That’s a non-sequitur. The question is what do you do while the obstacles are present. And it turns on your values. Smapti would rather break a few eggs to make an omelette. Others of us think protecting the innocent is as important as punishing the guilty.
Who’s talking about the innocent? The issue you’ve been raising the past several posts is that guilty people of color are sentenced to death more often than guilty white people are.
If there’s a racial disparity in the number of people being executed, there are 3 possibilities:
[ol]
[li]Too many blacks are being executed[/li][li]Not enough whites are being executed[/li][li]There are non-racial factors which account for the disparity[/li][/ol]
ISTM that people like RP assume the first and people like Smapti assume the second. I think it’s most likely a combination of the second and third.
That killing them is no more just or beneficial to society than life imprisonment, and the possibility of a wrong conviction means the possibility of executing an innocent person,which is unacceptable.
This presumes that every murderer deserves the death penalty, which is not a view adopted in any US jurisdiction. Many people are guilty of murder but wrongly receive the death penalty out of racial bias. That is as wrong as someone guilty of shoplifting receiving the penalty for robbery.
But more than that, I referenced the irreversibility of the penalty. The point being that we often figure out some years down the line that a person was wrongly convicted. The more people we kill and the faster we do it, the fewer innocent people can be spared from unjust punishment.
This involves subjective judgment… We may disagree on who should be executed.
I would guess that you haven’t read a substantial amount of the research before forming an opinion.
That isn’t an argument that they don’t deserve to die. That’s an argument that giving them what they deserve is too hard.
My position is based on the following axioms;
- Human life has value and should not be destroyed unnecessarily
- Killing a human being is the worst offense that can be committed against a person and against society and the authority to do so must therefore be restricted
- The state is the sole power with the authority to end a human life except in bona fide cases of self-defense
- Those who kill without legal sanction are therefore the worst form of criminal
- Punishment should be proportional to the nature of the crime committed
- The only form of punishment which is proportionate to murder is for the murderer to forfeit his/her own life
Can you dispute this?
I dispute the third and last point: the state should not have the power to end life for judicial punishment, and life imprisonment also can be proportionate to killing someone.
It is the view that I adopt.
The difference between petty theft and robbery is merely a matter of degree. There is very little difference in severity when it comes to murder - dead is dead.
And as I have already demonstrated above, the last time it can be shown that an innocent person was executed in this country was 70 years ago. Not one person has been executed since then who can be shown to be innocent. (Not even Cameron Willingham, since that’s usually where this argument goes next - he was demonstrably guilty even if one assumes the forensic analysis was 100% worthless.)
All judicial penalties are irreversible. If one is sentenced to life in prison and they’re exonerated 20 years later, we can’t give them those 20 years back. This is not an argument for the abolition of judicial punishment - it is an argument for better jurisprudence, more funding, better public defenders, and more staffing in general to speed up our overcrowded legal system.
I also dispute that the penalty must always be proportionate to the crime; the purpose of punishment is to deter and rehabilitate, or at least it should be, and this does not always require a proportionate punishment.
I am quite aware of most if not all of the current arguments against the DP.
When it comes to arguments of guilt or innocence, I regard the statements of those who try to prevent the DP with a skepticism that is not warranted towards statements of the pro-DP side. Because the guilt of all those condemned in the US has been established in a court of law, beyond any reasonable doubt, before an impartial jury, and where both the prosecution and the defense have been able to present a case, and where the testimony of all witnesses is under oath and subject to cross-examination. And very often after the case has undergone years or decades of appellate review, and no significant flaw has been able to be demonstrated in the process.
Hence my skepticism about statements like “he’s innocent! There’s no evidence! He was railroaded! It’s racism!”
[QUOTE=iiandyiiii]
When people from group X were historically much more likely to be executed without good evidence, and people from group X are still executed at a vastly higher rate even when crime disparities are taken into account, then it’s reasonable to suspect that some of the past biases that led to unjust executions might still be in play today.
[/QUOTE]
Feel free to suspect that if you like. All that you need is to produce some evidence in each individual case that bias or prejudice occurred. Not to mention that both the murderer(s) and the victim in this case were white, and so there is no reason to think that racism played any part.
The white murderer of a black victim and the black murderer of a white victim should be treated the same.
A and B both commit murder, but only A is sentenced to death. That’s a miscarriage of justice, because justice would be achieved by executing both A and B. Executing only A is better, because only one miscarriage of justice occurred. Executing both A and B is better still, because then no miscarriage of justice occurs. Executing neither A nor B is worse than executing only A - two miscarriages of justice instead of only one.
Regards,
Shodan
If the state has the power to kill while engaged in war, or to protect innocent life, or in the course of enforcing the law, then it follows that they also have the power to kill as a means of punishment.
I disagree because life is inherently superior to death, and merely imprisoning someone for life (and the free housing, food, and medical care for the duration of their natural life as part and parcel thereof) is awarding them an infinitely better degree of treatment than they gave their victim/s.
The primary purpose of punishment is to uphold the power of the state by demonstrating the consequences of violating its laws. Rehabilitation is of secondary interest, and there are occasions where it is not possible, nor desirable, to rehabilitate certain offenders.
As I mentioned above and you ignored, the coram nobis writ is a very rare and narrow exception to the general rule that you cannot acquit the dead. You have adopted the standard of innocent people executed precisely because the legal system makes it almost impossible to satisfy. If instead you used the perfectly reasonable standard of people very nearly executed but exonerated, and the perfectly reasonable assumption that the efforts of those trying to achieve exoneration are neither perfect nor universal, then you’d reach the opposite conclusion.
No it doesn’t. These are not necessarily connected.
Life isn’t always superior to death. Many would prefer execution to life imprisonment. Life imprisonment is superior because it can be corrected when mistakes are made.
Actually on looking around a bit, it seems that there may be even less to the disparity than one might suppose: From Wikipedia
So it’s really about the race of the victim, not the race of the killer. That argues even more strongly in favor of it being circumstantial (e.g. a higher percentage of black-on-black crime being gang wars, or the like).
That would be true if the only variable in justice were seeing that murderers are executed. Most of us believe there are other relevant variables in the justice equation, including not having people receive worse punishments because of their race.
As it stands, our system does not allow you to both execute the worst murderers and do so in a race-neutral fashion. There’s too much bias out there. So we have the choice to either proceed in executing people while trying to fix things, or stop until we fix things. That choice turns on how much you care about killing murderers and about racial injustice, respectively.
The numbers show it is about both the race of the perpetrator and the victim.
And if you think you have some insight into the numbers because black-on-black crime is more likely to be a different kind of murder, then I strongly encourage you to actually read about this subject instead of browsing some articles on Wikipedia. You might be shocked to learn that there is a decades-old literature that carefully considers the questions that occurred to you in the first 15 minutes of browsing Wikipedia.
People who are very nearly executed but exonerated is what proves that the system works. Any person who is factually innocent will be proven innocent before the final sentence is carried out. That’s how it should be.
A man shoots another man in the head. A police officer sees him and shoots him dead.
A man shoots another man in the head. No police officer is around to shoot him, but he is eventually arrested, proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, sentenced to death, and executed.
What is the difference? Is the man any more or less dead? Is he any less deserving of death on the basis that there wasn’t anyone around to kill him on the spot?
Existence is always preferable to non-existence. You can add that to the list of axioms if you like.
Sure. Similarly, the criminal justice system is 100% effective at punishing all criminals. After all, I’ve never heard of a criminal being found guilty who was not then sentenced for punishment.
Or, maybe, and I’m just putting this out there as a possibility, there’s some logical flaw in that argument.