not a smokescreen at all, even reading just the posts in this thread alone. The concept is that any justice system is subject to human error. In the case of the DP, that human error can result in an innocent person being put to death. And there are those for whom this fact alone is sufficient to be against the death penalty. Whether or not you can establish in this/that/or another case an absolute certainty, system is subject to flaws, and as such, is unacceptable to some people.
Oh, pshaw, archmichael. I’ll choose my own reasons to oppose the DP, thanks.
And my reason is, indeed, because the government might (and will, and probably has) kill innocent people.
The fact that McVeigh did the crime in this instance is wholly irrelevant. Essentially, you appear to be saying “Well, here’s a guy who crossed I-70 without getting run over. Therefore, it’s not true that crossing I-70 is a bad idea.”
There are a couple of principles here. One is that the State is just not competent to get the DP right with anything near sufficient accuracy to warrant its use morally. The other is that even if the State were right all the time, extending the power to kill the citizenry for violation of laws which the State itself sets up is beyond the scope of what many people think is the proper role of government.
*Originally posted by goboy *
**December, your moral calculus is appalling. One innocent man executed in error is one too many. **
I agree. Ten murders of innocent people are also ten too many. What’s your point?
Have you forgotten about Sacco and Vanzetti, executed in 1928 for a crime they didn’t commit?
Yes, I am embarrassed to admit that I had forgotten. I stand corrected.
Did you not know that not every person convicted of a capital crime has access to competent counsel?
Fair point.
** Did you not know that several men have been sentenced to death and been exonerated through evidence produced or reexamined through outside intervention?**
Yes. The system worked.
**The death penalty in this country is applied unjustly. **
Yes, it is. Murder is also applied unjustly. The poor and disadvantaged stand a better chance of being death penalty victims. They also have a better chance of being murder victims.
pldennison wrote
**As long as we’re just supposing, can we just suppose that the two innocents convicted and executed are your wife and your brother? Now how do you feel about it? **
This is no argument. Suppose the 18 innocent people killed by murderers include my wife, both daughters, my son-in-law, grandson and 13 other loved ones?
Did you know that all evidence indicates that the death penalty doesn’t prevent the murder of anyone, let alone 20 people per year,…
Actually I was referring to recidivism, not even counting deterence. Unfortunately, there are lots of people killed by convicted murderers.
**… and that in fact states with the death penalty tend to have higher murder rates? **
As an actuary, I may know more about the statistical evidence than pl does. I know that anti-DP folks have falsely claimed that studies prove the DP isn’t a deterrent. E.g., the NY Times had a scurrilous article several months ago, based on a half-assed statistical analysis. If a professional statistician had done the analysis that the Times reporters did, she’d have been fired.
pl’s last point above is an example of why the NY Times article was so objectionable. There was a period of several years when the Supreme Court had abolished all state death penalties. The statistics show that the DP states with higher murder rates also had higher murder rates while there was no DP. It’s clear that these states tend to have higher murder rates for reasons unrelated to the DP. PL’s comparison in simply invalid.
Incidentally, during the period when there was no DP, the murder rate everywhere shot up. When many states re-instituted the DP (in ways permitted by the SC decision) the murder rate went down.
I don’t claim that this relationship proves that the DP is a deterrent. I do say that there’s no serious evidence that it’s not. I regret that pl has been misled on this issue.
mattk wrote
**Unrealistic argument. There’s no way to make such a decision in the real world, since the number of people who may or may not die is impossible to know in advance… Utilitarian arguments, if this was your drift, are equally questionable at a simplistic level. Can you honestly put a price on a human life and compare it to others? **
I’m sympathetic. Still, military leaders make decisions like this. People who set speed limits or pollution levels make decisions like this. We all make decisions like this when we decide how much to donate to medical charity. If we fail to give that next dollar, someone may die.
** And would you be happy to go to your death as an innocent knowing that, hey, at least some genuine criminals will die too? I sure as hell wouldn’t (so my lack of support is partly motivated by self-interest!). **
That’s not my point. I was arguing that more innocent people will die if there’s no death penalty.
It seems a little strange, in a putative democracy, to hear “The State” referred to as being somehow a separate entity from “We the People”, instead of being simply the means by which society acts on any but the most local scale. The mindset that The State is not only separate, and in fact a bit alien and not to be trusted, is what enabled McVeigh himself to justify his actions.
No, friend, “The State itself” didn’t make murder illegal, nor did “they” establish execution as an available sentence. WE, as a society, and as all other societies past and present have done, made murder illegal, and set up a system of sentencing. WE, as a society, set up a system of government which has, as one of its functions, its enforcement. “The State” did not sentence McVeigh to die; a jury of 12 of “us” did, using their best judgment on behalf of us all.
There is evidence that this was, indeed, part of McVeigh’s motivation. It comes from Dan Herbeck, co-author of McVeigh’s biography:
**
I find punishment to be an important part of any justice system. Without retribution there is no justice.
**
Except for the other criminals and prison guards.
I don’t know how horrifying it is. Do you expect people to react emotionally to McVeigh with love and kindness? I’m not keen on torture myself but I don’t see how it was morally wrong to put him out of our misery.
Marc
archmichael said:
The specifics of this case are not relevant to the question of whether or not I support the death penalty. The reason for this is obvious: The death penalty is not applied just in this case. Since I do not support the death penalty in general, it would be inconsistent for me to support it in this specific case.
I never claimed he might be innocent. I said that I do not support the death penalty because it will inevitably result in the killing of an innocent person. Why do you think I have to sidestep the issue? I do not think the state should have the power to execute anyone. What part of that do you not understand?
Do I think Mcveigh deserved to die? I dunno, seems like he got off easy, slipping gently into that good night. This has no bearing on why I oppose the death penalty.
ElvisL1ves said:
Actually, it is precisely because I know that I am responsible for the actions of the State that I oppose the death penalty.
Yes, 12 fallible people chose to condemn another man to death. The fact that in this case, the condemned arguably deserved to die does not change the fact that in other cases, they do not.
gEEk
Am I correct in assuming that under US law there is no such designation as “never to be released”?
no, you should not assume that. “Life w/o possability of parole” is certainly available in the state of MI, and if it’s not specifically available now, it would be easy enough to enact.
However, I feel honor bound to point out that those on the other side will say things like :
- Escapes are never ‘impossible’ (very unlikely in many cases, certainly for those in the higher security prisons)
- Even for those who serve their time behind the prison walls, there’s potential victims (Guards, other prisoners, other workers inside the institution).
Of course, for this arguement to make sense, one should provide data for how many escapes and murders occur on death rows (since the sub set that we’re interested in is
‘those who would have been executed’)
I’d also like to point out that no one was forced to become a prison guard. When the guy or gal applied for the job, he or she ought to have known the job was dangerous.
poorly worded. Life w/o parole is available in Michigan right now.
new thought. In other states, if they don’t currently have that option, it’d be easy enough to enact (and I believe that most do have that option)
Thanks wring, I wasn’t sure whether prisoners given “life” in the US had some automatic right to seek parole - pretty much the only case which has been reported here is Manson’s, and of course he seeks parole with monotonous regularity.
We have built here a “super-prison”, purpose built to house our “never to be released” prisoners. I’ll see if I can find the an online copy of the article which was recently published about it.
BTW I think it is entirely wrong for DP advocates to assume that DP opponents approve of murderers being released back into society.
Yr. Welcome 
RE: Manson. He and many others (notably his codefendants) were originally sentenced to “death”. At that point, SCOTUS declared the death penalty as it was handed out during that time was ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment, and all those who’d been sentenced to death then had their sentences commutted to ‘life in prison’ (which was, at the time, the most they could do). Life, without the designatioin of ‘w/o possability of parole’ included an automatic possability of applying for parole (doesn’t mean you get paroled, as Mr. Manson and friends have discovered).
we, too, have ‘super max’ prisons available (at least at the Federal level)
I agree that all the statements of ‘sure, then **you ** take Manson home with you tonight’ et al do nothing to further the arguement.
As a taxpayer, I oppose the death penalty: it costs more. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs2.html
Typically the investigation stops after someone is executed. I can say that Thomas Thompson, executed by the state of California in July, 1998 looked innocent to this observer, but I must add that I followed that story only casually.
It is likely that innocent people have been executed though: since 1973, 96 people were freed from death row from 22 states. See http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innoc.html . (I see that the debate has since progressed on this point; thanks pldennison).
The death-penalty-as-entertainment argument. Since I assume Superdude doesn’t know anyone who died in McVeigh’s massacre, it’s not vengeance. But killing McVeigh in some graphic fashion would provide the poster -and many others apparently- with solid entertainment value. I find this pro-DP argument the most compelling.
Personally, if I believed that state sanctioned killing saved a statistically significant number of lives, I’d be in favor of it. As it doesn’t, I have to say that I agree with W. Bush that retribution/revenge is not a sufficient reason to support the death penalty. (Source: debate with Al Gore, 2000).
However, I could still imagine reasonable opposition to the DP. The lives saves would be statistical lives, while the lives killed would be actual ones. Suppose a child was stuck in a hole and it cost a cool $2 million to dig her out. The mayor is told that with that $2 million, they could improve emergency services sufficiently to save 10 lives. It is defendable to choose to save the life of the young girl over that of 10 hypothetical heart attack victims. (Thanks for posing the question though.)
I agree that there’s no good evidence that the death penalty causes crime. Except for one discredited paper from the 1970s, there has been no statistically significant relationship established -positive or negative- between the institution of the death penalty and crime rates. The NYT article (IIRC) was showing univariate relationships; more sophisticated (multivariate) studies have shown no relationship. (Though I find it plausible that high murder rates may lead to a greater desire from the citizenry for more punitive sanctions.)
pldennison, I appreciate your dogged effort to come up with cases of U.S. murderers wrongly executed, but you do realize your efforts have resulted in zero confirmed cases of innocent people being executed? Qualifiers like “probably” and “a good chance” make it obvious that you just don’t have the facts on your side. And I am mystified by the inclusion of Keith Longtin in your list - a guy who wasn’t even convicted of murder, much less sentenced to death. If you want to beat your breast about people wrongfully being arrested for crimes, that’s a separate rant.
One of your star exhibits, Gary Graham, is an especially poor poster child for the anti-death penalty movement. This vicious rapist, robber and murderer was justly convicted and I sleep all the more soundly knowing that he will not be released to repeat his crimes. Unfortunately, there are all too many killers who did manage to turn the trick again. There’s no “probably” or maybe about it. And I would love to hear acknowledgment of the 6 innocent victims of Arizona’s “Last Rampage” murders, committed after a cop-killer and serial murderer escaped from prison (alluded to in a previous link). But I guess it’s necessary to tune out the victims if one is to be fully committed to the anti-death penalty cause.
Even if some of you are willing to ignore the risk to prison guards and inmates from convicted killers in jail, appalling as that is, let there be recognition of yet another way in which killers can be freed to menace society yet again - pardons/clemency motivated by political considerations or greed. Have we forgotten the “Pardon Me Ray” scandals of the '70s under Governor Ray Blanton, in which numerous convicts (guilty of crimes including murder) were freed through payoffs to the Governor’s aides?
By the way, in case someone is revving up Britain’s old Christie case as evidence of someone wrongfully executed for murder - the pathologist who worked on the case, Keith Simpson, makes it clear in his book that the man who was executed in fact did not commit the crime for which he was put to death. But he did do another murder, which sort of blunts the indignation factor just a bit.
killing McVeigh was a stupid blunder. The man wanted to be executed rather than spend his life in prison. The wisest thing that we could have done with him was keep him alive for the next 50 years, give him time to realize what a monster he really is. Instead, we let him die feeling justified in his actions. :rolleyes:
This opinion piece in the Washington Post says it better than I can:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/columns/roughdraft/A50349-2001Jun11.html
tj
From this link, “Once an execution occurs, the small group of lawyers who handle post-conviction proceedings in death penalty cases in the United States move on to the next crisis. Investigation of innocence ends after execution. If an innocent person was among the 222 people executed in the United States since Furman, nobody in the legal system is any longer paying attention.”
So at the present time, we won’t be able to come up with any confirmed cases, only dubious ones such as Sacco and Venzetti. If you are saying that the federal government should fund the re-opening of some of these cases, well, I won’t object.
From the same link:
When innocent people are set free following fortuitous and sporatic investigations originating mostly outside the judicial system (e.g. a committed law school student, an impromptu pro bono lawyer) the system can’t be said to be “working”. (Ok, I admit that the latter characterization may apply more to non-death penalty cases.) Still, it’s difficult to believe that $5000 or less is sufficient to provide someone with an adequate initial defense in a capital case. (The total costs including appeal -when the defendant’s innocence is no longer presumed- can total upwards of $2 million, though). Under such circumstances, I’d be surprised if innocent people were not frequently put to death. What is odd is that even when the system has every incentive to dot all the proverbial i’s, that there are still screw-ups, as shown by the government’s withholding of documents during the McVeigh case.
I think that the current justice system is useless if you actually want justice. Because the justice system is in the hands of people who are no better than the rest of us. It will be abused by criminals inside it as equally as much as criminals outside try to abuse the rest of society. People are for the most part law abiding because they feel their life is better while they stay within the law. Criminals on the other hand feel like their life is better when they break the law. Putting them in jail simply lets them hurt a certain amount of people more, but its ok since they are only hurting other criminals.
Especially considering McVeigh. His life drastically improved after he killed all those people. He got to be famous and sat around watching cable tv all day for killing those 168 people. He then got a peaceful death that most terminally ill people desperately want. That he probably wanted. I am sure alot of people would jump at that punishment if they had the tools to blow up a building.
Presumably jab1 would be equally unsympathetic to the murder of my wife and cousin, who are on the staff of University Hospital in Newark, NJ. When these gals applied for their jobs, they ought to have known the jobs were dangerous. Being murdered would serve them right, for having chosen to provide medical care and medical education in the inner city.
In my professional opinion, the NYT “study” showed nothing at all. It was really just an article written by a couple of reporters who didn’t know the first thing about statistical analysis.
Flowbark, I am interested in the other studies that you mentioned. I’m unclear whether you are saying that these other studies have not shown a relationship or that they have shown no relationship. I thought the former situation was the case. If it’s the latter, I’m be most interested in cites or other sources.