What is the point of executing a person for a 1988 crime?

[stui magpie]

A guy named Blackstone apparently said, it's better for 10 guilty people to go free that 1 innocent person suffer. Benjamin Franklin took it a step (or 10) further when he said better that 100 guilty people go free than one innocent suffer.

I've said before, I'm happy with the death penalty provided the jury meets a different standard of proof, Beyond all doubt. No doubt, no appeal, get it over with quickly.

[Jezza]

I'm against capital punishment for various reasons.

[*] It's antithetical to being pro-life;
[*] There's no evidence that it deters crime; and
[*] I loathe the idea of the state being able to have the power to permit state sanctioned killings under any circumstances.

[stui magpie]

^

Is Martin Bryant ever getting out of gaol? Julian Knight?

what is served by imprisoning them for the term of their lives, and what is the cost?

State sanctioned killings happen all the time, just usually by the military forces.

Maybe it doesn't deter crime, but that's one less repeat offender out there and the family of the victim get closure instead of living their lives wondering when the person who murdered their son, daughter, father, mother will be released.

[Jezza]

Bryant (without parole) and Knight have life sentences. Apart from a sense of vengeance, what use is it executing them if they're already locked up away from society for the rest of their lives?

I need to do more research around the costs, but some statistics based on the American experience suggest the death penalty is more costly (once you add up all the legal costs) than just having life sentences without parole. I'd assume the same would apply in Australia if capital punishment was still in place here.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs/summary-of-states-death-penalty

[David]

[pietillidie]

Even if one theoretically supports capital punishment in unambiguous cases, there are steps before that to consider, such as forced labour to compensate the victims.

In my view the best punishment is always repayment and recompense. Failing that option, the person comes awfully close to forfeiting all rights, but we don't go there in order to make a point about the value of life,

[stui magpie]

[David]

^ I think we see murder as the more heinous crime than kidnapping someone and keeping them in your basement for a reason. Life is the cardinal right above liberty, so it stands to reason that it is also considered the graver punishment.

In answer to your hypothetical, all you need to do is find a dog that's spent years in a small space at at an old-school pound, and go at it with a weapon. If the dog tries to protect itself rather than gratefully succumb to death – and I suspect we all agree that that's what it will do – then I think that demonstrates something about the powerful desire for survival that runs through all sentient beings.

[pietillidie]

The biggest argument against it, even in unambiguous cases, is that without a shadow of a doubt you're going to be killing the mentally ill, sexually and physically abused, brain damaged and a great swathe of fatherless boys. And the better our knowledge, the more obvious its becoming, with the perpetrators themselves often unaware of what's happened to them, or unable to grasp their own circumstances.

The law is centuries behind the science because people can't wrap their heads around it; it's little different to a movie in which the volume of jeers from the crowd determines who's going to be killed, not actual specialists and investigators within a scientific framework.

To my mind, this is an incentive problem. If the facts were known and grasped, and the person hadn't killed anyone, we'd be either highly sympathetic towards them or encouraging them to sue for damages. But that's an alternative universe once someone has been killed because we still approach this one area of science and rationality like Neanderthals. I get why, but when we look at how many things we're ashamed of centuries or decades later, and have to apologise for as a society, it's a scenario very similar to executing someone under conditions of doubt. Remember, absolutely no one has any incentive to spend millions of dollars doing the historical investigation and fine-grained science to prove the case. That's why I call it an incentive problem.

Now, we lock those people up to protect society from them, but by killing those people without having spent those millions of dollars, even if indeed the information is available, you're suddenly even worse than them. In my view that's a form of eugenics, and even worse when we ought to have intervened long before to spot, say, brain damage, abuse or untreated mental illness (and often all three).

So, my view is that it's often an additional injustice and tragedy, and often very obviously so, but naturally we can't focus on that after the fact and some other poor sod is dead and their family is grieving. So we hide behind really primitive pre-scientific legal and religious notions to avoid the hard truth.

Then, there are the killers and mass murderers that go unpunished, such as Bush/Cheney, or those who contribute to death, such as tobacco and asbestos companies, or people who supported the Iraq War or delayed responding to climate change, or those who moved priests to new parishes to molest fatherless boys who became murderers, or a lazy medical specialist who missed a brain lesion, or someone who voted against universal healthcare meaning a child failed to get sufficient treatment, etc. Again, it's an incentive problem; but just because something is hard to prove, or too expensive or impossible to prove due to a lack of available information, doesn't make it so.

We just can't handle the truth. I get that, but it behoves us to be extremely cautious here.

[David]

^ Well said all round, I reckon.

[Magpietothemax]

[pietillidie]

^M2M, by jumping at shadows you're greatly misrepresenting both Stui and what he said. He's clearly not likening people to dogs; on the contrary, he's saying we wouldn't tolerate such cruelty where dangerous dogs are concerned, meaning we would surely have to see this as immeasurably worse.

And in any case, he's not offering a grand thesis once for all time, but simply working through ideas. Talking aloud, so to speak. Everything said in reasoning and brainstorming doesn't imply a person's immutable final word and stance. And even if he says something untoward, people misspeak, backtrack, throw unconsidered ideas out, express throwaway ideas, etc. He's not on the witness stand giving careful testimony.

Better to check what someone means before jumping down their throat, not to mention take into account genre and register.

[What'sinaname]

[stui magpie]

Well said Ptiddy, WIAN,

[think positive]

cruel to the dog, not the evil pricks or hitler!

as for capitol punishment, i still think there is a place for it, but only for the likes of Bryant, where there is no doubt whatsoever!

but watching the innocence project and Making a murderer ... fricken scary, especially when the cops/judicial system just want a statistic.