Punishment for a felony is justifiable.
No shit, Sherlock. But ‘Punishment’ =/= ‘any and all punishment.’
So, if someone else does it first, it’s OK. Gotcha.
A badge of honor that I will be proud to wear. 
Right.
So is this punishment too harsh or too lenient?
You suggested I was the first to talk about completion of the sentence. I gave you quote of someone doing it before I did and someone doing it after I did.
It’s “OK” at any point, actually, unless you’ve discovered yet another new moral principle that luckily supports your desired political results.
It’s too irrelevant and can end up punishing people who are not felons.
How is a fine relevant?
(Assuming you also don’t object to fines).
And how specifically does it punish people who are not felons?
I don’t object to fines. How about addressing the issue of nonfelons whose names get purged from voter rolls for being similar to the names of felons, before we go chasing tangents, i.e. sticking to the specific, relevant and real-world aspects of felon disenfranchisement.
Sure, it’s probably a fairly minor bureaucratic fix in most cases - but a minor bureaucratic fix is what the felon is supposed to be doing, no?
By the way, cite:
Without putting any particular regard to the racial or Gore/Bush aspect, this nonfelon was denied a chance to vote after being misidentified as a felon. I presume she had to take positive steps to have her right to vote restored (too late for that election, of course). I wonder if she needed letters about her good character from three nonrelatives.
What about it? Like anything else, it has an error rate. Undoubtedly fines have applied to people incorrectly. The IRS has surely levied property by accident. That doesn’t suggest we no longer permit fines or IRS levies.
Sure. So what?
No, you don’t.
You’re right, I don’t actually assume she needed three letters attesting to her good character, but she did have to take some “positive action” toward restoring her voting rights and she’s not a felon. Surely that runs afoul of Blackstone’s Formulation on some level.
“Sure. So what?” - seriously? Are you actually indifferent to the issue?
Or simply inappropriate as punishment?
For instance, I suppose that, rather than denying the franchise to felons until they jump through your hoops and, if lucky, win your crapshoot, we deny them the right to own real estate.
It would be a pretty silly punishment. We don’t do it mostly because it’s never occurred to anyone to make that a punishment, but its inappropriateness would be a pretty good reason to not ever include it in the menu of possible punishments.
Even that’s not a great analogy, because while owning real estate is a valuable right, it is not the single most fundamental component towards participation in democracy! I mean, we all know that Bricker doesn’t value voting quite that high, but I cannot consider a single case in which a person should be stripped of what is essentially their sole political power - the right to vote. Even convicted murderers should not lose the right to have a say in the governance of their country. Or is there some evidence that the imprisoned would be easily swayed by offers of giveaways or pardons? Good thing that’s a complete non-starter with the rest of the populace either way. :rolleyes: Of course, continuing this already ludicrous punishment after the felon is assumed to be rehabilitated and is back in society is simply cruel and unusual. The right to vote is sacrosanct. Stop violating it.
No, I’m not indifferent, but you have no actual argument in play.
Here’s a guy wrongly convicted for a shooting. He had to take substantial steps to free himself from his punishment.
But we don’t conclude that sentencing people to prison is violative of Blackstone’s formation.
More generally, the fact that a penalty is incorrectly applied does not mean it cannot be used, ever.
Your post confuses two ideas: whether the penalty, as correctly prescribed, is too severe for the crime, and whether it is applied in error.
Who says it’s inappropriate? You?
OK, then I will add “judging inappropriateness” to the list of things I don’t accept your authority to do.
This post throws around concepts that are inapplicable, and tries the usual tactic of declaring that the poster’s moral judgement is unquestionably correct.
The right to vote is not sacrosanct. You just announced that rule, made it up, as though Moses forgot a third tablet on Sinai. Denying it is not cruel and unusual. If you meant that to invoke the Eighth Amendment, it fails as a matter of law. If you were just “speaking morally, not legally,” then I don’t want your morals infecting my country’s laws.
I have an excellent argument in play and I take your attempts at diversion as evidence. I will now address and undermine this latest attempt.
Certainly, innocent people have been wrongly convicted. Aside from this being a potential argument against punishment for the sake of punishment, the convicted in your cite was (I assume and hope) given due process of law and an opportunity to defend himself. What is the analog in an instance of someone having their name struck from a voter roll by an election official who simply * assumes * the person is a felon?
I’m not sure Blackstone would have been big on locking up lots of people named John Smith because one person named John Smith comitted a crime.
Sure. Now prove that this particular penalty should be used at all, against anyone.
My only confusion is about how far you’re willing to dig yourself in.
Boy, getting feisty this morning, are we?
No, I was merely pointing out that “too harsh or too lenient?” didn’t exactly cover the waterfront.
Um, you kinda missed the point. In about the same way that Bush went after al Qaeda by attacking Saddam Hussein.
No, I was pointing out that (a) you were being arbitrary in a particular manner, and especially (b) burying that by your use of the passive voice to describe the positions you were taking, as if those positions had come out of the woodwork and not from your own self.
Never came back to this one. What I said was that if X is what the law says, that doesn’t mean that X is morally right.
(You have a long history of turning arguments over morality into arguments over legality.)
I’m not sure what ‘decree of rightness or wrongness’ I am supposed to have made. I believe you have incorrectly imputed such a ‘decree.’
I have certainly made arguments for the rightness or wrongness of things in this thread. That’s what this forum is about, you know.
That’s really kinda Maoist when you think about it.
I mean, I agree that there are a lot of rapacious interests out there who enrich themselves while doing harm to society. The question is, what to do about them.
Would you deny the vote to every payday lender? To the owners and executives of every company that makes a buck in a way that fouls the environment?
That’s rather extreme, IMHO.
Oh, wait: you’re just talking about those who would rob you with a six-gun, not the ones who would rob you with a fountain pen.