
This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California - dmmalam
http://www.paulgraham.com/prop62.html
======
sctb
We've moved most comments to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847611).

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danieltillett
Repost from the dead thread.

There is one good reason to keep the status quo (death penalty without any
actual deaths) which is that anyone given a death sentence gets their case
reviewed and appealed by excellent lawyers working pro bono. The people who
get life get no help at all and are just left to rot in jail.

I have read of prisioners being upset when given a life sentence as they know
that no one will help them appeal their conviction. If you are innocent you
want to be given a death sentence and sit on death row since you will have
people helping you get your conviction overturned.

~~~
labster
"If you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective
access to our legal system." \- Peter Thiel

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/single-digit-
millionaires-l...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/single-digit-millionaires-
like-hulk-hogan-cant-afford-justice-says-peter-thiel-2016-10-31)

~~~
danieltillett
Yep. Imagine you are a poor, young black man and have been given an overworked
public defender who has no time to put together even the most basic defence.
You are innocent, but have been found guilty. Do you want to be left to rot in
jail for the rest of your life with zero outside support or given a death
sentence and have a huge amount of legal effort put into overturning your
conviction?

There are tens of thousands of people serving life sentences getting zero
legal support and quite a few of them are innocent.

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tptacek
Duplicate of:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847611)
(taking advantage, it looks like, of the WWW here and no WWW on the original).

~~~
labster
Yeah, that's on page 4 now, because people tend to flag political articles
they disagree with now. I can't wait for the election to be over; hopefully
sanity will return to HN.

~~~
tptacek
I agree with this article about as forcefully as I agree with anything, and I
flagged it, because political appeals don't belong on HN.

Either way: this is a duplicate, and should be killed or merged with the first
post.

~~~
labster
It isn't really a political appeal, you know. It's an argument about effective
processes. Which is what hackers do all day, look for the best process to
solve a problem. I urge you, in the strongest terms, to click the [unflag]
button now.

~~~
tptacek
This is the problem with political discussions on HN: we've all read the
guideline that says "don't post political appeals to HN", and so we waste time
rationalizing that our preferred political appeals are something other than
politics --- often with some superficial veneer of engineering-speak. I've
been here for a pretty long time, long enough to have seen the same tropes
used to get Ron Paul's RE[LOVE]OLUTION on the front page. I'm not impressed.

What makes this one worse is that it has Paul Graham's name on it. Naturally,
half the site thinks that means it's pre-approved for HN. But no: just because
he wrote it doesn't mean he thinks it merits a shitshow political thread on HN
about it.

