Sorry if this is a derail, but how reliable are ‘truth-serum’ drugs for the purpose of determining guilt? I take it not at all, otherwise they would be being used? I’ve often wondered why more work is not done on establishing a 100% reliable lie detector - I know there is a pilot scheme in the UK where they are being implemented to establish benefits cheats. - but perhaps our leaders are reluctant in case we demand they use them.
I’m reading it. I’m simply saying that throwing someone under the bus because you can’t come up with a better way (even though there IS a better way) is less than civilized.
And I’d say that the numbers of people that have been saved from the needle, due to the tireless work of people outside the individual’s specific situation, is more than “occasional”. Since it’s impossible to create a perfect process, why not give the benefit of the awareness of that imperfection to the innocent? We’ve survived without the death penalty before. The only reason I can see that it was brought back was to seek revenge. But the proof shows that justice based on a thirst for revenge often results in the wrong guy going down for the crime. Since it is widely believed to be ineffective as a deterrent, and since your chances of putting an innocent guy to death are more than just “occasional”, I find it difficult to understand how you think this is somehow “good” for society.
But, as has been pointed out, that argument argues against the criminal justice system itself. There will be mistakes, as much as we try to avoid them. Let’s just take those sentenced to life without parole. By your own assessment, some of those people will be innocent, does that mean we don’t lock any of them up for life?
I do agree that we should take great pains to avoid the death of an innocent person. I think that can be achieved through raising the threshold and lowering the numbers. You can refer to my previous thread if you’d like to know more.
If you concede that some people will escape from prison, and that sometimes these escaped criminals will kill innocent people after escaping (or kill other people-inmates and workers-while in prison), and if the number of people these inmates kill is greater than the extremely small number of innocent people executed by the state, than your caring, compassionate, eliminate the DP proposal will result in more innocent people being murdered. That doesn’t seem to matter to you. It matters to me.
Agreed. Very few things are perfect in this world. Mistakes will undoubtedly be made. It’s pretty difficult for me to see these gaps as mistakes, though. There are known remedies to some of the gaps, and yet they aren’t incorporated into the system as a matter of judicial course.
Regarding life with no parole, again…some of those mistakes could be avoided by employing known remedies for certain flaws in the system. And those who still slip through the cracks can still try to get the wrongs righted. Some of the people who’ve been exhonerated were in prison for decades before the truth came out; longer than the average death row stay. As a society, we need to ask ourselves if we’ve done everything we can to ensure our decision is the correct one. At this point, I don’t see that happening.
I agree…the bar needs to be raised. A LOT. And until that happens, think we’d be better as a society if we abolished the death penalty.
I draw a distinction between an unbalanced nutcase who goes out and murders, and a state sanctioned death penalty that doesn’t go far enough to ensure mistakes aren’t made. It’s not about numbers. It’s about justice.
Well of course you will, because acknowledging the truth of it blows your argument out of the water. Here’s another difference: The unbalanced nutcase frequently kills multiple people. Your hypothetical innocent man is only executed once.
Dude, these are minimum standards. If the individual judicial districts want rules that are more stringent, they’re entitled and empowered to enact them, and many have. I’m simply pointing out that, contrary to what you see on TV or in movies, defense attorneys for capital felonies simply won’t be “baby lawyers” fresh out of law school, since it’s a misconception that many people, including yourself apparently, have.
Lemme tell you how it works: in order to be placed on the appointment list for capital felonies, an attorney who meets the minimum qualifications of that district must apply to the court for that district. The application is usually hefty, around 7-15 pages the last time I filled one out (and that wasn’t even for capital felonies), requiring a substantial amount of detail about your past trial experience, including grade of offense, trial date and length, first or second chair, bench trial or jury trial, verdict, and sentence. The application must be approved by the senior judge for that district. And then, the attorney is placed on the appointment list. That means that there is judicial oversight of the process before a lawyer is even placed on the list.
The practical problem is that there is a fine line to be walked. Many, dare I say most, capital felons are poor. There is a substantial public interest that they be properly defended by experienced counsel, so the minimum standards for their attorneys must be set high. But, because the very best criminal defense lawyers know they won’t make much money defending an indigent defendant, they tend not to ask to be placed on the appointment lists, so the standards can’t be set too high, or there will be no attorneys at all to defend indigent capital murderers. You can’t force Johnny Cochrane to represent capital defendants unless he has asked to be on the list.
And I stand by my statements from prior threads: the “cannot have been found to have rendered ineffective assistance” qualification is a recent addition to the list, intended to combat the defensive tactic of “falling on one’s own sword.” That is, a defense attorney could forestall or even prevent an execution by alleging that he himself didn’t properly represent his client, thus securing a new trial. Now that they will no longer be able to represent capital felons if they’re found to have been ineffective, hopefully that sort of gamesmanship will be squelched.
Anyway, it’s looking more and more like you won’t be satisfied with any information from anyone, regardless of how much more well-informed they are than yourself, if that information doesn’t fit with your preconceived notions of how things should be. Since it looks like I forgot to answer something from an earlier post, I’ll go back and start on that, but for now, please answer this: is there any point in debating this issue with you any further, or will all of your replies be of the form, “NOT GOOD ENOUGH, NO MORE EXECUTIONS, LA LA LA CAN’T HEAR YOU”?
But he’s still innocent. That doesn’t seem to make a difference to you. At all. You would be willing to give up your own flesh and blood to the flawed system.
There is nothing you’ve said that blows my argument out of the water. You are willing to willfully throw innocent people away and I’m not. You feel that hypothetical numbers are more important than real lives. You’re not alone. But that doesn’t make you right.
Dude. You’re the one arguing in defense of a hypothetical person, not me. I’m talking about real people who were really killed, in real jails by real inmates or in real communities in the real world by real escaped criminals. So far you haven’t even proven one unjustly executed man(since the DP was reinstated)! Don’t talk to me about throwing innocent lives away, you’re eagerly doing so in every post.
If I was innocent and got executed? It would suck royally for me, personally, but so what? It wouldn’t effect you, and if my execution is wrongful amongst a host of others that are deserved and those executions prevent future murder and mayhem, then my wrongful execution will have better served society than my lifelong incarceration because of no DP, a policy that results in more innocent people dying.
You’re talking about people who might be killed if a guy escapes from prison. Hypothetical. I’m talking about locking up someone and killing him without being certain he did the crime. And doing so without making EVERY EFFORT to uncover the truth. The Innocence Project has proven 218 times that the system failed. There are other people doing the same work. If that’s a fair trade off for your hypothetical escapee that might murder some hypothetical people, then that’s your opinion. It’s not OK with me.
Well, obviously you are not on death row so your prediction of your feelings may or may not be accurate. And you are wrong if you think the execution of innocent people in order to ensure Every. Last. Bad Guy. gets the needle doesn’t harm society. Some studies show that it may actually increase the number of murders.
We do this in almost every aspect of life. More than 40,000 people are killed in this country per year in automobile crashes. Now we could quibble about seat belts, air bags, speed limits, cell phone laws raising or lower that number, but the fact remains that we have decided to make that method of transportation legal and readily practiced KNOWING that tens of thousands of innocents, including many children, will die next year because of it.
Since you are not “willing to willfully throw innocent people away” do you support the immediate end of automotive transportation? Because if you say anything other than “no”, you are guaranteeing the death of many innocents.
Seems to me that the Innocence Project has proved 218 that the system works. But I guess I take a larger view as to what the system is than you do.
I think it’s important to make a distinction between escaping custody, escaping or killing in general population, and escaping or killing while on death row, though. Ted Bundy was mentioned earlier, but he’s not a good example: he escaped from county jail while awaiting trial, which has nothing to do with having the death penalty or not. Instead of asking how many escape from custody or prison or kill while in custody or prison, shouldn’t we ask how many escape and kill or kill in custody when their liberty is restrained to the degree that it is on death row or ad-seg? And when I say asking, I mean I’m really asking. I don’t know the numbers.
Oddly enough, there’s a news story today about one of the executed inmates I mentioned yesterday, Cameron Willingham:
I’ll take a tip from Max Torque and post what I posted in the last thread: volunteer journalism students shouldn’t have to be part of the system.
I posted this statistic before - 1.2% of all murderers in the US commit another murder within three years of their release from prison. Number of those executed in the US since the reinstitution of the DP who have been shown to be innocent is zero.
And it does sometimes happen where they will go back and try to prove some executed felon was innocent. They tried it with Roger Coleman, with some more sophisticated DNA testing that was not available when he was convicted. He was guilty.
Number of people who commit murders in prison, or upon escaping from prison, is low but not zero. Christopher Scarver, “Tookie” Williams, Robert Stroud (The “Birdman of Alcatraz”) and others are examples.
Regards,
Shodan
The death penalty is not about justice . It is about revenge.
It debases the society that uses it. A large percentage of the people in a society that uses it feels diminished and guilty when it is done. You may as well start cutting off the hands of shoplifters.
Um…yeah. They might die. But the idea is not to kill them. But thanks for playin’!!