Central Prison (where death row is for the state of NC) is right by NC State's campus. While I was there I was a heavy metal radio host for WKNC, and received a lot of letters from death row inmates.
Very few letters were of the type I was expecting at the time: "Play this Cradle of Filth song for me, or I will file down shards of my broken mirror in order to kill you". Along with very entertaining, if graphic, pieces of artwork.
Most of the letters were cordial, but gruff. Hard criticism of songs each inmate did not like, glorified praise for the songs they did like. Rarely, they would describe why a particular song was important to them and it was not anything alien to my freshman self: lost love, old buddies, family, trying times.
There was one I replied to and carried on a brief written correspondence with: Tilmon Golphin. Make no mistake, there is no excuse for his actions. But what I found fascinating was the attitude he decided to show in his letters; how true his words were I cannot accurately judge. He showed me major regret of brutally murdering officers of the law and provided no excuses, instead showing acceptance of what he had done with his brother.
I later learned that particular case of his and his brother's is one where the US Supreme Court's ruling in Roper v. Simmons divided the sentences of the brothers. Tilmon was 19, and his brother 17, so while both were sentenced to death, the SCOTUS ruling means Tilmon is still on death row while his brother is not.
I never would have thought I would learn so much from being a heavy metal radio show host.
The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are.
It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences.
See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win?
If you want a burger, a high, an orgasm or a conviction, you generally will get it at some price that's ultimately...above market.
How much more prone to excess is someone in the heat of a moment? How unlike the event does its moment by moment reconstruction during a trial appear? The mismatch has always struck me as unjust. As people judging an event whose experience they haven't had and haven't attempted to recreate. Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform.
An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation.
Any shade of grey zooming out from that seems too hard for any government system to decide well. I hear people say things in passing like "he only got 20 years". 20 years is a huge and devastating amount of time, as is one year. As we've ramped up the time on these sentences and made it an all or nothing proposition. Unfortunately, I don't think 20 years will do it if 1 year hasn't and I don't think death will do it if 20 years hasn't.
Regarding Richard Glossip. I don't know him or his case. I don't know the victim and while they won't return, there's a debt owed that I don't know how to pay. I want Richard Glossip to live. I don't think taking another life will pay the debt of the first. What I want most of all is for someone to tell me how to pay that debt.
"If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation."
Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children. They're usually in situations people would rather ignore. They're desperate. They want attention and they get it at some price that's ultimately... above market.
>Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children.
eric_the_read's comment notwithstanding, people subjected to extreme circumstances in their childhood years are less likely to be rehabilitated, not more.
The argument is that someone willing to shoot up a school for attention is beyond rehabilitation. His age is irrelevant to someone making that claim, and possibly argues in his favor.
The attention we're talking about here isn't narcissistic supply. It's basic interpersonal human concern. Shooting up a school because you're being systematically starved of your basic human needs isn't nearly as bad as you just made is sound. Otherwise I never contended with anything else you said. I do think they deserve a chance at rehabilitation but also that they're less likely to attain it.
I'm just pointing out that your argument isn't very effective. I actually agree with you, but someone taking the position that school shooters aren't rehabilitable isn't going to care whether or not they're minors. Their argument supersedes notions of maturity.
You're not refuting an argument I made. Read it again. I was simply trying to highlight the point at which we might actually have some meaningful effect on the problem. Hint: punishment is irrelevant.
Your point about 20 years vs 1 is really important. Sentences have gotten so long for relatively harmless crimes that benchmarking becomes distorted. If anyone thinks about all the tings they will do in the next 3 years, then compare that to losing 20 years it can help show how long of a sentence that is.
* in USA. The average jail time in France is less than 2 years. French people are often surprised of the length of the penalties in countries which seem similarly western, such as Luxembourg.
Oh boy... I would not use France as a counter-example.
Jail time is low in France because our jails are full. Any sentence below two years is automatically deferred to probation, which means that a large number of crimes are de facto not punished.
A quick google search will reveal a disturbing trend of violent crimes that don't result in jail time for this reason.
France has the opposite problem, and it's no better.
I find it good. So magistrates are constrained by capacity. Of course I'd prefer they don't fill up French prisons at 125%.
If we build more prisons, we'll fill them up. US is now famously known for having more people in jail than Stalin's gulags [1]. I quite appreciate France's leniency with penalties, because I'm not sure 3 months or 3 years is really different, apart from further distorting the social network of the inmate.
Your point is well-taken and I agree insofar as the solution is not to build more prisons.
My point is simply that not punishing people isn't a viable solution, either. France has the same problem as the US (too many people incarcerated) and an equally bad solution (stop incarcerating altogether).
"Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform."
How do you justify the statement that a jury is the best idea that we have? Germany has the concept of Schöffe, and some believe this offers results that stick closer to the law than the jury system:
While any government of mortal human flesh must inevitably have some flaws, the jury system seems especially bad at overcoming popular prejudice. In the USA, "a jury of one's peers" has often meant a mostly white (or all white) jury judging a black person, a circumstance that has given the USA many hundreds of famous miscarriages of justice.
The system that grew out of English Common Law, and which dominates England, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, is not the only system known to liberal Western societies. The English system is unique in the authority it gives to juries. Most of the Continental judicial systems either lack juries or have juries whose goal is constrained relative to the English system.
A review of the legal traditions in liberal Western nations reveals a lot of good ideas, many of which are probably superior to the jury system.
The bigger issue is that these things are hard to test and noone is willing to run the tests. In theory the US has a good setup for a state to decide to do some testing but politics make it impossible (and there's a decent ethical argument for either side that is far from simple). I mean think about the reactions if some politician would say "we need to see if our courts are as good as they can be, I propose we get rid of the jury system and replace it with X to see if X is superior"
1) That's UNAMERICAN. Courts and jury is the way god intended it to be.
2) Lol crackpot.
3) What if X turns out to be worse, sucks for the people who got trials like this during that time.
4) Lol crackpot.
Experimentation for political systems, judiciary infrastructure and the like is a really hard problem and I think de facto impossible. I applaud everyone who tries no matter how crazy it seems (seasteading) but at the end of the day I think there is no such thing as radical political entrepreneurship.
I think it's unfortunate but I also can't envision how (rapid) experimentation cycles could be transfered to such systems.
The purpose of a jury isn't necessarily to make the best, most legally correct decision. The purpose of a jury is to put the people in control of the state.
One could argue, perhaps from the experience of China, that elections aren't the most effective means of choosing political leaders. But this misses the point of elections.
Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time. In all the common law countries you list, this is basically unheard of, at least in the last 400 years.
Our common law system has evolved to be resilient against many different things, rather than being designed to maximize efficiency of a few things. It is certainly not perfect, there is no doubt of that. Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.
Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder. The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries. That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.
> Non common law countries have consistently suspended almost all civil rights from time to time.
Some civil law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years. Some common law countries have suspended civil rights during the last 400 years (e.g.: English revolution, detainment of Americans with Japenese ancestry during World War 2).
> Combined with the culture and other institutional patterns it has co-evolved with, it has proven incredibly stable, open to evolving for the better, and has served our common interests very well.
Except when it doesn’t serve the common interests very well by, for example, maintaining the legality of slavery well past the point it was abolished in many (civil and common law) countries and by taking another 100 years to reconsider the whole apartheid thing. In comparison, the civil law countries in Scandinavia seem to have faired quite well on the civil rights front and it was also civil, not common, law countries that drove the spearhead for women’s suffrage.
> Perhaps Germany is better at overcoming prejudice, but that was after the common law countries were forced to physically restrain them from aggression and murder.
Ah, yes, the famous French common law system based not at all on the Code Napoleon and the equally famous Soviet common law system.
> The list of common law countries is also the list of countries that have not had even a hint of losing their democratic institutions in centuries.
Again, the English revolution comes to mind. Or that whole debacle where slavery was only abolished after a bloody civil war in the 1860s! Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland weren’t exactly hotspots of instability either. And to be honest, I am not sure that Quebec has seen many more fascist dictators than the rest of Canada, something that would be implied by its civil law nature?
> That is something you can't say about any other countries in the world.
The main idea behind the jury system is to provide a further check upon the power of government. Unless there is a system which does a better job of that, then, from the point of view of liberal government, there is no point in reviewing it.
We put the people we're genuinely afraid of in extralegal holding facilities instead. (Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.)
I honestly question if GP is being sarcastic because this is a thing acknowledged by the US government, they wont even release some prisoners from gitmo that they acknowledge are innocent of crimes.
We do have prisons where we keep people without trial.
We don't, as far as I know, have entire prisons where we hold people without trial because they 'know secrets' and we are afraid they might tell them. In fact, I don't know of a single instance of this, outside of people who agreed to keep some secret but then changed their mind (snowden).
>>Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.
Also involuntary commitment facilities. While there is some truly deranged people out there, psychology has a long history of being abused to remove individuals by giving them false labels of mental disorders (or otherwise vastly overstating any disorders the person does have).
> An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation.
I think that you here implicitly assume that there is overwhelming evidence of who is the author of the crime. For example, all of these: Many survivors testimonies (be careful, they are not so reliable in practice), many videos of the massacre were the face of the attacked is clearly visible, a perfect matching of the ADN in few blood spots, fingerprint in the weapons, gunpowder marks in the hands, he/she is detained in situ while trying to kill more people, ...
An eye for an eye creates bad incentives. If the state is going to kill as punishment for some crime, rationally a criminal should go for broke once that line is crossed. In the worst case, they'll be killed by police. Trapping someone just dissuades them from surrender.
That same logic goes for anybody who has already earned the maximum possible punishment for their crime. If there was no death penalty, and kidnapping+rape earned you life without parole, why not kill the victim too? That way you have a better chance of getting away with it.
My uncle who's a pastor gave me an interesting perspective on this phrase. Before Solomon it was common practice to escalate a transgression. So a theft begets a retaliatory murder, begets a retaliatory massacre. This adage is not as much about seeking equality in punishment, as much as a brake to limit escalation. "An eye for an eye and no more."
This is not Solomon's phrase, it's Hammurabi's - it originated a thousand years before Solomon in Babylonian law. It also exists in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (i.e. the books of Moses), which preceded Solomon. Pastor needs to study his Bible better...
Yeah, I'm kind of undecided. I can imagine the death penalty being appropriate for the really egregious crimes. However, I just don't trust governments to carry it out correctly.
I encourage everybody to read up on the horrors of how the death penalty functions in practice. Especially in combination with the plea-bargain system, that effectively robs > 95% of suspects from their constitutional right to a fair trial.
Finally -- and I know this is only a minor point in comparison -- it's worth noting that pg doesn't have anything to gain by writing this, and people who stick their neck out by writing about political issues inevitably get shouted at. Soon enough publishing anything stops being worth the aggravation. So credit goes to pg for standing up and speaking out, when it's all too easy to be silent.
> I encourage everybody to read up on the horrors of how the death penalty functions in practice. Especially in combination with the plea-bargain system, that effectively robs > 95% of suspects from their constitutional right to a fair trial.
What do you mean by "in combination with," here? If you mean that the death penalty is used to convince people to plead guilty, I'm with you. But if you're saying that a large number of people who are sentenced to death were pressured into pleading guilty, then I am skeptical, since it is unclear what the defendant is receiving in exchange for the plea. (Usually it is a lighter sentence...)
I read his post as the death penalty can be a bludgeon that prosecuting attorneys will wield to get many more plea bargains from people accused of serious crimes. Pleading out to lesser offenses still with decades in prison is a much different calculation for the accused if the alternative is a trial with a death penalty vs. a trial with another decade or two on the end.
Plea bargains are a very core corruption of our justice system and should be outright banned in every shape and form. Everyone who has ever accepted a plea should have all punishments immediately ended (and any penalties accrued while in prison just for a plea), but prosecutors would be allowed to bring trials up against anyone freed to sentence them to their time served (the overload in cases would force them to prioritize on only the worse offenders who probably did do it while those who were forced to take a plea on dubious grounds would be ignored and left to live their lives). And this would include compensation for all those who have been imprisoned over a plea deal.
In short, every plea deal should be considered a grave injustice that needs to be corrected.
It's a real life Prisoners Dilemma, it turns out--plead guilty and finger this other guy we have in Holding Cell B, you get life in prison and he gets the death penalty.
Not the same case but Kayla Gissendaner is set to be executed tomorrow. http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/27/us/georgia-sets-execution/inde...
Unless the Georgia parole board changes its mind. She is guilty of having her husband killed. Guilt is not at doubt. The justice of her punishment is.
Her children suffered from her crime but they are pleading to keep her alive. She is the only parent they have. Killing their only remaining parent is victimizing them again. Their pleas here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8pgceAhqJo
> Her children suffered from her crime but they are pleading to keep her alive. She is the only parent they have. Killing their only remaining parent is victimizing them again.
That's on Kayla Gissendaner; nobody else.
I'm personally against the death penalty under any circumstances, but this particular case is no more or less egregious than any other.
If not, it seems like a pretty remarkable procedure to arrive at such a strong conclusion, with no other information besides a brief summary by advocates for the defense. Has pg ever served on a jury? If so, would he make his mind up this way?
Your questions (and link) are good, but I think you might be misinterpreting Paul's logic. He hasn't concluded that Glossip is definitely innocent (although he thinks he probably is), rather he's concluded that in the absence of physical evidence and with the majority of testimony being provided by a witness who has a clear motive to implicate someone else, that there must be "reasonable doubt".
He may be wrong, and in particular "reasonable doubt" may not have the legal definition that he thinks it does (legal terms rarely match common sense). But his argument is not "Glossip is innocent", but "there is no way we have sufficient evidence to kill this man without risking that we are killing someone who might be innocent".
Have you served on a jury, by the way? I served as the foreman on one relatively minor criminal case, and it did more to shake my faith in the rule-of-law than any other (minimal) encounters I've had with the legal system. In the end, we reached a unanimous "not guilty" in the case.
This was a difficult decision for all of us to reach, since the only way this could be the "correct" decision was if both police officers who testified were lying about significant details both in their report and on the stand. And yet this is the conclusion we eventually all agreed upon as being the most likely explanation for the way the pieces failed to fit together.
The defendant may well have done other illegal things, and possibly the world would be a better place if he was behind bars, but as a jury we decided that there was sufficient reason to doubt that he was guilty as charged. And yet there was no particular guarantee that this case would turn out as it did. On a different day, with a different jury, a different judge, or different lawyers, (but the same defendant, witnesses, and evidence) a guilty verdict seems likely.
As a limited participant in the legal system (but a "logical" computer programmer) my assessment would be that if we have the death penalty, the American jury system is practically guaranteed to occasionally sentence innocent people to death. I'd guess that this is the part that bothers Paul as well, I'd guess that he probably does have experience that leads him to believe this, and I'd guess that his opinion on the matter is not likely to be changed by a counterpoint that makes Glossip's guilt seem somewhat more likely.
I've served on two juries. In both cases, a drunk driver was acquitted. In both cases, the defendant's guilt was obvious, and the cause was a single juror who hated cops. (Or, more indirectly, the cause was an arrogant young DA who wasn't aggressive enough in voir dire.)
On one of these cases, I was the last juror to hold out. It was like "12 Angry Men" in reverse: "12 Hungry Men And Women." It was 5pm, I wanted dinner and so did everyone else, and I didn't want to bring 11 other people back again tomorrow. So I took the easy way out, as did 10 other people.
On our way out, the DA thanked us sarcastically and noted that the defendant had two prior DUIs. If we'd given him a third, she pointed out, there might actually have been consequences. As it was... I live in slight terror of glancing at a newspaper and noting that he's erased someone's six-year-old, just because I was hungry and wanted to go home for dinner.
To put it slightly differently: a few months ago, a woman in SF suffered the death penalty. She was innocent. She just wanted to look at the sea lions, or something. Unfortunately, San Francisco had sentenced her to death.
The executioner was an illegal-immigrant drifter who'd been pulled out of ICE's deportation pipeline by "sanctuary city" policies originally intended for intellectuals fleeing El Salvador in the early 1980s. A couple of days before, he'd smashed the window on a car and stolen a gun, which he was using (according to him) to shoot at sea lions. A bullet
Is her death an accident? How about Glossip's? I know of one billionaire who cares a lot about Kathryn Steinle. I know of another billionaire who cares a lot about Richard Glossip.
It seems to me both these deaths involve the action of the State, in choosing to allow a human life to be taken -- in one case intentionally based on the determination of guilt, in another case negligently, based on -- honestly, I couldn't even tell you what this level of carelessness is based on.
Supposing Glossip is innocent -- which doesn't seem terribly likely once we read the piece above, which is far more detailed and down-to-earth than the emotional appeals that triggered pg. Then, his death would be an accident, wouldn't it? The State did not set out to kill an innocent man. It didn't set out to kill an innocent women, but it did that as well -- with far less thinking than went into Glossip's case.
Suppose our other billionaire, the one we adore here instead of laughing at for his ridiculous hair, had chosen to care about the other human life in question. Or, more to the point, the next 1 or 10 or 100 that might be sacrificed in this absurd and cavalier fashion. What would your response have been?
I appreciate the genuineness of your response, but again, I think you may continue to misinterpret Paul's stance. I'm also not clear if Paul is the "other billionaire" you refer to? I presume he's financially successful but I don't know the degree. I should also be clear that I don't know him personally, don't know his politics beyond broad strokes that he has written about, and am interpreting based on what is written rather than inside knowledge.
Personally, I'm not against the death penalty in theory. In certain cases, executing criminals may be the best course of action. But I'd like it to be reserved for cases where the guilt is certain and the debate is about the severity of the punishment, rather than ones like this where the guilt itself may be in doubt. My statement that juries are likely to occasionally sentence innocent people to die does not necessarily mean that this is not the least bad of the available bad options. I don't know enough about this particular case to know whether this applies here.
> Supposing Glossip is innocent -- which doesn't seem
> terribly likely once we read the piece above, which is far
> more detailed and down-to-earth than the emotional appeals
> that triggered pg.
You're stretching here. I'd hope we would both agree that neither article should be taken as proof of either guilt or innocence? And that neither of us knows what other details Paul has or has not read? You started with a legitimate question (has he read counter-articles) but now seem to be presuming your conclusion, and then using that to make further unwarranted logical leaps.
> What would your response have been?
I probably don't understand your question --- I think you are asking my opinion on whether we should deport illegal aliens who are convicted of violent crimes? If so, then yes. But more importantly I think we should realign the rules we have on the books with the enforcement of those laws. I generally have a stronger belief in rule-of-law as a principle than I have belief that any particular law is or is not correct. I could be happy either with stricter enforcement of current law, or movement toward something like Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitanism
My point is that if your concern (or pg's) is strictly of the form "minimize the number of innocent people being killed unjustly," there are much more effective reforms available than abolishing the death penalty. For example, switching to the Japanese criminal justice system:
Judging by comparative crime rates, this would probably save 10,000 to 15,000 innocent lives per year. And I mean certainly innocent lives, not conceivably innocent lives (like Glossip's).
Of course, it would be a reform in more or less exactly the opposite direction than you and everyone on this thread is suggesting. That's why I posted this under a throwaway.
Which raises the question: if minimizing the number of innocent lives taken unjustly isn't the source of the general concern for Glossip, what is?
I understood that you were referring to Trump. I was (and still am) uncertain if you were referring to Paul Graham as the (other) "other billionaire", or whether this role was being played by a third party. I haven't previously seen Paul referred to as a billionaire on this site, although I suppose he might be one.
> For example, switching to the Japanese criminal justice system:
Whether a good or bad idea, I don't think there is a reasonable mechanism for switching our justice system in a wholesale manner. Alex Kozinsky (a US 9th circuit judge) has an excellent paper (mentioned in another comment and previously discussed here) on possible ways to improve rather than replace the system: http://georgetownlawjournal.org/files/2015/06/Kozinski_Prefa...
> Judging by comparative crime rates, this would probably
> save 10,000 to 15,000 innocent lives per year.
There is a great deal of confounding between societal norms and criminal behavior. I'd expect (for example) that if we somehow transplanted the US system to Japan, that crime rates would remain low. I don't know what the effect would be if we somehow switched the US to a Japanese system of justice while leaving the other elements of US society in place.
> Of course, it would be a reform in more or less exactly the
> opposite direction than you and everyone on this thread is
> suggesting. That's why I posted this under a throwaway.
I think you underestimate the degree of diversity of opinion on HN, and that your sense of "you and everyone" is misguided. Consider your own example of serving on a jury: the visible average opinion may not adequately reflect the individual views. I'm also surprised that you would feel that posting this under a throwaway account is necessary.
> Which raises the question: if minimizing the number of
> innocent lives taken unjustly isn't the source of the
> general concern for Glossip, what is?
I don't have a particular concern for Glossip, and had not heard of him before reading the parent article and the counter-article that you posted (which I appreciated). My concern is not for preserving the lives of murderers (if they are) but for preserving societal faith in the expectation of an impartial and fair system of justice.
Having such an expectation is today commonly considered naivetee, but I think a lot of the progress made in America in previous generations was because there was a belief that such a system was possible. I'd like to try to restore some of that faith, and avoiding high profile miscarriages of justice (I don't know if this is one) is an important part of that restoration.
Consider your objective of "restoring faith" and the means you (and many in society who seem to agree with you) adopt to bring it about: propagating the idea that miscarriages of justice frequently occur. Even if this isn't a miscarriage. Even if Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Ahmed Mohamed, etc, aren't miscarriages.
You could say: our means of increasing faith in justice is to tell everyone that miscarriages occur all the time, even if they maybe don't, so that good ordinary Americans will become more and more concerned and prevent miscarriages, which will increase faith etc.
This is a very complicated and indirect way of purportedly getting the result you want.
However, if you wanted exactly the opposite result - that is, you wanted to decrease faith in the criminal justice system - what would you do? Answer: give as much publicity as possible to miscarriages of justice, purported or real.
Which is exactly what you're doing, right? Have you ever heard the thing about what to do when you're in a hole?
Also, I'm quite aware that Americans aren't Japanese. On the other hand, I seldom hear that awareness from people who point out how much better urban life is in, say, Reykjavik rather than Detroit. And appear to believe that the problems of Detroit can be solved by adopting the ideology and/or governance structures of Reykjavik. (Which, in fact, has pretty much already happened - if anything, the flow is in the other direction.)
As for throwaways: stay on the reservation, and you'll have nothing to fear. Duck under the barbed wire, and you'll find out...
The linked reference mentions that the Oklahoma appeals court wrote that finding the same amount of money in the possession of both men was part of their decision to not reverse. Why would anyone say there was no evidence other than the other guy's testimony? And that is just a cursory reading of the details of the case.
Many who have looked closely at this case think Glossip is innocent. I think so. I encourage you to learn more about it and form your own conclusions. But one thing is certain: there is a reasonable doubt.
I just read the article you linked to from start to finish. From that article alone "on the opposite side of the case" I draw the same conclusion: there's reasonable doubt.
Further, I think your paragraph that starts "If not" is an awful lot of followup to your presumed answer to your unanswered question. Couldn't you even have prepended a perfunctory "If so, great" to it?
It's increasingly seems that the powers of prosecutors are deployed in arbitrary and unjust ways: either overreaching (as in the case of Aaron Swartz or Xiaoxing Xi) or non-prosecution of police brutality or corporate crime (just changing now that the statute of limitations run out on those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis)
It's not clear what can be done about it, other than occasionally writing a check to the ACLU to help limit the damage. Any ideas?
Prosecutors have almost absolute immunity. A prosecutor can intentionally cheat the system, get a conviction, put a person in jail, and if caught, there is no lawsuit that can be filed against them and it's almost impossible to get them disbarred.
There are incentives to cheat; as long as there are no ramifications for it, it will continue.
I honestly think the only thing that could ever change it is if some vigilante with nothing to lose started bringing the same flavor of extreme justice to the doorsteps of the people passing it out - fear of potential ramifications will very quickly change behavior.
That would cause change, but in the opposite direction. People would rally around judges and prosecutors and you'd see fewer people questioning the status quo. It would be a disaster.
Both proposals have been purely theoretical. I can provide three practical historical examples of turning it up to 11:
1) abortion clinic bombing changed nothing; if anything it helped raise funds (you'd almost think they were false flag operations? Is there anything that helped the pro choice cause more than the bombings?)
2) the War on drugs has ruined uncountable lives, certainly far more than drugs have ruined, none the less neither the fear of drugs or the more realistic fear of the war on drugs keeps people sober, business has always been booming.
3) the war on black men has gotten about 1/3 of them involved in the criminal justice system. The result? None, no change. They haven't become refugees, their culture has changed as little as possible under the circumstances, no serious rebellion...
In those three examples taking normal level actions and turning them up to 11 has either been utterly ineffective or counterproductive. I'd have to say the tsotha theoretical model fits observed reality better, although I admit further research could find observations overturning that... although I don't expect it.
Those aren't bad analogies, but I wouldn't consider them good.
1) The public and perhaps even many scholars are split on abortion - I personally don't think there's a clear cut "correct" answer.
2) I wouldn't expect people to quit. Drugs are fun, most are relatively harmless, using them is not immoral, and you most likely won't get caught.
3) Similar to #2, and much of the issues here are a direct result of #2
Turning it up to 11 (great expression btw) to be effective should be used only when there is obvious wrongdoing, when innocent people are clearly being railroaded by people who either know the person is innocent, or made no effort to determine innocence (which, let's not forget, is the job they are being paid very handsomely to perform). I'm not sure if this particular case is a valid example example for turning it up to 11, but there are certainly plenty. I think this would be effective, and I believe there would be widespread public support with sufficient communication.
>fear of potential ramifications will very quickly change behavior.
Considering that fear of ramifications has proven entirely ineffective in preventing certain kinds of behavior in other aspects of the justice system, I don't think this would be as effective as you might think
Consider that the behavior that is changed is that of everybody but the prosecutor: taxes go to personal security and maybe their staff, increased controls and inconveniences for those sharing space with them, like at the courthouse, and increased penalties for behavior not previously considered to be threatening. That is, the person acting with nothing to lose, "at all costs," may be misunderestimating where those costs will be borne.
Keep in mind that you're survey of examples is likely biased by what makes a good story... and journalists have become very good at figuring out which cases will make a good story.
It's a problem that there is enough material to keep the stories coming, but let's not conclude that the stories we read about represent the bulk of the justice system's operations.
The fact that the egregious examples exist is proof enough of the insanity and incompetence that's permitted by the justice system. The appeals processes seems too restrictive to allow for proper review in many cases. Just because a system has existed for a long time doesn't mean it's ideal in any way.
The murder of Meredith Kercher is another prominent example in another country. All evidence pointed to one murderer, who was duly convicted. And then the state decided to spend years prosecuting two innocent people based on some odd behavior and not the slightest shred of credible physical evidence. They're just lucky they finally got a sane judge at the highest level.
> The fact that the egregious examples exist is proof enough of the insanity and incompetence that's permitted by the justice system.
It's more like proof of the law of large numbers.
> The appeals processes seems too restrictive to allow for proper review in many cases.
Appeals processes should be restrictive, otherwise the time and expense of the trial itself are essentially squandered. That said, I have no doubt that at least in some, and possibly many systems, it's over the line.
> Just because a system has existed for a long time doesn't mean it's ideal in any way.
I hope you didn't think I suggested anything to the contrary.
Agreed. "Fixing criminal justice," is a vague if noble goal. I think it's pretty clear at this point however that the standard of evidence is too low. And out of the humility wrought by the awareness of our own fallibility, perhaps we should stray from punishments as final as death.
Even if the awful cases are a tiny percentage of all cases (which I don't believe is the case considering how common plea bargain extortion is), it is still a huge problem that is quickly eroding confidence in the justice system.
I think he meant (and I'm also curious) what we could individually do that would have a tangible difference. Not what could a large swathe of people in the US do collectively, which is a different question.
Steve Cooley -- and I believe he would agree with this characterization -- is enthusiastically for the death penalty in the right circumstances, and campaigned against Prop 34. In his own words [1]
There are some offenses that demand the ultimate sentence. We’ve got
individuals down in Los Angeles — for example, the Grim Sleeper case which
is pending — this gentleman killed 23 young women, in the most cruel,
inhumane way. Life without possibility of parole is not the appropriate
sentence for somebody who slaughters so many of his fellow citizens. Cop
killers, baby killers, serial killers — they deserve the death penalty. In
my county, we only seek the death penalty in 11 percent of the
special-circumstance cases, and they are well-selected and well-deserving of
the death penalty.
Kamala Harris is not a shining light, but she took no public position on Prop 34, and while she has supported a state appeal to defend the constitutionality of the death penalty [2], as sf da, she stated she would never charge the death penalty [3].
So the contrast is a full supporter on one hand, and someone who, at minimum, is conflicted about the use of the death penalty and widely acknowledges the racial disparity in its application.
I would call that a real difference, though in case it isn't clear, I would support banning the death penalty on both humane/equality and financial grounds.
NB: Prop 34 would have banned the death penalty in California. It lost by a couple percent [4]
So I just read whatever I could find on Richard Glossip and the case against him. On it's face it seems very likely that he is guilty.
It appears that someone had been stealing money and cooking the books at the hotels Glossip managed, and about the time his boss became aware of the theft, the boss was murdered. He admits to knowing that the boss was murdered and Glossip admits attempting to cover up the murder, his plan being to dissolve the body in acid. Glossip, as manager of the hotel the body was hidden in, reassigned cleaning staff specifically to prevent them from discovering the body. The person who is known to have performed the killing, an employee of Glossip's, says he was paid to do the killing by Glossip. Glossip also split money from the wallet carried by the man that was killed with the killer.
Glossip has had a trial and a retrial, and was convicted in both of them.
So maybe the death penalty is good, maybe it is bad. Clearly there is a serious debate there, and I am not attempting to defend the death penalty here. There is almost no chance that Glossip is innocent, and it seems clear, to me at least, that the state demonstrated he is guilty to the required standard.
In all of the mistrials and cases where innocent people have been killed, someone has thought the party was guilty. The thing that makes the death penalty barbaric is that people have misplaced confidence in their opinions.
There are two issues here that most commentary about this case seems to be happy to conflate:
- Is he guilty
- Should he be executed
These are independent questions. One is a question of fact, and there seems to be almost no credible reason to doubt his guilt.
The other is a question of ethics and policy.
As for your argument on why the death penalty is barbaric, it is not a valid argument. Reductio ad absurdum, your argument implies that every punishment is barbaric, because all punishment is the result of people's 'misplaced confidence' in their opinions. So if the death penalty is barbaric, it's certainly not because of the reason you say.
Don't take that as an attempt to justify the death penalty. I believe that almost all the prison sentences handed out in the US greatly exceed the severity of the crime being punished. I can't understand why any prison sentence would be for longer than 5 years in those cases where there is no chance of a repeat offense, no matter what the crime was. I also can't understand why we would ever want to let someone out of state supervision (prison or other) if there is a very high chance they would commit additional crimes if released.
The thing that makes capital punishment barbaric is that it's the equivalent of cutting off a thief's hand. It's a naked form of punishment, that seeks only to punish, not to repair or restitute, and which causes irreversible and grave damage. There is a simple alternative here for the truly guilty: life imprisonment and forced restitution (letting someone work to pay off their debt to society). I can only see two reasons to have capital punishment at all: bloodlust, and cost cutting (avoiding the expense of imprisonment). Either of those have no place in an enlightened justice system which aims to repair the damage done, not exacerbate it.
That's basically true, but maybe it is pretty simplistic.
For example, there are tons of people in prison for 5 years, 20 years, lifetimes that don't have the intelligence, resources, or opportunity to 'have their punishment stopped'. They will serve out their time despite being innocent, and despite not getting the death sentence. It in theory could be stopped, since it's not irreversible, but it will not be stopped and nothing will be done.
I find it hard to believe that a form of punishment is more just or better in any other way because it 'can, but actually won't be, stopped'.
There's always a possibility to correct the mistake but with death penalty there's no way back. You are telling that if you find you have a deadly disease you won't try a treatment cause in the end you are going to die anyway.
You're right that you can't get someone his life back: you can't give back someone the empty years he spent in prison; you can't remove the pain and agony of years removed from polite society; you can't remove the cruelty and abuse he experienced from other prisoners.
Punishment's unpleasant (that's its nature); death and imprisonment are unpleasant.
And yet, there are crimes which deserve death. Not to execute vicious murderers, rapists & traitors is a profound miscarriage of justice.
> Not to execute vicious murderers, rapists & traitors is a profound miscarriage of justice.
That's a minority position. At least 100 countries don't use the death penalty at all. Another 50 countries have a death penalty but haven't executed anyone for at least 10 years. The 30 to 40 countries left are a list of oppressive regimes or countries with corrupt justice systems or justice systems that do not comply with human rights laws.
It's more likely that the US is in violation of human rights laws than all those other countries have profound miscarriages of justice.
> > Not to execute vicious murderers, rapists & traitors is a profound miscarriage of justice.
> That's a minority position.
It's also correct. If 100 other countries jumped off of a bridge, would you?
Although, if you do want to argue from popularity, polls consistently show majority support for capital punishment even in countries without it. From that standpoint, abolition of execution is undemocratic.
There are many crimes for which the only just sentence is death (c.f. the Oklahoma man executed some time ago, who raped & buried alive a young woman, or the man in Washington, D.C. who tortured & murdered a family in their home): not to impose it is itself unjust. For, say, Hideki Tojo to have died peacefully in his bed after the deaths of millions would have been a moral outrage: his hanging was the only appropriate sentence.
The State's monopoly on force is predicated on it assuming the duty of exacting vengeance on behalf of its citizens: if a State refuses to exact that vengeance in every circumstance, regardless of evidence and certainty, then its monopoly on violence loses its legitimacy.
> You either execute no one or you execute some innocent people along with the 'deserving'.
Likewise with imprisonment. Innocents will die in prison even if they don't die on the gallows.
> You think it is more just to kill the innocent than simple imprison the 'deserving' for life?
Those aren't the choices: the choices are to be just in execution of the depraved (and unjust in accidentally executing the innocent) or to be unjust in imprisoning the depraved (and unjust in accidentally imprisoning the innocent). IMHO the justice delta between executing & imprisoning the truly evil is greater than that between accidentally executing & imprisoning the innocent.
These are not two independent questions, it turns out. When you are acting upon a judgment of fact, one's certainty in that judgment is a deciding factor in the severity of the action one takes in responding to it.
For example, suppose you have a family friend, Randall, who is accused of being a child molester. If you are perhaps 5% certain that Randall is a child molester, you would be justified in not letting your children stay at his house unattended. Just to be safe. If you are 51% certain that Randall is a child molester, that's more certain than not, but 49% is still "reasonable doubt". Ok, let's say we're about 90% certain Randall is a child molester, which is probably enough to get a jury to convict. 1 out of 10 times, that's a false conviction, but that's ok because people can be released from prison and dropped from the sex offender registry if it turns out they were innocent. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that we agree that child molesters should get the death penalty. What level of certainty is needed before we kill Randall? Surely more than 90%, or else 1 out of 10 people we kill will be innocent, and while that's an acceptable margin for imprisonment, it's probably not good enough for doing something completely final and irreversible. So does the level of certainty have to be 99%--so that 1 in 100 executed inmates is innocent? 99.9%--perhaps 1 out of 1000 is a more palatable rate of innocent people being executed? 99.99% then?
The question isn't whether someone is guilty, the question is whether we are confident enough in his guilt to take the risk of killing an innocent man. "Is he guilty?" isn't a binary question of fact, it's a question of certainty and implicit in that question of certainty is the acceptance of killing some innocent people as well.
The more nines we need to kill someone, the fewer people are left as candidates for the death penalty. Getting those nines means an exponential increase in legal costs. It also means spreading the fixed costs of execution infrastructure over a smaller number of executions. At some point, either you have to stomach a lot of innocent people being executed or the death penalty just becomes completely impractical, even if you start from the assumption that it's morally justified.
Because the first issue can never be 100%, the second is never a 'should'. Even cases where the convicted admitted guilt have later ended with the convicted being found innocent.
"[the victim's] brother Kenneth, who took over operation of the motel after the murder, testified in 2004 that the motel’s financial shortages were “really insignificant amounts of money” and would not have worried Barry. The Oklahoma City motel, he said, was a “very profitable operation.” "
> Glossip, as manager of the hotel the body was hidden in, reassigned cleaning staff specifically to prevent them from discovering the body
"Sneed would [later] testify that he was the one who told the maid to ignore Room 102."
> The person who is known to have performed the killing, an employee of Glossip's, says he was paid to do the killing by Glossip.
The murderer was threatened with the death penalty unless he fingered Glossip. He says he would recant his testimony in a heartbeat if he could be assured he wouldn't be executed himself.
> Glossip has had a trial and a retrial, and was convicted in both of them.
Said one juror, "“If the defense would have presented the case that they are presenting now in the original trial,” the juror said, “I would have not given a guilty verdict.”"
"He admits to knowing that the boss was murdered and Glossip admits attempting to cover up the murder, his plan being to dissolve the body in acid. Glossip, as manager of the hotel the body was hidden in, reassigned cleaning staff specifically to prevent them from discovering the body."
A couple of weeks ago when Glossip was all the rage, the various sources arguing that he should be spared somehow neglected to mention any of this. They did mention though that the actual killer is the the one who fingered Glossip, which made me sympathize with the man's possible innocence. I must say, I'm far less sympathetic now.
I live in a country with a terrible human rights record. Yet, since 1991, it never had a death penalty applied. [1] You might get sentenced to a death penalty (on extreme cases), but it's not applied. The law still legalise it but there is some pressure to remove it currently.
I find the news that 1) a death penalty is about to take place in the U.S, 2) hastily and 3) with little evidence really shocking, disturbing and unacceptable in a country which is supposed to be at the front of defending human rights.
The US is most certainly not at the forefront of defending human rights if by that you mean actual action to stop abuses rather than mere lip service. Our prison system is an atrocious human rights disaster. Our justice system is effectively non-existent and almost 100% based on forced plea bargains (this case being an unusual exception that actually went to trial). Guantanamo Bay. Abu Ghraib. And that's just in the last decade. If you look at reality, you'll see that the US is full of human rights abuses, almost all preventable. And as far as the prison system, well it's by far the worst in the world.
If Richard Glossip wasn't sentenced to death, he would likely have languished in prison as long as he lived. That would also be a horrible injustice.
People see more motivated by orders of magnitude to get death penalty cases right relative to life incarceration cases.
Counterintuitively, justice may be better served by abolishing life imprisonment and mandating the death penalty for cases where periods of imprisonment would exceed 20 years or so.
If the innocence rate for executions is 4%, then surely the innocence rate for long term incarceration must be much higher.
> Counterintuitively, justice may be better served by abolishing life imprisonment and mandating the death penalty for cases where periods of imprisonment would exceed 20 years or so.
I've seen several people already share this sentiment and it really confuses me. Because
1) It's made by people who have never, and come from a background where they most likely never would, have to seriously make such a choice. (If I'm wrong let me know).
2) I would venture if you really were faced with such a choice it would not be the automatic "kill me if I get more then 20 years" one that you flippantly imply you would make. I have a feeling when faced with the actual prospects of death vs imprisonment of 20 years or more, rather then on some hypothetical situation in an internet forum, you might decide differently.
3) Even if it was the case you were to decide death over long term imprisonment, what would give you, or the justice system, the right to decide that for anyone else facing that situation? I have a feeling most people would still choose life, even if faced with perpetual imprisonment, over death.
And finally lets just assume Richard Glossip was unjustly found guilty of this crime, I know nothing about this case so lets just assume. The problem isn't specifically with the sentence but the fact that he is in fact not guilty, but was deemed guilty by his peers. By killing him you eliminate any possibility of recourse, he already paid the ultimate price. At least with life imprisonment there is still a chance for having some just conclusion, even if it's late and inadequate to the penalty he suffered.
Richard Glossip did make this choice. He could have pled guilty and have received a sentence of life imprisonment.
In our current system innocent people accused of capital crimes are often faced with the choice of pleading guilty or going to trial and facing the death penalty.
> If Richard Glossip wasn't sentenced to death, he would likely have languished in prison as long as he lived.
Not necessarily. If Sneed, the guy who actually committed the murder, had not faced the death penalty then would he still have tried to claim that Glossip put him up to it?
This is essentially removing the right of appeal for certain classes of cases, and combined with mandatory minimums would bring us back to the age of hanging judges.
Of the 49 European countries, only 1 (Belarus) still has the death penalty and executes people.
Last time a civilian executed in Mexico: 1937, Canada: 1962, UK: 1977, Russia: 1999
In 2014, only these countries executed more people per million than the US: Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Somalia, Yemen,
Sudan, Palestine, China, Singapore, Belarus, Taiwan, Afghanistan and Egypt And North Korea N/A.
Internationally seen as against the universal human rights:
1948: The United Nations adopted without dissent the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The Declaration proclaims the right of every individual to protection from deprivation of life. It states that no one shall be subjected to cruel or degrading punishment. The death penalty violates both of these fundamental rights.
2005: The UNCHR approved Human Rights Resolution 2005/59 on the question of the death penalty, which called for all states that still maintain the death penalty to abolish the death penalty completely and, in the meantime, to establish a moratorium on executions.
2007: The UN General Assembly (UNGA) approved Resolution 62/149 which called for all states that still maintain the death penalty to establish a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.
It's not about the "authority" (yes, Smith and Wesson always beats four aces) but about the international understanding of the universal human rights and the effective position of the US in the context of the whole world regarding that understanding.
The death penalty is to the left what partial birth abortion is to the right. When groups are making emotional pleas to push their agenda then you know you are being played.
Actually, I guess I would be on the right, and I am against the death penalty for specifically the reason the article states. I have no moral problem with killing someone who has removed themselves from the society by killing fellow people, but my experience tells me that government is supremely unqualified to make that terminal determination. It is also quite a bit less costly to keep the person in prison until they die than go through with the court system with all the appeals.
So, both fiscally and an understanding of government's failing will often lead people on the right to be against the death penalty. It is really about which pillars of conservative belief you hold most dear.
Can be being not worse than
Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Palestine, China, Singapore, Belarus, Taiwan, Afghanistan and Egypt and possibly North Korea considered as being left or right?
And what about the universal human rights? "The right of every individual to protection from deprivation of life" and "no one shall be subjected to cruel or degrading punishment."
> And what about the universal human rights? "The right of every individual to protection from deprivation of life" and "no one shall be subjected to cruel or degrading punishment."
The basic argument against that is that a person who has committed such a crime has broken their social compact with the rest of society. Having declared war on their fellow people they deserve none of the protection of their fellows.
// also, doesn't Japan still have the death penalty?
"A 2010 poll by Lake Research Partners found that a clear
majority of voters (61%) would choose a punishment other
than the death penalty for murder." (deathpenaltyinfo.org)
And between 1967 and 1977 not a single person was executed in the whole US, independently of the possible will of some states. The Eighth Amendment from 1791, the visible public disapproval and stuff.
And please tell where you've found any "emotional pleas"? Edit: or even "outrage"?
Fine edited to outrage. Your goal is to paint the US as similar to those countries but the fact is it is up to the states. Here are the states with no death penalty:
Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin, District of Columbia
I highly recommend anyone interested in this to read the article Criminal Law 2.0 by Alex Kozinski (a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). He presents twelve fundamental tenants of the criminal justice system that are flawed and suggests some ways to fix them. (E.g., "Eyewitnesses are highly reliable" and "Long sentences deter crime.") If you haven't read anything by Kozinski, you should. It's very readable. Especially the conclusion.
In general, human testimony is one of the weakest forms of evidence we have. People, even when they don't have incentive to lie, have horrible memories! It should barely be admissible, let alone for first degree murder, especially in cases like this where the witness is being bribed for his testimony.
Means: he knew the person who committed the physical attack and had influence over this person
Motive: the victim was accusing him of embezzling $6000
Opportunity: plenty
Proof defendant actually acted on the motive: he attempted to hide the body from discovery, helped hide the victims car, contributed to a conspiracy to cut the body up and dissolve it in acid, split the money from the victim's wallet with the other man involved, and made sure that cleaning staff that he managed were reassigned so that they would not find the body. None of this is in dispute!
Wow I'm surprised that we're only talking about $6000. Maybe this is a privileged reaction, but in USA is that sum worth all the trouble of even a "successful" murder, let alone the calamity this turned out to be? Morality helps morons more than it helps rational people. A rational person would realize that a disagreement over $6000 will be much less hassle over the long term than a murder conspiracy. Someone to whom that is not obvious, and who also lacks enough moral sense not to murder in such a situation, really is a threat to the public. Maybe we shouldn't kill him, and maybe a long prison sentence isn't the best answer, but at the very least the public ought to be warned that this guy is completely irrational and might decide to murder for no good reason at all.
One thing to consider is that this case (and the 4%) figure refer to those who've been sentenced to death, where the standards for prosecution and sentencing are the absolute highest. It would only be natural to suspect that this figure is even greater the less the sentence/crime.
Until we carefully scrutinize the incentives facing the judicial system as a whole (and see how unbalanced it is), this is bound to be the norm.
"Might Sneed have lied to save his own skin? Reasonable doubt? Nothing is more likely."
And nothing more need be said. I don't understand how it seems impossible to force into people's heads the two notions that the burden of guilt lay with the prosecution and that guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt.
One of the most distasteful aspects of this case has been the way the Daily Oklahoman, the local newspaper, has been demanding the man's death every day, in effect reprinting the Attorney General's press releases as news and editorial columns. I point to "AG's office calls witnesses in Glossip innocence claim 'inherently suspect'" and "Glossip attorneys cross line with criticism of DA". The Daily Oklahoman is a journalistic embarrassment on every topic but in the case of Glossip it has really shone an unintentional light on bloodlust in the state.
So maybe 4% of people who get the death penalty are innocent. And some other portion probably don't deserve the death penalty according to the criteria we've established. So we get rid of it, and then what? They all get life without parole? How much better is that? And what about all the innocent people who are receiving that punishment right now? Or who are losing 5 or 10 years of their life? Getting justice right is tremendously important. The death penalty is something people can line up around without truly engaging with the justice system at all. It feels like a huge distraction to me.
We use the phrase "paying your debt to society" but no one pays any debts. They only incur debts. Debts to their family who they can't support. Debts to a society that ends up weaker than it started. The cruelty of this system isn't best exemplified in the death penalty.
The crazy thing is that although salient, of all the ways the US government kills innocent people, the death penalty probably has one of the lowest total body counts.
At least in comparison with wars of aggression, foreign coups, the war on drugs, subsidizing cars, subsidizing fossil fuels, subsidizing tobacco, weak pharma regulation, promoting antibiotics in food, cop shootings, fast food subsidies (via corn), not implementing cap & trade to combat climate change, privatized health insurance, trade embargoes, promoting harmful nutrition guidelines, lack of food safety standards/inspection, lack of any required safety testing for new chemicals, etc.
It seems almost pointless to even have a formal death penalty when law enforcement officers are given effective blanket immunity against homicide charges.
It is interesting to look at the graph at the top of the article, though. Why do justifiable homicides for police and private citizens track each other almost identically? I can't think of any explanation.
According to: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/us-police-kil... the number of police homicides have also been under reported, historically. It appears (if the Guardian's reporting is correct) that some states don't even report at all some years.
But let's assume that there are 15,000 homicides per year by non-police and that 1000 of them are deemed justifiable homicides (double the reported ones to account for under reporting). That's about 7% of homicides that are justifiable.
In the second link, it says that 19 out of 547 were killed by police after they were taken into custody. 31 were killed by tasers. 119 were killed while unarmed. What percentage of these killings were justifiable?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/police-rarely-criminally-charged... claims 41 police officers were charged for shootings in a 7 year period. That is about 5.86 per year. The original link claimed about 87% of killings were shootings, so let's assume that police are charged with killing linearly and we get about 7 officers charged per year. I think it is telling that I can't find the success rate of prosecution anywhere :-P
So if we assume all 7 officers were found guilty, that means we get 540 out of 547 killings to be justified, or 98.7%.
So the average citizen has an upper bound of somewhere around 7% of having a homicide found to be justified, while the police have a lower bound of around 98% of having a homicide to be found justified. This despite the fact that 3.5% of police homicides happen after the suspect is in custody, 5.7% happen as a result of the suspect being hit with a taser, and 21.8% of the suspects are unarmed.
While I wouldn't say this is a case for "blanket immunity", I have to say that the numbers do not seem reasonable to me. Especially if 20 people are killed by police while in custody and there is not an expectation that a charge will be laid in any of the 20 cases, that does not seem reasonable at all given that at least 93% of civilian homicides are deemed not-justifiable.
But even more worrying is the sorry state of affairs for the reporting of this data (if the newspapers I browsed while doing my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct). If they don't have better reporting, I don't know how anyone is supposed to scrutinize it.
Anyway, I hope someone found this interesting. Apologies if I made any math mistakes along the way.
Appalled that people are killed legally based only on a criminal's word. Also appalled that we still have the death penalty in some countries, these are pretty much all backwards countries with the outliers of US and Japan; it's a litmus test for humans rights imho.
Singapore has the death penalty. Taiwan has the death penalty. Singapore is probably the most advanced economy in the world. one of Taiwan's main exports is computer engineering R&D for most of the hardware in your PC (as the hardware itself is now manufactured and assembled in China)
Taiwan has nationalised health care - score 1 for Taiwan over the US.
I consider any country implementing the death penalty to be a cultural backwater. Many parts of the US are basically the definition of a cultural backwater anyway.
I'm sure there are some critiques that can be raised as to methodology, but just as a point of conversation you may be interested in the World Happiness Report, on which none of those countries rate higher than the US.
Vice released a special last night about mass incarceration related to non-violent drug crimes. It included President Obama visiting a federal prison and interviews with Former Atty. Gen. Eric Holder.
I don't always agree with the content / viewpoints that Vice puts out, but this was one of the most well made and powerful documentaries I've seen in a while. I'd like to think that President Obama's reactions were genuine and that things might slowly start to change in the US.
A "genuine" president would have issued hundreds of thousands of pardons for drug "crimes" by this point in his presidency. Obama is just another politician.
Andrew Johnson pardoned everyone who fought for the Confederacy, other than Jeff Davis and a few other bigwigs. Sure, armed insurrection is a less serious crime than getting high, but I think the precedent stands.
Strictly speaking however "precedent" doesn't apply to pardons since they are a power specifically granted the president by Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution. Precedents are important in courts, so if e.g. the Supreme Court had previously ruled that pardoning pot smokers is unconstitutional then that precedent would be relevant. My impression is that the courts don't want to touch pardons, which is only right, since the point of putting them in the Constitution was to give the executive the ability to rein in the vindictiveness of the legislative and judicial branches. I expect that if Congress passed a law attempting to restrict the use of pardons, even the most conservative jurist would toss that shit right out of court.
PG, thanks for writing about this and bringing both this case and the death penalty to readers' attention.
Richard Glossip's case is similar in many ways to Troy Davis[1]. You may recognize that name--in 2011, when he was executed, he was the world's most famous death row inmate. Like Glossip, Troy Davis had no physical evidence against him. His conviction (of murdering a police officer) was based primarily on 9 eyewitness testimonies. SEVEN of those eyewitnesses recanted or altered their testimonies, many citing police coercion or intimidation. Ten new witnesses came forward saying one of the two non-recanting witnesses, Sylvester Coles, confessed to the murder.
A few days before he was executed, ONE MILLION people signed a petition to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. Despite this, and the many doubts in his case, Troy Davis was executed on September 21, 2011.
I was close friends with Troy--I first visited him on death row in 2008 (when I was 15), and spent the next three years visiting him, corresponding with him, and talking to him on the phone. Troy was so well-known because his case epitomized everything that is wrong with the American justice system and the death penalty--racial bias (he was a black man accused of killing a white cop in 1980s Georgia), an overzealous DA with a history of prosecutorial misconduct, police coercion and witness tampering, the execution of innocents (over a dozen death row inmates have been exonerated since he was executed in 2011...how many innocents were executed in that time?) and a justice system so rigid and brittle that it would not even commute his sentence to life imprisonment, despite even a federal judge admitting Troy had shown at least a "minimal" level of doubt in his case.
In 2012, I raised 11k on Kickstarter to write a book on my relationship with Troy Davis called Remain Free[2]. It talks about many of the ugly aspects of his life on death row and of the legal corruption in his case that he (and I) couldn't publicly talk about while he was still alive. Since the book is built on hundreds of recorded conversations, in person visits, and letters with Troy, you really get a sense of who he was as a person and the kind of toll two decades on death row takes on him and his family.
If you'd like a copy, you can order it on Amazon[3] or through http://remainfree.com. All profits go to the Innocence Project [4], a non-profit that works to free wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing. Alternatively, email me (gautamnarula[at]gmail.com) a screenshot of a $10 donation to the Innocence Project, and I'll send you the e-book for free. Donate $20 to the Innocence Project, and I'll send you a physical copy for just the cost of shipping ($3 in the US).
Forget about the 4% innocent. Forget about racial bias and unreliable eyewitnesses. How about we stop executing everyone including the guilty ones.
But please, enough with the rest of the world is enlightened and America is basically gun-loving racist troglodytes. It's not true and it's not an argument which will change anyone's mind.
Seems like the real issue is that Oklahoma is not giving the guy a fair trial. While the finality of the death penalty makes it (or at least makes it seem) worse, it would/could be just as unfair to throw the guy in jail for life without giving him his due process.
There will always be mistakes and wrongful processes in any kind of system, the difference between death penalty and life sentence is the finality of the former: there is also some very small chance that you can be proven innocent a few years down the road (we're all taking about extremes here).
I agree based on what i know, India is the best when it comes to giving chance to the folks to trial multiple times. And while high courts (highest in states) can give sentence that could be overturned in supreme court. Can he not apply to USA supreme court or equivalent of that?
Many people are also unaware of the high cost and inefficiency of the death penalty in the U.S. With 3002 (as of April 2015) inmates on death row, there were 35 executions in 2014.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf
Depending on the state, a trial with a death penalty could cost anywhere from half a million dollars more, to millions more than a trial without a death penalty.
Even at the absurdly high price of $35k per year per prisoner, life without parole is likely a cheaper option for tax payers than the death penalty.
I don't mean to say this is the only reason why the death penalty is wrong. We know for certain that provably innocent people have been put to death.
It's just that in addition to being morally wrong, it's also expensive and a waste of resources. The only reason I can theoretically imagine for keeping it around is that supposedly criminals might be less likely to commit a crime for fear of the death penalty. I think every serious study has shown that harsher penalties don't deter crime.
One of the best ways to actually reduce crime is to provide better early education for poor people.
Ignoring the moralities and can-of-worms question of the death penalty itself for a moment, I've always thought the reasoning of "life without parole is cheaper, so let's do that" was flawed. Why not figure out why the death penalty process is so expensive, and fix that instead? Then you can have your moral & ethical arguments without adding economics to an already hairy debate. I would bet the costs are rooted in over-inflated legal fees and prosecutorial inefficiencies which should be fixed in any case.
The subject is different, but the point is the same:
It is hard to imagine technology restriction working, because we have to get past imagining this terribly powerful tool being wielded by our utterly incompetent and corrupt rulers. The same problem exists in contemplating effective protectionism. The most obvious outcomes of both these tools simply amount to featherbedding if not outright theft. As a result, protectionism has gained a bad name, and technology restriction is well outside the policy landscape. Yet in actual reality, the problem is not with the tool, but the wielder. Once we admit that USG isn't working and has to go, we can imagine replacing it with something that doesn't suck—and can actually wield such a tool.
I'm sympathetic to that argument, but the logical next step is to say that they're also too incompetent to protect your life, and then it's the wild-west.
I believe in extreme circumstances, society should reserve the right to "not turn the other cheek". Nothing is black and white. The government is not completely incompetent, and not all cases have reasonable doubt. But cases like this, no way. Define some clear-cut parameters and apply it to every state uniformly.
Isn't this already the case? Our police force, the ones with the motto of "protect and serve" are in the news nearly every day with some sort of gun crime against the citizenry [1].
We literally pay these people to put their lives on the line for us, but it seems to have become OK for them to "shoot first and ask questions later". They have lighter restrictions on the use of force than we had in a war zone in the Army.
Perhaps it's time that we DO say that they're too incompetent to protect our lives. Perhaps it's time to vote for an actual change while we still have time.
The logical next step is, "so the government should not be in the business of killing people."
Life in prison? Sure, though I'm personally not sure depriving someone of their freedom for the rest of their natural life isn't also unacceptably cruel.
I know there are big ethical problems with my "next step", but do you really care if you're killed by a murderer or a careless police officer? Or a careless safety inspection that leads to an accident?
Incompetence that leads to my wrongful conviction and death is probably just as likely as the incompetence that would lead to my death when I'm supposed to be protected. It's a hell of a lot less likely than the death of those whom I'm not-exactly being protected from, such as the countless victims of "collateral damage".
So if a government was sufficiently competent, you'd be in favor of them executing people for some crimes?
I don't ask this to be snarky. I'd like for the death penalty to be abolished. But I do want to know if that's your true reason for rejecting the death penalty.[1] If it's not, perhaps there's a different, stronger reason for your view.
I used to be for the death penalty, until the spate of prisoner releases based on DNA evidence after DNA forensic technology hit the mainstream. If there was a fool-proof method of proving guilt, then yes, and eye for an eye. But with any system based on humans, you will have human error.
If you think about it, death vs life in prison is pretty imbalanced. On one hand, you can either die immediately and escape from it all (that being the case), while on the other hand you're stuck in a cell for the rest of your life, living with your thoughts, away from the rest of society. Personally, if I had to choose, I would choose death, since it's quick and easy, and I won't have to suffer through my own thoughts on a day to day basis.
"When the order delaying the execution for two weeks came down, Glossip was so close to his scheduled execution time that he had already been served his final meal (which included chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, fish and chips and a strawberry malt).
In addition to their requests to the Oklahoma court, Glossip’s attorneys had also asked Gov. Mary Fallin (R) to stay the execution, arguing that the lethal injection should be halted due to new evidence. However, Fallin denied these requests, and she said her office determined that none of the evidence presented by Glossip’s attorneys changed her mind.
“After carefully reviewing the facts of this case multiple times, I see no reason to cast doubt on the guilty verdict reached by the jury or to delay Glossip’s sentence of death,” she said in a statement earlier this month. Fallin also said her office would respect the appeals court’s decision."
I support the death penalty, but I believe all executions should be carried out Ned Stark style. As in, if you are the Governor, and can commute the sentence, then you should be there and actually carry out the execution. If you can save a person's life, you owe it to them and society to bear the responsibility of not commuting the sentence and see what death looks like.
Why put the governor on the hook, but not the majority of Americans who support the death penalty? If tomorrow 75% of Americans disagreed with the death penalty, it would be abolished.
It's not your politicians who are keeping the death penalty, it is your citizens.
This is a pretty reasonable suggestion. The jury that sentences a convict to death has to actually carry out the sentence. I suspect that the number of strong supporters of the death penalty will drop dramatically when faced with having to perform the sentence with their own hands.
I sat voir dire for the trial of an accused child molester. I'm sure at least some of the venom displayed that morning was cynical, in order to get out of serving on the jury. Significant numbers of people, however, didn't strike me as intelligent enough to be cynical. So, I would say there are some crimes that would have no shortage of jurors willing to swing the ax themselves.
I'd like to examine the perverse incentives behind prosecutors going for the throat. Wouldn't this problem effectively disappear if prosecutors were ranked on "wisdom" and "mercy" instead of how badly (and cheaply) they crush someone who makes even the smallest mistake through a plea deal?
"I have reached the conviction that the abolition of the death penalty is desirable. Reasons: 1) Irreparability in the event of an error of justice, 2) Detrimental moral influence of the execution procedure on those who, whether directly or indirectly, have to do with the procedure."
Been thinking about this subject for a long time, for very personal reasons.
Capital punishment exists so that people don't go get guns and kill lunatics that have done them harm. For some crimes, only being told "We're going to kill him" holds the social fabric together.
It's not justice, it's not fair, and it's a terrible way to run things. One could make the pragmatic argument that if you're going to have a death penalty, then hanging them outside the courthouse the day after the trial is the way to do it. Otherwise you're just making a mockery of trying to be fair -- which this was never about in the first place.
When you see somebody kill his family and then say "I deserve the death penalty", when you see families torn apart by evil who demand that the criminal must die, when you see people who are never going to be anything but killers being set free to kill again? Even though you might be against the death penalty, it's pretty obvious why it exists.
So I've given up fighting against the death penalty. These things move in cycles. Another 50 years we won't have one and people will be clamoring for one again. Instead, I'm extremely pissed about what pg mentions in closing: prosecutors playing hardball with plea bargains.
Whatever you want the laws to be, I've seen enough prosecutorial misconduct over the last decade to last several lifetimes. The vast majority of the time they're doing a great job. But 1-10% of the time the public is getting screwed. The incentives are all wrong and oversight in nonexistent. I've seen them cover for bad cop decisions, screw over aaronsw, refuse to take DNA evidence that would release innocent people from jail -- the list goes on an on. Something is really rotten and needs to be fixed.
Even if you believe in the death penalty, you have to admit that the criminal justice system is so broken that it's way beyond a reasonable doubt that we're executing people we shouldn't. The system needs fixing. Not only will this save lives, it will result in many people either not going to prison or serving much less time than they currently are.
> "Richard Glossip's only hope now is if the Supreme Court intervenes."
Couldn't the President of the United States, Governor of Oklahoma, or other federal judges below the level of the Supreme Court intervene, at least temporarily?
The governor of Oklahoma can delay the execution or commute his sentence (which she seems disinclined to do), but not the president of the US. POTUS can only commute/pardon federal crimes.
More generally it seems his argument is: Lessen the punishment because the judicial system isn't reliable. That doesn't seem right. Maybe it should be fixed, rather than introducing hacks like this.
You can argue against the death penalty a thousands ways. It is statistically racist, it is against the Christian way which is supposedly important in America, there is little reason to kill someone when you can securely lock them away indefinitely.
I don't see how you can argue for the death penalty. Killing people doesn't help anyone. Who has lived a happy and healthy life as a result of a death row execution of someone with a life sentence?
Run the table "CAPPUN" vs "RELIG". Nearly every major religious position in the US (including atheist/agnostic/none) is largely in favor of the death penalty, with only Muslims and Native Americans coming out as more than 50% opposed in both sets, and "other eastern" being over 50% in the newer set.
Also of note: whites are much more in favor of the death penalty than other races, Republicans are slightly more in favor than Democrats, people with higher incomes are more in favor than those with lower incomes, and people with average education (high school or 2-year college) are more in favor than those with either very high or very low education.
(I'm from a religious subgroup that's anti-death-penalty, anti-war, pro-life, etc. and I would argue that the death penalty isn't consistent with a Christian ethic, but plenty of people obviously disagree with me.)
Thank you for posting this. All of it was super interesting. Also thank you for your assuredly thankless service as both a rational and faithful person.
> at least 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent
It should be made clear that this statistic was not derived from counting up actual innocent people who were sentenced. It was a statistical estimate with a number of assumptions built in to it. Not defending the death penalty, just pointing out something that was not stated precisely in my opinion.
Reasonable doubt is not an observable quantity, like water on Mars; the question is whether jurors in the case doubted of the culpability of the accused. Obviously they didn't.
If they did, that may save this man's life, but do nothing against death penalty. Death penalty is barbaric; if you can make the case that guilty people should not be executed, I think it's much stronger than if you just argue in favor of the innocent.
... notwithstanding the fact that Scalia argued in 2009 that executing innocent people was perfectly fine: "This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent". (You have to love the quotes around the word 'actually').
- - -
Completely OT: inconsistent number of spaces after periods is very annoying (the second paragraph has one, the third or 7th have two for example; the 6th paragraph has both). The correct number of spaces after a period is ONE, but if you disagree, the least you can do is be consistent.
If we can't entrust the justice system with the death penalty, how can we entrust it with a lifetime imprisonment? If we eliminate lifetime imprisonment, can we really trust them with 35 year sentences? Twenty years?
There is no punishment that fits both the guilty and the innocent. There is no compromise.
Even if everybody on death row were guilty beyond all doubt, I don't think it is right to sentence an innocent person to kill another human for any reason.
I wouldn't want it on my conscience, so how can I demand if of someone else? No innocent person deserves that responsibility.
Obviously pg's writings are favorites of the community here, but if you look back through the history of HN you'll find that right from the beginning there were selected political stories that were on topic.
I upvoted this mainly because I think it's healthy that people consider the ethics by which they and their fellow citizens live. But generally speaking, this is a stupid reason not to kill someone.
The DA basically told this guy point-blank that if you don't want to die, take this deal. If you do want to die, don't take the deal.
He chose not to take the deal.
Is there a chance that "good sense" could have prevailed, and that by some fluke, some part of the system wouldn't work, and so he would be saved from the death penalty? Maybe. But if he had taken the deal, he would definitely not have died.
This guy chose to play russian roulette with a six-shooter with five bullets in it and lost. And this is the reason we shouldn't kill people? Because a guy who can't do the basic math of "which choice is more likely to end in my death" chose poorly?
No. The guy should have taken the deal. Much like the rest of the people on the planet who choose to take huge risks with their life, he's going to lose out on this bet. And that has nothing to do with why we should stop the state from killing people.
Our system of justice is based on laws and rules. They can't be broken arbitrarily, which is why innocent people are put to death. Not because we're mean. Not because we're stupid. We make the rules, and we have to enforce them. In this case, one of our rules is, if you do X, you die.
So, if you don't believe in killing innocent people, by all means, get rid of that rule. But don't tell me we should get rid of the rule because the rules weren't perfect.
If he's innocent, he chose to not go to jail for life for a crime he didn't commit. People shouldn't have to accept unjust punishment to avoid other people's ignorance/laziness/incompetence/half-assedness.
So, if I'm innocent, I should take a plea bargain (which, let's not forget, involves me standing up before God and everyone and saying, "yes, I did it," so that I can spend the rest of my life in a maximum security penitentiary, so that I can avoid being put to death? Not sure I agree with your logic there.
That wasn't the choice given. It was "Accept this deal for life in prison" or "Have faith that your innocence will prevail in the court of law and you will be exonerated."
If I, an innocent man, was given that choice... I would probably try it out in court. I would assume my innocence would prevent the court from convicting me.
Are you saying that every person charged with a capital offense should instantly take a plea deal for life in prison? Because that's what your flow chart is suggesting.
Omg you are proposing such a hugely distorted justice system.
The punishment for making a bad decision on a deal presented to you should not be death. If your crime deserves the maximum sentence, and you are in subway helpful to the criminal justice system, then maybe you deserve a pass. However, if you didn't commit the crime, or if there is reasonable doubt as to whether you did, I don't care if you mooned the DA when they offered a plea bargain: you shouldn't get killed.
That's not arbitrary justice. That's just justice. You can't justify punishing innocent people.
Now, the nice thing about other punishments is, in the case where justice if misapplied, you can try to make up for it later. With the death penalty, that option isn't available to you, which is one of many reasons people question whether it at all makes sense.
You can opine in harsh language about whether or not this guy made the "smart" choice all you want, but why is our "justice" system forcing this man to make such an unfair choice in the first place?
The justice system isn't for only doing what is just at all times, it is for enforcing the consequences of laws.
The point of a law is simply to put down the rules by which order is maintained, and that order is dictated by the morality of the majority of people who hold power in government. The justice system merely upholds the law set down and doles out what the law defines as a 'just' punishment or judgment.
A law can say literally anything, like, "Black people may not marry White people", or "Women may not vote", "Gay people may not get married", etc. Or they can say things like "At an intersection, the left-most lane may turn left onto the street it intersects with, but not the right-most lane." It can say anything; it doesn't have to do with "fairness" and "justice", it has to do with maintaining order.
The laws, once put down, are enforced, as long as they remain laws. The results of those laws being enforced will only stop once the laws are abolished (and even then, sometimes the states just like to keep going with 'em even if they've been abolished anyway).
We can't just selectively enforce or not enforce laws. Then there would be no point to the law. Then literally any local government official, judge, court, president, etc could abuse the rights of citizens or allow people to go free simply because they felt like it. And that's not in the public interest.
Therefore, laws which are deemed to be unfair or unjust must be amended or abolished. But - and this is the important part - they must simply be made by decree by will of the representatives of the public, and must not always meet a measurement of justice or fairness. Not only because there are plenty of laws which simply define what the proper procedures of daily life are, but because we'd literally never get any laws passed if we had to have a philosophical discussion about the potential pros and cons of the impact of the law on justice as a general idea.
So why are they forcing him to make an unfair choice? Laws aren't designed to be fair. Only the consequence of the law can be fair, according to that law. In this case, if you ask a guy if he wants to live, and he says, "No", is it fair to give him death, assuming he was of sound mind and body and understood the consequences of his decision?
"We can't just selectively enforce or not enforce laws."
No one is suggesting the DA pick and choose which laws to enforce.
The point is that there appears to be reasonable doubt that he committed the crime and therefore, according to the very laws you demand be enforced, should be acquitted.
Even if there were reasonable doubt, which, if you look into the case, has not yet been established, if there were though, then this would be a miscarriage of justice.
Still not a reason to abolish the death penalty.
Is it immoral? Yes. Impossible to reverse once enforced? Definitely. The government screwed up this one case so the law should be abolished completely? Nope.
A solution is to build a platform that crowdsources such cases to raise awareness AND a call for action. The community would need to be unbelievable but it's not at all impossible. Once there are 100,000 signatures on any petition under 30 days, the White House guarantees a response. There are many great communities with more than 100,000 active users. Why not?
Do you intend to suggest that Ahmed should have gone to jail, and that the teachers, administrators, cops, and prosecutors who tried to send him there were somehow wronged by the "Internet mob"?
Absolutely not. Sending a kid to jail because he brought a clock to school is silly.
However, a kid who bought a clock from the 80s, than repackaged it in a pencil box claiming it his 'invention', and put a timer on it making it beep in class, who was then evasive when answering questions, on the day after 9/11 anniversary, definitely deserves some suspicion.
What I object to is the praise he's gotten, from Obama to Zuckerberg. Without even one look at the facts of the situation.
> That's why we can't have the death penalty in the US. I don't know exactly when it's permissible to kill someone. But I know for sure the Oklahoma judicial system should not be allowed to. If they have that power, all it takes is a half-assed police investigation plus a prosecutor playing hardball with plea bargains, and innocent people die.
Mmm? So, because the system is not perfect, we should remove death penalty altogether? Is that seriously the point PG is making here?
IRL there is no perfect system whatsoever. Yet we learn how to live with risk and deficiencies and hopefully improve things as we move forward to make less mistakes. Whether that applies to the US Judicial system, I don't know, but that's not a good reason to remove the death row altogether. There are a number of criminals who are well known to have no empathy and can kill without remorse or emotion, and I don't see how this kind of individuals can be rehabilitated in any way within society. On top of that, every individual who is conscious about their actions should also face responsibility - that's part of the "social contract" on which we base our actions every single day. There should be strong consequences for murder and certainly Death Row has its place as well.
But yeah, there is no discussion that we should have due process to make sure ONLY convicted criminals (with proper evidence) go to Death Row.
Yes, but the problem isn't that the system isn't perfect. The problem is that the system is horribly broken and doesn't really administer justice.
When you have plea bargains and negations and hardball if one doesn't just plead guilty irrespective of guilt, the concept of justice has been irrevocably subverted. And that's where we are at. And it's why we can't have the death penalty anymore. Because the system isn't working like it should.
For the record, I'm not opposed to the death penalty. In fact, I think in an ideal system it would be used rapidly and impartially from time to time. Some people are probably not redeemable. Some people probably shouldn't live anymore. Death happens to all of us... I don't believe it to be the tragedy some consider. The problem is... right now we have a horribly broken system that has zero business killing anybody.
You ask "Is that seriously the point PG is making here?"
I think that is indeed the case.
I also suggest that your writing doesn't make any kind of valuable argument against that suggestion. Yes, of course, "because the system is not perfect, we should remove death penalty altogether." That's the way it is.
When you write "There should be strong consequences for murder and certainly Death Row has its place as well," well, maybe you need some more time to think about what those "strong consequences" are?! My impression is that you'll have a difficult time coming up with reasons to support your choices.
I always find people who worry about the death penalty have some kind of delusion, are somehow obsessed with the question, for no good reason. Unable to cope with the world as it is.
Then why is that PG article coming up now? It's not like it's a newsflash that we have innocent people dying in the Death Row. it's been happening for years. Is it an epidermic reaction of some sort ? The news effect, just like people who can't fall asleep for 15 mins because they saw something horrible on TV and then forget it and go on with their lives the next day ?
If you are revolted against something, that should be on your agenda every single day of your life, not just when the news talk about it.
This narrow view seems to miss the fact that the world is a complicated place, where mere revulsion frequently isn't sufficient to actually enact meaningful change.
Being in a state of revulsion requires valuable energy. If you spend all your time being revolted, then you won't actually be able make friends and influence people, as it were. PG is in the position that he's got a sphere of influence, and now you chide him for what? Expressing a valuable thing in such a way that he can potentially cause a coherent constructive interference of an important community. I'd say that was quite a good thing. He also used timing to his advantage to get people to listen.
In your post you imply he doesn't think about this regularly, but you have no evidence for this. He could be thinking about this all the time, but we don't get to hear about that.
For me, it comes down to this: why should the state have the right to rob an absolutely powerless individual of their life? What possible reason can anyone provide for not keeping them alive?
Let's not make the butchers the victims. When you kill several people, what kind of redemption do you expect?
> why should the state have the right
Just as the State has the right to kill innocent people overseas. If you are worried about saving innocent lives, it's way more effective to prevent your state from going to war than to save the unfortunate innocents stuck in the death row. There are WAY more innocents killed in conflicts.
Very few letters were of the type I was expecting at the time: "Play this Cradle of Filth song for me, or I will file down shards of my broken mirror in order to kill you". Along with very entertaining, if graphic, pieces of artwork.
Most of the letters were cordial, but gruff. Hard criticism of songs each inmate did not like, glorified praise for the songs they did like. Rarely, they would describe why a particular song was important to them and it was not anything alien to my freshman self: lost love, old buddies, family, trying times.
There was one I replied to and carried on a brief written correspondence with: Tilmon Golphin. Make no mistake, there is no excuse for his actions. But what I found fascinating was the attitude he decided to show in his letters; how true his words were I cannot accurately judge. He showed me major regret of brutally murdering officers of the law and provided no excuses, instead showing acceptance of what he had done with his brother.
I later learned that particular case of his and his brother's is one where the US Supreme Court's ruling in Roper v. Simmons divided the sentences of the brothers. Tilmon was 19, and his brother 17, so while both were sentenced to death, the SCOTUS ruling means Tilmon is still on death row while his brother is not.
I never would have thought I would learn so much from being a heavy metal radio show host.