Why Tim McVeigh's execution was wrong...

What do North Korea, Iran, China, and the United States have in common? They all have the death penalty. And isn’t North Korea such a lovely place to live? We are in such great company. In fact, we’re beating the pants off Iran…they’re only #4 in the number of executions, and we’re #3!!! (behind Saudi Arabia and China) Granted, we still lag behind Iran on a per capita basis, but I think we can beat 'em on that measure too, especially if those bleeding heart moderates keep doing so well in Iranian elections.

What do the United States and Japan have in common? They’re the only advanced countries that still retain the death penalty. Oh, and by the way, the United States is #1 in murder and #1 in rape among industrialized nations.

Show me a backwards, authoritarian, or totalitarian country, and I’ll almost certainly show you a country that has capital punishment. Hitler, Stalin, Pot, Pinochet, Mussolini, The Ayatollah…oh how proud they would be to know that there are still people in the world who believe “might makes right” is the foundation of all morality. Show me an advanced “civilized” (i.e. politically and economically stable, basic human rights valued) nation, and I’ll show you a nation that has abolished the death penalty. (The U.S. and Japan are the exceptions.)

Many people say they adore holy men such as Jesus, Martin Luther King, Gandhi…yet overlook the very obvious fact that these individuals strongly repudiated the notion that “eye for an eye” is justice. Many people say that they believe in a God of unlimited grace…but show in their lust for retribution that they don’t really believe it.

What do North Korea, Iran, China, and the United States have in common? They all have the death penalty. And isn’t North Korea such a lovely place to live? We are in such great company. In fact, we’re beating the pants off Iran…they’re only #4 in the number of executions, and we’re #3!!! (behind Saudi Arabia and China) Granted, we still lag behind Iran on a per capita basis, but I think we can beat 'em on that measure too, especially if those bleeding heart moderates keep doing so well in Iranian elections.

What do the United States and Japan have in common? They’re the only advanced countries that still retain the death penalty. Oh, and by the way, the United States is #1 in murder and #1 in rape among industrialized nations.

Show me a backwards, authoritarian, or totalitarian country, and I’ll almost certainly show you a country that has capital punishment. Hitler, Stalin, Pot, Pinochet, Mussolini, The Ayatollah…oh how proud they would be to know that there are still people in the world who believe “might makes right” is the foundation of all morality. Show me an advanced “civilized” (i.e. politically and economically stable, basic human rights valued) nation, and I’ll show you a nation that has abolished the death penalty. (The U.S. and Japan are the exceptions.)

Many people say they adore holy men such as Jesus, Martin Luther King, Gandhi…yet overlook the very obvious fact that these individuals strongly repudiated the notion that “eye for an eye” is justice. Many people say that they believe in a God of unlimited grace…but show in their lust for retribution that they don’t really believe it.

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*Originally posted by flowbark *
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Oh, please. With all the dedicated and sometimes frantic efforts to de-legitimize the death penalty, surely advocates would have come up with a single genuine case to dramatize their cause, if there was one. That they are reduced to “probably”, “must be”, “could be” etc. is an indication of how threadbare the cupboard of evidence is.

And of all those errors cited under which murder convictions have been overturned, many relate far more to the procedural games played by attorneys than to the innocence of the accused. Take for example the case of Robert Anthony Williams, a gentle soul arrested in '68 for killing a young girl and stuffing her body into a trash barrel along Interstate 80 in Iowa. On the way to jail, a police captain said to him that the parents of the dead girl might like to give her a Christian burial. An hour later, Williams led them to the body. After strenuous efforts on his behalf (including a campaign by U of I law students), the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the murder conviction was overturned on the grounds that the the police captain’s statements amounted to “psychological coercion”. A later conviction was overturned on similar nonsensical grounds on appeal but was later upheld by the Supreme Court. We are fortunate that Williams was not released to prey on other children, but rest assured that advocates are working their tails off to find other technicalities on which to reverse convictions. That’s our system. And no, it doesn’t always work.

By the time a convict is executed, it is often a decade or more after the conviction. By this time, evidence proving innocence can be hard to find. Add to that that proving innocence can be really difficult: if one actually was sleeping alone on the night of Dec 5, how are you to prove it? Moreover, I suspect that the government isn’t too forward about giving people access to the corpses of the executed.

But the most valid point–already mentioned–is that it makes more sense to work on cases of those still alive; it affords you the chance to save a life rather than waste your time on someone who’s too dead to care about exoneration.

So it doesn’t suprise me to see no definative cases of the innocent being executed, at least recently.

(from the Onion: “Sacco and Vanzetti convicted on two counts of wopness”)

Thought I forgot to type:

McVeigh seems to me the poster child (as it were) for “life without parole”. He didn’t stab or assault anyone himself–it was all action from a distance. There’s no reason to believe that he’d be a danger to guards or other inmates, at least without some idiot giving him access to explosives.

Lay off the “we can’t just let these people go free to kill again” nonsense; nobody is suggesting that a murderer go free. Instead lock them up and throw away the key…

I just dug up a cite. Bedau and Radelet (1987) in the Stanford Law Review documented 350 twentieth century cases in the US where innocent victims were convicted of homicide or sentenced to death for rape. That’s a paraphrase from a sentence in Fox and Radelet (1989): it doesn’t say how many of those 350 were actually put to death though. According to the web, 23 of them were put to death, all but 1 of them before 1976.

The 10-20 years or more between conviction and most executions allows abundant time to scour up evidence of innocence. Looked at another way, the reversal of convictions on procedural matters or “competence of counsel” after all this time ensures that convictions on retrial are hard to come by - witnesses die or are lost to followup, evidence is lost (or deliberately destroyed by the Evil Police State, if you’re into conspiracy theory). So take limited pride in those reversals based on technicalities - you may just be putting a Robert Anthony Williams back on the street.

Myrr, I don’t know if you’ve been reading this thread, but there’s been ample demonstration that it is not possible to lock up someone and “throw away the key”. Escape*, parole and pardon are among the ways in which convicted killers get another shot at repeating their crimes (and have done so repeatedly). And if you manage to throw away the key, you may condemn those locked inside with the murderers (guards, inmates).

When we take the most grievous offenders out of circulation permanently, we save lives.

*Anyone remember Ted Bundy, serial killer and escape artist?
Lots of people in Florida do.

NYT: Speaking generally, univariate evidence rarely establishes causality. It is merely suggestive. IIRC, the NYT article indicated as much. If you want solid (typically multivariate) evidence, you have to look in the technical journals.

Are you asking for estimates centered near zero with narrow confidence intervals? That’s fine, but we both know that social science data is typically fairly noisy. Anyway, I skimmed the death penalty literature for a couple of hours earlier this year. This certainly does not make me an expert. Let me convey my very imperfect understanding.

The cross-sectional evidence has always come up with nil, probably (IMHO) because high murder rates tend to be associated with more punitive attitudes towards punishment. Isaac Ehrlich (1975), in the American Economic Review stunned the criminology community when he presented a different methodology; he reported that every person put to death saved 8 lives. Yow.

Unfortunately, his model was not particularly robust, meaning that fairly small shifts in its specification destroy his results. Change the sample frame (e.g. remove the 1962-1969 period) and the results go away as Layson noted in Congressional testimony. Put in the non-homicide crime rate as a control variable and the results go away.
I end with a quote from Fox and Radelet (1989), Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

Anecdotal evidence from Tabak (1998):
Ted Bundy went to Florida to commit his last murder because Florida had the death penalty and Bundy had a death wish. (See D.V. Drehle (1995)) FWIW.

Most criminologists and police chiefs do not believe that the death penalty deters crime. FWIW.

Final disclaimer. There’s actually another pro-DP paper by S. Layson, a former student of Ehrlich’s. It was published in the Economic Journal in 1985. It has also been thrashed, though it did not inspire the same volume of work that Ehrlich did.

Also state by state data apparently became much better after 1982 (Ehrlich used national data, which was problematic). Albert (1999) analyzed data from 51 jurisdictions during the 1982-94 period and concluded that the death penalty does not have a deterrent effect. I have the paper in front of me. Hm. The estimated effect of the probability of execution on homicide rates is negative, consistent with Ehrlich’s work, but insignificant (the t-stats range from -.067 to -.812, not even close to -2.0).

The dominant (highly significant) factor explaining homicide rates is the percentage of young people in the population. Nice. If you believe my theory, that increased crime leads to the death penalty, then the rise in the share of youth forecasted over the next decade should offset the current lull in popular support for capital punishment.

The presence of executions in any given year as well as the existence of a capital punishment law is associated with higher homicide rates, at a significant level (t>2.0). That is, until fixed effects are controlled for, at which point the anti-DP evidence collapses. So there is weak evidence that the pro and anti DP crowd can draw on, but the best guess IMHO is that the death penalty neither deters nor encourages homicide.

The 1972 Furman decision freed 558 inmates from the death penalty. The group went on to kill 7. Among the dead were 4 prisoners, 1 ex-girlfriend and 2 guards. 4 of the 558 turned out to be innocent. So on the one hand we have 554 probably guilty bodies and 4 innocent bodies. On the other we have 7 innocents who would have lived if we had killed the 554+4. IMHO, 554 + 4 >> 7. But that’s a value judgement. Source: Marquart and Sorensen (1989), cited in Tabak (1998).

december:

Oh, well. Problem solved then, eh?

I’m sorry, but I think that december avoided a valid point here. If you believe (as he seems to) that it’s preferable to execute two innocent people to save ten lives, then it shouldn’t matter who the innocent two are, correct? For december’s position to be at all consistent, therefore, he should be willing to execute his wife and brother (against their will, presumably) in order to save the life of ten other other people. december, is this so?

While I am somewhat more skeptical about the DP’s efficacy, I’m sure that most of those opposed to the death penalty would be have no problem working an “inconclusive” result into their respective positions. i.e. “Since we really don’t know whether or not the death penalty reduces crime, we shouldn’t have the government kill people like this.”

Well Pl, I can’t say anything about Iraq or Afghanistan, from what I hear, those two countries are the next best thing to going to hell. However, I have lived in Saudi for almost 2 decades. I live in Riyadh, a city of roughly 2 million people.
Saudi has one of the lowest crime rates of any place I’ve ever been. People regularly sleep with their doors unlocked and I can walk any street in the city at 2AM and be just fine.
Much of this IMHO, is due to the death penalty and the way it is implemented.

a) Executions are VERY public.

b) They are extremely gruesome. (Beheading)

c) They are implemented in a matter of months rather than years.

Executions are performed for a range of crimes, murder, rape, and major drug-dealing being the most common.
Obviously, I cannot claim that the DP laws and the (relatively) crime-free state of the place are cause and effect, but there IS a correlation. As an aside, I cannot believe that anyone who has seen an execution (as practiced here) would deny that this is a deterrent.
Regards.

Testy.

Finally, a personal note. What maximally pisses me off about the death penalty is the way that it displaces rational debate about crime control. I would seriously like to know what are the most cost-effective methods for crime reduction. Several innovative experiments in this area occurred during 1990s (I’m thinking of Bratton’s work in NYC and Boston). I wish that more effort could be devoted to identifying, adapting and replicating such practices.

C’mon Testy. The US also has the death penalty and one of the highest crime rates in the industrialized world. Still, I would support public executions if the subsequent stability in the crime rate would disabuse the public of the notion that the death penalty deters crime. But I doubt whether this scenerio would occur.

Authoritarian regimes often have low crime rates. With more freedom, crime typically increases. Examples: In Spain and Czechoslovakia crime rose when the dictators fell. My understanding is that this pattern is not unusual.

I don’t really believe that it is the DP itself that is a deterent. As you rightly point out, the US has a hellish murder rate AND the DP. There are two major differences here that I believe DO make this system more effective than that of the US:

a) The public (and gory) nature of the execution.

b) The speed at which the execution follows conviction. (Usually 3 or 4 moths max)

The effect of this is that people KNOW that when someone commits a crime they are punished, if not immediately then at least very quickly. To me at least, this makes the DP a MAJOR deterent. Actually seeing the head leave the body will send some people into mild shock, others into nausea. The realization that “Yes, that could have been ME” does indeed deter criminal thoughts.
As far as authoritarian regimes having less crime, I can’t really argue that as I suspect them of also under-reporting crime.

Thanks.

Testy

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You know what else we all have in common? We all have prisons, court systems, and some sort of police force as well. I don’t hear you complaining that we have these things in common with your examples. Why not?

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It must be because of the death penalty, right? Maybe if England, Germany, and other European nations had the same crime problems as we do they’d still have the death penalty. But then maybe not.

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So by your own admission a civilized nation which for the most part respects human rights can have the death penalty. Thank you.

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Did they? Do you have cites?

Marc

oh, my, there are a few more proven cases, apparently.

Another study finds similar numbers:

I shan’t provide any commentary…

-MLK, Jr. Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on 17 November 1957

Gandhi is also quoted as saying “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” King also has a similar quote, no surprise as he was very influenced by him.

As for Jesus:

and

and

Well, no room for doubt what these people thought of “eye for an eye” philosophy, is there?

Varlos, in describing my position, you omitted a word. I think it’s preferable to execute two innocent people to save ten innocent lives. I am assigning no cost to the execution of guilty murderers. They deserve their punishment, whether it be imprisonment or death. And, yes, it shouldn’t matter that the 10 or the 2 could be my loved ones.

Disclaimer: My wife works in a crime-ridden section of Newark, NJ. Her risk of being killed by an unexecuted murderer is probably greater than her risk of being unjustly executed.

[QUOTELooked at another way, the reversal of convictions on procedural matters or “competence of counsel” after all this time ensures that convictions on retrial are hard to come by - witnesses die or are lost to followup, evidence is lost (or deliberately destroyed by the Evil Police State, if you’re into conspiracy theory). [/quote]

Unless I’m horribly misinformed about our criminal justice system, on appeal the state does not have to reprove guilt; it is the responsibility of the defence to bring something new or overlooked to light. So dead witnesses favor the prosecution–they’ve already made statements under oath, and now they can’t be further cross-examined.

First of, I curious as to how someone sentenced to “life without parole” is going free on parole. Care to explain?

Pardons: yeah, but people sentenced to death can get pardons too. And because people often sit on death row for decades, I don’t think leaving them there for another 10/20 years really alters the odds of that too much.

Escape: well, escape is a possibility. But if it’s really that much of a problem, then we need better prisons. As noted before, death row inmates have plenty of time to plot an escape if they’re going to.

As for the death of other inmates/guards: anybody have any statistics on how many of these deaths are from “life w/o parole” inmates, versus–oh, say–how many of them are gang, drug, or “wheee! riot” killings? There are a lot more violent people in prison than just the convicts on death row.

As for executing innocents versus roaming murderer killing innocents: there’s no way to say “Johnny the Homicidal Maniac” (;)) will kill 3 innocents in the next 2 years. Every one of those innocents has a chance, at least, not to be killed. Death row inmates are going to have a heck of a time avoiding it. So you’re comparing potential deaths to actual deaths. Personally, I think one actual death is a whole lot worse than any number of possible deaths.