The expense is partly a CYA. This is a controversial and historical trial. It’s nice that Nidal gets a fair trial, but it’s more important that the files are extensive and complete and show that nothing was overlooked and that nobody was negligent. In ten years, twenty years, or fifty years, the files will show that things were done properly.
This is also a trial that is of interest outside of the country. It has a big audience. Basically, no one on the ground wants to be seen as less than thourough and correct. And higher-ups who might have otherwise discouraged certain expenses know that this is American Justice On Display To The World, and are more likely to refrain from pushing for cut-backs.
It’s not expensive because it’s Nidal’s trial. It’s expensive because it’s America’s trial.
If Hasan had been allowed to plead guilty, I’m not sure that it really would have saved all that much money, or even any money. The primary costs were expert witness fees and the transportation and housing of witnesses, and allowing a guilty plea wouldn’t have obviated either of those. The court would still want expert testimony on the record that he was sane at the time of his offense and that he was competent to stand trial, that he was competent to enter a guilty plea (and represent himself, if he still insisted), and whether or not he posed a future danger. Those same witnesses would have been testifying in the pretrial and punishment phases of his trial even if there was no guilt-innocence phase. Death penalty trials are expensive to try correctly, and the trial court has every reason to want to see that the trial goes correctly. The Military Courts of Appeals have no problem overturning death sentences when they feel that mistakes were made in the trial court; of the 16 death sentences in military courts since 1984, 10 have been overturned on appeal.
You are undercutting your own point, obviously. You stated rather baldly -
and now you are saying that it is rare because we modernized our system of justice.
That’s essentially what I said - since 1976, there is no good evidence that any innocent person has been executed, and therefore it is not a reason to fail to execute those who deserve it. 1976 strikes me as a good cut off point to say that the death penalty has been modernized.
If you want to claim that we can’t execute someone in 2013 because somebody was wrongfully hanged in 1920, then I will point out that you and I already know that scientific investigation of crime has come a long way since then.
If you have to go back forty years or so to find someone who you claim was wrongfully executed, you aren’t comparing apples to apples.
I actually agree. However, you added something to what I had said, then demanded I defend it. That’s shitty debate technique.
Wrong. Your reasoning is fallacious. The errors of the past are what has led to the reforms of the present. Some of these reforms also go back to the 1920s. Trials didn’t just start getting long and expensive in 1976 – or 1946. American trials were known worldwide for being long and expensive as long ago as the 1920’s. This was in response to errors in procedure.
Scientific evidence has come a long way. So has trial technique. And those advances (both in forensic science and in trial technique) are largely driven by errors, by people wrongfully convicted or wrongfully acquitted. Our trials are long, today, because back when they were short(er) mistakes were made, which have been addressed by additional layers of detail.
You keep rebutting things I haven’t actually said.
Doesn’t the OP say that the shooter admitted it? Confessed? I think that that would be one way. I’m sure that there are others. Don’t know about random persons, tho, which aren’t in the OP.
I’ll pipe in again to say that the evidence Cameron Willingham was innocent is pretty strong.
The problem there is that trials don’t just determine guilt or innocence. They determine degrees of guilt, and people who plead guilty usually argue that their are mitigating circumstances that affect their culpability. One of the reasons this trial was so bizarre is that Hasan didn’t really do that and was arguably trying to get executed.
Ouch. I hadn’t known about that case. Definitely shaky evidence and some disturbing procedure.
By the way, one doesn’t have to go back to the 1920’s… Here’s a news article I found on the topic. From 2011: “Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn abolished the death penalty Wednesday . . . out of concern that innocent people could be put to death by a justice system that had wrongly condemned 13 men.”
So, maybe, just maybe, trials still aren’t long and expensive enough. Errors are still being made. I do not claim to know where the trade-off point is, and I feel distrust for anyone who says that they certainly do know.
Again, just throwing more time and money at the problem cannot get the results we want. Maybe you can go from 90% accuracy to 95% accuracy by doubling the amount of time and money spent, but you’re still getting false positives and still killing innocent people. Which is why my suggestion is to change the nature of the sentencing stage, by giving the judge a strong personal interest in not wrongly sentencing someone to death. They should think “If I sentence this man to death and he turns out to be innocent, I’ll lose my job and spend the next five years in prison. Am I so confident that he is guilty that I can take that chance, or should I sentence him to life without parole?”
The judge should be punished for applying the death penalty in any situation in which this is a danger. If he would not bet his own freedom on being right, he should not bet another man’s life on it.
Agreed…but that 5 percentile improvement is a good thing.
Simply increasing the time and money spent doesn’t intrinsically improve the quality of the results of a trial. But the things that are known to improve the results are expensive. It costs money to compensate witnesses, for instance, who may have travel expenses and lost wages. Expert witnesses are also expensive. But those are ingredients of a better trial.