Why doesn’t he just escape?
Just out of curiousity, where did he escape from?
Death row isn’t easy to escape from, but it has been done. Texas has done well in keeping its trash behind bars, but it happens elsewhere; see, for example, the Briley Brothers from Virginia. Thread favorite Ted Bundy had fully hacksawed through one bar of his death row cell window in 1984 before his escape attempt was discovered and foiled.
And while escapes from death row itself may be uncommon, sadly, its residents aren’t there full-time. Thanks to appeals, retrials, subsequent hearings and the like, death row inmates get shuttled around. Oddly enough, their escapes while on such jaunts don’t seem to be recorded as “escaped from death row”. One such escape was perpetrated in Houston, by an inmate who was under a sentence of death, a Charles Victor Thompson, in 2005. So, about that “only one person has escaped from death row” statement…
(dang, why do I always start on these so close to five o’clock?)
well hell, when you put it like that, sign me up. :rolleyes:
Peter Gibbons: Do you know, they have conjugal visits there (prison)?
Samir: Really?
Peter Gibbons: Yes.
Michael Bolton: Shit. I’m a free man and I haven’t had a conjugal visit in six months.
Ranked in order of preference -
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killed by serial killer, 30 years before I would have naturally died.
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live the last 30 years of my life in a prison cell, wrongly accused and convicted of a crime I didn’t commit, proclaiming my innocence until my natural death.
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live the last 10 years of my life wrongly accused and convicted and sentenced to death, proclaiming my innocence until my life is stolen from me by the state.
and of those, how many went on to kill again? (sincere question) moreover, many of those appeals would be obviated with no DP (8th amendment appeals, for ex.).
Look, if the DP were applied the way many seem to think it is (see Annie and serial killers and others and DNA), I might be more inclined to support it. As it is, not so much.
I am not limiting myself to DNA, but to scientific advance in general.
Maybe I should have said “execute them if they are convicted of murder”. You mentioned the 5-10% of cases of violent crime in general where DNA evidence was available, and I wanted to be sure we were talking only about murders.
Well, that’s a rather poor way of putting it. It would be more accurate to say that I am choosing to incur a lower risk of being innocently executed to offset a larger risk of being the victim of a murderer.
It would be rather like choosing to have your lifetime risk of being hit by lightning doubled, in return for having your risk of dying of heart disease cut in half.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s not quite correct to say Thompson was “on death row.” He wasn’t on death row yet. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out his death sentence and ordered him retried on punishment (Thompson v. State, 93 S.W.3d 16 (Tex. Crim. App. 2001), which is why he was back in the Harris county jail. You can’t have a jury trial without the defendant present. To my knowledge, barring retrials that require a return to county jail, the only time Texas death row inmates are taken out of the Polunsky unit is for federal habeas corpus proceedings, and they’re kept under constant surveillance and returned that same day.
Like I said about the Bundy escape, escapes from county jails while awaiting trial aren’t relevant to having the death penalty or not, because you’re going to have them in county jail for those hearings regardless of what the eventual punishment is. Having the death penalty isn’t going to obviate that. The only way to avoid that is to shoot them in the head in the courthouse parking lot as soon as they’re taken into custody and avoid court altogether.
You said earlier something along the lines that you’re willing to risk the remote possibilty of somebody being wrongly executed to protect society from the dangers these offenders present, but it appears the danger is what’s remote. Since the reimposition of the death penalty, nobody has escaped from death row and killed somebody. Nobody has escaped Texas’ death row at all. With the possibility of wrongful execution looming as an ugly spectre in several cases, what is the death penalty accomplishing that incarceration under the same conditions wouldn’t?
OK, death penalty supporters, answer me this.
I conceed the possibility that the 1100 executions since 1976 might have prevented a handful of murders. Maybe 1% of them would have killed again, so perhaps those executions saved about 11 lives.
My own personal opinion is that is too much killing for too little gain. It’s just not worth killing so many people to save so few. YMMV.
My question to you supporters is, at what point would YOU stop supporting it. When does it become too much?
If you had to execute 250 people to save 1 life, would that be too much?
What if you had to execute 500 people to save one life?
Would it be too much if you had to kill 5,000 human beings in order to prevent one murder?
At what point does it cease to be worthwile?
If they say “I don’t know,” does this mean that the death penalty supporters automatically lose? 'Cuz frankly, I don’t see that it does.
Why not make this an equitable test? Why not ask how many people should be killed by convicted murderers (whether imprisoned or escaped) before opposition to the death penalty becomes unreasonable?
Again, I’m not trying to specifically argue for the death penalty. Rather, I can’t help but notice that the death penalty opponents in this thread keep adopting inequitable standards of proof. (This is in addition to my previous complaint that they fail to consider the murders that can result when a murderer is merely sentences to life imprisonment.)
If anything, the arguments and challenges offered make me sway all the more toward supporting the death penalty.
I fear that you are begging the question of “why do you support the death penalty?” You are assuming that the principal argument is whether it is “too much killing for too little gain”. For me, that’s not real high on the list of reasons why I’m a (lukewarm) supporter of the death penalty.
For me, the central issue is justice. Justice as I understand it is about making the punishment fit the crime. Now for many crimes, this is not too hard. We naturally punish someone more for grand theft than for theft, and more for assault and battery than for picking pockets. All societies do this, using various scales that weigh things like community service and jail time and probation and prison time and caning and halfway-house time and home detention against the perceived severity of the crime to come up with a sentence that is considered “justice” by that society. And that all works pretty well, considering.
It is at the upper end of the scale that we run into trouble. Suppose we sentence someone to life in prison for a series of a dozen brutal child rapes. That seems like justice to me. But then someone comes in, and they not only raped a dozen kids, they killed them as well.
This is where it becomes much more difficult. Killing someone is orders of magnitude greater than taking their money. It is orders of magnitude greater than rape. Life is the one thing without which all other things are meaningless, the one thing that it is impossible to recover. You can recover from theft, burglary, aggravated assault, rape, but you can never recover from being dead, far as I know.
So, if we consider it justice to give someone who raped a dozen kids life imprisonment, what is the just punishment for someone who raped and killed a dozen kids?
For me, the answer is execution. If we give life in prison for anything other than heinous murder (and we do that all the time), then we have no other just response left for heinous murder. I laugh when I see somebody get five life sentences, as though that made it a more just solution. I always want to ask “Do the life sentences run concurrently or consecutively?”
Of course, like all answers, my answer brings up a host of other questions about who, and how, and what.
In particular, it brings up the argument that the system is flawed, and that innocent people will be executed. To me, that is not an argument against execution. It is an argument to fix the flaws in the system.
However, we should not be so foolish as to think that there will never be innocents who are convicted. In a human system, that will always happen. It is our responsibility to make be as sure as we can be that no one is put into any kind of harm from being wrongly imprisoned.
And unfortunately, the problem is not just with death sentences. Innocent men and women have spent their entire lives in prison and died there, and just like with murder and with the death penalty, we cannot give them their lives back. Guys go inside on a bogus small-time charge and get shanked in the shower … does that mean we should stop sentencing people to jail on small-time charges? Not to me, it means we should take better care of our prisoners.
All in all, it is a very complex and thorny problem, beset with hidden pitfalls and moral dilemmas on both sides of the question. It is not a simple matter of deciding if it is “worth killing so many to save so few”. That’s a side issue for me. A good friend of mine, who has the curious distinction of having been the Chief Justice of the local version of the Supreme Court in four different countries (one of which has the death penalty), is one of the people most passionately opposed to the death penalty that I know. His comment to me was “It’s easy to be in favor of the death penalty until you are the man who has to actually sentence someone to execution. Then it gets hard.”
So while I think the death penalty is more just for heinous murder, I understand and immensely respect his point of view … which is part of why, like I said, I’m lukewarm on the matter.
Many thanks for your post,
w.
That’s an interesting question. With the caveat that all the people being executed are guilty of murder, I don’t know that there is an upper limit, but I feel like there should be.
I guess the practical answer is, once the collateral damage of so many executions results in the death of at least two innocent people, then you have reached the limit. But that is almost impossible to establish.
But one can always construct scenarios to test these kinds of assumptions, until they become progressively more bizarre. Witness the “Would You Shoot Your Child If He Were Trapped in a Burning Car and Couldn’t Be Extracted?” thread of a couple years ago that quickly progressed (I won’t say “degenerated” - it was one of the funniest threads I ever read) in more and more far-fetched conditions.
But one can do that with your assumptions as well. YOu are arguing that human lives, even guilty ones, are worth preserving. That is a defendable position, but it leaves you open to stuff like this.
It is war time, and your country has been invaded. You are defending a house with a woman and her fourteen year old daughter. The invading force is behaving as the Japanese did during the Rape of Nanking. You have a rifle with ten poison-tipped bullets. Five enemy soldiers are outside. They shout to you that they want to rape and kill the woman and her daughter, but they are not interested in you. You will be allowed to escape if you abandon the woman and her daughter.
So, you can shoot the five soldiers, or you can run. If you shoot the five, you will be sacrificing five lives to save two. If you run, five lives will be spared and two sacrificed. By the logic in post #225, the moral choice is to allow the woman and her daughter to be murdered.
I would argue that you should shoot the five. Whether or not you should shoot them if it were a million rapist/murderers, I don’t know.
Regards,
Shodan
Because the jail had been made totally unescapable so that convicted murderers would not be able to escape and kill again.
So the guy waits 20 years in prison and then…whoops, you are innocent, you’re free, good thing we didn’t execute you. He has gone from a good job and a good family to a prison record, his wife has left him and remarried, his children are grown and don’t want to know him. The state gets him a room to live in and a good as a stocker at the grocery, and figures they have done him right.
Indeed, but you seem to have overlooked the part of the article that stated, “He had been transferred to the jail in Houston because an appeals court had ordered that he be resentenced. A jury issued a new death sentence Oct. 28, but Thompson was still waiting to be transferred back to a prison about 75 miles away.” (emphasis added) The date of the news story is November 5th. So, he wasn’t waiting for retrial, he had already been sentenced, again, to death. He was taken from death row, and was going back to death row. You’re telling me that you feel that doesn’t count?
The story I linked to about Bundy wasn’t about his 1977 escape in Colorado, which happened before he was sentenced to death; it was about his attempted escape from his death row cell in 1984. You hurt my feelings when you don’t read my links. snif…
Future dangerousness is one reason to execute our worst offenders, but it’s not the only reason. It just happened to be the one we were discussing at the moment. As you and I both know, there are four basic philosophies of criminal punishment: deterrence, protection of society, rehabilitation, and desert (that is, “D did something wrong, and therefore D deserves to be punished”). Incarceration under the same conditions does not accomplish “specific deterrence” to the same degree as capital punishment (and there’s data to argue on both sides about general deterrence), does not protect society to the same extent as capital punishment (escape remains a possibility, regardless of past indicators of lack of success), and does not punish the inmate to the extent that a majority of society have decided that he deserves to be punished; that is, he would not receive a punishment that is worse than all other punishments for a crime that is worse than all other crimes.
There’s something that’s been nagging at me for the last few days: it appears that many of the death row exonerations have come about because people who aren’t particularly interested in the general prison population have invested time, money, and labor into poring over every detail of the condemned person’s case. Without the specter of death looming, would the same effort be put into cases of persons serving LWOP sentences? That is, is there a higher probability that, were the death penalty threat removed, that innocent persons would remain in jail for life rather than being exonerated, because people wouldn’t address their cases with the same urgency with which they tackle a death penalty case?
This, by the way, is why I agree with the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Louisiana statute which included “rape of a child” as a crime for which a jury could give the death penalty. My reasoning is this: if a person who rapes a child can receive the death penalty, he has no reason to leave his victim alive, because the punishment will be the same whether he murders the child or lets him live. With the additional incentive to eliminate a witness, the possibility that child rapists will become child murderers seems too great a chance to take. Only murder, and constitutional crimes against the state such as treason and espionage, deserve the option for the death penalty.
I felt I should mention this, since so many here seem to think that death penalty supporters are just bloodthirsty beasts bent on revenge. Some of us do put some thought into these things.
No, not really. How does having the death penalty prevent escapes from county jail at or around the time of trial? I didn’t overlook that part, I said the reason the whole reason he was back in the Harris county jail was for retrial on punishment, same as when he was originally tried on guilt/innocence. Whether he escaped from county before, during or after retrial isn’t relevant, and it doesn’t matter any more that he’d been on death row before than it does that he’d been in juvie before. Every single condemned murderer in the United States awaits trial in county jail, is shuttled back and forth from the courthouse to county jail during trial, and waits to catch a chain to death row in county jail after trial, every single one without exception. Having the death penalty does not change that - we will still have to have trials and they will still be in county jail before, during and immediately after. It doesn’t make any more sense to argue that “we have to have the death penalty because they could escape from county jail before they’re transferred death row” than it does to say we have to have the death penalty because they could escape during their trial."
And you hurt my feelings right back when you misread my posts. Even if I hadn’t read your link (which I did) it would be a little hard to mistake the part where you said “fully hacksawed through one cell bar of his death row cell window in 1984” right there in your post. I didn’t say “attempted escape,” I said “escape.” I was referring to the post I’d made earlier about Bundy escaping from county jail in Colorado. I didn’t address your link because, well, he didn’t escape.
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Putting aside future dangerousness for a moment, is it acceptable as a society to say we will accept the concrete danger of executing the innocent to gain the abstract benefit of deterrence? If that were enshrined in law, you’d have the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denying claims of actual innocence on the grounds that executions are necessary to deter future crime, and district attorneys arguing that we need to execute defendants not because they’re guilty, but just to prove that we’re willing to do it. I’m using hyperbole and not at all serious, of course, but it’s a sobering thought that even though we would never craft the law in such a fashion, we’re tacitly willing to accept the execution of the innocent to further pubic policy.
If it’s deterrence you’re after, though, a lifetime in admin seg ain’t no joke. 23 hours a day in a 5x9 cell, one hour out to exercise in a cage slightly larger than that, for years and years. Preferable to death, maybe, but not by much. Still, I question the deterrence effect of nearly any punishment. Most of the criminals I know aren’t “think things through” or “my actions may have consequences for me” kinda guys. I’m sure you have some “repeat customers” in your neck of the woods that never seem to learn.
“We have to kill them or we’ll never find the innocent ones” is an odd argument, but I don’t think you have to worry, the bleeding hearts are plenty tenacious. Most of the Innocence Project’s exonerations are of people who aren’t on death row.
So, what then? Are you saying that you would be willing to kill 10,000 murderers to save 1 “innocent” person? Or not?
It’s not the same thing. In the scenario you paint, the soldiers are posing an immediate and direct threat. They are behaving in a threatening manner right now. I’d certainly shoot them. In principle, I’d have no objection to killing thousands of invaders to save a couple of innocent people.
That is entirely different to someone in a prison cell who may at some uncertain time in the future just might possibly hypothetically harm someone.
Killing is justified in the wartime soldier scenario, but not in the second.
Two problems with that: sometimes the forensic advances come too late, and sometimes there’s no forensic evidence at all. The Willingham case I mentioned earlier may be an example of the former, and the Cantu case I’m sure it seems by now that I can’t shut up about is an example of the latter. Willingham involved arson investigation techniques that have since been discredited; four invesitgators reviewing the case concluded there was no reason to think the fire was anything other than accidental. The state panel that investigates negligence and misconduct in forensic labs announced last Friday that they would look into the case. With Cantu, there was no forensic evidence at all, just the testimony of the lone eyewitness to the shooting who now claims that police badgered him into identifying the wrong guy. How are you going to fix the system so cases like that don’t slip through the cracks?
No, that’s all violent crimes; murder would be some percent smaller than that. My point, though, was what to do about the factually innocent people who aren’t in that small percentage. You say go ahead and execute them?
But we also don’t have to worry about directly killing innocent people. Seems like a fair trade-off to me.
Sure, I am willing to take that chance. (Mind you, I’m not going to actively seek it out…)
Ok, I do see one difference - in one scenario I’d be pissed off at my government, and in the other I’d be pissed off at some raving lunatic.
I agree. It’s kind of like asking how many grains of sand are required before you officially have a beach?
My answer: it doesn’t matter. If a convicted murderer escapes prison, then some mistake or oversight was made by the prison officials which allowed him/her to escape. Likewise for a convicted murderer that manages to murder someone while still in prison.
Both of these cases imply that there is some underlying problem(s) that needs to be fixed. Executing the murderer does nothing to solve this problem - IMO, it actually masks the problem (or diverts everyone’s attention from it, anyway).
I can see where you’re coming from with the first claim, but the second claim has been (and is still being) addressed.
Great! So why is this guy on death row, if he can’t possibly escape?
I doubt they “figure they have done him right”. It’s more of a matter of, “well, at least we didn’t kill you.”
If someone in that situation ends up committing suicide, well, that sucks. But there are going to be plenty of people who are grateful for having not been executed.
Maybe so, but it seems to me that all support for the DP are based on revenge, with every other argument being tacked on to make it seem more palatable.
Example of this: the whole argument about future dangerousness. The chance that they might kill again is real, but small. At most you prevent 1 murder per 100 executions.
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, there’s no debate. The death penalty kills vastly more people than it saves. Anyone who wanted to save lives would oppose it.
Killing those 100 people to save 1 person makes sense if and only if you already want to punish those 100 people by death. To someone who thinks those 100 lives are worthless it makes sense. To someone who thinks their lives have some value, it doesn’t make any sense at all.
Every pro-DP argument is like this. All of them only makes sense to those who want to execute for the sake of punishment.
And for the record, many anti-DP arguments fall into the same trap too.
Peter, you’re not following the thread. Several people, myself included, have discussed a fairly wide variety of considerations that are important to them regarding the DP.
In other words, it is not all about revenge, that’s only in your head. You might profitably consider why it is that you want to reduce everyone who disagrees with you to some kind of person driven by revenge …
w.