I am opposed to the death penalty, but only for one reason- because the possibility exists that we may (and probably have) execute an innocent person. Morally I don’t really have a problem with executing murderers, violent rapists, or terrorists, but I’d rather they all rot in high security prison rather than risk killing a single innocent man.
Anyone agree or disagree?
I contend it’s morally bereft, but also agree your reasoning is valid.
Your reasoning is exactly the same as mine. I do not care if a murderer, rapist, or other exceedingly dangerous and morally bankrupt person lives in prison or dies. I do, however, care if an innocent person is wrongfully executed, there’s no going back when you make that kind of mistake, and our justice system is no more perfect than the people who comprise it.
“High security prison” does not protect other inmates and prison employees from being killed by violent offenders (even if they’re in lifetime solitary confinement, which isn’t doable because it’s inhumane). Nor are prisoners in “high security prison” safe from contracting fatal diseases like AIDS, hepatitis and tuberculosis, for which prisons provide a high risk environment. And while they are relatively uncommon, escapes do occur and people are injured or killed as a result.
Incarcerating rather than executing killers does result in the deaths of innocent people - don’t kid yourself. The high moral plane of being anti-death penalty isn’t all that elevated.
His reasoning is not valid. Even if the death penalty was reduced to a once-in-a-blue-moon event, there are people you can safely say are guilty of their crimes, with no qualifiers. Executing these people does not mean you need to turn into Texas and start acting like morons.
I’ve pondered a proposal in which a state or province gets to pursue one death-penalty case per year per (say) three million population, rounded up. Thus most venues get one to three per year, while Texas gets nine and California gets 13. With such small numbers, a governor/premiere (assuming the venue has the death penalty at all) will be inclined to pursue the death penalty only in cases where the crime is especially grevious and guilt especially certain and even then, actually getting a death sentence is uncertain. Coupled with a fast-track review and appeal system, we could actually execute people within a decade of their conviction, as opposed to the ludicrious process that currently exists in many U.S. states.
If I can’t have a limited and expedited system of capital punishment, though, I’d rather continue not having it at all.
Or… the poorest suspect that can’t afford a private investigator and a good lawyer, or the minority, or the guy that looks bad on paper because of his past.
Heck, I don’t even know why we call what we have justice. When the supreme court in our country says that it’s perfectly ok for the DA to hide and destroy evidence that supports the innocence of the accused, we might as well throw our hands up in the air.
Death penalty or not, those factors are always going to exist to some degree. They can be mitigated somewhat by preventing prosecutors from referencing prior bad acts that are not substantially relevant, and by preventing them from excluding potential jurors that may be the same race as the defendent.
I don’t know what this is specifically referring to, if anything, so I’ll withhold comment.
Bah, wish I’d seen this before I wrote up my long post in the other thread. I believe it is just in certain cases, particularly pre-meditated murder, murder in the commission of a crime, etc. If we really want to rehash my reasoning, I suppose I could quote myself from the other thread. However, I cannot agree with the reasoning in the OP.
If one believes it is moral and just in theory, as I gather the OP blieve, then one ought to be willing to implement it in at least some cases. I can understand being reluctant to impose it in situations where one is not absolutely certain that the person did it for fear of missing evidence or whatnot. However, what about in a case where there is literally no doubt. Imagine a case where a person is caught on film murdering someone, is arrested by police at the scene with the murder weapon and covered in the victim’s blood, confesses to it without coercion. Even if there are cases where one might be willing to convict of murder but not be certain enough to impose the death penalty, why would one not at least allow it on a case by case basis, to be determined by the facts of the case.
Moreso, though I too agree with the concept that it’s better to let 10 guilty men go free than imprison one innocent man, there has to come a point at which one has to accept a false positive, otherwise a particular virtue isn’t worth so much. Yes, there’s been a number of people who have gotten off of death row with appeals, and some argue that it’s a case of the system not working, but isn’t that the whole point of death row and appeals? I imagine we probably have executed some innocent people, but if we as a society sacrifice innocent lives for so many idealsand even for many things that aren’t ideals and I would believe that justice as a virtue of our society is important enough that it qualifies as worth some value of false positives greater than zero. Hell, I risk my life and the lives of others every time I get in my car to go to work, it may be a very small value, but it isn’t zero.
And so, I can certainly see some people arguing that the current false positive rate is too high, but then one shouldn’t oppose it but, instead, be arguing for methods to reduce that false positive rate to the point that it is acceptable. And if one won’t accept a value higher than zero, then I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that one believes in that value as a social virtue.
So is it okay to wrongly imprison an innocent man for his entire life? We met as well just all take the Casey Anthony jury route and let 'em all go.
I agree 100% with the OP. I believe that certain crimes are so heinous that the criminal forfeits his right to life. But even with impeccable evidence and witnesses, mistakes are still made. If the person has been put to death, no restitution is possible.
Are there any statistics available that would show us what percentage of those killed in the prison system are killed by inmates that would have normally received the death sentence if it had been available?
His reasoning is perfectly valid in the absence of a valid mechanism for separating people we “know” are guilty from people we don’t know are guilty but convict anyway.
Especially since our justice system doesn’t differentiate between convictions in the sentencing phase.
ETA: The Texas legislature supposedly considered a bill a while back which would have eliminated some of the appeals process for death penalty cases where “three reliable witnesses” identified the defendant. Since eyewitness testimony is arguably the least reliable form of evidence we have, it was rightly dropped as a really stupid idea.
If this is in response to my point, no. There has to be some reasonable acceptance of a false positive though or justice will never be served. It might be better to let ten guilty men go free than imprison one innocent man, but what about a hundred or a thousand? That is, I believe that it’s important to do as much as we can to minimize the false positive rate, but at some point, the false negative rate may also grow to the point that it also becomes unacceptable. In fact, considering that there will always be some failure rate in our justice system, the only way to guarantee we’ll never imprison an innocent man is to never imprison anyone. Clearly, not imprisoning anyone undermines justice, no?
Or to eliminate the whole stigma surrounding the death penalty, let’s consider another case where the false negative and false positive rates have vastly different values. Let’s imagine we’re screening for a fatal disease and there’s a cure but it’s expensive and has some non-negligible side effects, and of course the screenings aren’t cheap either. As with any such procedure, you’ll probably get the right answer the majority of the time, but sometimes it will say you have the disease when you don’t and sometimes it will say you don’t have it when you do. Obviously, you want to minimize the false negatives as much as possible because those likely result in killing people, but doing so will increase your false positives at a higher rate. As such, if you push it too far you start giving an expensive drug with serious side effects to a lot of people who don’t need it, and you still can’t guarantee that you catch everyone. In fact, the only way to guarantee that everyone who needs it gets it with absolute certainty is to give it to everyone but then, pardon the pun, the cure is worse than the disease.
So, if we’re going to apply an imperfect metric to an absolute virtue, which our justice system inherently attempts to do, then we’re going to have to accept some failure rate. We can argue that we should adjust the decision point so that we favor one type of error over another, as they often have different consequences. The founding fathers and most other modern societies tend to agree that we should err against falsely convicting an innocent man, but if we refuse any chance of that, absent a perfect metric we don’t have, we cannot claim to be a just society, as we are unable to punish anyone.
It’s not okay, but it’s not nearly as bad as executing an innocent man. If someone is wrongly convicted and sentenced to life, then they still have a chance to have their conviction overturned and be set free. I strongly support a robust appeals system that enables the truly wrongly convicted to seek to overturn their convictions, which is probably absent from many localities.
Basically, I’m willing to risk the possibility that an innocent person be convicted and imprisoned (as long as they have a legitimate chance to get that conviction overturned), but I’m not willing to risk the possibility, even if it is one in a million, of having an innocent person executed.
You are overlooking the distinction between the death penalty and other forms of punitive action- you can let people out of jail. We could let them out of coffins, too, but it seems a somewhat empty gesture, not to mention messy.
I am against the death penalty because I can’t think of many situations in which it feels like justice to me. The visceral response most people give is the example of someone who brutalizes one or many others, especially children. My feeling based on reading I’ve done is that the vast majority of people who commit “overkill” crimes that are especially gruesome or repetitive are often brain injured or not psychologically well. I don’t know if I believe in pure evil.
Another type of candidate for the death penalty are people who premeditate to commit cold-blooded murder, motivated by personal convenience, vendetta or money. In those cases, my feeling is that taking another life (that of the murderer) still does not feel like justice. It in no way makes whole what has been broken. We have life in prison if we are concerned about murderers walking free.
Also, the fact that people languish on death row for decades seems cruel and abhorrent to me. If the death penalty were carried out cleanly by firing squad in the courthouse yard immediately upon conviction, that would somehow feel more just than this awful business of years of anticipation followed by a possibly grotesque execution in a malfunctioning electric chair or injected cocktail.
I’m not sure that’s a valid reason to oppose the death penalty in general. People languish on death row for years because the death row appeals process takes years. I generally only takes a year or two to execute people in states that actually do so once the appeals/commutation process is complete.
On the other hand, some states (like mine, Florida) take so long to execute people they almost invariably die first. We execute maybe one or two people a year, and we won’t execute any until at least 2013 because the state supreme court is reviewing the constitutionality of the lethal injection procedure.
I am not. I think it requires a higher level of certainty than other forms of punishment, precisely because it is irreversible. I think that is the purpose that the series of appeals is intended to serve. However, to never do so is to accept absolutely no margin for false positives, which requires absolute rejection in all cases, which means that that virtue has no meaningful value.
My issue here is that the OP says that that’s the only reason that he opposes the death penalty which implies to me that he believes that the death penalty has some value, but he seems unwilling to accept anything but a zero margin for a failure rate. Again, I can see an argument for having more certainty to reduce the false positive rate, but failure to accept even a miniscule rate I think implies that the virtue has no value and, thus, contracts the OP in that it is the only reason he opposes it.
Blaster Master, if you want to argue math, than I would accept a failure rate of roughly 1/googolplex (or 1/the number of atoms in the universe, whichever is larger). Anything short of that is unacceptable to me.