But if people living in a society know that the highest powers reserve the powers to take life as an act of revenge, that sanctions violence as a justifiable response to perceived ‘injustice’ or ‘slights’. Do you see where I’m going with this? Think about the psychology of “justice.” Shit, look at the death penalty states: they are “coincidentally” some of the more violent ones.
I make similar arguments regarding guns. People who walk around with concealed guns are not really good guys with guns; they are a solution that’s looking for a “problem” to solve.
That would only be true if violence against the state were ever acceptable, which it is not.
Why, it’s almost as if there were some sort of correlation between the prevalence of violent crime and a willingness to appropriately punish it!
Seriously, though, of the five states with the highest per capita homicide rate - Louisiana, Missouri, Alaska, Maryland, and New Mexico - only one of them (Missouri) has an active death penalty, which is pretty much the opposite of what you’d expect if having a death penalty somehow caused more violence.
Probably, yes. I’d declare with every breath I had remaining that it was a damn injustice, and I’d hope that my family sues and eventually wins so much that they never have to want for anything ever again and the state has to think long and hard about their standards for evidence, but I don’t think it’d cause me to believe that nobody should ever be executed for their crimes no matter what.
I don’t want innocent people to be executed any more than you do, but I don’t think that abolishing the death penalty is the right solution. Our goal should be to improve the standards of evidence, the quality of counsel provided to defendants, and the overall respect for and fairness of the judicial process, so that we can be sure that the people we are putting to death absolutely deserve it.
I agree with this. Several things about our current system are messed up in this area. First, if you are innocent and convicted of murder, you should hope that you get the death penalty. It seems insane, but if you are sentenced to death, you have a myriad of procedural safeguards which are added. You will be approached by all of the anti-DP groups and have access to some of the best appellate attorneys in the country. If your death sentence is overturned and you get LWOP, these people disappear, on to their next crusade to save someone from execution.
Conversely, at your trial, when it really counted, you were assigned the next schlub in the pool at the public defender’s office. Now don’t get me wrong, some of those attorneys are very capable, some are not, but they are overworked and outmatched by the resources of the state. When I represent indigent clients, I have to beg and plead for money for investigators, experts, etc. while the state makes a phone call.
Further, wins in post conviction cases are notoriously rare. Most people don’t have untested physical evidence out there that could exonerate them, and judges don’t believe recanting witnesses. That’s why when someone gets post conviction relief happen see a Netflix documentary about them. Judges are tired of them; you rarely get a fair shake because they think that your case is like the previous million which were bullshit.
Finally, I think the anti-DP argument misses the point. If we should not have the DP because of the likelihood of convicting an innocent person, then we shouldn’t have LWOP for the same reason. Personally I would rather have a lethal injection than live in one of those hell holes for the rest of my life. In a perverse way, getting rid of the DP would stop many of the activities of groups like the Innocence Project because most of their members only work so hard because of their anti-DP fervor.
I mean, that’s a stupid reason to retain the DP, but what else do we have? I’ve seen many people convicted on the flimsiest of evidence by bored jurors mostly because they didn’t like something about the defendant. And prosecutors do everything to introduce irrelevant and prejudicial things. More and more judges allow it where if you read cases from thirty years ago, they didn’t.
In short, if you believe that there is too much error rate in convictions, your focus should not be on eliminating the DP. It should be on correcting the error rate.
I wasn’t saying violence against the state was acceptable; I’m saying that allowing the state to even the score on someone’s behalf reinforces the idea that violence is an appropriate form of retaliation. Sure, you can say, “But the death penalty is used only in specific situations such as murder” - I get that, but it still reinforces culturally reinforces violence as part of its value system, even if that’s not the stated purpose of capital punishment. That’s the same reason adults shouldn’t spank, or why school systems shouldn’t allow violent retaliation if someone gets bullied or sucker punched in the cafeteria. Except for cases of self-defense, violence is wrong - period.
If you look at where the death penalty has been utilized the most since 1976, it’s been used in the South, which is consistently the region with the highest rates of violent crime.
There’s obviously more to that correlation than just the death penalty itself. I’m sure systemic racism, lack of education, and an overall mentality that encourages criminalization and detention are also contributing factors, but the same psychology that drives these factors is the same one that fuels the death penalty. The death penalty encourages society to deal with violent crime by murdering an individual as a way of expressing our contempt for that person’s life and also as a way of intimidating everyone else who might have violent tendencies.
Maybe instead of wasting our resources over an obsessive desire to see someone take a needle in the arm, it would be better to demonstrate a different set of values - a set of values that illustrates how we can force criminals to face the consequences of their actions and yet show others that we can exercise some restraint and possibly even take something that’s awful and somehow turn it into something positive.
But as I said, there is not new evidence in most cases even we someone protests their innocence. No DNA out there; nothing. Zero chance of reversing the conviction.
So under this logic, and since there could at least be one innocent person wrongfully incarcerated, we should eliminate incarceration as a whole, especially LWOP.
“Most” is not “nothing” or “zero”. Under my logic, there remains a non-zero chance of fixing an incorrect verdict/sentence. Under your logic, there is absolutely a zero chance of fixing an incorrect verdict/sentence. Non-zero is different than zero.
I agree, we shouldn’t imprison innocent people! But if we do, we have a chance of correcting that mistake. And I haven’t seen any statistics that it’s “pretty close to zero” that innocent convicts are eventually freed – do you have such statistics?
In any case, even if you’re right, it’s not a defense of the death penalty. If you want to argue against imprisonment at all, then feel free – but this is a thread about the death penalty, and I oppose it because (among many other reasons) it’s wrong to institute an irreversible solution when the alternative is just as effective in terms of justice and deterrence.
It is not evidence for that, because you are still pretending that the number of innocents executed is zero.
Nor should those who are arguing that innocents have been executed have to point to specific examples. We can find plenty of examples where justice has not been done, such as a man sentenced to death while his court-appointed attorney slept through his trial. Now, maybe that man was innocent, and maybe he was guilty. We’re certainly going to have a hard time proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he was innocent. But there also was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty.
So, look for cases where there’s a 1% chance that the defendant didn’t actually do it. For every hundred of those, there is, on average, one innocent man. Look for cases where there’s a 10% chance that he didn’t do it. For every ten of those, there is, on average, one innocent man. Look for cases where it’s 50-50: For every two of those, there’s one innocent man. It adds up to a heck of a lot of innocent men, even if we don’t know which ones.
Yeah, I’m usually with Shodan on things, but this has to be correct. No human endeavor is perfect. Car brakes fail, planes crash, bridges fall. Our justice system will convict, at minimum, a non-zero number of innocent people, and if we have the death penalty we will execute a non-zero number of innocent people, even if we cannot point to THAT GUY and identify the innocent person executed.
I just disagree that LWOP is the “solution.” Take a child sexual assault case with no DNA and the guy gets an effective life sentence. Let’s assume he is one of the innocent ones. How is he EVER, and I do mean ever, going to prove his innocence? Remember, judges don’t listen to recantation evidence.
In a modern sexual assault case with no DNA evidence, he should never have been convicted in the first place. The difficulty of proving innocence is why we put the burden of proof on the prosecution.
That is pretty ridiculous if you think about it for a second. Not only because of delayed accusations mentioned but also because there’s plenty of sexual assault that wouldn’t leave DNA. Your standard would also let women and condom users off the hook