this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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I think people like her deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison, but no crime, no matter how severe, deserves a death penalty.
I think there are certainly crimes that deserve the death penalty (think CP type crimes). Just get those people out of society tbh, but this is just my opinion.
The only problem I have is with 100% certainly. You would have to be certain, or very very close to absolute certainty, that you have the right person who committed the crime.
If the person goes to prison for the rest of their lives, it will keep society safe from them either way. The death penalty is not making society safer.
People in maximum security prisons can, and do, escape. Sometimes the commit more violent crimes once they escape. A malicious governor can, in most states, pardon any person they want, and there's no legal recourse. (In my state, the governor does not have the legal power to pardon a person until they've served at least 6 (?) years, and have been recommended by the parole board.)
On the other hand, people don't get raised from the dead, no one gets resurrected, and there's no reincarnation. Dead is dead, and is as safe to society as is possible.
The death penalty is certainly over-used, and applied in cases where it's not likely necessary, but I absolutely, 100% believe that people like e.g., Gary Ridgeway should be executed as quickly as is possible.
Point about escaping/pardon. I acknowledge that society is ever so slightly safer when exceptionally dangerous criminals are executed.
About the risk of being pardoned by a malicious state, it's true... But the other way could also be true that a malicious state can execute people who don't deserve to be executed, like Snowden... Perhaps a compromise is to make particularly heinous crimes unpardonable? That would be a decent alternative to the death penalty, and it would be very difficult to repeal such a law.
As for escaping prison, it's already rare that someone escapes from it. The solution is making better high security prisons for the most violent and dangerous criminals. I think it's definitely possible to make escaping so difficult and dangerous that it wouldn't be a problem. Make a prison on an island or an old oil rig, implants to track the prisoner's location (a fancier version of the anti-theft tags in clothing stores), random X-rays to check they don't have anything hidden in their bodies. All of these are definitely better than executing someone, though personally I think that maximum security prison breaks are already so rare it wouldn't be worth it.
Remember that people did escape from Alcatraz. And Devil's Island, IIRC. Never underestimate the ingenuity of prisoners that really, really don't want to be prisoners.
I think that the death penalty should be used in extremely limited cases, cases where there's not even a shadow of a doubt about guilt, and where the person has committed multiple heinous crimes spanning a period of time (say, >1 year). So a simple mass murderer wouldn't be eligible, but a serial child rapist would be. You'd also need to have forensic evidence that at a minimum cleared the Daubert standard, and you'd have to exclude forensic evidence that relied on standards that hadn't been published and peer-reviewed. So DNA and fingerprints would be in, but forensic bite impression analysis would be very definitely out.
I think the evidentiary bar should be extremely high for death penalty cases. I think that it's currently mostly applied to people that don't have enough money to get better legal counsel.
I would also say that convicted people should be able to request the death penalty rather than life without parole. I can't speak for anyone else, but if I had the choice between decades in prison, or being summarily executed, I'd take execution.
Yes, people do escape, but it's extremely rare. I'm far more worried about the state having the legal power to execute someone than an individual escaping from prison.
Also, giving the prisoner the choice to either be executed or imprisoned for life would give an incentive for the operators of the prisons to treat their prisoners even worse so prisoners would choose to be executed.
The risk of me getting wrongfully convicted of something and getting a death sentence is higher than the chance of some dangerous murder escaping prison and hurting me.
Unfortunately being absolutely 100% certain is not a luxury we have in the majority of cases. People are framed, new evidence comes up, things like lie detectors and blood splatter analysis turn out to be junk science. Life in prison can get overturned and corrected if mistakes were made, death can't.
I think that you can make it much, much more difficult to get a wrongful conviction in a case that's eligible for the death penalty though. I think that, for starters, all interactions with police should require video and audio, so that suspects can't be coercively questioned for 16 hours without an attorney before signing a "confession". I think any claimed evidence should have to have standards that were published, peer-reviewed, and repeatable before they could use it. And I think that crimes eligible for an imposed death penalty should have to take place over a period of time, rather than a single event. E.g., a robbery/murder shouldn't get the death penalty, but (per an earlier comment I made) a serial child rapist should. I would even say that you should be absolutely required to have forensic evidence in order to get a death penalty conviction; I believe that most exonerations were for convictions that relied on witness testimony, official misconduct, and coerced confessions, usually combined with an overworked and ineffective defense attorney.
I dunno; even the possibility of someone like Ed Kemper ever getting out--like if he ever tells the parole board that he thinks he's finally safe--is terrifying.
I vote that all statists should get the bullet.
That's an interesting interpretation.
Yes, I think that Roger Stone should be executed, so that if Trump is re-elected he can't pardon him.
Certainty is a dangerous thing when people lie out of self interest or from coercion.