Another complicating factor is that LWOP doesn’t always mean life without parole. See, for instance, Ed Wein, who was sentenced to death, and then had his sentence changed to LWOP. Then it was changed again to life, and he was paroled. Then he kidnapped, raped, and murdered a woman he saw at a bus stop.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t think you’re entirely clear on the concept of “always wrong”. The statement “choosing to kill another person is always wrong” does not lead to the statement “therefore, we should choose to kill certain people”. And the fact that someone else does evil does not obligate me to do evil, too.
And everyone in this thread except for you are arguing for the system under which the smallest number of innocents die. Your argument hinges on the number THREE!, and insists that THREE! must necessarily be the largest possible number, and that no number could conceivably be larger than THREE!.
The logical extension of these statements is that we should execute members of the other groups as well, given that they have an equal probability of committing murder and given that, were they to be executed, that probability would drop to zero.
One could continue to follow that path of logic ad absurdum, but it doesn’t end well.
No, I am clear on the concept.
AFAICT the statement “choosing to kill another person is always wrong” leads to the statement “choosing to kill another person is always wrong even if it will save innocent lives”.
Not really. The three innocent lives lost because the Arkansas murderers are examples, and I have adduced other instances of murderers who killed again.
Three is, however, a larger number than zero. Zero is the number of innocent lives who would have been saved if the eight murderers in the OP had been executed. And as far as has been established, the number of innocent people who have been executed in the US since 1976.
If it were morally permissible to execute members of other groups, then you are correct - we would be better off if we executed them. All you need to do is establish that executing other criminals is morally justified.
You can certainly do that - Ed Wein, who I cited, was originally sentenced to death for violent rape and kidnapping, and it would be possible to argue that he deserved his original sentence. But establishing the moral justification for the DP for non-murderers has to come first - it doesn’t follow automatically from the morally justified execution of murderers, even if non-murderers have an equal chance of committing murder.
Regards,
Shodan
So true.
This is a specious distraction. The point I was getting at was that this hand-wringing over potential escapees running amok is a distinction without a difference, as both the capitally condemned and those under lengthy custodial sentences (including, but not necessarily limited to, LWOP) have an identical 15-year stretch of incarceration during which to attempt any escapes.
Furthermore, as I have just noticed on re-reading your post, even you didn’t argue the case for escapee mayhem - your cited criminal was paroled, not free by his own efforts.
After a criminal conviction, an individual defendant always has the right to appeal. This is what’s known as a direct appeal, and the defendant has the task of explaining to the appellate court what errors the trial court made that together render his conviction untrustworthy. Typically there are multiple levels – a state intermediate appeals court and a state high court, for example. In such appeals, the facts are usually not reweighed – the appellant cannot say, for instance, “The jury believed the eyewitnesses and convicted me, but that was an error, because they lied.” The appellate court generally treats facts found as true at trial as true on appeal, as long as there is some evidence in the record to support those facts; they do not re-weigh the credibility of witnesses as a general rule.
So in a direct appeal, the appellant is arguing that the trial court made errors of law, or abused its discretion. “The witness that testified against me was repeating hearsay, and the jury should never have heard that testimony,” or “The jury was told of my previous arrests even though they were not relevant to the current crime.”
That course ends at the state high court, for a state trial. (I say “high” instead of Supreme because not all states call their highest criminal appeals court a “supreme” court.) If you allege that the error was one of federal constitutional dimension, then the path can extend to asking the US Supreme Court to review your case.
Then it can get a little confusing.
The appeal process I describe above is a direct attack on the conviction. But even after that appeal is exhausted, it’s possible to mount a collateral attack against the conviction. You might, for example, ask the federal district court to order you set free if you allege your conviction violated federal constitutional guarantees and you have exhausted your direct state appeals. In years past, it was possible to approach these kinds of collateral attacks on a conviction in a number of ways. In the mid-1990s, Congress sharply limited this path by passing the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. This law dramatically limited the federal courts’ ability to intervene unless the conviction was completely contrary to clearly established federal caselaw from the Supreme Court, or based on a wholly unreasonable finding of facts in light of the evidence presented.
The law also removed the option of attempting multiple petitions for relief: all claims needed to be presented in the first collateral attack. A second attempt at a collateral attack could be summarily denied.
So the set of direct appeals, and post-conviction relief under federal law described above, is what I called “ordinary appeals.”
If we are now talking about the morals of killing, I disagree. I do not think that the killing of a murderer is morally justified. Killing anyone, when there is an option not to, is not a justifiable action.
I would change your second paragraph to "AFAICT the statement “choosing to kill another person is always wrong” leads to the statement “choosing to kill another person is always wrong even if it has a tiny chance to save innocent lives”. "
Choosing to kill someone when it will save an innocent life, as in a cop shooting an an active shooter or other actual threat to the public or innocent individuals, is, INHO, a perfectly acceptable moral action. Choosing to kill someone because they might kill again, is, once again IMHO, not morally justifiable.
There are arguments from a practical standpoint, that killing certain people may be the practical thing to do, but if that is the case, then we should start with the people most likely to end innocent lives, which is not convicted and released murderers, but is instead drunk drivers, executives who cut corners on safety, people who lobby on the behalf of polluting industries, and whoever the guy was that invented the McRib.
But your argument - and indeed the moral justification you have offered - for execution in this thread is not based on punishment for previous murders but on prevention of future murders. Therefore if convicted murderers are at equal risk of committing (further) murder as other groups, and if execution is, as you appear to suggest, the only reliable means of preventing future murders, the conclusion I have presented stands. Individual anecdotes do not change that.
Others that should be executed? How about:
Parole violators?
Those convicted of firearm and drug charges?
Those convicted of abduction?
My argument is indeed based on punishment - that is, execution - for previous murders. If you want to extend that to the death penalty for other crimes, you need to prevent a moral justification for execution for those other crimes.
You are correct that if the only consideration were the prevention of future murders, then we should execute for other crimes. But it is not the only consideration. Moral considerations like proportionality enter in as well.
Regards,
Shodan
So, you are not arguing that murders should receive the death penalty to prevent future murders, you are just arguing that murderers should get the death penalty because they deserve it.
That’s a completely different argument from your op, and relies entirely upon objective views, and relative moral weighting.
For instance, I feel it is immoral to kill anyone who is not presenting an immediate and credible threat to others. I understand why we used to have the death penalty; keeping a murderer locked up was a strain on quite scarce resources, and it probably wasn’t all that hard to break out of jail before modern times, so killing them was a much more pragmatic option than it is now. Those aren’t really issues anymore, and we even have the resources that we could focus on rehabilitation, if that was our choice.
For any “moral justification” that you present for DP for murderers, I could present one for rapists, child molestors, drunk drivers, embezzlers, violators of safety or labor codes, violators of environmental codes, people who lobby to water down safety, labor, or environmental regulations, and jaywalkers.
As I said, this is a principled stance. Keeping in mind, however, that the chance of saving an innocent life by executing a guilty murderer isn’t so tiny - in the case of the eight in the OP, it has been pretty clearly established that executing them would have saved at least three lives.
Maybe we are running up against Richard Parker’s distinction about things that are true about a group that don’t tell you anything about any individual. Or maybe that’s where Bricker is headed - that of the people on death row, there is a non-zero number of those who are actually innocent, but the chance of any one individual being innocent is a thousand to one. (Or whatever the odds are.) Likewise if they are executed, of course - 1.2% of them will kill again within three years of release, and others will escape and kill again, and others will kill a guard in prison, or will plot and carry out murders while still in prison (like Tookie Williams). But the odds are a hundred to one (or whatever) against any one individual being the one who will kill again.
But IMO it is morally acceptable to execute a murderer even if he is not the one who will go on to kill again. Therefore we can do it, and gain the benefit of saving innocent lives even if we don’t know which one (or two, or three) of the executed are the ones who brought about the reduction. It’s the flip side of the argument that we can’t execute anyone, even though we don’t know which of the one (or two or three) is actually the innocent one. Because the odds are a thousand to one against it being the innocent one in any individual case.
Regards,
Shodan
No, I am indeed arguing that murderers should receive the death penalty, and this will prevent future murderers. The fact that they morally deserve it is why we can and should do it to them, and thereby gain the benefit of preventing future murders, but cannot apply it to others. Because the others don’t morally deserve it (assumed for the sake of the argument).
Aristotle says that justice means that equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally. Murder and burglary are unequals.
Regards,
Shodan
Sort of like Jesus-They should die for the sins of others…only instead of one dying for the sins of many, we’d have many dying for the sins of a minuscule few.
So, let us take my idea- that to be executed the murderer must have killed twice. Given the extremely small number of innocents executed (1 so far) and the small but larger number of killers who killed again (I think the generally accept stat is around 100), the ratio for dead innocents given my premise is 100-1.
You CANNOT know this.
I would certainly agree with the increasing requirements needed to ask for the death penalty, so only allowing it in cases where a murderer has either been paroled or escaped and killed again would be an improvement.
Not only is it far more likely that they are guilty of at least one of the crimes of which they are convicted, but rehabilitation is less likely to be effective on someone like that.
No, it hasn’t. And that wasn’t your original argument, anyway:
I am growing tired of your repeated nonsense about the “three lives” whose sacrifice you seek to attribute to opponents of the death penalty. One of those lives was lost because the culprit was on parole (which obviously negates any rationale for making a comparison between the preventative efficacy of the DP and LWOP, in this case), whereas the other two were lost because the offender escaped within three weeks of his conviction. Had he been facing a death sentence, he still would have been able to effect his escape - the actual terms of the sentence itself are irrelevant, unless you are arguing for summary executions, which would of course be unconstitutional.
Ok, yes, so here’s a list of 13 potential possibles;
also that cite does show you can have a conviction overturned after execution:*On January 7, 2011, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter granted a full and unconditional posthumous pardon to Joe Arridy, who had been convicted and executed as an accomplice to a murder that occurred in 1936. * But that was 1936.