I don’t think personal recollection is relevant.
People get blackout drunk or high and then commit crimes that they don’t remember all the time. They are still punished.
Here’s a question: Is the reason that they can’t remember relevant? Is there a relevant distinction between someone not remembering due to being under the influence, and someone not remembering because of old age/mental deterioration?
You may not buy it, but I’m pretty sure it’s a major motivating reason for why death penalties are applied - that and “justice”. I don’t think DPs are scheduled based on fears that the perpetrator will later escape, or on the fear that they’ll run a criminal empire from prison. (These are reasons cops extralegally kill villains in TV shows, but they’re not reasons courts and juries make these calls, in my opinion.)
If we’re going to talk about whether a given execution is justified, we’d best keep in mind the justifications we actually use for them in the real world. There’s little to be gained by arguing based on reasons that aren’t used to justify executions in the first place.
Yes. There are many reasons for *imprisoning *a criminal.
IMHO, there is only one moral reason for executing a criminal.
Well, yes. It’s not just “can’t remember” it’s mostly “can’t commit again”.
Well, right. I’m saying that, even if we (as a society) accept social vengeance as a legitimate reason to execute someone, in this case it doesn’t make much sense, because vengeance isn’t satisfying unless the avenged-upon knows why it’s happening.
You’re killing a sack of cells that, without consciousness of its prior actions, may as well be a side of beef.
That’s the cold-revenge mindset, which depends on the subject knowing who killed them and why, etc. I suspect that DPs are ordered based on the hot-revenge mindset, where all that matters is seeing the perpetrator suffer.
Yes, the reason is very relevant. If a drunk driver a) kills someone and b) can’t remember it, his/her decision to drive drunk caused both a and b. You can’t use one consequence of a crime to excuse another, because you’re punishing the behavior that caused both.
Our legal system is based upon the fiction of free will. Since we are all the deterministic product of our genes and our environment, it’s meaningless to try to discern which offenders “should have known better”. None of us have any freedom that floats completely free of cause and effect.
That being so, there is no justification in punishment solely for retribution. It makes no more sense than torturing a cat because it killed a bird.
None of this necessarily argues for softer punishment or against the death penalty. Punishment for deterrence is justified; and punishment simply to remove a threat from society.
It’s perfectly reasonable (and more just) to set up a deterrent punishment system base entirely on the notion that “actions have consequences”. The state of mind of the perpetrator should not be relevant, since retributive punishment is never justified: nobody is ever “deserving” of retribution for their actions, whatever their state of mind. If the purpose is deterrence, then everyone should simply understand that a certain set of actions always leads to certain set of consequences.
Assuming that you are not opposed to the death penalty altogether, then the only relevant question should be whether the death penalty is an empirically effective deterrent for this type of crime. If it is, then it should be applied without consideration of the state of mind of the perpetrator, either at the time of the crime or subsequently. If it is not, then it should never be applied.
So this is going to become a discussion about free will now?
And in any case, if we’re going to utterly ignore the actual reasons why death penalties exist and replace them with a set of hypothetical reasons, I declare that the reason why death penalties are assessed is because they’re believed to be cheaper than indefinite incarceration. Under this logic they are equally justified for amnesiacs as anyone else.
Can’t someone with dementia continue to commit crimes?
More of a psychiatry/medical question than a legal one I guess.
After SCOTUS decided in Jackson v. Indiana in 1972 that involuntary commitment of a criminal defendant for an indefinite period of time solely on the basis of his permanent incompetency to stand trial; these cases needed to proceed.
In 1975 O’Connor v. Donaldson, SCOTUS found that mental illness alone is not sufficient grounds for confining a person against their will.
This lead to the government closing most mental health facilities during the 1980’s and we have never comprehensively revisited the topic. This means that prisons are the default location for such individuals and will remain so, for better or worse, until we as a country decide to revisit the problem.
You may not care to consider it. I think that basing a justice system on the fiction of free will has immense moral consequences, and must always be part of any discussion of justice.
I’d be thrilled to debate free will! (I’m a compatiblist, which means that I don’t think determinism implies any of the things you think it does, so we can have tons of fun!) However there’s already been a protest about this thread ranging too far afield, so I think that morphing this thread into ‘Free will? Yea or nea?’ would go over poorly.
And besides which, even under your model of free will, you can’t dispute that the cost rationale for execution I proposed is potentially valid. And under that model we kill 'em all.
You’re the one seeming to want to take this off on a tangent. I think the fact that free will doesn’t exist is critically relevant to any discussions of justice, including the OP, and I described my view of the OP accordingly. Other people may not, but I can’t frame my own opinion coherently without explaining the premise it derives from. It seems to me that we can discuss our view of the OP based on certain differing premises without necessarily entering into an extensive discussion of which of those premises are correct; a discussion of the premises in detail may belong in a different thread.
But excluding mention of free will altogether is petitio principii that it’s irrelevant.
As for your last statement: no, I can have an view that killing people as punishment for any reason is morally wrong, something that overrides other considerations. (I don’t as it happens, but it’s an orthogonal question to free will.)
Generally, I’m opposed to the death penalty. I agree with the notion that releasing prisoners from being executed or incarcerated because they “forgot” their crime would be problematic to enforce as others have said. But I do think there is merit to discussing the ethics of it. Food for thought, we don’t incarcerate the corpse of a prisoner if he/she dies in prison before the end of their sentence. In a sense, dementia is like a death, the death of the mind that committed the crime. I think it is as useful as punishing a corpse.
But if this is really true, one could make an argument that either a mind exists, in which case the death penalty is justified; or it doesn’t, in which case imposing the death penalty isn’t killing anything. So trying to discern whether a mind still exists is a waste of time.
Except that “an eye for an eye” is not related to justice. Ancient laws yes - justice no. “An eye for an eye” IS revenge, plain and simple.
But what was the purpose of “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life”?
Was it revenge?
Or was it: “Don’t poke nobody’s eye out, cause if you do, we’re gonna poke YOUR eye out. And don’t knock nobody’s tooth out, cause if you do, we’re gonna knock YOUR tooth out. And don’t kill nobody, cause if you do, we’re gonna kill YOU.”
And suddenly all the pokings and knockings and murderings settle down to once every other week instead of all day, every day.
So should criminals who claim to have dissociative identity disorder have a get out of jail free card because they claim to not remember the crime, and they didn’t really do it–An alternate personality did?
(Unless it was a slave, then you just had to pay the depreciation)
It even more was the establishment of proportionality and rule of law, rather than of constant vendetta. So if Agnar pokes out Ognum’s eye, Ognum doesn’t kill him — we poke out Agnar’s eye and it ends there. If Ghar kills Urum, Urum’s brothers don’t go slay Ghar and his sons only to then have Ghar’s cousins go and slay every male in Urug’s family, burn their houses and sell their women —we execute Ghar and it ends there.