Your argument also completely fails to factor in any sort of redemption. How many of these murderers will forever be unrepetant? What about the murderers that can be rehabilitated? I concede they aren’t “innocent”, but the issue isn’t so black and white. Killing fifty ultra reformed Karla Faye Tuckers types to death to spare 12 innocents begins to look like a less appealing tradeoff.
Economic: -6.62
Social: -5.95
Firstly, nobody at this thread or anywhere I’ve seen defines “revenge” as punishment that the criminal deserves. Secondly, you apparently take it as a given that a person who commits murder “deserves” to be executed, which is a subjective call. Not everybody accepts that.
As to the “human rights” argument, I’m not following. We should execute murderers so as not to deprive them of their human rights? Their human rights to be executed?
What would differentiate premeditated murders deserving of the death penalty from those not deserving of it? I’m struggling to see the circumstances in which a DP supporter might say someone guilty of premeditated murder did not merit execution.
I would be against the “less harsh” punishment because it is unneccessary given the punishments we already enact. (Surely, if it is indeed “less harsh”, we can simply reduce the term of imprisonment?) The only justification I can see for extending the list of punishments, from capital to corporal to “cruel and unusual”, is revenge. Some, like MGibson, think this acceptable. I do not.
And I speak not of the “dispassionate contemplation” of the judge or jury in a given case, but of the politicians and electorate who advocate such an unnecessary extension. They must provide a rigorous and impassive argument for extension, not simply a rigorous and impassive decision to use it.
I have already admitted that some level of inequitable treatment is necessary. As I have explained to marky33, I am concerned with the motivation for the choice of punishment. Life imprisonment might be “harsher”, but it is still essentially the same punitive entity as for lesser crimes. A punishment only becomes “barbaric” IMO if it the motivation for extending the range of punishments (to physical, irreversible or demeaning punitive entities) is vengeance.
No, statistical studies abound: Skeptical Inquirer’s recent treatment is just one example of analytical rigour.
I contend that deprivation of property and liberty are the only necessary punitive entities, and that only false democracy demands more.
Which is effectively what we do whenever we vote, or indeed express an opinion about changing the law. I do not consider killing people to be wrong period, but I consider that the death penalty is unnecessary and motivated by revenge.
Remember that framing is always an option. People seem to consider DNA testing to be a panacea for all miscarriages of justice, without considering how easy it is to acquire someone else’s hair, skin or even used condoms to pin rape on them as well. “Beyond reasonable doubt” is all very well for sending framed people to prison, during which a whistleblower or acquitting evidence may come forth, but to kill them dead?
Like I asked others, in what way is natural-life imprisonment less serious a punishment than death?
No, like I said the first time, if an innocent person is killed by the state, the association is direct. You are projecting the deaths given a variable. I will explain Bayes Theorem in detail if you wish - your particular choice of variable is arbitrary.
As for “proving innocence”, well we have not had such a burden of proof in our respective democracies for many centuries. We are all likely guilty of something, even if it’s only speeding or the like.
Execute a thousand speeders, illegal handgun possessors or even suspected criminals and “innocents are spared”. Statistical fallacy.
Whose talking about extending the list of punishments to include corporal and “cruel and unusual”(whatever that means)?
I have no illusions that prisons are particularly nice places to live. However I’d take a sentence of 100 years over a sentence of death. Life imprisonment is a less serious punishment then death because, wait for it…YOU GET TO LIVE! In a prison I have the opportunity to read books, watch some television, and maybe find a few hobbies to occupy my time. When I’m dead I have no future as I will cease to exist.
Marc
What would you take if your sentence, with no chance of a reprieve, was to be spent in a North Korean gulag, for example, instead of a relatively cushy western jail?
Apologies, I meant only to reference you with regards to “There’s nothing wrong with a little revenge”, not to imply that you advocate physical punishments other then death.
I think if the choice was between certain death and the gulag I’d take the gulag. As bad as the gulags are there is always a chance I could be freed. There are refugees in S. Korea who were sentenced to those N. Korean gulags.
Marc
Aren’t you doing the same? You are projecting some innocent executions, given a statistic of the same in the past.
Please do - I don’t think I understand your contention.
Regards,
Shodan
No - let us put “innocent executions” to one side for a moment, since this relates more to the ‘real world’ sentences and evidence.
If an innocent person were to be executed, then an innocent person will have been killed: the association is direct. There is no inductive, probabilistic or statistical step there: the relationship is a syllogism (indeed it is pretty much a tautology.)
What you are saying is If someone convicted of crime X were to be released, then an innocent person would likely be killed: you are examining the probability of an association between crime-X-conviction and subsequent-innocent-death. You have moved from the deductive to the inductive, an utterly different form of investigating propositions.
Bayes theorem tells us how to deal with prior and posterior probability distributions. You are asking us to consider the probability of “subsequent innocent death” given conviction of a particular crime. You are indulging in a form of the Prosecuter’s fallacy by arbitrarily limiting the sample to convicts of the crime of murder.
There is no more reason to choose this set than other sets, such as speeders or illegal firearm possessors, in your calculation of the posterior probability.
And I have no interest in attempting to prove any real-life executee “innocent”: I believe that Aileen Wuornous suffered a mistrial and would not have been executed given a competent defence, but I cannot prove that she didn’t act in self defence any more than I can prove the nonexistence of garden fairies. That is the nature of burden of proof.
What would be the legal basis for a mistrial? She had a competant lawyer for her appeal and the court upheld the sentence. You guys need to find better poster children for your cause other then Mumia and Wuornous.
Marc
I take it to be the generally held position of those who believe in a humanitarian theory of punishment - including the OP - that to punish a person because he or she deserves it, as much as he or she deserves it, is mere revenge. Thus, when SM writes “If deterrence and punishment provide no additional justification over imprisonment, and I do not believe that they do, then we are left with revenge as the sole justification”, my response is that he is putting the cart before the horse. For, while “Is it deserved?” is not the only question we can ask about a punishment, it is the first question we should ask. Deterrence (and reforming the criminal) are secondary considerations. We should also note that imprisonment is punishment, just a different kind of punishment to capital punishment. This relationship is rather confused in the formulation “if deterrence and punishment provide no additional justification over imprisonment”.
Yes, my view is that fixing the right sentence is a moral problem, ultimately based on what C.S. Lewis in *The Abolition of Man * calls the Tao (or the Law of Nature) and the Bible.
This has to do with the distinction between desert, on the one hand, and deterrence (and indeed reform), on the other. It doesn’t make sense to talk about a “just deterrent”, since we demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. When we stop thinking in tems of what a criminal deserves and consider only what will deter others (or reform him/her), we have removed him/her from the sphere of justice altogether. It is in this sense that instead of dealing with a human being, a subject of rights, we are now dealing with an object.
I was making allowances for the fact that different countries may have differences in terms of such things as the age of responsibility.
This thread is very interesting to me, great to hear people much smarter than I debate an issue I’ve struggled with.
One of the hardest aspects in the death penalty debate for me to overcome has been the emotional response we, as a society, have to certain crimes. I’m all for cool logic, but it just doesn’t translate into the real world all the time.
When ever someone asks me if I’m against the death penalty, I always answer yes. A common follow up I’ve encountered to this question is, “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler before he assumed power (or insert your mass murderer/dictator of choice here), would you?” My answer is invariably yes. Figure that out…
—*Btw, I’d like to see a thread on mandatory castration for pedophiles and sex offenders (I’m new to the board, so if this has been done, apologies)
- Rebekkah
With Hitler you have the benefit of hindsight. With most death penalty cases you are dealing with what they did in the past, which is no guarantee of how they are going to turn out in the future. The death penalty is about punishing prior bad acts, but it makes the folly of freeze framing someone at their worst moment and assuming they will always be bad and not worthy of life.
I don’t think the analogy holds. In the case of arresting and imprisoning individuals, there is an obligation on the part of the “captors” to justify their actions and demonstrate that by imprisoning the person in question, they are acting in the public interest . They are held to a set of standards. For every single person they arrest and detain, the onus is on them to prove that they used their authority in the correct way.
Barring the Patriot (or, up here War Measures) Act, no one just gets pulled off the street for no reason. Imprisonment of individuals has a specific purpose (to protect them and the public). It is a consequence of breaking the law that every five-year old knows about, and IMO in most cases it’s an appropriate consequence.
It really doesn’t compare to snatching a fifteen year old girl off the street because she’s got a purty mouth, except on a very superficial level.
The analogy was not between with the state’s incarceration or judicial process, but with the legal status of a penalty of incarceration for one who incarcerated another illegally. If the death penalty of murderers is legal, that does not make the state a murderer any more than the legal status of imprisonment makes the state a kidnapper. Clearly, both incarceration and execution are counter to the will of the criminal.
SentientMeat -
It is possible that I am not understanding your objection. Nonetheless, I will follow up and you can correct whatever misconceptions I am holding.
Very true.
Similarly, if an innocent person is murdered, the association is equally direct. Yes?
Yes, indeed.
Might I also suggest that the suggestion that “one innocent person has been executed, and therefore it might happen again” is doing the same thing?
“We can’t execute anyone, because one of them might be innocent, and that would invalidate our whole system” is just as much a statement of probability as “we have to kill them all, because one of them might kill again”. I am not really changing from deductive to inductive, so much as countering one inductive statement with another.
Your “if” statement (if an innocent is murdered) removes the statistical element from your argument, and, as you say, the conclusion follows inescapably.
So does mine. “If a murderer repeats his crime…” means that an innocent has died just as surely as your “if” does.
Again, I may not be understanding your argument, but the choice of “convicted murderers” as the set to whom my argument applies is not arbitrary. Only “convicted murderers” are eligible for the death penalty. This has to do with commonly held notions of justice and proportionate punishment, but it is not arbitrary. The concept of “a life for a life” is the reason that convicted murderers can be considered for execution, and thus spare lives.
Keep in mind, that my predictions of how many murderers will repeat the crime are not aimed at any specific individual. You are certainly correct that the 1.2% chance that any one convict will kill again is small. The chance that a thousand convicts will commit (considered as a group) twelve further murders is much higher. That is the nature of group statistics.
The chance that I flip a coin and have it come up heads is exactly 50%, obviously. Having it come up heads ten times in a row is not impossible. But the more times you flip, the more likely you are to approach a 50-50 distribution.
Similarly, the more murderers you execute, the more likely it is that one of them was innocent. And it is more and more likely that you have saved an innocent person as well. The question remains, which is the more common outcome?
You are correct that you cannot be certain that any of the executed would have murdered again. You can, I suppose, be more nearly certain that one of them were innocent, supposing some new evidence became available or something. And I hear a lot of people arguing that we should never execute anyone, because we can’t take that chance. But notice that this is a chance-based argument. Just like mine.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve read this sentence a few times. I’m trying to come to sorts with it.
I’m one of those people who believes that “killing people is wrong, period”, and I’m trying to figure out if that is writing moral beliefs into law, and whether or not that is true, is it valid.
An argument could be made that all law is a manifestation of moral beliefs. Sometimes this can be disguised as “inalienable rights” - but, for instance, is anti-slavery legislation a “moral belief” written into law? Or do beliefs like that only count when they swing into your moral compass?
To expand the idea further, is mutilation (say, genital mutilation for rapists, or chopping off the hands of thieves, or whatever) a “moral belief”? Would your “amoral” legislation allow for what may morally be termed “cruel and unusual punishment”?
I think that all law is based on moral terms. You either have a right, or not.
I have to ask this question of you, because I’m curious how you’ll answer: how would you outline a true amoral legal system?
I don’t think you have to answer yes. If on the absurd hypothetical you’re going back in time and can affect history, there are many different paths you can choose to enforce this change. The idea “go back in time and kill Hitler” is a pretty kneejerk, and if I may be so bold, stupid, way to handle the situation. It represents a mindset that is simple - kill or be killed - rather than a more, I’ll be bold again, “enlightened” mindset where you consider actions and re-actions, and different ways of solving the problem.
Besides, if we’ve learned anything from computer games, if you go back in time and kill Hitler, Stalin just takes over everything.
Strongly Disagree.
Nobody, no institution or group of people, should have the power or authority to decide that someone else deserves to die, no matter who the person is.