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An immigration activist has been sentenced to death for the 2009 murder of a nine year-old-girl and her father.

Shawna Forde, 43, organised a break-in at the Arizona home of Raul Flores apparently to fund her group, which campaigns against illegal immigration.

But the burglary went wrong and 29-year-old Mr Flores was shot dead along with his daughter Brisenia.

Forde was convicted of first-degree murder. Her alleged accomplices have yet to be tried.

She was was also convicted of attempted murder and robbery.

The girl's mother, Gina Gonzales, survived being shot and later identified her attackers.

During the trial, the jury was told the young girl had pleaded with her attackers to not fire on her, but was still shot in the head.

Forde and two men dressed as police officers forced their way into Mr Flores' home in Arivaca, 10 miles (16km) north of the Mexican border.

She apparently believed there were drugs on the premises and had planned to sell them to fund her group of so-called border vigilantes, known as the Minutemen American Defense.

Forde began her own group after reportedly being expelled from the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a national volunteer group which monitors US borders for illegal immigrants.

Albert Robert Gaxiola and Jason Eugene Bush, Forde's alleged accomplices, are scheduled to go on trial later this year.

I'm still not pro-death penalty. But this person is truly horrible.

Well I am pro death penalty. And I can't think of a more deserving recipient.

Personally I am against the death penalty, but a case this heinous really tests my beliefs.

My only problem here is that she's labelled an 'immigration activist'. When you form an armed posse, to enforce the laws you decide, you are a fucking vigilante. An armed mob. And in this person's case, a fucking murderer and criminal.

Say hi to Hades for me.

Is there anything wrong with a .45 to the temple as an execution method?

And yes Nit, it's stupid when they try and be PC with labels and just end up screwing it all up.

I'm pretty sure the courts agree with you Nitram, what with you know sentencing her to death and all.

I can't say I'm pro-death penalty because well... It would like saying I'm pro-blue sky. I think the death penalty is something we should be careful with, because as far as I know no one currently on the planet has perfected a method of taking back a killing. That said, some people just need to be taken out.

At the end of the day, support for the Death Penalty really depends on one thing. If you consider it more important that someone who has done heinous things to die for their crimes; or the concern that you will kill someone that is innocent of the crime.

Charon wrote:At the end of the day, support for the Death Penalty really depends on one thing. If you consider it more important that someone who has done heinous things to die for their crimes; or the concern that you will kill someone that is innocent of the crime.

If a man attacks me with a knife, I have the right to shoot and kill him. If it later turns out that he merely was chopping onions, walked outside to fetch the mail, had an epileptic seizure, and lunged towards me with the knife with no intention of ever killing me, that is a tragedy. It is not however reasonable to take away everyone's right to defend themselves with force because there is a chance that any particular knife-assailant might be simply suffering from epileptic seizures.

Society as a whole has a similar right. A woman who orchestrates a home invasion robbery wherein a nine year old girl is brutally murdered for being Hispanic while she begs for her life, has forfeited her right to live. The fact that other people who were charged with other crimes in other jurisdictions were later found to be innocent does not change the particulars of this crime, this victim, and this culprit.

Presumption of innocence is one thing, but presumption of judicial incompetence is quite another. The fact that innocent people have been wrongfully executed is an argument for improving the system of justice, not for eliminating it. It is, in my mind, not justice to sentence such a person as this woman to spend the rest of her life being maintained at the sufferance of the society whom she grievously injured. It is justice to shoot her in the head.

Failing that, the death penalty as it exists in Arizona will have to suffice.

My opposition to the death penalty is purely on practical grounds:

1) It's cheaper to lock them up for the rest of their life

2) If you fuck up and jail an innocent man you can at least give some compensation to the living. As frigid said there's no way to take back a killing.

3) Fuck ups do happen a lot in death penalty cases. Illinois suspended the death penalty when more people on death row were being acquitted then executed. Think about that one for a second. Then there's Texas.


That being said I don't believe the death penalty is unjust. Clearly guilty people being executed for committing heinous crimes? That's just what they deserve. I look forward to the day when this bitch stops mooching off the communal oxygen supply.

General Havoc wrote:If a man attacks me with a knife, I have the right to shoot and kill him. If it later turns out that he merely was chopping onions, walked outside to fetch the mail, had an epileptic seizure, and lunged towards me with the knife with no intention of ever killing me, that is a tragedy. It is not however reasonable to take away everyone's right to defend themselves with force because there is a chance that any particular knife-assailant might be simply suffering from epileptic seizures.

There's one huge difference between defending oneself from an attacker and executing a person: you have already subdued the prisoner. If you have managed to subdue your attacker you don't get to kill them afterward, so by this argument, granting society the same rights WRT self-defense as the individual would presumably preclude execution.

It would allow using lethal force when necessary in police work and in defensive war though, and I support that. The operative phrase is "when necessary". You use the minimum amount of lethality that can be reasonably expected to resolve the situation, and that ties in nicely with my previous point.

Cynical Cat wrote:My opposition to the death penalty is purely on practical grounds:

1) It's cheaper to lock them up for the rest of their life

2) If you fuck up and jail an innocent man you can at least give some compensation to the living. As frigid said there's no way to take back a killing.

3) Fuck ups do happen a lot in death penalty cases. Illinois suspended the death penalty when more people on death row were being acquitted then executed. Think about that one for a second. Then there's Texas.

That being said I don't believe the death penalty is unjust. Clearly guilty people being executed for committing heinous crimes? That's just what they deserve. I look forward to the day when this bitch stops mooching off the communal oxygen supply.

All of these objections are perfectly reasonable, though I still support the death penalty despite them. For me it is a question of justice, though to ignore the practical implications is obviously unwise, and no doubt informs the reason why many states and countries have abolished the practice.

There's one huge difference between defending oneself from an attacker and executing a person: you have already subdued the prisoner. If you have managed to subdue your attacker you don't get to kill them afterward, so by this argument, granting society the same rights WRT self-defense as the individual would presumably preclude execution.

It would allow using lethal force when necessary in police work and in defensive war though, and I support that. The operative phrase is "when necessary". You use the minimum amount of lethality that can be reasonably expected to resolve the situation, and that ties in nicely with my previous point.

The problem is that in this case, I do not see that physically restraining the subject "resolves" the situation in any way. The victim is still dead, and the criminal is alive, and not only alive, but entitled to free room, board, and medical care for the rest of her natural life, at the sufferance of society in general. Justice is about redressing this sort of imbalance, and in my opinion, as we cannot resurrect the victim, the only conceivable redress would be the execution of the perpetrator.

Justice does not restrict itself solely to the practical matters of preventing further crime from the perpetrator (though I'll mention that the Death Penalty certainly does that, whatever its flaws). We consciously distinguish between types of murder as we do between types of theft or assault. 1st and 2nd degree murder, voluntary and involuntary manslaughter, as well as justifiable homicide, all carry wildly different penalties even though the victim is just as dead. This is because we as a society recognize that, independent of the flat facts of one person being killed by another person, there is more to proper justice than simple arithmetic and cost/benefit analyses. It is, to me, eminently reasonable to state that there are therefore some classes of crime, in this case particularly heinous premeditated murder, that carry with it an ultimate penalty, as the only possible redress for a crime so grave. This is perhaps an arbitrary designation, but so are all of the gradations we already apply to various forms of murder. Such is the nature of justice.

There are indeed numerous practical objections to the Death Penalty, but I tend to see those as indictments less of the concept and more of the system which institutes it. To abolish the punishment itself overall, regardless of what crimes are committed, because of a presumption of incompetence (that being an assumption that justice cannot be done due to our own inability to prevent the innocent from being convicted with absolute certainty) is to me just as ludicrous as to abolish life sentences or lengthy jail terms for the same reason (as some countries have done).

In my mind, justice demands that this woman be executed, regardless of how inconvenient it may be.

General Havoc wrote:All of these objections are perfectly reasonable, though I still support the death penalty despite them. For me it is a question of justice, though to ignore the practical implications is obviously unwise, and no doubt informs the reason why many states and countries have abolished the practice.

It is also a matter of justice not to execute the innocent. That's rather more than just a practical implication that can be dealt with somehow since you can't have a perfect court system.

General Havoc wrote:The problem is that in this case, I do not see that physically restraining the subject "resolves" the situation in any way. The victim is still dead, and the criminal is alive, and not only alive, but entitled to free room, board, and medical care for the rest of her natural life, at the sufferance of society in general. Justice is about redressing this sort of imbalance, and in my opinion, as we cannot resurrect the victim, the only conceivable redress would be the execution of the perpetrator.

Your earlier argument was based on people's right to defend themselves from an attacker. If you want to go beyond that, the self-defense analogy is not going to prove your point. And the victim is still dead if you execute the criminal. "Balance and redress" doesn't change that.

General Havoc wrote:This is because we as a society recognize that, independent of the flat facts of one person being killed by another person, there is more to proper justice than simple arithmetic and cost/benefit analyses. It is, to me, eminently reasonable to state that there are therefore some classes of crime, in this case particularly heinous premeditated murder, that carry with it an ultimate penalty, as the only possible redress for a crime so grave. This is perhaps an arbitrary designation, but so are all of the gradations we already apply to various forms of murder. Such is the nature of justice.

I'm sorry, but I can't see that the conclusion follows from the premise, and you haven't explained what there is to proper justice that allows it.

General Havoc wrote:In my mind, justice demands that this woman be executed, regardless of how inconvenient it may be.

And in my mind, it does not. So where does that leave us? And again, the "inconvenience" involves innocent people potentially being executed for another person's crimes.

The Minx wrote:It is also a matter of justice not to execute the innocent. That's rather more than just a practical implication that can be dealt with somehow since you can't have a perfect court system.

By the same notion, it is equally a matter of justice not to imprison the innocent for their entire lives, nor for part of it, nor even to fine them for crimes they did not commit. Yet the acknowledgment that these things do happen does not prevent us from employing these punishments, even though we recognize that they will from time to time be inflicted upon undeserving victims of miscarriages of justice.

Obviously, there's a big difference between fining someone and executing them, in terms of reversibility if nothing else. But the point I was making is that at a certain point, we cannot build our system of justice out of what I call "presumption of incompetence". It's one thing to take every measure possible to correct abuses , ensure presumption of innocence, and reduce to a minimum possible the number of people who are unjustly convicted of crimes. It's another to assume that because we will never be able to completely eliminate such mistakes, that therefore the presumption is that ALL guilty people are potentially innocent and cannot be held fully accountable for their crimes. There is in fact (as I see it), an independent societal value in punishing the guilty commensurate with the crimes they commit. Abandoning that principle because we assume that all forms of terrestrial justice will always be flawed renders the entire justice system without purpose.

The Minx wrote:Your earlier argument was based on people's right to defend themselves from an attacker. If you want to go beyond that, the self-defense analogy is not going to prove your point. And the victim is still dead if you execute the criminal. "Balance and redress" doesn't change that.

The victim is still dead regardless of what we do. Nothing can change that. The only decision we have available to us is what to do with the perpetrator of the crime in question. In my mind, independent of the practical questions of cost and such, to lock that person away and maintain their lives at the sufferance of society in general for the rest of their lives compounds the injustice that the perpetrator committed, whereas to execute them redresses it at least in part, up to our power to redress it at least.

My earlier argument was not that self-defense justifies the death penalty. My earlier argument was that just as you would not revoke the right of self-defense because it can misfire, you cannot unilaterally deny justice because it too can misfire.

The Minx wrote:I'm sorry, but I can't see that the conclusion follows from the premise, and you haven't explained what there is to proper justice that allows it.

Here we enter into the aforementioned question of what is justice, one which has been debated since the concept was invented, and accordingly one which I do not expect that you and I will agree. I see justice (and of course you may not see it this way) as a societal good that is not solely motivated by practical concerns, important though they may be, of recidivism and cost. It is, to me, a manifest injustice to permit the practitioners of premeditated murder to live because of some concern over the ultimate fallibility of the criminal justice system. This is because I do not see justice as purely utilitarian but also at least partly retributive (as distinct from vengeful). We as a society have, in my view, a moral obligation to punish greater crimes more than we do lesser ones (a notion that does not originate with me). Justice must be (and for the most part is) proportional to the crime, independent of the forward calculation of whether the punishment will benefit the criminal.

This is not mere prattle. The entire point of the criminal justice system is to provide justice, the definition of which has been debated endlessly, but is generally considered to be something beyond a mere preservation the security of life and limb (at least by the jurists whose opinions I respect). There is a societal benefit, unquantifiable perhaps, but nevertheless present, to seeing the perpetrators of these deeds punished appropriately. It is, to me, a miscarriage of justice to see this woman be permitted to live, while her victim is still dead. Is it as great of a miscarriage as putting an innocent person to death would be? No. But it is still a miscarriage of justice, and one that we cannot simply ignore by claiming that the purpose of the justice system is merely preventative.

As Immanuel Kant put it: "Judicial punishment can never be used merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society, but instead it must in all cases be imposed on him only on the ground that he has committed a crime." If the guilty are not punished appropriately, then justice is not done.

I expect that your opinion (to say nothing of everyone else's) will be different. But this is mine.

The Minx wrote:And in my mind, it does not. So where does that leave us? And again, the "inconvenience" involves innocent people potentially being executed for another person's crimes.

No, in this case it does not. This woman did, beyond any standard of doubt that I am aware of, commit this crime. Executing her does not place an innocent person in jeopardy, save in the sense that other people charged with other crimes may be executed in error in other cases at another time.

Obviously, that's not a minor matter, but my point is that it's frankly no less minor to deny justice overall because of the risk that it will not be applied correctly. And I see refusing to execute the perpetrators of these most heinous of crimes as a flat denial of justice, one that is just as important to me as the possible consequence that shocks you. If there are people who are innocent that are being found guilty (and there are), then the system must be reformed to prevent that by any means possible. But we cannot abandon justice under the theory that we are never really sure.

General Havoc wrote:By the same notion, it is equally a matter of justice not to imprison the innocent for their entire lives, nor for part of it, nor even to fine them for crimes they did not commit. Yet the acknowledgment that these things do happen does not prevent us from employing these punishments, even though we recognize that they will from time to time be inflicted upon undeserving victims of miscarriages of justice.

Of course, but fines and imprisonment are reversible, death is not.

General Havoc wrote:Obviously, there's a big difference between fining someone and executing them, in terms of reversibility if nothing else. But the point I was making is that at a certain point, we cannot build our system of justice out of what I call "presumption of incompetence". It's one thing to take every measure possible to correct abuses , ensure presumption of innocence, and reduce to a minimum possible the number of people who are unjustly convicted of crimes. It's another to assume that because we will never be able to completely eliminate such mistakes, that therefore the presumption is that ALL guilty people are potentially innocent and cannot be held fully accountable for their crimes. There is in fact (as I see it), an independent societal value in punishing the guilty commensurate with the crimes they commit. Abandoning that principle because we assume that all forms of terrestrial justice will always be flawed renders the entire justice system without purpose.

OK, this could mean one of two things. The first possibility is that you're saying that we should try to decide who is deserving of presumption of innocence and who isn't in advance of the trial. If you take that approach you're presupposing who is more guilty than another, which is a miscarriage of justice. Justice, by its very nature, has to be equitable.

Or, if you're simply denying presumption of innocence for the most egregious of crimes you are actually increasing the chances of innocent people being put to death! It is precisely when society overall is most appalled at the crime that the person suspected of the crime is least likely to get a fair trial: there's great pressure to find out who to punish, and the process gets out of hand.

Moreover, whenever you increase the severity of a punishment, you're inevitably increasing the damage caused by a false conviction. That is why the burden of proof for capital crimes is so much higher than for other crimes; if you go so far as to deny presumption of innocence you're basically reversing that.

General Havoc wrote:The victim is still dead regardless of what we do. Nothing can change that. The only decision we have available to us is what to do with the perpetrator of the crime in question. In my mind, independent of the practical questions of cost and such, to lock that person away and maintain their lives at the sufferance of society in general for the rest of their lives compounds the injustice that the perpetrator committed, whereas to execute them redresses it at least in part, up to our power to redress it at least.

Life in prison is hardly desirable for anyone, you can just as well see it as prolonging the punishment they have been given. Besides, execution is also going to cost society money, since death penalty trials are always more expensive than regular ones, and with good reason.

General Havoc wrote:My earlier argument was not that self-defense justifies the death penalty. My earlier argument was that just as you would not revoke the right of self-defense because it can misfire, you cannot unilaterally deny justice because it too can misfire.

Fair enough.

General Havoc wrote:Here we enter into the aforementioned question of what is justice, one which has been debated since the concept was invented, and accordingly one which I do not expect that you and I will agree. I see justice (and of course you may not see it this way) as a societal good that is not solely motivated by practical concerns, important though they may be, of recidivism and cost. It is, to me, a manifest injustice to permit the practitioners of premeditated murder to live because of some concern over the ultimate fallibility of the criminal justice system. This is because I do not see justice as purely utilitarian but also at least partly retributive (as distinct from vengeful). We as a society have, in my view, a moral obligation to punish greater crimes more than we do lesser ones (a notion that does not originate with me). Justice must be (and for the most part is) proportional to the crime, independent of the forward calculation of whether the punishment will benefit the criminal.

Of course greater crimes should be punished more than lesser ones, that doesn't mean that death need be included in the equation. Anyway, what is the functional difference between retribution and vengeance?

You're right that I probably take a more utilitarian view of justice than you do.

General Havoc wrote:This is not mere prattle. The entire point of the criminal justice system is to provide justice,

Siggable truth.

General Havoc wrote:the definition of which has been debated endlessly, but is generally considered to be something beyond a mere preservation the security of life and limb (at least by the jurists whose opinions I respect). There is a societal benefit, unquantifiable perhaps, but nevertheless present, to seeing the perpetrators of these deeds punished appropriately. It is, to me, a miscarriage of justice to see this woman be permitted to live, while her victim is still dead. Is it as great of a miscarriage as putting an innocent person to death would be? No. But it is still a miscarriage of justice, and one that we cannot simply ignore by claiming that the purpose of the justice system is merely preventative.

I haven't actually claimed that the justice system is merely preventative, nor do I think it should be. But I agree that IF we assume that it is a miscarriage of justice not to execute someone, it is less so than executing an innocent. I think that our differences lie in the fact that I don't loose sleep knowing that she'll be rotting in jail rather than in a coffin as punishment.

General Havoc wrote:As Immanuel Kant put it: "Judicial punishment can never be used merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society, but instead it must in all cases be imposed on him only on the ground that he has committed a crime." If the guilty are not punished appropriately, then justice is not done.

I expect that your opinion (to say nothing of everyone else's) will be different. But this is mine.

Yup, this does look to me like saying "it is so because it is so". Sorry

General Havoc wrote:No, in this case it does not. This woman did, beyond any standard of doubt that I am aware of, commit this crime. Executing her does not place an innocent person in jeopardy, save in the sense that other people charged with other crimes may be executed in error in other cases at another time.

You don't know that for certain. You merely assume that based on the outcome of the trial. Don't you think that there have been cases where people have been utterly certain that the defendant was guilty and it turned out that he was not? And especially here when all you have to go on is a news article? There is always the chance of false positives, even when you think that you know something with absolute certainty.

General Havoc wrote:Obviously, that's not a minor matter, but my point is that it's frankly no less minor to deny justice overall because of the risk that it will not be applied correctly. And I see refusing to execute the perpetrators of these most heinous of crimes as a flat denial of justice, one that is just as important to me as the possible consequence that shocks you. If there are people who are innocent that are being found guilty (and there are), then the system must be reformed to prevent that by any means possible. But we cannot abandon justice under the theory that we are never really sure.

It is not equivalent! Even assuming that you're right, and execution of the convict provides some redress for the crime, tit hat does not - as you agreed above - bring back the victim. Therefore, it is always less of a miscarriage than the death of a wrongfully accused person, assuming that it is a miscarriage at all, and you agreed to that also. Therefore, we are not abandoning justice by not having the death penalty, in fact we're doing precisely the opposite. This is especially true since life imprisonment can be seen as a more severe punishment than a "way out", a life prison inmate has nothing to look forward to but a 10x10 foot cell, possibly for decades with no end in sight.

To borrow your line, "this is not mere prattle". Here's an article which illustrates this point:

Link
Italy inmates seek death penalty

BBC wrote:Hundreds of prisoners serving life sentences in Italy have called on President Giorgio Napolitano to bring back the death penalty.

Their request was published as a letter in the daily newspaper La Repubblica.

Italy has almost 1,300 prisoners serving life terms, of whom 200 have served more than 20 years.

Italy has been at the forefront of the fight against capital punishment and recently lobbied the UN Security Council to table a moratorium on it.

But at home some of the country's longest serving prisoners want the death penalty re-introduced.

'Light into shadows'

The letter they sent to President Napolitano came from a convicted mobster, Carmelo Musumeci, a 52-year-old who has been in prison for 17 years.

It was co-signed by 310 of his fellow lifers.

Musumeci said he was tired of dying a little bit every day.

We want to die just once, he said, and "we are asking for our life sentence to be changed to a death sentence".

It was a candid letter written by a man who, from within his cell, has tried hard to change his life.

He has passed his high school exams and now has a degree in law. But his sentence, he says, has transformed the light into shadows.

He told the president his future was the same as his past, killing the present and removing every hope.

'Need for change'

Italy abolished the death penalty after World War II.

Under current laws, prisoners serving life can obtain the right to brief periods of release after 10 years and conditional release after 26 years of good conduct.

The Communist Refoundation party's senator, Maria Luisa Boccia, has proposed draft legislation to abolish the life sentence and replace it with a maximum sentence of 30 years.

The president has spoken many times about the need to change the sentencing regime.

But in his response to the letter, he said it was now for parliament and the government to deal with the prisoners' request.

If they would request if of me, I would say "NO. You committed your crimes, that is why you are here. You don't deserve the easy way out if it means an innocent person might be executed for a crime they didn't commit".


EDIT: fixed tags. And grammar.

BTW, lest you think it a contradiction that I'm concerned with false positives and at the same time pointing out that some prison inmates prefer the death penalty to staying in jail, keep in mind the point that inmates can be released and compensated, but the dead cannot.

I'll note at the beginning here that I was not making any condemnation of the death penalty here. I was simply stating the fact that no Justice system is ever, was ever, or ever will be perfect. Therefore if you have the death penalty an innocent person will die. I made no comments as to if that risk was worth having the death penalty.

General Havoc wrote:If a man attacks me with a knife, I have the right to shoot and kill him. If it later turns out that he merely was chopping onions, walked outside to fetch the mail, had an epileptic seizure, and lunged towards me with the knife with no intention of ever killing me, that is a tragedy. It is not however reasonable to take away everyone's right to defend themselves with force because there is a chance that any particular knife-assailant might be simply suffering from epileptic seizures.

There was no intention to kill you, but if that knife was coming at you you still have a right to defend yourself. You are acting in the heat of the moment without all the facts. The Death Penalty should not be done in the heat of the moment or without all the facts. If it is, you are doing something very wrong. I hope we can both agree on that.

Society as a whole has a similar right. A woman who orchestrates a home invasion robbery wherein a nine year old girl is brutally murdered for being Hispanic while she begs for her life, has forfeited her right to live. The fact that other people who were charged with other crimes in other jurisdictions were later found to be innocent does not change the particulars of this crime, this victim, and this culprit.

But we cannot create laws for the particular of any one crime, one victim, or one culprit. Laws have to be created to cover the whole, and if we make exceptions for this law the whole book might as well go out the window.

Presumption of innocence is one thing, but presumption of judicial incompetence is quite another. The fact that innocent people have been wrongfully executed is an argument for improving the system of justice, not for eliminating it. It is, in my mind, not justice to sentence such a person as this woman to spend the rest of her life being maintained at the sufferance of the society whom she grievously injured. It is justice to shoot her in the head.

Failing that, the death penalty as it exists in Arizona will have to suffice.

It's not a presumption of judicial incompetence, there are at the very least dozens of factual examples of it occurring. I at no point said that it was a common occurrence, hell probably less than 1 in 100 Death Penalty cases are actually wrong. The only point I brought up was that it is a personal question as to whether these numbers are worth it or not. You think it is, some others don't. Honestly the whole argument for or against the Death Penalty is a personal thing, and for that reason subjective

To speak first to Charon's objections, I do indeed agree that this entire matter is subjective. I am not here attempting to argue that one is wrong for opposing the death penalty, only explaining my reasons for supporting it. None of the objections that people make against it are unreasonable ones. However, none of them, to date, have occasioned me to alter my conviction that Capital Punishment is a reasonable and appropriate penalty to apply in the worst cases, such as the one above.

All I am doing in this case is explaining the reasons whereby I believe in the appropriateness of the death penalty, reasons which have nothing to do with what most people tend to assume they do.

The Minx wrote:OK, this could mean one of two things. The first possibility is that you're saying that we should try to decide who is deserving of presumption of innocence and who isn't in advance of the trial. If you take that approach you're presupposing who is more guilty than another, which is a miscarriage of justice. Justice, by its very nature, has to be equitable.

Or, if you're simply denying presumption of innocence for the most egregious of crimes you are actually increasing the chances of innocent people being put to death! It is precisely when society overall is most appalled at the crime that the person suspected of the crime is least likely to get a fair trial: there's great pressure to find out who to punish, and the process gets out of hand.

Moreover, whenever you increase the severity of a punishment, you're inevitably increasing the damage caused by a false conviction. That is why the burden of proof for capital crimes is so much higher than for other crimes; if you go so far as to deny presumption of innocence you're basically reversing that.

I hate to say it, but what I was saying means neither of those things. At no point have I said that the Presumption of Innocence is something which should be discarded, or is not merited. It is the foundation and bedrock of the entire justice system, and I have said and will say nothing against it.

What I am cautioning against is what I call "Presumption of Incompetence". That is to say, rather than presuming that someone is innocent until proven guilty, the act of presuming that they are innocent even after they have been proven guilty due to the fact that the justice system is systemically incompetent. Abolition of capital punishment is, as I see it, an example of this, not of presumption of innocence. As you pointed out, the burden of proof for capital crimes is significantly higher than that of other crimes. This is as it should be. However, when the established guilt of a criminal meets that enhanced burden of proof, survives the lengthy appeals process, and culminates in a sentence of execution, there is some certainty involved that the person has in fact committed the crime, and as I have argued elsewhere, there is a societal interest in seeing them pay for it.

Do people still wind up on Death Row who are innocent? Yes, unquestionably. This is an argument to improve the court system, the appeals process, and the means by which these verdicts are come to. They are not an argument to abolish just punishment.

The Minx wrote:Life in prison is hardly desirable for anyone, you can just as well see it as prolonging the punishment they have been given. Besides, execution is also going to cost society money, since death penalty trials are always more expensive than regular ones, and with good reason.

These things are true, and there is certainly a case to be made that Life in prison might well be a worse punishment than death. Ironically, if that were so, one might well object that in such a case, life in prison would be inappropriately harsh for a convicted killer, and that the lesser sentence of immediate death would be more appropriate for their crime.

Not saying I believe that, just a thought that came to mind :)

The Minx wrote:Of course greater crimes should be punished more than lesser ones, that doesn't mean that death need be included in the equation. Anyway, what is the functional difference between retribution and vengeance?

You're right that I probably take a more utilitarian view of justice than you do.

By itself, no, that does not mean that death needs to be included in the equation. I simply believe as a matter of retributive justice that the death penalty is the just punishment in cases such as these, and thus lesser penalties are not just. The question is of course an inherently subjective one.

As to the functional difference between retribution and vengeance, it is primarily a matter of proportion and impartiality. Retribution is impartial, applied evenly and fairly to all perpetrators regardless of the status or capabilities of the victim. It has a proper scale of appropriateness, with room for such modifications as mercy or extenuating circumstance, and is designed to correct a moral wrong, in this case premeditated murder. Vengeance on the other hand is a personal matter, enacted by one party against another to correct a perceived wrong, whose scope may be objectively inappropriate, and often unlimited in scale.

If I punch you in the face, and the court sentences me to be caned, or to be made to work in community service, or otherwise subjected to just punishment for my actions, that is retributive justice. If I punch you in the face, and you go back to your house, get a gun, come back to my house, and shoot me (or even if you just come back and punch me in the face), that is vengeance. What most utilitarian judicial theorists would advocate is either preventative justice (imprisoning me so that I cannot punch you again), restorative justice (making me pay for your hospital bills), or both. Neither solution is at all unreasonable, and cases could be made that both also represent retributive justice as well. However in the case of premeditated murder, no restorative justice is possible (as the murderer cannot raise the dead), and, in my view, preventative justice (locking the bastard away where he can murder nobody else) does not itself represent proper justice for the crime. Only retributive justice (execution) does this, in my opinion.

Your mileage may, of course, vary

I haven't actually claimed that the justice system is merely preventative, nor do I think it should be. But I agree that IF we assume that it is a miscarriage of justice not to execute someone, it is less so than executing an innocent. I think that our differences lie in the fact that I don't loose sleep knowing that she'll be rotting in jail rather than in a coffin as punishment.

You may be right in that case. Frankly, I probably will not be losing sleep over this matter (for one thing, she WAS sentenced to death), as both punishments are quite horrible. But if twenty years go by and the appeals end, and she is actually executed for her crime, will you lose sleep then?

Not to say that you should or should not. I've no objection to someone who has a moral abhorrence of killing, or someone who simply believes the legal right of the state to kill should not exist. But I do not possess either, and find the prospect of her execution to be justice, if delayed.

Yup, this does look to me like saying "it is so because it is so". Sorry

Well it looks that way because it basically is that. As I said, I'm not making claims to some objective authority here. The nature of justice is a question that has vexed philosophers since the dawn of time. I believe in retributive justice, and therefore that what I have said is right. It is, however, merely opinion, and can be gainsaid by those whose sense of justice differs.

You don't know that for certain. You merely assume that based on the outcome of the trial. Don't you think that there have been cases where people have been utterly certain that the defendant was guilty and it turned out that he was not? And especially here when all you have to go on is a news article? There is always the chance of false positives, even when you think that you know something with absolute certainty.

And if the prosecutor had not sought the death penalty, or the crime had been committed in a state with no death penalty, would we be any more certain? The established guilt or innocence of the subject has nothing to do with the sentence imposed, indeed it's even more strict in the case of a capital crime, if anything. By the logic that 'we don't know for certain', what grounds do we have to imprison her at all? What grounds to imprison anyone? Imprisonment can be reversed of course, but the thirty years of one's life that an innocent man spends behind bars cannot be restored to him. Is it not therefore unconscionable to imprison criminals given our lack of certainty?

False positives do happen, and innocent people are found guilty, and even executed, but for the system of justice to function at all, there is a line that we establish and draw beyond which we say that a person is guilty. We intentionally draw that line such that any reasonable doubt is sufficient to secure acquittal. We establish courts and procedures to insure that irrelevancies are burned away to the extent we can. But in the end, we cannot eliminate all doubt from trial proceedings, nor can we use the fact that we have not eliminated it as an excuse to deny justice arbitrarily to every case we see.

It is not equivalent! Even assuming that you're right, and execution of the convict provides some redress for the crime, tit hat does not - as you agreed above - bring back the victim. Therefore, it is always less of a miscarriage than the death of a wrongfully accused person, assuming that it is a miscarriage at all, and you agreed to that also. Therefore, we are not abandoning justice by not having the death penalty, in fact we're doing precisely the opposite. This is especially true since life imprisonment can be seen as a more severe punishment than a "way out", a life prison inmate has nothing to look forward to but a 10x10 foot cell, possibly for decades with no end in sight.

Abolishing the death penalty will not change the fact that innocent people are being convicted of crimes they did not commit. Arguably it may even make it more common (as the need for the enhanced burden of proof that capital cases entail will no longer exist). But even if it does not make it more common, that particular miscarriage of justice will continue to occur. Only now it will be additionally compounded by the fact that actual murderers who have committed these terrible crimes will be permitted to live on, supported by the society they so grievously harmed, alongside the innocents who have been locked away wrongly. We have therefore solved nothing, and added further injustices to the system, all for the sake of ensuring that innocents who are wrongfully convicted spend their lives in prison instead of being executed. And I remind you that you just made the case that life imprisonment (which these innocents are now being subjected to) is worse than the death penalty!

With respect to that opinion and those of the Italian prisoners, I do not presume to know whether it would be better to rot away in a cell or die in an execution. I do however know that it appears to me to be the height of fairness and justice that one who takes the life of others unjustly should be made to pay with his own. If execution is worse than life in prison, it is no more than they deserve, and if execution is better than life in prison, then it might well be unjust to sentence them to a worse fate than their victim's. Either way, execution is, to me, the reasonable choice.

And note, in that article you quoted, that the Italians are considering doing away with the life sentence as well. They're not the first country to do so. Shall we abolish all heavy punishment on the grounds that we might "make a mistake?" Shall we abolish all punitive punishment in general?

BTW, lest you think it a contradiction that I'm concerned with false positives and at the same time pointing out that some prison inmates prefer the death penalty to staying in jail, keep in mind the point that inmates can be released and compensated, but the dead cannot.

Most death penalty cases, for better or worse, take decades to sort through appeals before the actual execution is performed. If an innocent man is convicted, and the mistake spotted in the first two decades of their imprisonment, they can and should be released, just as they would be in the case of a life sentence.

If, however, the mistake is not spotted before then, and the person is executed, then that is a terrible thing. But is it really much less of a terrible thing to find out thirty years into a life sentence that the conviction was wrong and that the prisoner was innocent? How do you compensate someone for taking away thirty or forty years of their life? What payment do you make to them in restitution? Yes, they still have whatever years remain to them to live free and unhindered, which is indeed preferable to being dead. But I would hesitate to call it "good". And since in changing from one to the other, you have ensured that what I consider to be terrible injustices are committed in every single would-be capital murder case, I cannot support this change. Not even if it means that innocent men will be executed.

Whether the death penalty exists or not, you cannot abolish the punishment for the most heinous of crimes simply because your trial system is imperfect. The only solution there is to improve the trial system, not grant the worst criminals in the world immunity from the just consequences of their crimes, meaning, as I see it, death.

I disagree. Now keep in mind that morally I am in favor of kiling someone when they deserve it, but death is a 100% no-take-back thing. What this comes down to is how many innocent people you are willing to let die in order to retain this threat. For many, this number is zero, and I can respect that. You can say we need to inprove our courts, and yes, we do, but we will never reach 100% accuracy at discerning guilt, full stop. For every case you cite wherein it is certain that you think someone should die, I can cite to you one where it is ambiguous at best, or was thought to be a sure thing and ater proven wrong.

I oppose the death penalty on practical grounds. It costs more to put an inmate on death row than it costs for life in prison with no possibility for parole.

It is not a fallacy to assume incompetence, corruption, or simply ill fortune. Our nation of checks and balances is built on the truth that we are fallable beings. To say we need to improve ourselves is a constant of our existence. To say we can be infallible is a fantasy held by the naive and the libertarian, but I repeat myself.

As I have been saying exhaustively, yes, our court systems are fallible, and will always remain fallible to one degree or another. Shall we therefore abandon the pretense that we are capable as humans of enacting justice at all?

Abolishing the Death Penalty, as I argued above, will not prevent people from being wrongly convicted, and in fact it might actually cause more people to be wrongly convicted (capital cases are held to a higher standard of proof than non-capital ones). Even if it does not, the result will be more people locked up for life sentences for crimes they did not commit, as opposed to being placed on Death Row for it. Is it more just to lock someone undeserving away for forty years before letting them out with a pittance payment and an apology? Does that change make up for the fundamental injustice of allowing brutal murderers to live at the continued expense of their victims?

You may find that the answer to that is yes, that it is worth it. And that is a perfectly valid finding. But I simply do not.

Many nations, Mexico, France, apparently now Italy, have taken this a step further and claimed that because one can never be really sure, life sentences are as immoral as death sentences. There is movement to reduce the maximum criminal sentence for any crime at all to twenty years, all in the name of "we are never sure". I'm sorry to sound heartless, but at a certain point, if we do not enact penalties on criminals proportionate to the crimes they commit, then what we are performing is not justice, but a panacea mockery thereof, thrown in the faces of the victims and relatives of the victims. Not all of those victims are going to quietly sit down and let you deny them justice in the name of ontological uncertainty.

If it had been my sister or niece murdered by that woman and her band of thugs, I would demand justice be done upon her as my absolute right. My preference would of course be for execution, I could probably be brought to accept life in prison, but reducing the sentence beyond that because "someone innocent might go to jail forever" would encourage me to buy a gun and assassinate her myself, maddened with rage and grief as I would be. And I am not the only person who would do so.

After all, they can't do anything worse to me than they did to her, now can they?

The death penalty stands alone over other punishments because there is no way to atone for a miscarriage of justice in the event of a false positive. While one cannot go back in time to remove time spent in jail, something can be done to the person wronged, in most cases, within their lifetimes. It's not perfect, but to imply that somehow apologizing to the family of the dead is a better solution is absurd.

And to assume that we will go to the other extreme, to only temporarily lock up our worst inmates, is absurd and I will thank you to respond to what is presented, not what you fear will happen should this occur. I will categorically NOT discuss or defend a viewpoint other than my own because that is a point you would rather debate. If you wish to rail against another position, you are free to do so be under no circumstances should you bring that to my door.

There is simple math behind this, sad as it is to say, but what is the acceptable rate of risk you are willing to accept? What rate of false positives dying to a death penalty are you comfortable with? For some people, it's zero, and that's understandable, but what you're saying is that you are fine with a non-zero number. Forget the pleadings of special cases of absolute guilt or innocence, those have no value in this discussion as they are pleadings to emotion as opposed to anything worthwhile in justice. Justice, to be removed from vengeance, must be as removed from emotion as can be reasonably done. Otherwise, we might as well use lynch mob justice.

So what is an acceptable number? One in a hundred? A thousand? A million?

Remember that one of the fundamental aspects of justice is that yes, we should let the guilty go free in an effort to prevent the conviction of the innocent. You can pay a man money for what he might have earned in prison. You can remove the stain from his record. You ensure that they have access to care to help him cope with the ordeal of prison.

If he is dead, you can at best make amends to the family and pay for a new headstone.

Meanwhile, from a practical standpoint, the more effort you put into confirming guilt or innocence in a death penalty crime, the more escape hatches you allow to prevent a wrongful death, the more those avenues will be used by the guilty to put an undue cost on their detainment, which leads to the fact that it costs more to put someone on death row than to put them in prison for life.

Look, I'll agree that the entire Judicial System and Department of Corrections need massive overhauls, to say nothing of the laws that put people there in the first place.

Now, for the hypothetical of "well what if the guy dies in prison", that's a different scenario. Assuming it's of old age and not one of the myriad problems of the DoC, for most people, we're looking at 40-60 years of life. If new evidence or techniques cannot save someone from an unjust prison sentence in that expanse of time, well then it's a tragedy, but in that situation there is virtually nothing that can be done by any being on this planet to resolve the situation. In that case, everything reasonable has been done to ensure a just response and unless there is a provable conspiracy, nobody could really easily found to be at fault. It's so rare, particularly in this day and age, to be basically pointless as a point of contention in this discussion.

Again, I am against the death penalty on a practical level (under our system it doesn't work as a deterrent and ends up costing the people more for the care of its worst scum), and I understand why people are opposed to it morally. I also understand why people are for it, but, as they say, Justice is Blind (or at least that is the ideal), and thus needs to be applied with an even hand and with concern for what happens when it will inevitably makes a mistake.

General Havoc wrote:I hate to say it, but what I was saying means neither of those things. At no point have I said that the Presumption of Innocence is something which should be discarded, or is not merited. It is the foundation and bedrock of the entire justice system, and I have said and will say nothing against it.

What I am cautioning against is what I call "Presumption of Incompetence". That is to say, rather than presuming that someone is innocent until proven guilty, the act of presuming that they are innocent even after they have been proven guilty due to the fact that the justice system is systemically incompetent. Abolition of capital punishment is, as I see it, an example of this, not of presumption of innocence. As you pointed out, the burden of proof for capital crimes is significantly higher than that of other crimes. This is as it should be. However, when the established guilt of a criminal meets that enhanced burden of proof, survives the lengthy appeals process, and culminates in a sentence of execution, there is some certainty involved that the person has in fact committed the crime, and as I have argued elsewhere, there is a societal interest in seeing them pay for it.

Do people still wind up on Death Row who are innocent? Yes, unquestionably. This is an argument to improve the court system, the appeals process, and the means by which these verdicts are come to. They are not an argument to abolish just punishment.

That's what I get for relying on speed reading your post. Sorry.

Anyway: even if we ultimately come to the conclusion that someone is indeed guilty (and of course we must do that), then the punishment we mete out must still take into account the possibility that we are wrong. See, even if justice is not merely about utilitarianism and cost benefit analysis, we still must include these things in our judgements, or our justice system is flawed anyway. There isn't any way we can implement a system which ignores the possibility of error and still claim that we are doing justice, since everyone must be subjected to the same system. See more on this in point #9 (these posts are getting rather long... :| ).

General Havoc wrote:

The Minx wrote:Life in prison is hardly desirable for anyone, you can just as well see it as prolonging the punishment they have been given. Besides, execution is also going to cost society money, since death penalty trials are always more expensive than regular ones, and with good reason.

These things are true, and there is certainly a case to be made that Life in prison might well be a worse punishment than death. Ironically, if that were so, one might well object that in such a case, life in prison would be inappropriately harsh for a convicted killer, and that the lesser sentence of immediate death would be more appropriate for their crime.

Not saying I believe that, just a thought that came to mind :)

If it is inappropriately harsh, then we can limit it (as the Italians were considering). At the very least, we can claim that proportionate justice IS possible with prison and that we don't therefore need execution to achieve it.

General Havoc wrote:

The Minx wrote:Of course greater crimes should be punished more than lesser ones, that doesn't mean that death need be included in the equation. Anyway, what is the functional difference between retribution and vengeance?

You're right that I probably take a more utilitarian view of justice than you do.

By itself, no, that does not mean that death needs to be included in the equation. I simply believe as a matter of retributive justice that the death penalty is the just punishment in cases such as these, and thus lesser penalties are not just. The question is of course an inherently subjective one.

OK, but if lesser punishments are not just, then other punishments which are equal must be just, right?

General Havoc wrote:As to the functional difference between retribution and vengeance, it is primarily a matter of proportion and impartiality. Retribution is impartial, applied evenly and fairly to all perpetrators regardless of the status or capabilities of the victim. It has a proper scale of appropriateness, with room for such modifications as mercy or extenuating circumstance, and is designed to correct a moral wrong, in this case premeditated murder. Vengeance on the other hand is a personal matter, enacted by one party against another to correct a perceived wrong, whose scope may be objectively inappropriate, and often unlimited in scale.

If I punch you in the face, and the court sentences me to be caned, or to be made to work in community service, or otherwise subjected to just punishment for my actions, that is retributive justice. If I punch you in the face, and you go back to your house, get a gun, come back to my house, and shoot me (or even if you just come back and punch me in the face), that is vengeance. What most utilitarian judicial theorists would advocate is either preventative justice (imprisoning me so that I cannot punch you again), restorative justice (making me pay for your hospital bills), or both. Neither solution is at all unreasonable, and cases could be made that both also represent retributive justice as well. However in the case of premeditated murder, no restorative justice is possible (as the murderer cannot raise the dead), and, in my view, preventative justice (locking the bastard away where he can murder nobody else) does not itself represent proper justice for the crime. Only retributive justice (execution) does this, in my opinion.

Your mileage may, of course, vary

It does indeed. That is, if by "retributive justice", you mean that the guilty must suffer the exact same fate as the person who suffered the attack, and none other (even one equally bad). But if punching someone can be punished by requiring the guilty to spend time in jail, what is it about jail that fails to meet the retributive justice standard for murder? See point re: Italian prisoners actually asking to die.

General Havoc wrote:

I haven't actually claimed that the justice system is merely preventative, nor do I think it should be. But I agree that IF we assume that it is a miscarriage of justice not to execute someone, it is less so than executing an innocent. I think that our differences lie in the fact that I don't loose sleep knowing that she'll be rotting in jail rather than in a coffin as punishment.

You may be right in that case. Frankly, I probably will not be losing sleep over this matter (for one thing, she WAS sentenced to death), as both punishments are quite horrible. But if twenty years go by and the appeals end, and she is actually executed for her crime, will you lose sleep then?

That is a very real possibility. I don't approve of execution, regardless of who it is. That applies to anything from the average street thug to Bin Laden.

General Havoc wrote:Not to say that you should or should not. I've no objection to someone who has a moral abhorrence of killing, or someone who simply believes the legal right of the state to kill should not exist. But I do not possess either, and find the prospect of her execution to be justice, if delayed.

I hold that killing is to be avoided; it should not be impossible to kill, but only provided that NO other alternative exists. If there is a reasonable possibility to use some method achieve a goal (which you are morally required to achieve) without killing, then you are morally required to use it instead of killing, in my view. That goes for the state as well as individuals.

General Havoc wrote:

Yup, this does look to me like saying "it is so because it is so". Sorry

Well it looks that way because it basically is that. As I said, I'm not making claims to some objective authority here. The nature of justice is a question that has vexed philosophers since the dawn of time. I believe in retributive justice, and therefore that what I have said is right. It is, however, merely opinion, and can be gainsaid by those whose sense of justice differs.

Well, sorry, that's not terribly convincing. If we're arguing fundamental postulates, we aren't going to get anywhere.

But I like to think that my reasons for being opposed to execution are based on something more than "just because", no offense.

General Havoc wrote:

You don't know that for certain. You merely assume that based on the outcome of the trial. Don't you think that there have been cases where people have been utterly certain that the defendant was guilty and it turned out that he was not? And especially here when all you have to go on is a news article? There is always the chance of false positives, even when you think that you know something with absolute certainty.

And if the prosecutor had not sought the death penalty, or the crime had been committed in a state with no death penalty, would we be any more certain? The established guilt or innocence of the subject has nothing to do with the sentence imposed, indeed it's even more strict in the case of a capital crime, if anything. By the logic that 'we don't know for certain', what grounds do we have to imprison her at all? What grounds to imprison anyone? Imprisonment can be reversed of course, but the thirty years of one's life that an innocent man spends behind bars cannot be restored to him. Is it not therefore unconscionable to imprison criminals given our lack of certainty?

We would not be any more certain. We would be more able to reverse a bad judgement.

General Havoc wrote:False positives do happen, and innocent people are found guilty, and even executed, but for the system of justice to function at all, there is a line that we establish and draw beyond which we say that a person is guilty. We intentionally draw that line such that any reasonable doubt is sufficient to secure acquittal. We establish courts and procedures to insure that irrelevancies are burned away to the extent we can. But in the end, we cannot eliminate all doubt from trial proceedings, nor can we use the fact that we have not eliminated it as an excuse to deny justice arbitrarily to every case we see.

I doubt that anyone is arguing that we can be 100% certain, at least we agree on that. Also, we agree that there must be a point at which we apply the penalty, whatever it is, as if the person is guilty. This doesn't really refute the point I raised, though.

See, while in any given trial we act as if the person is guilty or not guilty at the end of the process, that is entirely different from the process of designing the justice system itself. When we do that we have to take into account the fact that we're consigning X innocents to whatever the punishment is.

General Havoc wrote:

It is not equivalent! Even assuming that you're right, and execution of the convict provides some redress for the crime, tit hat does not - as you agreed above - bring back the victim. Therefore, it is always less of a miscarriage than the death of a wrongfully accused person, assuming that it is a miscarriage at all, and you agreed to that also. Therefore, we are not abandoning justice by not having the death penalty, in fact we're doing precisely the opposite. This is especially true since life imprisonment can be seen as a more severe punishment than a "way out", a life prison inmate has nothing to look forward to but a 10x10 foot cell, possibly for decades with no end in sight.

Abolishing the death penalty will not change the fact that innocent people are being convicted of crimes they did not commit. Arguably it may even make it more common (as the need for the enhanced burden of proof that capital cases entail will no longer exist). But even if it does not make it more common, that particular miscarriage of justice will continue to occur. Only now it will be additionally compounded by the fact that actual murderers who have committed these terrible crimes will be permitted to live on, supported by the society they so grievously harmed, alongside the innocents who have been locked away wrongly. We have therefore solved nothing, and added further injustices to the system, all for the sake of ensuring that innocents who are wrongfully convicted spend their lives in prison instead of being executed. And I remind you that you just made the case that life imprisonment (which these innocents are now being subjected to) is worse than the death penalty!

I argued that it was possible that life in prison is worse than the death penalty. The point was that retributive justice is possible without death, and that therefore you have not shirked your responsibility in meting out justice by imposing a long prison sentence. My apologies, but you have never actually addressed this key point directly. Of course there will be false positives with life in prison. But... see previous points re: the ability to take back error.

BTW: your point regarding burden of proof can easily be shown to be a two edged sword: since you require higher burden of proof for death penalties, you are also increasing the chances that the guilty will go free by requiring death.

General Havoc wrote:With respect to that opinion and those of the Italian prisoners, I do not presume to know whether it would be better to rot away in a cell or die in an execution. I do however know that it appears to me to be the height of fairness and justice that one who takes the life of others unjustly should be made to pay with his own. If execution is worse than life in prison, it is no more than they deserve, and if execution is better than life in prison, then it might well be unjust to sentence them to a worse fate than their victim's. Either way, execution is, to me, the reasonable choice.

If you assume that, but... you assume that the killer values his own life no more or less than the victim. Guarantee that perfect symmetry exists is hardly certain even with the death penalty.

General Havoc wrote:And note, in that article you quoted, that the Italians are considering doing away with the life sentence as well. They're not the first country to do so. Shall we abolish all heavy punishment on the grounds that we might "make a mistake?" Shall we abolish all punitive punishment in general?

Not all heavy punishment should be abolished, no.

If you argue that it is worse to lock someone up forever than to kill them, then permanent imprisonment might be something we should do away with, as per your previous point.

General Havoc wrote:

BTW, lest you think it a contradiction that I'm concerned with false positives and at the same time pointing out that some prison inmates prefer the death penalty to staying in jail, keep in mind the point that inmates can be released and compensated, but the dead cannot.

Most death penalty cases, for better or worse, take decades to sort through appeals before the actual execution is performed. If an innocent man is convicted, and the mistake spotted in the first two decades of their imprisonment, they can and should be released, just as they would be in the case of a life sentence.

If, however, the mistake is not spotted before then, and the person is executed, then that is a terrible thing. But is it really much less of a terrible thing to find out thirty years into a life sentence that the conviction was wrong and that the prisoner was innocent? How do you compensate someone for taking away thirty or forty years of their life? What payment do you make to them in restitution? Yes, they still have whatever years remain to them to live free and unhindered, which is indeed preferable to being dead. But I would hesitate to call it "good". And since in changing from one to the other, you have ensured that what I consider to be terrible injustices are committed in every single would-be capital murder case, I cannot support this change. Not even if it means that innocent men will be executed.

It may not be good, but it is better than nothing at all, no matter what it is. This argument seems to contradict your earlier stance on justice when you said words to the effect of "just because we can't guarantee 100% certainty, we shouldn't abolish heavy punishment" (which I never claimed, BTW ), but here you are using exactly that kind of reasoning with regards to compensation? "We can't compensate someone for having lost 30 years of their life, so we must cling to the death penalty"... seriously?

Besides, if you wait 20 years for the appeals process to be completed, aren't you sparing the guilty person decades of their life anyway?

Also WHY is it that you insist that the justice of not executing someone is "terrible" if you acknowledge the possibility that life in prison can potentially become worse than death? Then since prison-as-punishment covers options from light punishment to fates worse than death, it must cover death at some point, so what need have we for death to ensure proportional punishment?

General Havoc wrote:Whether the death penalty exists or not, you cannot abolish the punishment for the most heinous of crimes simply because your trial system is imperfect. The only solution there is to improve the trial system, not grant the worst criminals in the world immunity from the just consequences of their crimes, meaning, as I see it, death.

If you want to improve the justice system, I'll be supportive of that. But the more perfection you try to achieve, the more money it will cost, and the greater the practical arguments for keeping them locked up.

I think this sums up our differences: you believe it is an intolerable injustice to see a killer not to be executed (regardless of the possibility of innocents being executed along with him/her), while I see it as an intolerable injustice to see an innocent person executed along with the guilty (given other punishments being available).

I'd make a "bad" Inquisitor.


(edited for clarification)