Death penalty

A prominent British politician in the 1960s, I think it may have been the Conservative leader, Sir Edward Heath, said the correct question to ask supporters of capital punishment was not "Would you be willing to pull the lever?" but rather "Would you be willing to be executed by mistake?"

People die by mistake every day. The number of executions by mistake is insignificant compared to car crashes, falls, work accidents.

There are 150,000 accidental deaths each year. There are 25 executions. Even if all executions are undeserved that represents an insignificant number.

Keep in mind that the reason there are so few executions is because most jurisdictions do not practice it anymore, even if the laws allowing executions remain on the books.

And many states do not even have laws allowing executions.

I'm proud to say that Michigan was the first English-speaking government in the world to abolish the death penalty for murder, which we did in 1846.

I wonder if we should take this type of logic to an argument about men vs women.

There's a huge difference between accidents and executions.

Nuff said.

[img]...The number of executions by mistake is insignificant...

Even if all executions are undeserved that represents an insignificant number.[/img]

Insignificant?

Okay maxdancona. Let me create a possible situation for you:
Someone you love dearly (an adult child, a sibling, a spouse, cousin or someone else), is arrested for a crime. They swear up and down they did not do it. You believe them, the jury and general public don't. They are convicted. They are sentenced to death. They are executed after 10 years, once all appeals have been exhausted. They still said they were innocent to the end and you still believed them.

A year later, after the execution has left the memory of most, someone comes forward and admits their guilt. DNA tests prove with a 99.98% certainty that they did it. (The DNA of you loved one had been inconclusive)
(but hey whatever, you spent years telling folks the "number of executions" was "insignificant")
Would you still be so hungry for the death penalty to have existed? If they had instead been sentenced to 25-Life, you could have welcomed your loved person back into the outside world. They would have had a chance of some level of a future. A prison sentence can be brutal and a deterrent for some and can prevent some from entering into recidivism. The death penalty removes that.

If the Central Park 5, had been sentenced to death as your President Trump wanted (even took out a full page ad in a newspaper), they'd likely be dead now. The DNA evidence and the actual perpetrator being convicted and sentenced, would not bring them back.

So think carefully, is the death penalty still so wonderful an idea to you? Your loved person lives until evidence clears them or has their physical being snuffed out due to the death penalty and never gets that chance. Which is max?
Is that number of executions still so "insignificant" as you claim?

what Sturgis said.

Apart from a general moral unease about capital punishment, I believe that one of the factors affecting the British decision to abolish it was a growing realisation that miscarriages of justice are not always (or even very often) simply blameless "errors" - they have human causes. Just one example out of many: Mahmood Hussein Mattan was a Somali former merchant seaman who was wrongfully convicted of the murder, with a razor, of Lily Volpert on 6 March 1952. The murder took place in the Docklands area of Cardiff, Wales, and Mattan was mainly convicted on the evidence of a single prosecution witness. Mattan was executed in 1952 and his conviction was quashed 45 years later on 24 February 1998, his case being the first to be referred to the Court of Appeal by the newly formed Criminal Cases Review Commission.

The main witness for the prosecution was Harold Cover, a Jamaican with a history of violence, who later received a share of a reward of £200, equivalent to £5,281 ($7,300) in 2016, offered by the Volpert family. Cover claimed to have seen Mattan leaving Volpert's shop, though it later emerged that he had previously identified another Somali living in the area at the time, Taher Gass, as the man he had seen. The jury was not told of this, or of Cover's background during the trial. Neither was the jury informed that four witnesses had failed to select Mattan from an identification parade. One 12-year-old girl, who saw a black man near the shop at the time of the murder, and was confronted with Mattan, stated that he was not the person she witnessed, but the police ignored her statement and did not take the evidence to court.

Mattan was described as having a limited understanding of English, and refused the services of an interpreter. In a trial slanted with racial overtones, Mattan's barrister described his client as "Half-child of nature; half, semi-civilised savage". These comments are likely to have prejudiced the jury and undermined Mattan's defence, particularly since they came from Mattan's own barrister, who had the task of defending him.

In 1954 Taher Gass was convicted of murdering wages clerk Granville Jenkins. Gass was found insane and sent to the Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane; after his release he was deported to Somalia. In 1969 Harold Cover was convicted for the attempted murder of his daughter, using a razor.

These police and legal shenanigans - basically responding to public/political pressure to get a result by rushing a case into court with poor evidence, and ignoring or suppressing evidence unfavourable to the prosecution side - were familiar to many people who had contact with the criminal justice system. It happened a lot. Still does.

In its judgment, the Court of Appeal, after quashing the conviction, made the remarks below (I have split the 5 points into separate paragraphs for clarity) which support my main point above. I should note that, unlike the US system, persons sentenced to death were usually executed very soon afterwards, generally within three weeks to a month later. Since Victorian times a "humane" provision was that the condemned person should have "three clear Sundays" to make his peace with God in the prison chapel.

I should add that the court awarded the family £725,000 compensation, to be shared equally among Mattan's wife and three children. That is equivalent to 1.2 million UK pounds today, or about 1.7 million US dollars.

Some people have the same intelligence as Trump. There’s no cure for stupid.

This is a flawed (although emotional) argument.

Of course I would be upset if my child were executed by accident. I would also be just as upset if my child were eaten by a shark, or consumed by flesh eating bacteria or mauled by a mountain lion or even killed in an automobile accident.

You are making an argument by worst case. This is not a valid argument. Every social policy has a cost. This cost is often measured in innocent deaths.

Raising the posted speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph was correlated with (and almost certainly caused) with hundreds deaths. I would be horrified if my child were one of these deaths. And yet, we as a society accept these deaths because of the perceived benefits of this policy.

Capital punishment has perceived benefits to victims and to society at large. It comes with the risk that someone innocent might die.

You are willing to accept that risk with car accidents which happen in the tens of thousands each year. And yet, for some reason, you are objecting to the dozens of executions that happen.

It is not a logical argument.

There is a cure for stupid. That is what this thread is about.

The difference here max is, car 'accidents' are just that. They are not planned methods of taking a life.

Where you say that I am willing to accept the risks associated with car accidents, you are partly correct. The acceptance hinges on the laws on driving being listened to, followed and enforced. Further, there are many benefits which have come about from automobiles. Tangible benefits. There are no tangible benefits from execution.

Do you truly find the execution of a person to be an acceptable 'risk'?

Wouldn't it be better to incarcerate the convicted person and have them spend the remainder of their time in a body contained in a small windowless cell, with limited interactions with others (mainly just with the guards and any visitors, occasionally a medical or religion related)? That would send a much harsher message to people, knowing that if they are convicted, their freedom will be greatly curtailed.


Besides which, an incarcerated individual may eventually gain release (depending on the severity of their crime) and might be able to do something productive while in prison. Or, as indicated prior, may be found to be innocent and goes back into society. How many executed folks get to do that? None.

Do you understand the reason that the families of victims of the most heinous crimes want the option of capital punishment? We are talking the worst crimes; people who have been convicted of torture, murder, rape, the most violent and barbaric of child abuse.

These are real crimes with real victims and real loved ones left behind. These are crimes the shock us and represent an evil that can not be tolerated.

For someone to be executed they need to be convicted, in open court. These criminals have the right to a lawyer. These criminals have the right to cross examine witnesses and face their accusers. And these criminals can only be convicted if the prosecution can unanimously convince a jury instructed to only convict if the evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Yes, there are rare examples of a mistake. But, our system is designed to favor the accused. Most of the people who are executed are almost certainly guilty of the crime.

You asked me how I would feel if my child were unjustly convicted. Let me ask the question from the other side. How would you feel if your child were the victim of a brutal rape and murder... and the perpetrator was being allowed hope, a hope that your child wasn't granted.

You are overestimating the risk to people convicted of the most barbaric crimes, and you are underestimating the pain to the families of their victims.

Ah! The families!

My older brother was murdered. I turned against the death penalty anyway.

There are success stories of prisoners. http://www.freedommag.org/english/vol29i1/page30.htm

65? What are you, one of those east coast people? Most of the country drives at least 70.



When I went out west for the eclipse, crossing the Minnesota/South Dakota border felt like being in the Millennium Falcon as it jumped to light speed.

Minnesota the speed limit was 70. Everybody, including me, went 75.

South Dakota the speed limit was 80. I nervously inched up to 78. Normal traffic blew past me at 90mph. A few cars weaved in and out of the traffic at 100 mph.