
The Death Penalty, Nearing Its End - daredave
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/24/opinion/the-death-penalty-nearing-its-end.html?emc=edit_th_20161024&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=72261283&_r=0&mtrref=undefined&gwh=0A9C9128E84D7F663F086244B72709C7&gwt=pay&assetType=opinion
======
m12k
Article 3 of the universal declaration of human rights from 1948 (which the US
voted for):

 _Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person._

Now, obviously we as a society cannot always guarantee these three things for
all people, since criminals infringe on the rights of others and thus human
rights are violated daily. In order to prevent this we choose to infringe on
the liberty of criminals (by imprisoning them), in order to prevent their
(greater) infringement on others. But since it is possible this way to prevent
their infringement, by limiting only their liberty, there is no way to justify
killing them instead, taking away not just some, but all of their liberty
along with their life and their security. Yes, in order to enforce the human
rights we must (somewhat ironically) infringe on them ourselves, but we cannot
justify performing a bigger infringement than is absolutely necessary.

~~~
zanny
The problem is America in particular views prison as punishment, because of
its puritan roots and culture a large part of the country sees punishment as
both an effective correctional technique and a deterrent when the evidence for
decades has consistently shown neither hold.

Which is part of the problem with the "abolish the death penalty" movement.
The opposition was raised and impressed upon how prison is not for the
security of society as a whole but for the punishment of the criminal. Except
the later never works, and if you frame your law enforcement around that you
end up violating a gross amount of human rights just like parents who think
punishments are the optimal way to raise children most of the time end up
abusing their kids.

~~~
vlehto
What would you suggest as punishment for murder then?

~~~
farhaven
Life in prison without the option of parole. Or, if the murder was caused by
something like a psychotic episode or drug withdrawal, therapy in a closed
facility.

~~~
vlehto
So a free get therapy card?

I don't mean to be asshole. It's just that the general moral decay from these
things is the absolute worst that can happen. Most people don't think about it
with all the focus in the current criminals and victims. Not the future of
society.

In my understanding the future of society is exactly why there is penal code
in the first place.

~~~
eveningcoffee
If you would think about it a bit more, then it is possible that you would
realize that therapy is more beneficial for the society in general than for
the inmate.

There would be many things to say, but I would be already incredibly happy if
you would realize importance of this small aspect.

~~~
vlehto
Therapy would be most beneficial to the society, if you don't need to commit a
crime to get it.

~~~
bonzini
With proper healthcare it ought to be free anyway, so the "cost" to society is
the same. Why would it matter if your diagnosis came during a trial?

------
bmh_ca
As a matter of interest, I wrote the most up-voted answer on Skeptics.SE, in
response to the question of whether the death penalty is an effective
deterrent, here:
[http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/6164/1792](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/6164/1792)

tl;dr: there's no evidence to suggest it is effective, and much evidence to
the contrary.

~~~
laichzeit0
I suppose the assumption you make is that the death penalty is meant as a
deterrent. My world-view is that the death penalty is a form of punishment for
serious crime. It is not meant as a deterrent, not meant as some "lesson" for
others. And I, personally, see no problem with it as a form of penalty to be
payed by some. (I also reject Blackstone's formulation)

~~~
rimantas
If you see no problem, how do you propose to revive those killed because trial
went wrong and an innocent man was sentenced?

~~~
gedy
The vast majority of trials are absolutely fair and this "what if?" argument
is thrown up too often as an emotional argument, even in the cases of truly
cruel and heinous crimes. I've been on a murder jury, and if anything the
system is biased towards not convicting (as it should be).

~~~
Noseshine

      > The vast majority of trials 
    

You skirt the question. It said "those killed because trial went wrong and an
innocent man was sentenced". So it asked exactly about those that you exclude.

~~~
laichzeit0
>If you see no problem, how do you propose to revive those killed because
trial went wrong and an innocent man was sentenced?

I don't. They are dead. They got unlucky. I reject the idea that we can't have
capital punishment because sometimes the outcome of a trial is wrong. If you
think this is a real problem then quantify it. Put down exactly what the
percentage is (i.e. out of every X trials how many "go wrong" as you say).
Then we can talk about a feasible upper bound. To say "If the percentage of
people wrongly convicted is > 0% then we can never have a death penalty" is
too idealistic. If it's 10% then it's obviously too high. Now we have a lower
bound and an upper bound and can have a debate about what is an acceptable
number of innocents dying. (again, 0 is infeasible).

> One person is one person too many!

This is the Blackstone principle. As I have said in the first post, I reject
this. We both seem to disagree on a "first principle".

~~~
Noseshine

      > Put down exactly what the percentage is.
    

That statement makes no sense at all! There _have_ been proven cases
(headlines about people freed from death row more than once in the last few
years; and no, that's not a sign that "the system works", quite the opposite),
so there is no question that they exist. Asking the obviously impossible and
completely unconnected question "how many _exactly_ " makes no sense, what
would that achieve, even if it were possible?

One person is one person too many!

I am all for weighing risk or cost vs. benefit, but what would be the benefit
of killing people, apart from "revenge feeling"? Also paart from costs,
because the death penalty AFAIK is _very_ costly to the US taxpayer and I've
read actually more expensive than life in prison.

So zero benefit against killing even one innocent person.

I'm not even someone who is dead set against killing.

------
porsupah
Polling in California's Proposition 62, which would end the death penalty, is,
perhaps unsurprisingly, uncertain, though offering some hope for its
abolition:

[http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/21/polls-voters-favor-
leg...](http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/21/polls-voters-favor-legalizing-
pot-outlawing-capital-punishment/)

"Proposition 62, which would replace the death penalty with lifetime
imprisonment without parole, has a tougher road to passage, according to the
Field Poll, done in conjunction with UC Berkeley’s Institute of Government
Studies.

The measure, which faces a competing state initiative, has the support of 48
percent of likely voters, while 37 percent oppose it and 15 percent are
undecided. The pollsters cautioned, however, that a nearly identical
proposition four years ago enjoyed a similar lead before being defeated by an
electorate that wasn’t ready to soften sentences for some of the state’s most
violent criminals."

------
VLM
When its gone I'll miss the justice it provided because of its controversy.

We already know that Y% of death penalty cases are overturned before the
victim is killed due to judicial misconduct and Y% is ridiculously large. We
can assume that whatever the percentage of justice system failure is for mere
life or mere 20 yrs w/o parole, its much higher than Y% due to having less
attention paid to it.

The end result of getting rid of the death penalty is we'll be stuck living
with (100-Y)% of really bad people, which is an inherent bad for all of us,
and we'll have far more than Y% serving life and 20 yrs and so on unjustly and
unexamined because those aren't death penalty cases anymore.

You can't seriously claim the people overturning unjust death penalty cases
are going to transition to overturning unjust 20 yr cases.

Obviously some fraction of the (100-Y)% of those deserving the death penalty
today will find a way to cause more human suffering years after they'd be dead
if the penalty existed.

The net result, paradoxically, of getting rid of state killing of people, will
be more total human suffering due to massive increase in false imprisonment at
lesser sentences and obvious increase in number of victims of the worst of the
bad guys because the worst of the bad guys won't be dead.

There are also weird cultural double standards issues, where its great and
patriotic to kill brown people on the other side of the planet, but not here.
Why does the dirt they stand on matter more than the flesh they're made of?

~~~
euyyn
> We already know that Y% is ridiculously large.

That premise for the rest of the argument warrants more evidence than a non-
backed vox populi.

Apart from that, it also failed to consider the percentage of executed people
that were indeed innocent.

~~~
icebraining
It's an easily findable number: _" Those sentenced to death are almost three
times as likely to see their death sentence overturned on appeal and to be
resentenced to a lesser penalty than they are to be executed."_

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2015/03/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2015/03/17/most-death-penalty-sentences-are-overturned-heres-why-that-
matters/)

~~~
euyyn
Why would that make it "ridiculously large"?

~~~
icebraining
75% isn't very large?

------
vidarh
I wrote this in response to a comment that was deleted, but I'll leave it here
as it's my favourite criticism of the death penalty:

I like to give this as a counter [1] (from Franquins "Idées Noires", which
shamefully I still don't think have been translated to English).

The text reads roughly (my French is rusty):

"The law is clear: Anyone who intentionally kills another loses his head. Let
the executioner do his job."

"Over here my friend."

"And so a good deed is done."

"Sorry, but the law is clear: Anyone who intentionally kills another ..."

[1] [http://www.funeraire-info.fr/journee-contre-la-peine-de-
mort...](http://www.funeraire-info.fr/journee-contre-la-peine-de-mort-une-
autre-idee-noire-5288/)

~~~
umanwizard
I don't get why that's a great argument rather than a silly word game. It's
legal for the State to do plenty of stuff that it's not legal for private
citizens to do.

This is at best an argument against having poorly-thought-out laws like
"Anyone who intentionally kills another loses his head", not one against the
death penalty in general.

~~~
jerf
I agree. Humanity has been distinguishing between "murder" and "killing" for
millennia. It is sophistry to obtain a pre-concluded end result to pretend
otherwise.

I say this not because I'm pro-death-penalty; I say it because it's a terrible
anti-death-penalty argument. There's much better arguments than such word play
so simple a child can see through it.

(Cards on the table: My personal position is that, actually, I'm OK with the
death penalty in situations where a society can not afford to keep the
murderer alive, or the society does not have a reasonably expectation of being
able to keep the murderer from murdering again. But I do not merely mean "the
society would be inconvenienced", I mean, the normal state through history is
that the society literally can not afford to feed a murderer or have a
realistic expectation of holding them; a tribe 5,000 years ago of 100 people
literally can not afford it. However, in the 21st century, every major
civilized society in which we might even be having this debate is very far
away from that problem, having both abundant resources to feed and house them,
and very realistic expectations that they can indeed keep them away from
innocents. Prison breaks today are big news, and still don't happen all that
often.)

~~~
vidarh
It is intended to make you think about _why_ an execution is different.

For starters, if we accept state sanctioned killings, then any argument that a
life is inviolable goes out the window. With capital punishment, the state is
saying that taking lives can be acceptable.

> Humanity has been distinguishing between "murder" and "killing" for
> millennia

Yes, and a major distinguishing factor has tended to be premeditation and
intent. An execution is of a nature that would fit in the worst category of
murder if it wasn't for the fact that it was ordered by the state.

An execution has all the hallmarks of something that would tick every possible
mark of a particularly heinous murder otherwise. Yet even when we _know_ that
innocent people get executed too, it is tolerated when carried out by a state.

~~~
jerf
"then any argument that a life is inviolable goes out the window."

Very few people argue that. Even fewer people who are pro-capital-punishment
would argue that, for obvious reasons. An argument that only convinces those
who already agree isn't even an argument.

"An execution has all the hallmarks of something that would tick every
possible mark of a particularly heinous murder otherwise."

No, it doesn't. You're just doubling down on the sophism. Again, let me
emphasize that if anything, I'm angry that this is a _bad argument_ against
capital punishment, not as a defense of capital punishment. Everyone from
philosophers to the man on the street have understood the differences between
cold-blooded murder, murder in the heat of passion, execution, warfare, and
self-defense for millennia. Nobody who is capable of making those distinctions
is going to be convinced to see all killing as equal, when even the man on the
street considers it a rather unsophisticated position.

See also why the animal rights argument that "if it's wrong to murder people
for premeditated reasons it should be wrong to kill animals to eat them"
hasn't gotten any significant traction. Appealing to people to deliberately
dumb down their morality for that to work isn't a good argument, especially
when, again, it's not even that sophisticated a difference we're talking about
here. We're not into weird Latin terms, reading 19th century existential
philosophy, or even arguing what "begging the question" _technically_ means,
we're talking stuff that your average 12 year old could explain.

~~~
HolyHaddock
So what is the distinction? I mean that as a genuine question - Vidarh's
position seems to be that the death penalty is intentionally taking a life,
and shouldn't have a different moral standing to murder.

The response seems to be that that's a bad argument, they don't really believe
that there's no distinction, and it would be stupid to believe that.

If I don't see a distinction of moral significance between the death penalty
and, say, the CEO of a company deciding to painlessly execute one of their
reports that they discover has gotten away with serious embezzling for
multiple years, scorn doesn't help me understand the distinction someone else
does see.

------
venomsnake
Life without parole is way crueler and inhumane punishment. We either need
penal colonies or the ability of the prisoners to request and be granted
euthanasia.

~~~
noonespecial
Or we could try, oh, you know, prisons that aren't torture to be in even for a
few days.

It's kind of a radical new thing for humanity that we now have the means to
provide lives, even meaningful ones, to people who prove themselves too
dangerous to live in open society. We should at least give it a try.

~~~
drakonandor
5 star hotel treatments for lifers seems a little bit silly. Why should they
live as Kings after what they did to their victims?

~~~
noonespecial
So vengeance is what you're after. I can understand and even respect that.

The question you might be asking is why the "bleeding hearts" like me aren't.
For me at least, that would be because I believe that culpability for actions
is a continuum. Hell, I even think _sentience_ is a continuum. At some point,
criminal tendencies cross a blurry line from willful malfeasance into mental
disability. Because I can't reliably determine this point and I don't trust
those passing judgment not to let their prejudices and biases influence their
thirst for vengeance, I prefer a system that uses extra caution.

We have the material resources to provide meaningful lives to these
individuals for their entire natural lives. Not "5 star" accommodations mind
you, but far from the hellish gulags we have now.

Lashing out in deadly anger feels _awesome_ , I freely admit. But how many are
on life sentences for no less?

~~~
drakonandor
I was referring to those in there for life (to protect society).

I don't see it as 'vengeance' if they aren't pampered. There is a broad range
between gulag and the Hilton.

That being said, those who in short-term should have some environment suited
for rehabilitation, which probably includes learning that "wow jail sucks, i
will remember that next time before I punch someone". Obviously they should be
given the chance for education and employment, but the latest Playstation
games might not be a necessity.

------
vlehto
One thing to remember when talking about criminal punishment. It's not for the
criminal and its not for the victim. It's society acting for its own sake.

What matters is that crime is not profitable in any situation. Punishment is
there to reap away any profitability, but nothing more.

Murder gets you life in prison and I think that is justified. But it opens a
problem here. Once you do one murder, second, third and fourth only increase
your risk of getting caught. The punishment stays the same. There is specific
case where death penalty would make some sense. If you are caught on the act.
Killing witnesses should get you worse punishment than the original murder.
But this gets tricky very quickly on many occasions.

~~~
e40
Caught in the act isn't a clear cut thing. Witnesses have been known to be
wrong. In fact, identification of people you don't know is a very tricky
thing. I read an article recently about a man in AZ that was identified
_twice_ as the perp in robberies, and even though he had an alibi for both,
the prosecutor ruined his life (lost job, drained bank account, divorce). The
problem was, he looked amazingly like the perp (there was video).

Had he not had a job with video showing he was there, he would most certainly
have been convicted of those to robberies.

If this had been a capital murder case, he could have been convicted on
eyewitness testimony. Wrongly.

~~~
vlehto
Yes it's tricky.

But it's also quite nasty that in some police sieges the perpetrator has
absolutely nothing to lose anymore, except his life. So if he kills several
policemen and manages to escape, it's still good deal. If that doesn't look
likely, surrender and get the exact same life in prison you would have gotten
anyhow.

Knowing this dynamic, the police is incentive to use sharpshooters early in
the situation. Which is essentially death penalty without due process.

~~~
knz
Google tells me that the average time on death row is ~15 years. I'm not sure
the average criminal weighs the difference between life or 15 years when
contemplating murder. I also believe that sentencing for crimes are compounded
in the US - so you might get 15 years for each murder, 10 years for robbing a
bank with a weapon, 5 years for robbery, 5 years for using a weapon in a crime
etc - effectively a "life" sentence.

Also, is being shot by a sharpshooter the death penalty without due process or
a reasonable effort to preserve the lives of innocent people who may be
involved?

~~~
vlehto
To me 15 years for murder sounds low. Even for Nordic country standards.

My understanding is that the ~15 years is because the convicts try everything
to get the sentence repelled. Which signals that "death sentence" is really
something they consider lot worse than being in prison.

There has been research that humans are unable to accurately discern more than
3 years into future. I don't think 15 vs. 30 vs. 45 years makes much
difference. But 20 years vs. lethal injection, there is obvious difference in
the quality of the punishment.

>Also, is being shot by a sharpshooter the death penalty without due process
or a reasonable effort to preserve the lives of innocent people who may be
involved?

You could claim that any death penalty is exactly that. No matter which
position you take, the best situation in either case would be the perpetrator
turning in and getting that due process.

