We execute innocent people EVERY YEAR?!?!? Can you provide a cite?
I agree with you, except for “violent rapists”.
“It is never unquestionable.” I beg to differ. I just spent the last two days attending training related to police tactics. I saw several videos of officers being murdered in the line of duty, some while begging for their lives. There is NO QUESTION that the person on the video executed the officer. None. I don’t give a rat’s ass if they had a tough childhood or whatever. People who kill those who are out there protecting you do not deserve to live. Executing innocent people is completely unacceptable. But, like it or not, there are cases where guilt is 100% certain. (Oh wait, maybe the video tape was faked by those guys who faked the moon landing and the five witnesses who were present and apprehended the killer are wrong. Maybe they were confused and grabbed the wrong guy who somehow ended up with the murder weapon in his hand and the cops planted fingerprint evidence on the shell casings and blah, blah, blah.) In those cases I say they have forfeited their right to live. What do you do with the inmate serving life without parole who kills a corrections officer? Give him a smaller cell?
No internet or TV for two weeks, and it will be three if they do it again. :rolleyes:
I think the chair might be put to good use in that case.
Of course, because their innocence is well-documented yet we are so blood-thirsty that we execute them anyway :rolleyes:
Or are you claiming that while hundreds of people are released from death row upon being proven innocent, not a single one of the executed should have been amongst those hundreds? The system’s that good? Or is a better explanation that there have been dozens of people if not hundreds of people executed in the past few decades who are utterly innocent of their crimes, and had there been better evidence to free them, would have walked out like the lucky other ones?
Could you please codify what NO QUESTION means? Is that a question for the jury to answer? A judge? Another appeal process of some sort? If it is a jury process, do we need a simple majority or would this require unanimity? I would think you’d have to have unanimity otherwise how could you define it as “NO QUESTION”. Does our present system allow for the death penalty in cases where legitimate doubt exists? I know a jury could convict with the death penalty, but you would think that the Governor or appeals judge or someone would commute the sentence to life without parole if there were ANY doubt someone were innocent. And yet, as was pointed out, many have been released from death row after further evidence was found.
We may not execute them. But we sentence them to Death every year.
Do you have proof of this statement? Because it seems a pretty remarkable one. I’m not saying that innocent people have never been sentenced to death, but at least one every year?
Well, there was that brief period where we didn’t have it all…
The death penalty is always wrong. The reason we punish murderers is because killing someone is, except when there’s no other choice, wrong. Execution is never the only choice. As a society, we should be better than criminals.
Capital punishment is wrong, always and everywhere. The possibility of it being carried out on an innocent only makes it worse; but eliminating that possibility still won’t make it right.
Now let’s discuss topics that HAVEN’T been definitively setled.
Right, but I’m assuming you’re talking about since the death penalty has been reintroduced. Where’s your evidence that an innocent person has been sentenced to death every year? Or it that just something that you’re pulling out of nowhere because it sounds good to you?
More than one, in fact. About 3 or 4 in an average year. And those are just the ones we know about.
Thank you. I don’t see anybody on that list from 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, or 2010, but as it apparently takes some time for these things to come to light, I’ll concede it’s possible.
Yes, indeed. You are correct.
“Average number of years between being sentenced to death and exoneration: 9.8 years”
And it may then take a few months before the list is updated to include them. So, I’d expect there to be a couple from 2001 added to the list in the next few months.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf We have murdered 1263 since 1976. There have been 140 plus people , on death row, exonerated. I would say we kill an innocent person every year.
Sorry, haven’t visited this thread in several days. But, no, you do not understand my argument, though it was made in a post other than the one you quoted. The one you quoted was an argument that accepting a zero-tollerence for failure for using an inherently imperfect system to implement an absolute virtue is contradictory to the assertion that one believes in that virtue.
The crux of my argument was exactly that life imprisonment is NOT just. Without arguing why I hold each step to be true again, he’s the short gist of my argument. Justice is about re-establishing balance. In order to do so, a crime is responded to with a forfeiture of the same right violated or an equitable amount of another right. The right to life is the most valuable right and it is worth more than the sum of all other rights as it is necessary to the exercise of any and all other rights. Therefore, it is impossible to establish balance without the death penalty in situations where the right to life has been violated.
I think it’s the only logical conclusion from that definition of justice. Of course, one can come up with other definitions that don’t come to that conclusion, but I don’t think many of them make sense. For instance, some say we punish people to avoid future commission of crime, but that’s crime prevention, not justice. Or others insist it’s because they have to pay for their crime, but that’s revenge.
Now, a lot of people have argued that the death penalty is inspired by revenge, and I will concede that for some individuals it probably is, but I’ve laid out a logic for why, given that justice is a value worth upholding, it wouldn’t be motivated by revenge for me. In fact, I specifically would argue that it should be done as humanely as possible precisely to remove any revenge factor and focus solely on the aspect of justice as balance. So, even if you don’t agree with my logic, at the very least I think my example ought to demonstrate that the argument that it is motivated by revenge as a blanket statement is false.
Frankly, these statistics are meaningless. People against the death penalty, like you, argue that it’s a sign of how barbaric the system is and how inherently risky it is. Most people in favor of the death penalty argue that it’s a sign that the system of appeals is working in helping to minimize or eliminate the chance that an innocent person actually gets executed.
In the end, the only number that matters as far as failures go is how many people who are innocent actually get executed, but that number is probably all but impossible to determine, which makes either side using the numbers you give as indicative of these numbers is silly.
And again, I think the whole “how many innocent people have been executed?” argument misses the point because it doesn’t address whether or not it’s just, it emphasizes an unknowable value that, at best, indicates that it is just and we just need to improve the system, and at worst, indicates that justice is a worthless concept altogether, as it is only worth having if the cost is zero, and thus makes the entire argument moot because the whole justice system is based on a worthless concept.
This argument only makes sense if you believe that you can only achieve justice (for certain crimes) with the death penalty. If you believe (like I do) that justice can be achieved without the death penalty, then my argument is perfectly consistent.
I believe Kenneth McDuff came close to accomplishing that all by himself (McDuff is best known for having eluded the death penalty back in the '70s when it was declared unconstitutional, and later got out of prison and went on to leave a trail of corpses through Texas).
There’s also the convicted killers who busted out of prison in Arizona in 1978 and murdered six more people before authorities could catch up with them.
Just a small sampling, but worth learning about.
There are errors of governmental omission as well as commission.