George’s simple 3 step proposal to ensure that innocent people are not killed by convicted murderers:
Job done.
I’m not the one proactively going out of my way to see them killed.
Of course, if folks like me had their way, we wouldn’t have a “kid doing five years for drug charges,” provided no violence was involved.
Unfortunately, a lot of the morons who think that locking up users is the solution to the drug problem are the same people who think that executions are the solution to violent crime.
Well, first let me point out I contend no one should be executed, even if their guilt is clearly established.
So I’m not talking here about whether a given person should be executed, but rather whether it’s possible or likely that a factually innocent person has been executed.
But when I ask that question, you turn it into a different question: whether I can name the specific factually innocent person that has been executed. These are two separate inquiries.
Let’s imagine I ask you about a person holding twelve dice who throws them all and ends up showing twelve boxcars – twelve sixes. I say that it’s virtually certain this has happened in the past.
You deny this claim, and say, “OK, prove it – here are the twelve dice. Go ahead.”
I can’t prove the proposition by direct evidence, because it’ll take a long time for the unlikely event to happen. But I hope you can see that in that example, it’s a certainty that given enough dice throws, it’s going to happen. Right?
Well, what can I say? Drugs are bad shit. I’ve seen more lives ruined and even lost due to drugs than to anything else, including violent crime and disease. This would include the 20-year-old son of a couple of good friends of mine just this last April. People who peddle it or encourage others to use it deserve to be in jail.
Plus, consider this: drugs are illegal! What a concept! This means that if you indulge and get caught, the law will have its way with you.
Yes, there are those of us who believe that if you choose to break the law, you deserve the consequences. I have no problem self-identifying with that group, and your characterization of them as morons speaks more to your own intellectual (and moral) shortcomings than it does to mine.
Except:
Not only that, but once someone has been executed, the law, by its very nature, expends no more effort to establish guilt or innocence. I’m not sure if it’s even theoretically possible to call for a new trial for an executed person, but even if it were, it seems rather unlikely that it would actually happen.
Is it possible for a court to reopen a case, based on (for example) DNA evidence, where the person found guilty of the crime has already been executed? Because if it isn’t, then by (legal) definition the justice system has never executed an innocent man, because every person executed has been found guilty in a court of law.
But, given that we know that (at least)17 people (by the Innocence Project’s count) have been exonerated by DNA evidence while on death row, we have strong evidence that innocent people can end up on death row. The only thing that prevented those 17 people being killed before the DNA evidence was tested was the slowness of the process. And a lot of people who support the death penalty also support reducing the number of appeals and the length of the appeals process.
But you’re not.
The method that will result in the fewest innocent deaths would be to confine formerly-death-penalty-eligible convicts to highly secure facilities, such as ADX Florence in the federal system or Pelican Bay in California.
So far as I’m aware, no one has ever escaped ADX Florence’s high security section, nor murdered anyone else, be it guard or fellow inmate.
So why isn’t that the correct solution?
That’s correct. Any proceeding trying to establish innocence of an executed person generally won’t be heard, in that it’s moot. A case is moot when no finding will change the status of the parties before the court, and the court cannot offer any relief.
Correct again.
So what? Your claim was wanting to choose the method that resulted in the fewest innocent deaths. Besides, that same theoretical future liberal court would also presumably invalidate the death penalty, so this weakness exists for your approach also.
This is essentially the same claim as #1
Not true – I mentioned Pelican Bay in California. There’s also Tamms, in Illinois, and Wallens Ridge in Virginia off the top of my head.
The Supreme Court doesn’t get to write the law. And they can only overturn those laws which are unconstitutional. Simply write the law in accordance with the constitution. Besides, wouldn’t that same court have also ditched the death penalty anyway?
What, louder than we currently protest the death penalty? I’d love to see you try and demonstrate that.
Then states should rearrange their budget, cut waste, and/or raise taxes to pay for them. It’s preferable to instituting a system guaranteeing the deaths of innocent people.
You’re embarrassing yourself and those of us who are anti-death penalty.
Wow, you’ve certainly given me a lot to chew over there. On balance, however, I have to say that while I certainly appreciate your concern, I think I’m gonna carry on making my own case however I damn well please. If you don’t like my manner or my arguments, I don’t much give a fuck. And given our obvious difference in approaches, I could most likely level similar charges against you.
I completely understand. If you want to look like an idiotic buffoon more intent on insulting the opposition than making relevant points, that’s your perogative. It’s the Pit, so feel free to embarrass yourself all you want.
One point that you and other life-without-parole advocates omit is that sometimes guilty parties plead guilty to avoid the possibility of the DP. This would no longer be on the table under your scenario.
Yeah, I wish I could be more like you, focussing with the relentless intensity of a fucking diamond cutter on the unavoidable crux of this entire argument - my netiquette.
Fucking prick.
True.
Why is that bad?
It might be a solution to this aspect of life sentences without parole if these types of prisons could be financed, instituted and maintained for the imprisonment of convicted murderers. I think the likelihood of it though is scant, and then we still have the threat that future Supreme Court decisions could overturn such sentences. Most of my comments however have been aimed at our current situation, where escapes, paroles and prisoner-to-prisoner attacks have been and currently are resulting in more deaths than wrongful executions.
“So what” is that life without parole does not guarantee life without parole, so it’s not an adequate solution to keeping people safe from convicted murderers.
That’s right. I’m afraid I’m at a loss to see how my concerns about a future Supreme Court overturning life without parole results in fewer innocent deaths, which is what you seem to be saying here.
It’s true that future courts may invalidate the death penalty yet again, but I see no reason why this means we should stop protecting the citizenry from convicted murderers now while we still can.
Not quite. We currently have the death penalty; we don’t currently have a solitary confinement rule for all convicted murderers, and it’s highly unlikely that we ever will for the reasons I stated.
Okay, so I wrong about Supermax-style prisons being exclusively federal prisons. I’m still not seeing the public will to finance, staff and maintain such prisons to house convicted murderers, and of course we still don’t have any rule that they have to be housed in these types of prisons.
In the event that escape-and-murder-proof supermax-style facilties were built to house murderers and laws were passed mandating that they must be housed there, then I would say that would effectively eliminate the argument that imprisoned killers present a danger to innocent citizens and other inmates.
It’s a consideration that you’re leaving out of the equation.
There are some number of murderers who would plead guilty facing the possibility of the DP, but who will go to trial and beat the rap if that’s not on the table, or alternatively will plead guilty in exchange for shorter sentences (i.e. shorter than they’d take if facing the DP). For example, no one would ever plead guilty to charges that would result in (what is effectively) a lifetime sentence if that’s the maximum they could get from losing at trial, and prosecutors would have to sweeten the deal a lot to get guilty pleas. Which I imagine they would do, because they are frequently strapped for resources.
So that’s some murderers out on the loose, which will result in some additional murders.
I don’t know how big of a factor this would be. I would think Hamlet, who is - I believe - a prosecutor, would have a better sense of this. But it’s not zero, so talking about escape-proof prisons does not address the entire issue.
[If I had to guess, I would think it’s a bigger factor than people escaping from prison. Although only in that the numbers of free murderers would be much greater. Prison escapees would presumably have a much higher murder rate than murderers who beat the rap or served out their sentences. So I don’t know.]
Starving Artist argues history and public policy based on personal anecdote. News at 11.
Talk about begging the question.
I never suggested that drugs are currently legal, and i’m well aware that those who currently use and deal them do so in the knowledge that getting caught might lead to conviction and incarceration. The very point of my argument was that many practices that are currently illegal should not be illegal.
I assume that you can understand the difference between the two arguments “This thing is legal” and “This thing is currently illegal, but should not be illegal”?
I too believe that if you break the law, you deserve the consequences. The point of my argument is that i differ from you on what should be against the law, and what the specific consequences should be. Even you can probably understand that concept.
And your stupidity is related less to your membership of some broader social group than it is to your own personal shortcomings. I don’t hold anyone else responsible for those.
It’s kind of hard to take someone seriously who characterizes the appeals process as “legal shenanigans.” It’s especially appalling coming from an officer of the court.
[QUOTE=Ann Coulter]
Now, a brisk 22 years after Davis murdered Officer MacPhail, his sentence will finally be administered this week – barring any more of the legal shenanigans that have kept taxpayers on the hook for Davis’ room and board for the past two decades.
[/QUOTE]
Those “legal shenanigans” are constitutionally mandated checks on criminal justice system and are directly responsible for ensuring that at least some of the convicted innocent are not executed. There’s ample evidence that juries get it wrong and convict on meager and/or poor evidence. There’s ample doubt in the Davis case to the extent that several of the jurors who convicted him pleaded for clemency as a result of what has come to light since the conviction.
As to the honesty of her assessment, she makes a point to note that 34 witnesses testified against Davis carefully implying that most of those witnesses were eyewitnesses, but omitting the fact that they were not all eyewitness, but included police and forensic investigators. The media, she charges, is misleading the public by reporting on only nine eyewitnesses, seven of whom recanted their testimonies.
[QUOTE=Ann Coulter]
It’s nearly impossible to receive a death sentence these days – unless you do something completely crazy like shoot a cop in full view of dozens of witnesses in a Burger King parking lot, only a few hours after shooting at a passing car while exiting a party.
…
After a two-week trial with **34 witnesses **for the state and six witnesses for the defense, the jury of seven blacks and five whites took less than two hours to convict Davis of Officer Mark MacPhail’s murder, as well as various other crimes. Two days later, the jury sentenced Davis to death.
…
Now the media claim that seven of the nine witnesses against Davis at trial have recanted.
First of all, the state presented 34 witnesses against Davis – not nine – which should give you some idea of how punctilious the media are about their facts in death penalty cases.
..
Only two of the seven alleged “recantations” (out of 34 witnesses) actually recanted anything of value…
[/QUOTE]
Bolding mine. She knows damn well those nine witnesses the media are referring to are clarified by Amnesty International as non-police witnesses, but she leaves that out because it doesn’t fit with her narrative that seven is not a significant number compared to 34. Other media reports list them as “key” witnesses, which makes sense given there isn’t likely to have even been a trial without those witnesses.
Further, while lambasting weepy liberals for their questioning of the validity of the conviction, she conveniently fails to note that former U.S. Attorney, U.S. District Judge and Chief Judge for the Western District of Texas and former FBI Director (appointed by Reagan), William S. Sessions also called for a stay of the Davis execution, not just on eyewitness recantation alone, but on multiple allegations of police coercion and lack of relevant physical evidence.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that there were allegations of police coercion given the fact that the police had a piece of physical evidence excluded from the trial due to improper search and seizure by threatening to break down Davis’ mother’s door. Coulter conveniently left that out, too. Probably because it’s not such a jump to conclude from those actions that the police had already decided who was guilty long before the trial ever started and failed to investigate any other possibilities.
Then she concludes with the accusation that people who oppose Davis’ execution want to return “sociopathic cop killers” to the street which is pure hyperbole. The fact is that clemency is not synonymous with full pardon and release. She knows this. Among those who’ve questioned Davis’ conviction urge for a new trial or at the very least, as in Session’s position, commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment. It’s character assassination to allege that death penalty opponents prefer sociopathic killers be allowed to roam free and a misrepresentation that all of those questioning the Davis’ conviction also oppose the death penalty.
In her defense, we all know that Coulter is just trying to make money by riling up conservatives (which is why it also doesn’t surprise me that you indulged in her particular brand of fruit punch). It’s amusing that you thought you’d have much company at her punch bowl around here, though.