Right, and again having innocent people die in airliner and auto crashes is ‘wrong’ if we could prevent those. Which we could by banning those forms of travel.
IOW the implied moral standard that you have to abandon something if any innocent person could be killed or harmed by it is logically unsustainable.
You can’t avoid getting in the messy details of how often a given system does wrong and how much wrong to innocent people, and getting everyone to agree on the underlying messy facts. Gambits like pointing out one life sentence murderer who escaped to kill again, or one ‘provably truly innocent’ person who was executed are an attempt to get around that. But the implied standard ‘explain to the family of that one person…’ is populist BS not logic. ‘We’ allow all sorts of things that kill innocent people, if it’s few enough compared to the societal benefit.
Personally I believe the demonstrated frequency of errors in capital murder convictions is too high to favor the DP. And again error in that context must be defined as ‘guilty’ verdicts that should have not ‘not guilty’ if the system was working properly, not a pseudo standard of ‘prove beyond reasonable doubt the person was wholly innocent’ which turns the basic principle of the system upside down.
Then, cutting down the error rate (G’s which should have been NG, not ‘we’re sure they didn’t do it’) raises costs and narrows the application of the DP to where it’s useless for deterrence, which would be the main valid reason IMO to have it. It’s obvious that lack of DP doesn’t breed uncontrollable lawlessness by family members seeking vengeance, which might be another valid reason if true. So junk it, IMO. But as to putting people in prison for long periods though we’re not 100% sure 100% of them deserve it, that gets back to cost v benefit, the cost of not sending anyone to prison or ensuring 100% correct convictions is too high IMO. Doesn’t mean we should look for positive cost/benefit ways to reduce erroneous convictions though.
And lets take a heinous example- a man murders a whole family, then kills more. He is caught, cheerfully admits guilt and even shows the police where the bodies and evidence is. No doubt of guilt. He also says he loves killing and will kill again, given any chance. What is to be done with him that will prevent him from killing again?
You are correct - no system ever devised by man is or ever will be perfect.Therefore, the system where we execute murderers, despite proof beyond a reasonable doubt and after years and decades of appeals, will, eventually execute an innocent person. We might not even know it, but eventually we will. Similarly, the system where we condemn murderers to prison is not perfect. The difference is that we know pretty clearly that innocent people, more than one, have already died due to the imperfections of the “prison for murderers” system. Because murderers escape, are paroled, are furloughed, kill other prisoners, kill guards, etc., even from prison.
So the question is not, which system is perfect and never allows an innocent person to die. The question is, under which system is the smallest number of innocents going to die. There has been, possibly, maybe, at worst one or two innocents executed. At the same time, pretty certainly, many more than that who were murdered by people who were not executed. See the OP.
It doesn’t help to say “innocent people shouldn’t die”. Innocent people are going to die either way. Do we go with the system giving the larger number, or the smaller?
Convicted rapist Kevin Coe’s mother tried to hire a hitman to kill the prosecuting attorney and judge who sent her son to prison. Coe has neer recanted his claim of innocence, served the maximum 25 years, and is still incarcerated as a sexual predator. If he gets out, he will probably be commitment more violent sexual attacks.
At worst, hundreds or more, considering how abominably unfair the justice system was for most of the 20th century. But we’ll probably never know for sure.
Nah, that’s not really the question. If it were, we would be morally obligated to advocate a system of autocratic tyranny that executed suspected “murderous types” at the drop of a hat, as long as the total number of innocent deaths ended up being less than that produced by the combination of executions and murders under other systems.
What you’re speciously trying to ignore here is that there’s a significant ethical difference between accepting the inevitability of some evil and/or sick individuals choosing to illegally kill innocents for their own selfish purposes, and accepting a legal system deliberately made draconian enough to inevitably legally kill innocents under the guise of socially approved criminal justice.
We as a society are not morally obligated to knowingly undertake to kill more innocents because we want individual murderous lawbreakers to kill fewer. On the contrary, it’s hypocritical of us to decry killing innocents as wrong if we’re not doing everything we can to avoid killing innocents ourselves.
DNA evidence, for example, was not available for prosecution OR exoneration until the late 1980s at the earliest, so was not available to any of the 8000 or so people executed in the United States between 1900 and 1987. We know that people have been exonerated since that date; how can you possibly know that NONE would have been exonerated before then?
I am talking about the period since the reinstatement of the DP in 1976. I am sure there were innocent people executed a hundred years ago, but forensic science has advanced.
As far as a cite for those executed subsequently to that date, again, they were all convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, their cases survived years and decades of appeals, and even things like the Innocence Project has not been able to come up with a case where DNA exonerated an actually executed person. To be fair, I don’t know if they concern themselves with those kinds of cases. But IMO if they oppose the DP, they should - such cases would help them in their advocacy.
The only case I am aware of off the top of my head is Roger Coleman, who was convicted of murdering his sister-in-law based in part on less sophisticated DNA evidence which IIRC established his guilt to within 2% or thereabouts. There was other evidence as well, and he was duly executed. Later the DNA was re-tested using a more exact method that narrowed the ID down much more precisely. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what that more exact method demonstrated.
Sure it’s the question. And no, we don’t need to advocate a tyrannical system - that’s a false dichotomy.
If I understand your argument, you are saying that it is ethically superior to accept a system where more innocent people die rather than one in which fewer innocent people die. I don’t agree.
If we execute a thousand people, of whom one is factually innocent and thereby prevent the 999 guilty from committing a dozen murders, IMO that is ethically superior to not executing a thousand people, sparing one innocent life at the cost of twelve innocent lives. If your argument is that it is twelve times worse that society executes one person than for murderers to kill a person, I don’t agree. The innocents are dead in both cases, and their families and society have suffered the loss. It’s just that in one instance, twelve times as many families have been harmed and society has suffered twelve times as much loss.
Hypocrisy comes when we decry killing innocents as wrong when we aren’t doing everything we can to avoid killing innocents -by, for instance, executing murderers, and thereby saving innocent lives.
They’re trying, but it is rather difficult. Consider, e.g., the case of Sedley Alley. He was executed in Tennessee in 2006, but went to his death protesting his innocence. Before his execution, the Innocence Project tried to halt it to get DNA tested; the request was denied. The Innocence Project has tried again; oops, again denied. The judge has ruled that only the convict has the legal standing to request DNA testing, and he is unavailable; his next of kin have no standing to act on behalf of his estate. (The State of Tennessee vigorously argued against testing; investigators in Missouri want to establish whether there is a connection between the murder in Tennessee and a 2018 murder in St. Louis.)
My argument is that we have no idea whether we are executing 999 murderers and one innocent, or 850 murderers and 150 innocents. If we killed 150 innocent lives to save twelve, do you still agree it was worth it?
Yes, forensic science has advanced. However, a lot of the cases don’t really turn on forensics; they turn on eyewitness testimony, coerced confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, police screwups, and other factors that haven’t really changed all that much in the last forty years. Look at the case of Ralph Wright, mentioned above; look at any number of the Innocence Project’s exonerations. Twenty out of 167 exonerations were based on DNA. That means 147 people were released from Death Row because of something OTHER THAN what you seem to be hyper-focused on. Do you really believe that the police never mess up, that prosecutors never lie, that forensics techs are never corrupt?
Have you or anyone else provided an example that the death penalty (which usually takes many years to be instituted) would have prevented a later murder? I’m not sure I even accept that possibility without good evidence.
Moreover, if we imprison and execute an innocent man, how much more likely is it that that innocent man’s children will grow up to be criminals than if they were later exonerated and released? How much more have we increased distrust in the system, and mortal fear of law enforcement and the justice system (which can endanger everyone), by executing the innocent?
The ramifications of executing the innocent go far beyond a single life affected.
EDIT: Also, what slash2K said about how little we know about the number of innocent actually executed. Any number, including 0 or 1 out of 1000, is basically a wild guess. You’re making all types of assumptions about the accuracy and effectiveness of a justice system that huge portions of the country distrust as fundamentally biased and unfair.
No, I wouldn’t. All that we need therefore is 150 instances where innocent people have been executed. Because really - the idea that we have no idea how many executed people were actually innocent, all of whom have been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and after decades of appeals on every possible point (and some impossible - Sedley Alley confessed to the rape, murder, and mutilation of his victim, led the police to the crime scene, and pointed out the tree from which he tore the branch that he rammed up his victim’s vagina, and never even suggested that he didn’t do it until twenty days before his scheduled execution).
Shodan’s Law: If they didn’t read it the first time, they aren’t going to read it the second time either.
How do you know Alley made a legitimate (and uncoerced) confession and legitimately led the police to this evidence? Some of us don’t accept an account just because the police say that’s how it happened.
You forgot the corollary, that sometimes you get it wrong – when your cite doesn’t say what you think it did (in this case that the inmate in question would have had plenty of time and opportunity to kill, as they did, whether they received the death penalty or not).
He also confessed to ramming her with his car; the autopsy report introduced at trial established she had not been struck by any vehicle. (Funny thing: the police initially believed Alley’s car was used, until it turned out the blood on the car was from a bird.)
He said at trial that he was drunk that night and had no memory of what happened, and that his confession was coerced by police misconduct. (And he had been requesting DNA testing for years before his execution. At the time of his original conviction, DNA evidence had not been used anywhere in any criminal case in Tennessee, for any purpose, and it had not been used in any post-convictions exonerations anywhere in the world at the time of his first scheduled execution date.)
EVERY one of the 167 people exonerated by the Innocence Project was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and on average they went through fourteen years of appeals before being exonerated. (I mentioned a case above where it took 43 years.)
The problem here is that you have not addressed the timing issue arising from the cases you cite. Your original OP noted a man who escaped three weeks after conviction as an example of a murderer who killed again. However, you have been asked repeatedly to state how “decades of appeals” would have balanced against “escaped three weeks after conviction,” and in almost three years you have declined to do so. Other than having him executed immediately after conviction, with zero chance of appeal, how would you have prevented his subsequent crimes? If you cannot give a good answer to that question, that “example” is worthless.
Here’s another tidbit for you to ponder: the new Alley appeals were done in part because St. Louis County detectives want to explore similarities between that case and a triple attack in their jurisdiction, with two women sexually assaulted and a third murdered. If Tennessee had tested the DNA years ago, then it is at least possible that if it was a mismatch, the Memphis police would have looked further andfound Thomas Bruce, a classmate of the murdered woman, BEFORE he shot Jamie Schmidt in the head in 2018. Why do you suppose the state of Tennessee is so adamantly opposed to a test that might have saved another innocent woman’s life?
The point of the escapee who was sentenced to LWOP is that people can and do escape from prison. Whether he escaped three weeks or three years after conviction is almost irrelevant - prison rather than execution means the murderer continues to present a risk to the public (and to prison guards, other prisoners, etc.) See the title of the OP.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the Thomas Bruce case. Alley, or at least Alley’s lawyer said Bruce was not involved. Maybe he was, but there is no evidence of it. And you cite says there was no evidence at the scene linking Bruce to the crime of which has been accused. Bruce had no criminal record, so his DNA would not be on file.
But sure, test the DNA. Keeping in mind, even if Bruce was involved, that doesn’t prove Alley wasn’t, especially since Alley’s story has gone from “sure I did it but I was too drunk to remember” to “I did it but I have multiple personality disorder” to “no I didn’t do it at all.”
Maybe Bruce was involved - he and Alley were both in the Navy, and attended the same avionics school, although not necessarily at the same time. But Bruce hasn’t even been tried, yet.
That’s the point here: those sentenced to death are confined to prison while the “decades of appeals” take place. Either you don’t want decades of appeals, or you want them put somewhere other than prison: which is it?
Alley said that he didn’t remember much if anything about the night, and that everything in his “confession” was dictated by the cops. Whether or not that is true is one of the questions in dispute.
Could that be because the evidence hasn’t been tested, and won’t be tested if the State of Tennessee and the Shelby County prosecutors get their way?
His possession of a criminal record is not the only way his DNA, or the DNA of familial matches, could have gotten on file. Moreover, my argument was that if it was proven that Alley wasn’t the perpetrator, or at least the only perpetrator, the detectives might have used other investigative techniques to identify potential suspects. Once they focused on Alley, no other suspects were considered.
No, but if somebody else was involved, it throws further doubt on the “facts” established by the investigation and the purported confession, and invites further scrutiny of the police actions and potential police misconduct in obtaining it. (Keep in mind that if the police did falsify a confession, there’s a pretty good chance they did it more than once, which means some other innocent people might have had their lives ruined as well, even if they didn’t end up on death row.)