:whynotboth?:
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The only way to guarantee you don’t lock up any innocent people is to not lock up any people.
The same is true for execution.
It’s not really practical to not lock up anyone, so you try to reduce the number of innocents as much as possible.
It is very practical to not execute anyone.
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Note: we lock up WAY too many people in general
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For all of the noise that is being made about capital punishment, what is being done about innocent people not on death row?
It seems like people clamor to get rid of the death penalty but don’t do anything about locking up innocent people… which certainly gives the impression that they don’t care.
Anyway, I don’t see the solution to maybe executing an innocent person being to get rid of the death penalty. I see the solution being to work harder to not convict innocent people.
Getting rid of the death penalty GUARANTEES that there won’t be any innocent people executed. How is that not a solution?
I agree that more should be done to help the wrongly convicted. There are organizations like the innocence project that try to work on this.
Both of those problems can be worked on at the same time, and one of them is extremely easy to solve.
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If you want to argue that the death penalty provides a benefit to society that outweighs the cost, go ahead. I’m not seeing what that benefit could be, but make your case.
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The death penalty has never been about justice. It’s always been about revenge. I’m OK with people supporting it on those grounds, at least they are being honest.
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250 exonerations in 2022 in the US, a record high, and there are NGOs dedicated to this.
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WTF
Excuse me, I speak Twig. She’s saying that ideally we would stop convicting innocent people across the board, not just in capital cases.
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So what are the suggestions on fixing the problem? When do we achieve a 0 failure rate?
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Oh, I got that from what she said. Hence the post about that only happening if we stop convicting people period.
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Because the problem is convicting innocent people and it doesn’t help one iota in that regard.
I’m not making that argument. I’m just saying that the argument that we should get rid of it because what if these convicted folks are actually innocent doesn’t carry weight with me.
If you want to argue that we shouldn’t have the death penalty for other reasons, fine. But I don’t see locking up innocent people for life as a great and fantastic solution to the problem of possibly executing an innocent person.
I think the counter argument to this is that a wrongly convicted person who is serving a life sentence who get exonerated can be set free. A person who has been administered the death penalty who is later exonerated can not be reversed.
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Yes, that is the argument people make. But it doesn’t move me. The wrongly imprisoned person still suffers immensely, and is actually less likely to be exonerated, according to an article posted in this thread.
Yes, that’s one of the problems. The harder one to fix. Likely impossible to get rid of entirely.
The problem of the state killing innocent people is easy to fix.
The perfect and the good being enemies and all…
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I mean, nearly all actions can have unintended undesirable outcomes, sometimes fatal.
Innocent people are killed by all kinds of things all the time (cars, swimming pools, knives, airplanes, wars). We don’t just ban everything that might kill an innocent person due to that possibility. We determine reasonable precautions and acceptable losses and decide whether there is enough benefit to justify the cost.
And if you’ve ever ridden in a motor vehicle or airplane or swam in a pool or used a sharp knife please don’t tell me that the number of acceptable losses is automatically zero.
As a society we’ve decided that the deaths of 43,000 Americans (and many more worldwide) per year from motor vehicles is an acceptable loss.
Maybe you don’t think that the death penalty is wrong. Or that there’s either no or insufficient benefit to it. Or that it’s used too broadly. Fine… then make those arguments. (Some of you have already.)
But the mere existence of a bad unintended possible consequence is an unmoving argument. Especially when your proposal involves simply replacing [really bad consequence A] with [slightly less awful but still really bad consequence B].
(And it’s not even clear to me how much less awful B is. If given the choice between death and life in prison, offhand I think I’d probably prefer death. Prison seems pretty awful. I realize that a lot of prisoners do prefer to live though. And maybe I would too; I’m not sure. I’ve fortunately never faced that choice.)
See I don’t view replacing wrongful execution with wrongful life imprisonment as “good”.
It’s slightly less awful at best.
I’ll take it.
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