As a non-US citizen I find the death penalty barbaric. However, at least you take it seriously. What I think is worse is your callous approach to solitary confinement. It is torture, way more widespread than death penalties, and overall the larger evil.
Ok. I’d recommend a 1-2 punch.
Punch 1: The death penalty is FUBAR in this country so let’s have a moratorium.
Punch 2: The death penalty is barbaric so let’s keep the moratorium.
In most countries, abolition passed against majority opinion. (Cite: I read this in the Economist once.) But opinions shift once the moratorium is in place: you need a method of cementing that. Also see mr. jp’s non-US perspective.
Full disclosure: I buy punch 1, but I don’t entirely buy punch 2. Except insofar as the US is on par with Iran, North Korea and China with respect to its enthusiasm for death penalty. I’m not a big fan of the human rights record of those 3 countries. (See? Barbaric!)
The morality argument is generally weak IMO, no matter the issue. It’s an argument from authority. For that to be logically valid the person making the argument is impying that they are an expert on morality and there’s no room for debate. Even if that’s genuinely the case, “I’m right. You’re wrong. Behave the way I tell you” isn’t the most hearable or convincing case for most people. There’s room for the morality argument if it’s presented as a discussion asserting why a certain moral principle should be the standard. It’s a rational discussion about what the appropriate moral code should be. Down that line of attack “It’s immoral” is just the last step once the real convincing has already been done.
Personally, I do consider someone attempting it as well on the way to an end all settlement to a debate with me. It doesn’t change my opinion. I just stop listening. Debate over.
Ok, but what about, don’t rape? don’t murder? do we really have to explain to people why you don’t rape and you don’t murder? aren’t there a handful of things we should just expect people to agree too/accept?
If you want to make an argument based on morality, you must first establish an universally (or at least widely) accepted moral standard as the basis for your discussion. A good starting point could be what philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in his “Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals” (1785):
If you can get everyone in the discussion to agree that this is a valid principle, you can work from there. This will probably lead you to an agreement that murder is immoral (because murder being universally accepted would break down society).
that book is, quite literally, on my bookshelf, on the “to read” shelf…
Don’t forget the ones who killed in prison.
Similarly, all we need to do is improve the appeals process, and the objection that we might execute an innocent person disappears. So it cuts both ways.
If we can make one process perfect, so that the risk drops to zero, then we can make another perfect, and that risk drops to zero.
Regards,
Shodan
Ok, I follow. So what you basically are saying is that the number of convicts that escape due to an imperfect prison system to kill again is likely to be greater than the number of innocent people that are executed due to an imperfect appeals system. I do not know, if that is true but I’ll admit that it may very well be.
But can we really bring this down to a numbers game? Is it okay to kill five innocents by applying a policy that will prevent six other innocents from getting killed? I say it is not, because it makes a difference *who *does the killing.
Imagine you are the representative of your nation during a hostage crisis. The hostage taker is holding six innocent people captive. He promises to set them free unharmed, if *you *agree to kill five other innocent people. Otherwise the hostages die. Even if you could somehow be sure that the hostage taker is as good as his word, you would not do it, right? Because for a state to actively kill an innocent person is much worse than failing to prevent a criminal from doing it.
(Sorry for using an example that is a bit far fetched - I hope it illustrates the point.)
It does illustrate it, but I don’t agree that it is better to let six innocent people die than to let five innocent people die.
You said that it makes a difference who does the killing. Can you describe more precisely the harm being done when the state kills someone innocent, after every effort to ensure that the person is guilty, that outweighs the loss of an innocent life? And is it absolute, where one innocent execution outweighs a hundred other innocent lives?
Regards,
Shodan
(italics mine)But the State’s job is not to ensure that every effort is made to ensure that the person that they have in custody is guilty. Their job is to make sure that the person that they have in custody is convicted. Their job is to fight against any and all evidence the defense puts forth in the defendant’s favor, to cast doubt in the jurors minds, and to get a verdict of “guilty”. They are not there to find the truth-They are there to find a high conviction rate.
I am not sure if I can, but I’ll try:
Your view of the state is a bit like that of a chicken farmer: If some of my chickens catch a deadly virus, it is best to kill them. I will try not to kill any of the healthy ones, but if I need to kill some of them in order to prevent the virus from infecting half of the stock, so be it. A reasonable decision.
I’d like the state to be more like a mother. You cannot tell a mother to kill one of her children in order to save all the others. A mother will not kill her own child, because if she does, none of the others will ever look at her the same way.
I know that a state cannot always be the mother. But it cannot always be the chicken farmer either.
It’s not about being effective. People use different arguments because they’re opposed to DP for different reasons.
I use the first “effective” argument because I don’t think the DP is wrong in itself, I just think its implementation is fatally flawed and leads to the execution of innocents.
Others use the second “ineffective” argument because they believe the DP is inherently morally wrong. That’s the reason why they oppose it, hence that’s the argument they use.
This question makes no sense to me. How avoiding the death of an innocent would justify killing another innocent?
The state shouldn’t kill any innocent, period. That’s a job for criminals.
The state doesn’t do that. Especially not in the American system, where it tries to demonstrate guilt and isn’t obligated to do the slighest effort to ascertain innocence.
Jurors don’t do that, either. It seems pretty obvious to me that as far as DP is concerned, you’re better of if it’s blatantly obvious that you commited a not too awful crime (say, murdering your spouse in a fit of jealousy) than if you’re strongly suspect of having commited a really awful crime (say, rape-murder of a child). Also, being unsympathetic to the jurors for whatever reason weights more than an actual evidence.
George Stinney for a recent post humous exoneration. Timothy Evans, Mahmood Hussein Mattan, and Derek Bentley for some older examples. Also Johnny Garrett and Cameron Todd Willingham.
Sorry, but that argument is voided by immediate execution. As in the convicted is immediately removed from the courtroom and executed. Or maybe executed in the courtroom.
That list is meaningless. I bet I could come up with a list of people who murdered someone less than 24 hours after getting a speeding ticket. Should we then kill them too as a way to prevent murders?
The death penalty fails on numerous counts. It doesn’t improve anyone’s safety and costs a fortune to implement. About the only thing it manages to do is satisfy some blood lust.
As it happens I’m all for utilitarian calculations. If I could be convinced that the death penalty saved a statistically significant number of lives, I would support it. That implies that to me a convicted murderer’s life is equivalent to a statistical life. That’s a big moral step. If there’s a miner or a child caught in a hole, society may spend six or seven figures to get them out even if the same funds could save more (statistical) lives if devoted to an EMT program. Strict utilitarians (I’m not sure they exist) would find that irrational.
The argument you are responding to is probably not a utilitarian one though, as the death penalty fails on such grounds. That’s ok: all sorts of moral frameworks can weigh advantages and disadvantages.
Personally, I put a pretty heavy weight on a guy who is put to death because of junk science. Others differ. I also advocate funding devoted to evaluating the accuracy of past death penalty decisions, largely because I dislike societal cowardice. I would not have a problem with comparing the number of people killed by escaped death row inmates to the number of innocent folk put to death. By way of fighting ignorance I’ll link to a 1990s study that concluded that wrongful conviction rates (all cases, not just murder) are conservatively estimated at about 1/2 of one percent. That produced about 10,000 victims per year. http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/ronhuff.htm
That seems like an opinion, since one can just as easily choose a set of axioms, as have you, that logically leads to an opposite conclusion.
My argument that I would employ against the death penalty is that it’s too much power to leave in the hands of the corrupt political class that make up the law enforcement, judiciary, and the other apparatus of government. That argument ought to be made in opposition of any form of state sanctioned, even implicit, ‘uncivilized’ punishments.
Recent? He was executed in 1944.
We have already covered Willingham. Johnny Garrett was not exonerated AFAICT - the appeals court said
Cite.
You and I have differing definitions of “exonerated”. As I said, simply repeating the defense case, using unsworn testimony and the unchallenged opinions decades after the fact, and after repeated appeals upholding the verdict, are not exoneration IMO.
What I am looking for is something like what the Innocence Project does, where there is actual evidence of innocence. And preferably for an execution that happened more recently than the 1940s. The DP was reinstated in 1976. That is recent enough to consider it as the start of the modern era of executions, which is where we are now. Include DNA testing in your consideration; that is a powerful form of evidence.
Do you have any actual cases of exoneration that fit those particulars?
Regards,
Shodan
Claude Jone appears to have been executed in the modern era yet later exonerated based on DNA evidence.
Jesse Tafero, while not exonerated, was likely innocent given that Walter Rhodes confessed to the murders. Not based on DNA like you were looking for, but another almost assuredly wrongful execution in the modern era.