Do you really believe that, or are you attempting sarcasm?
I’m deeply opposed to the death penalty on both moral and practical grounds, but that is the silliest argument I’ve ever encountered.
If it’s offered as a serious point, you fail. Even if you’re trying to be funny, you fail.
He’s right you know. That is a silly idea.
If you are going to do that, do it in Florida.
(if you are white that is)
While I assume that Chronos’s point was fairly tongue in cheek, his point that once an innocent person has been convicted, and really once they’ve been charged, the police will no longer investigate to find the real criminal is extremely valid.
If someone is actually in jail, there is a chance that they may manage to prove their innocence, which would reopen the case. Once someone is executed, it is incredibly rare for the conviction to be overturned, meaning that, short of a direct confession, there is no chance that the real killer will ever even be looked for, much less caught.
Isn’t the point of giving the governor the power to commute a sentence that he could use it in cases where the evidence is poor and there is some doubt about whether the prisoner is guilty?
Newsom has pardoned everybody on death row. There is a murderer who had a recording of him torturing a victim in his apartment, another who was recorded taunting the mother of his victim, there is one who confessed to killing four women and walked into a police station with a victim’s severed breast in his pocket, there is another who is on videotape killing two women and telling one “You can cry and stuff, like the rest of them, but it won’t do any good. We are pretty … cold-hearted, so to speak.”
If the problem is that we can’t be sure that everyone who was sentenced to death is guilty, can we execute the ones we know are obviously guilty?
Cite? Or do you consider commuting to life imprisonment equivalent to a pardon?
Has he?
So when loading the main SDMB page this thread happened to be the last posted to in GD, and the thread title off on the right was truncated to ‘Gov Newsom cancels Death…’
So, okay, I know the governor of California is a fairly powerful person, but this might be a little beyond the purview of his office. :dubious:
No. Because capital punishment is and always has been morally wrong. And barring the development of resurrection technology, it always will be.
This is objective, non-debatable fact. Accordingly, I won’t participate in the debate. If y’all want to discuss hypotheses about how puddleglum has managed to remain unnotified of this fact, have fun.
Charles Ng, huh? California sure was eager to get their hands on him after he’d fled to Canada, and while Canadian officials were hesitant to extradite Ng because he was likely to face the death penalty, we sure didn’t want him on our streets, so we kicked him out.
In 1991. More than 25 years before Gavin Newsom became governor. And Ng is still alive.
Maybe you just shouldn’t have the death penalty at all, because you do such a half-assed job at it.
O Henry wrote about that 115 years ago…
No, he has** not.** He has for all intents and purposes commuted their Death sentence to Life.
Actually that’s subjective opinion.
However, the purpose here was not to debate the DP as such, it was to ask whether or not Newsome was wrong in lying about his promise to uphold the DP?
I have to ask, for those willing to risk the chance of an innocent person being executed – would YOU be willing to be that innocent person?
Except the next governor can lift the moratorium. Newsom can’t commute their sentences on his own, in most cases, because of a quirk in our law so all he can do is stop them while he is in charge. He could pardon them but he certainly won’t do that.
Would you willing to be the innocent person given Life?
I understand the individual words, but…?
Life Imprisonment, what did you think?:rolleyes: A crappy board game? A tasteless cereal?
yes-- all you have to do is raise the standard of proof substantially every time an innocent person is executed.
then youll end up executing about 1 person a year, two years, five years-- until all thats left is a lot of lost taxpayer money, and a very expensive system for killing a couple of really nasty horrible people every decade or so. which is almost what california has now, and sooner or later theyre going to love having money to spend on fixing something like global warming, rather than pumping some psychopath full of chemicals every few years. its too expensive.
Actually, in the last few decades, afaik, there havent been any.
Hell, yes, I would. The life imprisonment isn’t coming out of nowhere; it’s a sentence after being convicted. Now, if I were falsely accused of a crime and then convicted of it, I’d rather be given life imprisonment instead of getting executed. While still alive in prison, I can assist my attorney with any and all attempts at exoneration.
FTR: I actually have been falsely accused of a serious crime. I was not tried, let alone convicted, but it was not a fun thing to face.
we are basically already at the point where i was talking about-- where about 13 people are executed over the course of decades, and the real question left is “what are we really spending all this money on?”