So does locking them up securely forever.
How many were actually executed, and which ones? And if they were innocent, why weren’t they released instead of being resentenced to life?
Regards,
Shodan
I wish I could be so cavalier about killing innocent people. But here I am, somehow hung up on “justice” and facts.
Yes, but that’s a big hypothetical. You don’t know that a criminal will commit the same crime again. Your comparison between ex-ante and ex-post executions is simply wrong.
Not necessarily. Prisoners escape. They commit crimes against their fellow prisoners. Time passes and popular sentiment changes and they get out on “good behavior”. Capital punishment is the only form of judicial discipline with a 0% recidivism rate.
Past behavior tends to be a very strong indicator of future behavior.
I take it very seriously. I don’t want any innocent people to be executed. Every innocent person who is executed is a true patriot giving his or her life for his country. That’s why I want our justice system improved, better access to good legal counsel for everyone, and stiff penalties against prosecutors who get innocents incarcerated. I just don’t think the baby needs to be thrown out with the bathwater.
The article lists one, which is one too many in my opinion, given that there are no actual advantages to execution rather than life imprisonment. It’s more expensive, and has no effect on deterrent values.
I don’t consider giving satisfaction to bloodthirsty savages to be an advantage.
Mock the concept if you want, but people (almost certainly) have been executed who never committed the crime they were convicted of. You actually seem to be OK with 4% of executions being performed on people who didn’t commit the crime, and that’s a rather disturbing thought.
Shodan, you’re not going to find many proven incorrect executions, because the efforts to exonerate people on Death Row tend to fizzle out once the guy is dead.
Do you really not understand the difference?
That’s why I said “securely” – a well run, secure prison will not have escapes or serious prisoner-on-prisoner crimes (which means that most prisons in the US are probably not well run by this definition).
I’ll accept that if preventing recidivism is the only goal, then the death penalty is the best option. And this goes for any crime, from theft to murder.
I actually don’t have a problem with executing murderers or even rapists. I oppose the death penalty because I think the risk of executing a single innocent man outweighs any benefits (which I believe are miniscule) of the death penalty over life-imprisonment.
All wars have their collateral damage. I consider 4% to be within the realm of “acceptable losses”. Does that mean I’m “OK” with innocent people being executed? No - but that means that what I want is a system that doesn’t execute anyone unless there is absolutely no question about their guilt, not that I want to let all the guilty people off the hook for fear that some hypothetical person might bumble through the legal system for 20 years without ever having a competent lawyer.
“We can’t prove a single case of it happening, but we know it must be true.”
I don’t acknowledge that there is one.
Well, you don’t fucking have a system where we don’t execute someone unless there is no question about their guilt because we know that 4% of those executed aren’t guilty.
We know no such thing. We know that some researchers claim based on statistical analysis (not on actual instances of wrongful execution) that 4% of people on death row (not 4% of people executed) are innocent. And they had to go back to 1973 to arrive at that number - to a time before DNA profiling and modern forensic science. And they left out the last ten years when those sciences have become better than ever.
We don’t have a system where we don’t execute someone unless there is no question about their guilt? Then let us build one.
That’s trivially easy, in fact all civilised countries have managed to do so.
Don’t fucking execute people.
Not executing anyone would be an impediment to the goal of executing the guilty.
You can’t build infallible juries, nor can you rid police departments of crooked cops, the courts of crooked or incompetent judges, or defendants to have competent legal counsel. Witnesses will lie and juries will believe what they want to believe.
Good idea. And until you’re absolutely certain you’ve built one, how about you put the executions on hold?
Firstly this was not torture, it was a botched execution.
Secondly to link this animal in any way to Rosa Parks is despicable.
And no, this won’t make any difference at all to the debate on the death penalty. Those against it will be the only people to mourn this guy’s passing and the manner of it. Those for it will say that his suffering was nothing compared to that of his victim. And they would be right.