Would you be willing to BE one of those very few cases? Would you be willing for your wife or child to be one of those cases?
This doesn’t even make sense. How does using the DP save innocent life? You don’t actually think it’s a deterrent, do you?
Life without parole protects potential victims more effectively than the DP, because it removes the murders from the population without risking the possibility of adding one more innocent person to the death count via the Death Penalty.
How do you get from “convicted” to “executed?” How is society more protected by executing people than by imprisoning them for life?
In all their fucked up, Machiavellian glory, Shodan’s answers to these questions and more can be found in this thread. Enjoy.
You assume that jailing someone for life is better than killing him. That is debatable. I’d rather die for instance. Many more share my preference.
The thing to remember here is that, just because someone is sentenced to life doesn’t mean he will be proven innocent a few years down the line ,released and will live happy ever after. Quite the contrary. He will most probably rot and die in jail. He might even BECOME a criminal in there just to survive and , if released DECADES later, rejoin society as an angry and embittered man with no regard for the law which served him so poorly. I couldn’t blame him…
You totally missed my point. I wasn’t making a comment about what was a better or worse punishment, I was commenting on your own argument that society would be more protected if more people would be convicted. Even if you think it’s worth convicting a few innocent people to protect society, it does not follow that executing them offers any more protection than life in prison. If your goal is simply to remove dangerous people from society (even if it means catching a few innocent people in the net) then your goal is accomplished simply by imprisoningthem, is it not? What’s the point of killing them? If they’re in prison then mission accomplished. (would you be willing to be one of those innocent people, by the way?)
Nonsense. Convicted Killers can & do any of the following: get paroled anyway, escape, kill a guard, kill a fellow prisoner and order & organize killings “outside” from inside.
If they’re doing life without parole, they cannot “get paroled anyway.”
I think your scenarios about escaping and killing guards are far-fetched and reaching. At most, they would represent weaknesses in the prison system. If you’re worried about, make prisons more secure.
Yeah, I had a feeling I missed the point on that one. In any case, I wasn’t really disagreeing with you. Yes, putting someone away for good should protect society as much as killing him. In theory anyways. As someone else mentionned, that same guy could very well get paroled down the line. And even if that were not an option, he could seriously hurt and/or kill other prisoners. That’s definitely not reaching. There is a reason we have all the “Bubba will make you his bitch” and “oops you dropped the soap” jokes. Of course, this also applies to inmates who are not sentenced to death so I guess the whole point is moot. Moving on!
No, I would NOT be willing to be one of the innocents rotting in jail. I was not actually justifying the present system in my post. Only describing it. If my description is faulty, please let me know how.
The goal of the penal system is NOT just to remove dangerous people from society. It is just as much about revenge. Society punishes those who break its laws. Remember Augustus Hill from Oz? That guy was no longer a danger to society yet was still serving a long, long sentence. The problem is: where do you draw the line? Should a serial killer be tortured for years before being executed since he killed more than one person? What if the person killed was old instead of young? Should the killer get less time? What about rapists? Should THEY be raped too so that they have a keener understanding of the suffering of their victimes? These are all valid options depending on where you cross that line.
I’m waiting for the answer to this myself. Also, an answer to the same question from the other supporters of the DP.
Did you mean a total, or a percentage?
There have been a total of 997 executions since 1976. During the period 1976 - 2002, there have been a total of 187,194 homicides. On average, 1.2% of convicted murderers are re-arrested for murder within three years of release. (Cite provided in one of the linked threads). Therefore, (assuming for the sake of the argument that this is a real case of an executed innocent), in order to overcome my argument of a net loss of innocent lives thru elimination of the death penalty, you need to come up with 2,245 more cases of wrongful execution. Since the net total of executions is less than half that, it would seem that you are out of luck, statistically speaking.
Sure, I’m willing to take the chance. Just as I am sure that you are willing to take the (much greater) chance of your wife or daughter or self being murdered by someone who should have been executed. Right?
Regards,
Shodan
Your reasoning is quite profoundly flawed, as it makes the implicit assumption that every single murderer is a death penalty candidate. Since this is clearly not true, your 1.2%-of-total-murders figure[sup]1[/sup] can not be used as the comparison for the wrongful executions figure. What we ought to compare (assuming we buy in to your morbid calculations in the first place) is the number of people killed by recidivist murderers who under a death penalty regime would have been sentenced to death, but were instead sentenced to life without parole where the DP was not an option and yet somehow managed to either get released or escape to reoffend. This, I would hope you would agree, is considerably less than the recidivism rate for all murderers multiplied by their number of original victims[sup]2[/sup]. It is also considerably more difficult to assess.
You do of course have another choice, which is to argue that every single one of those 187 thousand murderers should indeed have been executed, but then you find your argument failing at the other end, as with such a drastic increase in execution rate there would of course be a commensurate increase in the number of errors (and possibly even error rate, as the standard for applying the DP falls).
[sup]1[/sup] Since it’s hardly the most egregious torturing of statistics in this argument, we’ll let the assumption that arrest is equivalent to guilt pass.
[sup]2[/sup] Which again is a flawed calculation even if we did accept the basic reasoning, but never mind.
I’m willing to take my chance as long as you’re willing to be executed.
It’s a deal.
Getting back to the OP, and in particular the thread title: what is this “found innocent” crap?
There was no rehearing. No court has determined that this man was not guilty. What we have here is a witness, perhaps longing for attention after ten years, deciding that maybe he didn’t identify the right guy. Oh, and we also have the word of his co-defendant, which we have to believe, because a murderer wouldn’t lie, right?
You all shouldn’t be this gullible.
Not only that, it also ignores the option of life without parole as an alternative to releasing convicted murderers or killing them. Shodan, if you can dig up the statistics on murders committed by people who are serving a sentence of life without parole, then you’ll be comparing apples to apples.
Daniel
Yes, I am arguing in favor of a mandatory death penalty for murder*.
Yes, there would be an increase in the number of errors, but not the rate. I am assuming for the sake of the argument that this person was indeed innocently executed (pace Max Torque). Therefore the rate of innocent executed remains at roughly one in a thousand, and the rate of those killed by repeat murderers drops to zero.
Thus, we execute 187,194 people, of whom 187 are innocent. We save 2246 lives, all of which are innocent.
Regards,
Shodan
*We could argue a system under which murderers were exempted from the DP under special circumstances, sort of how they are now exempt except under special circumstances, but that is another thread.
It’s mostly anecdotal, but Christopher Scarver (sp?) murdered Jeffrey Dahmer in prison, the Birdman of Alcatraz commited a murder in prison, prison guards have been killed, and Ed Wein (I mentioned him in the other threads linked to) was sentenced to death, then had his sentence commuted by Pat Brown (governor of California before Reagan - he mentions the case in his autobiography) to life without parole, and was then released and raped and murdered a woman. And, while Willie Horton didn’t actually kill anyone during his furlough, I am willing to argue that his raping and torturing a couple over a period of twelve hours is a sufficiently evil crime to justify his having been executed.
I believe there was a case in Texas where a person escaped death row and killed some one too, but I don’t remember the name off hand.
Anecdotal, obviously, but if you share the assumption of the OP that even one single instance of a wrongful, preventable death is enough to discredit a system altogether, then these multiple examples should be enough to discredit the notion of life without parole as well.
And, of course, unless you are willing to advocate a mandatory sentence of life without parole for all murders, your system is subject to the same objections that Dead Badger made.
Regards,
Shodan
Nor will there ever be, because there exists no recourse to law for the dead. If your standard is that no court has ever found a dead man not guilty of a crime for which he was executed, then of course you will perceive no error, for there is no way for such a case to be heard. If this satisfies you, fine. The rest of us will apply our brains, consider a case in which both main witnesses have recanted and the prosecuting DA has stated that the DP should not have been sought, and reach our own conclusions.
More than that, they must have been convicted in a state without DP, and have been eligible for the DP in those states that have it (or eligible under whatever DP criteria Shodan chooses, save that he adjust the DP rate and error rate accordingly).
If only statistics were as simple as multiplying two numbers together. It looks like fun, you get “an answer”, but perish the thought that we question the basic assumptions.
Okay, then you must accept that such a regime would be so vastly different from our present system as to render the present DP statistics all but useless.
You have absolutely no basis for the latter statement but dogmatism. As you point out, we have executed 997 people since 1976. The capital system in the States takes years upon years, and is layered with expenses and appeals far beyond those of most trials. That you can advocate increasing the DP rate by two orders of magnitude and still maintain that the error rate would be the same frankly beggars belief. Your trite usage of statistics in this manner betrays your motives; calculations like these are fundamentally flawed, and as LHoD points out you have still not addressed the alternative of LWOP. To do so would greatly reduce your 1.2% figure, yet you ignore this factor. You also ignore the fact that the error rate for the DP is highly questionable given the lack of recourse once the sentence is carried out. With the potential for orders of magnitude errors at both end of your fallacious equation, I worry that you use it as the basis for advocating the execution of so many thousands of people.
It is possible that such a draconian application of the DP as you suggest would result in a net saving of lives, although I doubt it. What is absolutely certain is that your equation shows nothing of the sort.
No, and this again is confusion caused by your equivocation of the DP-as-practiced and the DP-as-proposed-by-you. If we are examining the efficacy of the DP as practiced, then LHoD’s stipulation is exactly correct. If we are examining your version, then you are technically correct, but only subject to the caveat that all of the figures you are using are completely irrelevant. Unless you can accurately estimate the error rate for the system you propose, there is simply no way to perform the calculation you want. It is entirely unreasonable to insist that the error rate for a system used 6250 times a year will be the same as that for one used 33 times.
I’d also be interested to see a cite for that 1.2% recidivism for murderers figure, incidentally, to see what the precise definition of a “murderer” is, and to see whether it tallies with your idea of what offences should receive a mandatory death sentence.
So long as it is your wife or daughter who is wrongly executed, that sounds reasonable to me.
Mostly anecdotal indeed.
First, I have difficulty seeing how you propose that your proposed solution (mandatory DP for all murderers) would have prevented Jeffrey Dahmer’s death. Isn’t that a little backwards?
Second, folks who have their sentence commuted or who are paroled or furloughed aren’t relevant: these are problems that can be solved by changing the system to disallow these actions. By citing them, you’re still ignoring the possibility of a meaningful life-without-parole sentence.
Third, I’ll certainly accept cites of folks who killed prison guards: these are legitimate cites in your favor. If we are unable to improve teh prison system so as to protect guards, then you’ve got a strong argument in favor of the death penalty. But keep in mind, only guards killed by people under a non-DP sentence for a crime that you propose the DP for are acceptable cites here. Those under a death sentence may be more likely to try to kill guards, since they’ve got nothing to lose (the LWP people could always face solitary confinement), and those who wouldn’t suffer the DP under your system don’t present a problem to which you offer a solution.
Daniel