The US constitution (amendment 6) ostensibly provides the right to a speedy trial. Amendment 8 forbids "cruel and unusual" punishment.
What I don't understand is how people can be against the death penalty but yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives. I personally know someone who, if they live to be 75, will ultimately end up being in prison for over 5 decades. How is that not "cruel and unusual"?
>>What I don't understand is how people can be against the death penalty but yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives.
So I'm one of those people. It's simple really - death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't. Yes it sucks that sometimes we might have to release someone who spent 30 years falsely imprisoned - but it's sure a hell lot better than finding out that there is no one to release because the person was executed a decade ago. And secondly, I just don't see any need to execute people, the risk vs reward is not worth it.
> death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't
I think the word you're looking for here is "irreversible", not "permanent." Life imprisonment is, by definition, permanent.
And yes, you can "reverse" life in prison by setting the prisoner free. But what you can't so easily reverse is the psychological damage done by the false imprisonment.
Depends on which alternative you're talking about. One alternative is not to execute people or lock them up in inhumane conditions at all (the Norwegians do this). It's not at all clear to me that writing checks when you get it wrong is better.
In theory, if applied flawlessly, maybe nothing is wrong with the permanence of the death penalty.
In practice, mistakes are made, regularly, and these mistakes are distributed unevenly, such that the poor and minorities suffer the most.
The many wrongful deaths at the hands of the government is a good reason to be skeptical of arguments which assume the death penalty can be applied perfectly. It can’t.
For a simple counter example, you can look up the Outreau case : 12 people were accused of raping and videotaping children, with multiple testimonies. And 5 years later, the majority of them were found to be actually innocent.
If death penalty was a thing in France, they would have got it for sure, as it was a very emotionnal case at the time.
You can also check the movie 12 Angry Men, which is a work of fiction obviously, but still very relevant on why counting on 'black and white cases with extreme evidence' is simply wishful thinking, and will lead to innocent people being killed
The case of Timothy Evans, who was wrongfully convicted and hanged in the 1950s in the UK (classic case of him being in the wrong place at the wrong time) is even more appropriate. After his execution the actual killer (a serial killer) went on to kill several other women.
It was highly influential in the eventual abolition of the death penalty in the UK in the 1960s.
> In cases where it’s black and white with extreme evidence why even allow them to continue living on everyone’s dime.
Because the cost of putting them to death using a system that has sufficient checks to (mostly) prevent innocent people from being executed (i.e. the current system, if you believe it works) is greater than the cost of imprisoning people for life.
Well that just means the current system needs some changes. Just because that's the way it currently is doesn't mean that's the way it always has to be or always was. Some laws and policies may need to change, but treating this like an immutable fact is like being content with a super inefficient piece of code that's bottlenecking your application.
Well, if the legal system was completely infallible in deciding who is guilty then that might be an argument. But I'm not aware of any legal system in any country that can make that particular claim.
> Yes it sucks that sometimes we might have to release someone who spent 30 years falsely imprisoned - but it's sure a hell lot better than finding out that there is no one to release because the person was executed a decade ago.
For society's conscience, certainly. For the prisoner, I'd say it depends. I suppose most will agree that a swift death would be preferable to 65 years of extreme torture with a "sorry, you're free to go" in the end. It comes down to whether long term imprisonment, especially solitary confinement, is close enough to torture. Some prisoners apparently prefer death, the suicide rate is much higher than that of the general population, and iirc, quite a few prisoners dropped their appeals and asked to be executed, likely because they prefer a horrible end to never ending horror.
In a hypothetical scenario, imagine whatever torture you consider the absolute most cruel. Would you prefer somebody suffer that torture for 50 years or be killed tomorrow? If you choose the latter, we've established that death can be a preferable alternative to otherwise horrible circumstances. I'm not saying that imprisonment is the most extreme torture imaginable, but it's probably not the best thing ever either. It's somewhere in between, likely closer to the torture end of the scale.
If and where you draw the line between "this is fine" and "no person shall suffer like that for decades, no matter what they may have done, ending their life is the humane thing to do" is up to you.
> It's simple really - death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't.
Death being permanent is a feature, not a bug. Is it possible that evil people can continue to negatively influence society from prison? Or even continue to commit heinous crimes in prison? I'd say this scenario happens much more often than killing an innocent.
For example, organized crime. If you don't kill organized crime leaders, they continue to spread their secret oaths among other prisoners and continue to manage affairs even outside of prison via comm links.
I agree that it's bad to kill innocents, but I think with the right policy and rigor, we could make the death penalty an efficient and painless process that has an extremely low false positive rate.
In my mind it's like "yeah, we save the extremely rare false positive at the expense of allowing all the non-false positives to continue to spread and propagate evil for decades"
> For me personally, 0 is the only acceptable number.
But why? Surely you must acknowledge that the "innocent people murdered by the state rate" is inversely proportional to the "innocent people murdered by criminals who should have been put to death but weren't rate"? This latter rate includes prison murders, calling/paying for hits from prison, influencing copycat killers, being released and then killing again, etc.
So basically you are trading one form of innocent death for another (not to mention introducing a host of other negative effects to society by allowing truly evil people to interact with people in said society). For me, death penalty is acceptable as long as the "innocent people murdered by the state rate" is less than the "innocent people murdered by criminals who should have been put to death but weren't rate".
It's crude to try to compare how awful one murder is to another, but it does feel in some ways worse if the murder of an innocent person is funded by taxpayer money and performed by people claiming to have the legitimate authority to govern me.
It turns out a lot of those issues you call out are only a real problem in America. Our prison system is barbaric and the solution isn't to just kill all criminals, it's to reform and rebuild our prison system to match our EU counterparts.
> Our prison system is barbaric and the solution isn't to just kill all criminals
I never said it was. I think DP should be reserved for organized crime leaders, serial killers, and other people who have repeatedly shown that they are fundamentally incompatible with a good society.
A crime of passion such as a husband killing the man cheating with his wife does not necessarily deserve DP and would be a candidate for reform.
Yes, but there were people here in this very thread wanting to use the death penalty for varying level of offenses. And your definition of people that are 'fundamentally incompatible with society' leaves a lot of room for interpretation considering there are those that believe color or identification is enough to make you incompatible with society.
To be in favor of the death penalty is to accept the possibility of abuse, something we've seen occur where people are rushed to death row before their criminality can be fully presumed.
The death penalty should never be on the table because the possibility of abuse is too high and the history of it being abused proves that it can't be handled in any rational way.
I'm not the person you replied to, but is this supposed to be a gotcha? I assume the answer would be zero. But if you accept that the criminal justice system makes mistakes (between 100k-200k in current prison population per https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-018-9381-1) then it's obvious it's better to be able to have reversible punishments. Unless you are suggestion the complete abolition of incarceration for all crimes?
I suppose what I'm rejecting is the dichotomy between imprisonment being "reversible" and execution being "irreversible." Neither are reversible, of course. You can't give someone back the time they were unjustly imprisoned.
I think the reversibility argument is a sloppy way of trying to say that there is some massive difference in kind between a lifetime of imprisonment and an execution. The argument seems to be implying that outright ending a human life is taking infinite value, but imprisoning someone for an entire lifespan is taking only finite value. That's the only way it would make sense to allow for the possibility of some erroneous lifetime imprisonments, but not allow for the possibility of some erroneous executions.
First, you relying too much on semantics. "Reversible" is understood to be "I can reverse taking away someone's freedom". They were in prison, but now they are not. You can't give back the lost time, and everyone understands that. Also, it comes from "reversing a conviction" which is a legal term.
Secondly, and I'm sorry, but your characterization is incredibly sloppy. The overall outcome is better if even one exoneration happens and you assume equal preference for life imprisonment vs execution. However:
* Further, while the preference might not be "infinite" you can just look at the overwhelming majority - innocent or not - of death row prisoners that exhaust all avenues of appeal to see that there is a strong preference there.
First, I don’t think I’m playing semantic tricks. The finality of imprisonment and execution are the same. You don’t get time back if you’re released from prison. The difference is that you’re still alive, but of course that’s already the difference between imprisonment and execution. The fact that the death penalty involves killing someone is just definitional, it’s not a justification for why the death penalty is bad.
Secondly, of course I don’t dispute that there’s generally a preference for life imprisonment over execution.
The finality of eating an apple is the same if you are an external observer and just judging it by the direction of the time arrow.
From the perspective of the - potentially falsely - accused, "The difference is that you’re still alive" is a pretty fundamental distinction and "The finality of imprisonment and execution are the same" is false.
> I agree that it's bad to kill innocents, but I think with the right policy and rigor, we could make the death penalty an efficient and painless process that has an extremely low false positive rate.
How low of a rate are you willing to accept, and how do you plan on getting there?
By restricting death penalty not just to the type of crime, but the type of crime and the type of evidence. I think death penalty should be reserved for repeat offenders of egregious crimes where there is overwhelming strong evidence.
The standard is already beyond a shadow of a doubt and requires the prosecution, original judge, jury, several rounds of appeals overseen by more judges. After which the governor or president can weigh in.
Humans are fallible and therefore incapable of creating an infallible justice system.
Allowing any death penalty means murdering some number of innocent people to "get" a greater number of bad people who you already have locked up.
So answer the question. How many innocent people are sufficiently low collateral damage and stop pretending we can only execute bad people.
Keep in mind that those statistics are very indirect, particularly since once an execution is carried out, no one has any incentive or interest in reexamining the case.
I can't name a hard figure, because it's a relative figure. The rate is sufficiently low enough if it is lower than the rate of innocent deaths caused by not executing exceptionally bad people.
If you’re making a Pareto Optimization, it’s reasonable to think that if the probability of being murdered by the state is still much lower than the probability of being murdered by an incompletely reformed criminal for each subset of the population, there’s an argument that every subset of the population was made better off.
I’d hate to overlook a 10x improvement for all because one group got a 2/10ths penalty and another got a 1/10th penalty. The alternative (to give one discriminated against group a penalty 50x worse and the lesser discriminated group a penalty 100x worse “because fairness demands it”) is worse, IMO.
I am a little worried that you are using these made up numbers actively to justify your thinking to yourself. I understand it’s just a hypothetical to explain your framework for reasoning. But you should have actual numbers before you commit to that framing, no?
The subtext of my comment was that your formulation might be immoral given the racial context (i.e. “racist”), and I think your detailed answer still probably is that, by assigning different wrongful death targets to different races. But I understand your moral position is that you just want the best possible for each race, which is.... well, racist but morally defensible I suppose.
I believe you introduced the “what if the state murder rate was racially biased?”
I used a constant non-state rate in my example. If I had actual data, I’d have been happy to use it. Without that, I had to go theoretical and argue that if every group is made better off, there’s an argument to support. Surely, before such a plan is changed, it will be studied to an extent that’s impractical for news.yc commenting.
Life imprisonment is cruel? For the absolute worst possible crimes? I don’t think so.
Life imprisonment is unusual? For the absolute worst possible crimes? Again, no, not really. It certainly must suck, but what is unusual about society wishing to protect itself from it’s worst offenders?
Life imprisonment has the huge benefit of being undoable if new evidence exonerates someone.
I am certainly opposed to “BS life imprisonment”, like US drug three strike laws leading to that outcome. But for murder, rape, etc? No, I personally am entirely on board with life imprisonment, provided the justice system can demonstrate the person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
I don’t think that’s true in the USA - the idea that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can make it cruel and unusual is the essence of the famous Furman v Georgia decision of the US Supreme Court in 1971 which led to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty until the late 1970s. What’s more eg in Coker v Georgia in 1977 the US Supreme Court ruled that rape of an adult woman was insufficient to qualify for the death penalty.
Well like I said below I maybe hoping for something that doesn't exist. I assume enough legal action has taken place to figure this out but I wouldn't really know. However, I agree that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can be cruel and usual (depending on how the punishment is defined). I fail to see how the second case example relates if the first is true.
What is cruel or unusual seems unrelated to the crime severity because cruel and unusual is a separate concept like the first example seems to show or so I thought. Crime severity and severity of the punishment should be related though.
This is why, in my opinion, solitary confinement can be called might be cruel and unusual. It's categorically different from prison.
I hope any of that makes sense.
Maybe I'm hoping for a more thoughtful legal system than is actually in place. While your example would be unusual it's only unusual now. Meaning you're basing what what is usual on the length of the prison sentence can gradually increased over time as long as it never appears to be usual compare to the "current mean". Much of this is legislated which implies to me that unusual would fall outside of what has been legislated.
Forcing someone to eat a box of baking soda would be unusual to me because it's in a totally different category of punishment. Like fining, community service, or death instead of prison.
> Life imprisonment has the huge benefit of being undoable
That's a blatant lie. If an innocent man ends up in jail at the age of 20 and it "is undone" when he's 40, his life is destroyed anyway: No career, no savings, no family, no prospects for ever amounting to anything. How do you undo that?
Get off your moral high horse. Life imprisonment is more cruel than death.
That's a good question, and worth pondering outside the context of the state's monopoly on violence. Would the average person prefer Ted Bundy kill them immediately or lock them in his basement for 20 years?
This entire comment chain seems to be conflating two common arguments:
1) If it's wrong to kill an innocent man, it's also wrong to imprison that same man; you can call one more unjust than the other, but (as the argument goes) you can't say that one is justified while the other is not.
2) Our society has gotten too used to locking people up in metal cages for several decades; there are many arguments in favor of moving back to flogging[1][2]
Yes, definitely it would be far less cruel than subjecting them to the penal system for the best years of their life. Especially if it is a quick, painless method of execution.
It's sort of too bad that there aren't many mostly empty wastes that we can exile people to any longer. Remove them from society, but give them the chance to make what life they can under the sky.
Were the years Nelson Mandela spent imprisoned ones that would have been the "best years of his life" had he not been imprisoned, considering what occurred in the years after he was released? How do we determine value of time spent alive? Was it worth it and valuable to him to suffer through years of imprisonment in order to reach the later years? Was is worth it and valuable to society? Would he and/or society have answered differently during the years of his imprisonment than now? Whose answer (now-Mandela's or younger-Mandela's, now-society's or younger-society's) matters most?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. The difference is small, though.
But context matters. I'm really objecting to the weird notion that miscarriages of justice are sort-of okay, as long as they don't result in capital punishment. It makes little difference whether a man's life is unjustly destroyed or unjustly extinguished!
You are honestly arguing that killing innocent people is better than wrongful imprisonment?
Besides the fact that execution (last I checked) is permanent, there are no methods used in the US (or most places in the world) that guarantee a quick, painless death.
Practically, the most likely methods (lethal injection) end up torturing people to death.
That’s really the kind of world you want to live in?
Yes I am. Seriously, how is this even hard to understand?
Imagine yourself in the situation: you are 20, you go to jail. You are 40, now exonerated. You have no friends, no skills, no job, no money. You are a failure. It's unfixable. You are likely to commit suicide.
The point isn't so much whether a messed up life is still better than no life, the point is that someone upthread glibly asserted that wrongful imprisonment can be reversed. That is a convenient lie. Those years are lost. Forever. Irreversibly.
Still not getting through? Fine, imagine a women spending her third and fourth decade in jail. That means no children. Ever. Is that enough to get the point across that imprisonment causes permanent, irrevocable damage and that it isn't markedly different from capital punishment in this regard?
Well, I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I think your reasoning is... flawed, to say the least. We're not going to see eye to eye on this, so let's call it a day.
I think you need more practical life experience to understand why you are wrong.
> You are 40, now exonerated. You have no friends, no skills, no job, no money. You are a failure. It's unfixable. You are likely to commit suicide.
That was me at 40. I didn't go to prison. I got sick. Lost everything and had to start over. And 15 years later life is okay.
Friend mentioned his college professor. He fled the Nazi's and went to Argentina. And then had to flee again to the US. Each time he started over with _nothing_.
In one case, you can potentially reunite a person with their family. In the other, the state has killed an innocent man and permanently destroyed a family.
I'm really having a hard time understanding how locking someone up and potentially freeing them later after a miscarriage of justice is discovered is the same as murdering that person.
I'm not saying it makes it okay, but wrongful imprisonment, at least in the USA, results in fairly hefty lawsuits and financial settlements, usually in the millions of dollars depending on the length of incarceration.
I don't see the problem. You can easily undo all of those things. No savings? Just give him homey. No career? Hire him for a government job. No prospectors for ever amounting to anything? Get off your high horse, he'd still have 40 years left to do that. Especially for men 40 years is a perfectly fine age to start a family nowadays.
Really the worst case would be to convict someone who is 60 years or older who then dies in prison because of a lack of medical attention.
Are you being satirical here? The rest of your comment, other than this line, seems like you are trying to be serious, but this is so clearly over the line into absurdity I can't tell.
> No prospectors for ever amounting to anything? Get off your high horse, he'd still have 40 years left to do that. Especially for men 40 years is a perfectly fine age to start a family nowadays.
Assuming you are being serious for the moment (and if you arne't, good on you, I honestly wasn't sure): it seems like you are not accounting for any of the realities of the scenario you are describing. What about the trauma and PTSD from living through decades of psychological torture? What about the destroyed social networks? What about the consequences of decades of poor diet and exercise?
In terms of human history, life imprisonment is very unusual. It's new enough to still be regarded as in an experimental phase, and everything we know about this experiment suggests that prison (especially life) is failing to have any of the positive effects that it is supposed to have.
Cruel refers to punishment which is torturous. Prison, in theory, should not be torture, despite often being so. Many aspects of incarceration in the US which are effectively torturous are commonly excused as being necessary for security and safety (e.g. solitary confinement) or medical reasons (e.g. force feeding), or being acts of other prisoners not under the control of the state (e.g. bullying). By contrast, many other countries' prison systems treat these factors as being within their responsibility.
Unusual refers to the punishment being arbitrary or not appropriate for the crime. This doesn't set a standard for what punishment is reasonable, but only requires punishments be consistent (for similar crimes). Additionally, if the punishment could not have been expected, then it can't be considered useful for the purpose of deterrence.
Crucially, the requirement that punishment not be cruel and unusual does not require the punishment to be reciprocal to the crime.
> yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives
There are countries where prisons are not exploitative hellholes, and locking people up for life is not a form of punishment but an acknowledgement that society has failed them, so there is no point in making the prisoner's incarceration as unpleasant as possible.
If it's "cruel and unusual", it's your society that makes it cruel and unusual. It doesn't have to be that way.
Society has not failed some people. A person for whom all mental and physical faculties are intact, yet is simply evil (these people do exist), who goes on to rape, murder, engage in paedophila... these people have failed society and should be removed by dint of a rope.
There are cases where people have been overlooked, needed help, etc. But the evil among us should be purged. Locking up serial rapists, serial paedophiles, and serial murderers does nothing but waste taxpayer money. If someone who commits these crimes is found guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt, they should be removed from society.
Norway, for all its goodness, needed to execute that moron who murdered all those kids in cold blood. Yet, he enjoys an expansive room, cooked meals, TV, games, conversation... all like it's no big deal. I think that is an example of society failing to deal with a problem. There is no closure for all of those families who lost innocent children. They exist knowing he exists, and is enjoying life as he's able.
You seem fairly ruthlessly pragmatic on the issue.
Yet, you take issue with a murderer being offered anything that could be considered a comfort.
Assuming he's completely severed from society, what difference is it making? I'm genuinely curious.
If we sent him out into space with a couch and a chess partner, is the "closure" of anyone victimized the responsibility of anyone other than the victims?
It's harsh, but no one can "give them closure", and it's not clear that watching the perpetrator die is the one true form of final closure.
It depends on what "locking up" means. If we are talking about US-style prisons then letting (possibly innocent and for that matter even guilty) people languish there _is_ cruel and unusual punishment.
However, there are better "prisons" (see e.g. what Norway does) and it is possible to let (dangerous) people live lives that are dignified, fulfilling and productive (when they are able to work) under the constraints of captivity.
I've definitely thought about both this and the cost and problems with keeping people on death row alive for decades. I think the answer is easy: Remove the death penalty but enable euthanasia options for those sentenced to life.
1. It removes the cruelty of life imprisonment. If we take away someone's freedom permanently and they will never have the option to regain their freedom, they can "take the easy way out". Those who are innocent and believe they will eventually be freed can stay the course, but those who know their life is over can choose to exit early.
2. It removes the added bureaucracy and delay to execution and death penalty cases. By removing the government's ability to kill someone, we no longer need additional hearings for death penalty cases or need to hold out a very long time for possible appeals many years later. It just becomes someone's choice.
Now, there's other considerations, I think there'd still need to be a minimum time for euthanasia after being sentenced, you'd want maybe a periodic opt in period for people to elect for euthanasia, maybe every five years or so, and you'd want to have someone evaluate that the prisoner wasn't making a rash choice due to recent news from the outside or the like.
But this allows death as an "escape" for a life of misery in jail and also removes bureaucratic overhead to the government electing to kill someone.
That's insane. You're basically putting somebody in a cruel and miserable existence with the expectation that they commit suicide, for the sole purpose of keeping your hands clean. I find it worse than outright killing them.
Well, I mean, ideally our prison system shouldn't aim to be cruel and miserable, but we can't exactly set the convicted serial killers free, now can we?
Shouldn't we aim to give them the most freedom we can, though? The ability to ideally, in a restricted environment, continue to read and learn and grow, or if that won't satisfy them, to remove themselves from the situation?
Its effect on people goes beyond those two amendments. In Roper vs. Simmons the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for crimes committed while a minor (under 18 years of age) is cruel and unusual punishment.
One consequence is for the brothers Tilmon and Kevin Golphin. Tilmon was 18 and Kevin was 17 when the crime occurred. At the time, both were convicted of the death penalty for the same event. However, due to the US Supreme Court ruling, Kevin later had his sentence changed to life in prison. Tilmon is still on death row.
Their situation presents a lot of moral questions about the death penalty, morality, fairness, and so on. Justice is never going to be fair, and it is always hard for a society to determine the correct balance.
I am one of those people who is opposed to the death penalty but in favor of life in prison without parole. In my thinking this punishment is/should be reserved for the worst and most heinous crimes against other people, whether that is murder of or violence against another individual or perhaps also white collar crimes of sufficient scale. I see nothing wrong with depriving a criminal of their own life and freedom if they consciously did the same to others. They also don't have a potentially limited period for exculpatory evidence to arise like with the death penalty.
Apparently the Supreme Court is interpreting the prohibition as only applying to punishment that is both cruel and unusual. Cruel alone or unusual alone is A-OK.
What I don't understand is how people can be against the death penalty but yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives. I personally know someone who, if they live to be 75, will ultimately end up being in prison for over 5 decades. How is that not "cruel and unusual"?