (average) natural life? Exactly X number of years? If storage units are relatively cheap enough, should they remain frozen for a hundred years? When does the state pull the plug?

When should they be frozen? They should be able to assist in their own defense, but for how long? Do they get frozen shortly after their original trial, one year afterwards, or after their last appeal?

I don’t believe that this is too farfetched of an idea. NASA is working, albeit slowly, on the hibernation issue. Cryogenic companies have a good number of frozen bodies and are working on some of the same problems. Judges / DAs offer people alternative punishments from time to time, this could initially be such a case. I am not suggesting this in a mamby-pamby effort to ‘solve’ the death penalty debate, but am interested in thoughts on the follow-up questions it raises. Ideas? Thanks,
Rhythmdvl

2

So, let me see if I have this straight. Instead of death or life in prison, you want to freeze criminals? So a guy who robs a bank and happens to kill 5 people gets sentenced to 200 years of deep freeze. What happens during those 200 years? What has been accomplished if the guy comes out in 200 years at pretty much the same age as when he went in, only there has been no rehabilitation, and he hasn’t been able to stew over what he did. So now, you have a guy who killed 5 people, with no rehabilitation walking around a world where everybody he knew is long since dead. Wouldn’t that alone equate to cruel and unusual punishment? Don’t you think that he might be just a little bitter, and a candidate for relapse?

3

NO! :stuck_out_tongue:

4

No, not all criminals, just capital offenders.

Someone has been convicted of killing Mrs. Schlipelschultz in an egregious manner. That person should be removed from society. There are some very strong arguments for taking that person’s life. There are also some very strong arguments against doing that. Birdsyeying the person, in some respects, offers a compromise - it completely removes that person from society (or enjoying a ‘soft’ life in prison) but is not completely irreversible.

That is one of the questions I’m interested in. If the crime would normally have been punished by death, when do you pull the plug? If the criminal is twenty, do you wait fifty years to pull the plug? How long of a safety net do you extend? Is the length of time based on probability of another guilty party coming forth or the life expectancy of the felon? I don’t think that the person would every ‘get out’ except in the case in which innocence is eventually proven or an appeal is won. In those cases, there would be a readjustment, but that is a side technicality that can be better dealt with by bureaucrats.
Oh, and DTWD - PPpptppptpp! :slight_smile:

5

That is probably one of the funniest things that I have read on these boards.

6

Didn’t this happen in demolition man? :slight_smile: Except there they had a system to rehab the person.

Without rehab, you’d have a person stuck 200 years in the future with no change in personality. Unless in those 200 years someone invented a way to do it.

Without some chance at rehab they’d still be dangerous.

7

St.Z - I think Rythmdvl’s point is that the condemned would be frozen against the possibility of error. If no exculpatory evidence is ever brought forward after X years, they’re not brought out of deep-freeze in a way that brings them back to life; the plug is pulled in a way that finishes the job of killing them.

One problem that I see is that the resources of DP opponents are already far too stretched to do any post-execution research; they can’t adequately represent people at trial, which is where the real action is. So the likelihood that more than a handful of cases could be sufficiently looked into, post-freezing, to use this method as a backup, seems to me to be a bit of a longshot.

If the unlikely day ever comes when we still have the DP, but every person on trial for his/her life has quality representation at trial, then we can look into this method as an added safeguard. And if the Rapture occurs, we just might have something happen like in the “Left Behind” novels. But I’m not expecting anything soon, in either case.

8

Not only that, they’d be a drain on society. In all likelihood, any job skills they had prior to freezing would be meaningless in their new world. His skills would be as out of date as a blacksmith would be today.

They would probably suffer some form of culture shock as well (just imagine a Revolutionary War soldier showing up today… just explain to him (in no particular order) the telephone, television, Internet, computers, space travel, anitbiotics, electricity, trains, automobiles, the right of women to vote, Gay Pride, legalized abortion, birth control, the atomic bomb, and many other scientific and cultural things that never existed in his day… he’d be overwhelmed.)

Zev Steinhardt

9

What Zev said.

Spider Robinson wrote a wonderful story about a time-traveller–a man released from a prison camp after 20 years. For all intents and purposes he had moved 20 years into the future. Robinson captured the temporal culture shock quite nicely.

Cryogenic freezing or some other type of stasis is pure-D silly as a way of handling criminals. Freezing serves no purpose and as pointed out there are many reasons for not thawing the criminal in the future. An “indefinite” cryo sentence is a death sentence–something will go wrong with the equipment eventually. There’s no rehabilitation, there’s no punishment, and it only temporarily gets the offender off the streets and out of the gene pool.

Might as well just execute them as freeze them.

10

If you freeze an innocent man and exculpatory evidence comes to light 50 years later, you can thaw him out, but you have still taken away everything this man has known. Parent’s and probably spouse dead, children grown and elderly, friends gone, vocational skills obsolete, etc…

11

I think this hypothetical situation was the basis for one of the Superman movies.

BTW, if you believe in reincarnation, the death penalty is pretty much the same thing that the OP describes.

12

One objection not yet stated is that a popsicle convict has no way to fight for his innocence. Many of the accounts I’ve read about innocent people freed are of the “tireless defender” variety. Somebody on the outside believed from Day One that Mr. Jones was innocent and worked their butts off proving it. However, a lot of others are of the “I sat in jail and wrote hundreds of letters for 6 years before I finally got So-and-so’s attention,” variety. You freeze a guy, especially one without family or many friends, and he becomes powerless to help himself. No exculpatory evidence will ever be found if he can’t convince someone to actually go out and look.

13

I am pro-DP and I object to this idea of freezing a guy with no rehabilitation or aging to slow down his crimainal behavior if and when he gets thawed out. Consider this, even with today’s 5-10 year appeals process some murderers are able to beat the wrap simply because the case against them deteriorates with age. To be sentenced to death in the first place a defendent must be proven guilty of a capitol offense beyond a reasonable doubt. Death row inmates often study the law in prison and execute their constitutional right to appeal their case to the Supreme Court (or any other court). Did you know that the vast majority of appeals made to the SC come from convicts with nothing better to do but make (mostly) frivolous appeals? After 10 (or even 20) years of appeals, suppose an inmate wins a new trial based on a technicality (such as the judge giving the jury the wrong instructions). This technicality has nothing to do with the evidence in the case, only with procedures. This new trial, though, will almost always favor the defense, since no one has to prove he’s innocent, the burden of proof is entirely on the prosecution. After 10 years, the evidence originally used to convict could be lost, stolen, or deteriorated beyond use. The witnesses for the prosecution may have died, disappeared, or changed their story for no apparent reason. Some of the people who we hear about being released from death row after years of appeals are as guilty as sin, but the state can no longer prove this beyond a reasonable doubt, so they go free.
Don’t get me wrong, I support a person’s right to appeal their sentence, I just think that these appeals should be finished as quickly as possible and the sentence either carried out or revoked. If a guy’s family could appeal a case for 50 years and then win a new trial, there would be no way in hell that all of the evidence and testimony from the original trial would still be intact. Powerful eye-witness testimony delivered on the stand by a credible and well spoken individual is reduced to a clerk reading the testimony out of the court record in a dry monotone voice (since the original witness passed away years ago). It could mean the eventual release of anyone who was originally sentenced to death by eternal freezing (assuming that technical mistakes continue to force new trials in the future). Then, when these guys get thawed out they are exactly as young, as strong, and as good or evil as they were to begin with.