Most people are making moral, rather than strictly legal, judgements when making comparisons between the implementation of capital punishment and murder.
When the very evidence used to convict and execute is called into question then there can be no assessment that such executions were 'lawful.' This is more than enough to engender doubt that our legal standards are good enough for such condemnation, and that allowing the status quo to continue until we theoretically start getting it right is unconscionable.
The four attributes of a lawful execution I identified serve just as well to distinguish it from murder in a moral sense as in a legal sense. The act that triggered the government's response, as well as the government's purpose in responding with the death penalty, and the arduous process of imposing the death penalty, all make a lawful execution different in kind, morally, from simple murder.
I agree that government agents lying about the evidence taints the entire proceeding.
That you can't add another criterion to the notion of "certainty" since human fallibility necessarily means we can make mistakes in what we classify as certain. The reason I brought up mitochondrial DNA is because it's the perfect example of this. Scientists back then were just as certain of the capacity of mitochondrial DNA to be unique to a person as they are that regular DNA is unique to a person nowadays. We know now that mitochondrial DNA has at best 50% chance og being accurate despite people actually being convicted via mitochondrial dna evidence. "Certainty" is a function of what humans believe they can be confident about, but we know, based on historical evidence, that what humans can be really confident about are also things we can be really wrong, rendering the whole notion of various certainty classes of "beyond reasonable doubt" moot.
"Beyond a reasonable doubt" is not synonymous with "certainty." It excludes doubts that are not based in reason, such as speculative doubts or merely possible doubts. So, there's clearly a degree of certainty that is higher than it--one that would not be satisfied if any speculative doubts or merely possible doubts remained. Blecker (whom I referred to in my initial post in this thread) describes his preferred standard as follows:
Before we sentence a defendant to life without parole, and especially before we condemn him to die, I would require a higher burden of persuasion than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. A jury should have no nagging doubts, however unreasonable. Before they sentence a person to die, a jury should be convinced beyond any residual doubt that he did it, and also be convinced “to a moral certainty” that he deserves to die.
That's a standard I could get behind. Though I said that 1-4% of those sentenced to death being innocent is "not especially troubling," naturally it would be preferable that there be fewer--particularly if that can be accomplished without unduly increasing the risk of letting a guilty person get away. I think that can be, by establishing one standard for guilt of a crime for which the death penalty is sought, and a higher standard before the death penalty may be imposed.
This is another one of those moments where people try to pretend there isn't wide consensus on an issue by pointing to the few studies that even simply say it's
inconclusive let alone beneficial.
This is 88% believing this. The experts in the field, asked to answer based on the empirical research what they believe is true on this "controversial" subject. This is the equivalent of saying there's a controversy among climate change scientists. There is no controversy, just wide eyed crazies wishing harder than they've ever done that the majority of the evidence stops proving them wrong. We have a billion real world examples of countries like this, and we have the studies of which the majority agree.
This is nothing but an appeal to authority. "I don't have actual evidence to support my case, so I'll just point to the number of experts who agree with me!" Worse, it's an appeal to deeply flawed authority. The 94 criminologists polled do not constitute a random sample of all criminologists, nor even just of the members of the American Society of Criminologists. Instead, they were hand-picked by the authors on the following basis:
Radelet & Lacock said:
To shed light on this dispute, we drew up a list in mid-2008 of every living person who (1) was a Fellow in the American Society of Criminology (ASC), (2) had won the ASC’s Sutherland Award, the highest award given by that organization for contributions to criminological theory, or (3) was a president of the ASC between 1997 and the present.
In effect, when the authors of your study say that "88.2% of the polled criminologists do not believe that the death penalty is a deterrent," they're literally talking about 67 people associated with this one organization, and nobody else. And given that your authors don't really explain
why they chose the methodology they did, we're left with the very real possibility that they chose it because they knew ahead of time what those specific 94 people believed.
And the "wide eyed crazies" you disparage include the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty, as noted in the PolitiFact article I linked to earlier. The NAS study concluded:
The committee concludes that research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates. Therefore, the committee recommends that these studies not be used to inform deliberations requiring judgments about the effect of the death penalty on homicide. Consequently, claims that research demonstrates that capital punishment decreases or increases the homicide rate by a specified amount or has no effect on the homicide rate should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment.
(
Here's a critique of the NAS study by death penalty proponent John Lott, should anyone be interested.)
So, again, revenge. As I said. Bloodlust. There's no such thing as a "punishment fitting the crime" if it harms society at large to do it. Society did not agree to those terms.
Blecker distinguishes between revenge and retribution in the following manner:
Opponents wrongly equate retribution and revenge, because they both would inflict pain and suffering on those who have inflicted pain and suffering on us.
Whereas revenge knows no bounds, retribution must be limited, proportional and appropriately directed: The retributive punishment fits the crime. We must never allow our satisfaction at doing justice to deteriorate into sadistic revenge.
You can buy it or not, but you should at least be honest enough to reckon with your opponents' arguments rather than glossing over them in your haste to win an Internet argument.
And I'm completely at a loss at your "society did not agree to those terms." I mean, society enacted the laws that created those terms. As with your definition of "experts" earlier, your definition of "society" is woefully underinclusive. You mean just you.
So your answer is "sure i mean it may bankrupt some small towns, but it doesn't have to - instead the entire state should have to take on the burden of a demonstrably failed policy!"
No, my answer is that you're complaining about an incidental problem in the existing death-penalty regime. There's nothing inherent in the death penalty that requires small towns to go bankrupt trying to enforce it. Restructure the funding mechanism, and your complaint about insolvency is resolved. Put differently, yours is not a complaint about the death penalty, but about how the justice system is funded.
No innocent deaths are acceptable, even if the current measurement is in the 90% that's just because of what we're currently able to measure. Anti-capital punishment sentiment is pessimistic about that success rate going up, or even staying the same.
Dude. Come on, seriously?
We're talking about innocent people being killed and you'd be alright with an error rate up to 4% just because it would mean we get to keep executing the other 96%? Forget 4%. If it's happened once that's a black mark on this country's history.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of a wrongly convicted person in the death chamber. It's horrifying to think about.
1-4% of people sentenced to death being innocent is an OK margin of error to a guy in this thread. I guess that confirms the "gotta break a few eggs" joke on the first page.
It is OK to destroy hundreds of lives over a few decades to get revenge on some bad people. It is OK to commit the gravest violation of an innocent life, to strip them of the very right to live, so we can feel like we got the bad guy in some other cases.
It doesn't even have value as a detterent. Just fucking pointless.
I'm not even going to get to the heart of the monstrous comment you made literally saying it's perfectly acceptable if people's entire life, liberty and pursuit of happiness is eviscerated in the name of disgusting, petty bloodlust. Truly outrageous. Like "oh statistically it's not that bad, I mean that's about the margin of error I'd expect from a well-oiled killing machine!" I mean, the fuck? What can even be added to this shit?
These are largely emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. Any human institution will include errors. Many of those errors will result in death. The question is not merely whether there will be deadly errors, but whether the cost of deadly errors is outweighed by the benefits of whatever is being done. Here, the benefits are: (1) sparing future victims of (i) a recidivist or (ii) a criminal who would be otherwise deterred (which remains a possibility not contradicted by the evidence, on balance); (2) doing justice by imposing a punishment that fits particularly heinous crimes; (3) providing an orderly process through which society's bloodlust can be channeled, while providing protections to the accused against that bloodlust; and (4) providing personal closure to the family and friends of the victims of particularly heinous crimes.
In any event, if your primary concern is that the innocent are being put to death, but not that the guilty are being put to death, then the solution would be raise the standard of proof necessary to impose the death penalty, or otherwise make it more difficult to do so, and not to abolish the death penalty altogether.
1-4% of innocent people being sentenced to death is OK to someone. Killing INNOCENT people is ok to a poster here. I hope he just got caught in obtuse argumentation to win the debate because such views are borderline psychopathic (no dude, you are not being "rational and objective").
See above. (I even did you the favor of quoting you so you'd easily know your comment was being discussed.)
