Sure, why not? There comes a point where an individual is so dangerous and destructive that a society cannot contain the violence they unleash at every opportunity. Life in prison merely changes the population exposed to that individual. Prison guards, staff, and other prisoners deserve protection from such uncontrollably violent people just as much as anyone else. Capital punishment reduces recidivism rates to zero. No one who has been executed has ever been found to continue committing crimes.
It's only cheaper because our capital punishment process is so badly broken. It should not take decades to complete the process; that's just dumb. On the other hand, there are flaw in how it's applied currently (moving to the second part of your issue with it), so those also need to be fixed. I support the death penalty, but with some pretty major reforms. And as a strong advocate of it, I would be open to suspending it until said reform has changed the process to one which is much faster, cheaper, more humane, more fair, more evidence-based, and more regulated. For starters, take all the stuff the Innocence Project is doing and integrate it directly into the process and provide wide open access to all information going into the process to any third-party groups wishing to provide sunshine/oversight.
Some individuals are so dangerous and destructive that all members of society (including prison guards, staff, and other prisoners) deserve permanent protection from them. I have no issue with extinguishing the existence of those who are so fundamentally broken that we can't contain their violence. However, we need to bend over backwards to ensure the process to do that is applied fairly, reasonably, and is designed to make it as close to impossible to execute an innocent person as we can reasonably make it.
Capital punishment certainly can be "revenge killing", but it is not necessarily so. Personally, I think that if it's fairly applied and handled reasonably, it can be as simple as a society determining that an individual is simply too dangerous and destructive to be allowed to continue existing. I have no problem with that. Prison guards, staff, and indeed other prisoners are people too and they have a right to be protected from particularly destructive and dangerous individuals. At some point, it's fair to admit that you cannot adequately control the violence unleashed at every opportunity by someone who is fundamentally broken in a way we cannot fix.
The US Constitution doesn't give a damn about the rest of the world. Frankly, the rest of the world has such a sordid history (and present) that we should be thankful for that.
Capital punishment is long-established in the US. Taking the "cruel and unusual" approach won't get anywhere. Now if someone comes up with a particular method that's different enough (e.g. giant catapult, throwing people out of an airplane, letting alligators eat them, etc), you can attack the methods.
Oh please; they just realized how the drugs were being used? Decades of repeated, public use and some executive finally picked up a newspaper? Give me a break. What actually happened is that they periodically reevaluated the amount of money they made off sales versus the PR hit they took for making those sales and eventually the numbers tipped in a new direction.
Murder is against the law; killing absent unlawful motive or negligence is not. Hence, the state can lawfully kill someone once their guilt is determined, their due process rights respected, and the penalty determined to be reasonable given the crimes committed. An individual whose life is at risk by the actions of another individual can also kill, legally. Justifiable homicides happen all the time. If I break into your home to try and murder you, you can kill me and the state has no interest in prosecuting your causing my death.
Capital punishment doesn't bring anyone back to life and if we're honest with ourselves, it likely has little deterrence effect on other criminals. However, the benefit is that it stops an individual who is so dangerous and destructive that society cannot afford to risk their continued existence. Locking them in prison subjects other prisoners, guards, staff, and even other members of society to varying levels of risk from that individual. When an individual is found to exhibit a certain level of danger and destructiveness, society's best option may just be to end that individual's existence in a fair and lawful process.
Even being above average means you're surrounded by (relative) idiots. Hell, just stay informed about world events, history, literature, and then stand there in disgust as all people can talk about is the latest episode of "Naked and Afraid". This is by no means a recent thing either; every generation throughout history has repeated the same sorry story.
Run Windows VMs and keep adding them until the boxes are under some level of resource contention (3:1, 4:1 vCPU:pCPU). If you don't see a difference, I'd be highly curious of your workloads and configuration.
This is exactly correct. I myself replaced a SQL Server cluster that was using boxes with dual 12-core AMD procs with one using dual 4-core Xeons a couple years ago. Performance and responsiveness went way up while the bill to Microsoft dropped massively.
I was a solid AMD enthusiast from the original Athlons all the way up until about 5 years ago. They went from huge underdog to reigning champion for a long time while the marketing guys ran Intel's product offering into the ground with everything from Northwood to Prescott and all the stuff in between. But the landscape has shifted for AMD. They've simply gone downhill. As of the last couple of years, I can no longer justify buying AMD procs at work and I'd already switched at home. That AMD could boast significantly more cores was the last leg they had to stand on in the server market; now they're a has-been.
I sincerely hope they recover and blow past Intel as they've done in the past. I think that's healthier for the market and I think we all win when that competition heats up. But at this point, there's little to justify their existence in the server space and the market share numbers reflect that (dropping from >25% share to ~3%).
Because it sounds like you're placing nearly absolute confidence in a solution where a back-end server storing biometric template data is one compromise away from being used to make all your efforts completely useless. Gone are the days when someone intent on espionage needed a wig and fake mustache; now they can compromise your back-end server, overwrite some template data, and become a whole other person that you firmly believe should be trusted and provided all kinds of privileged access.
What you've done is come up with a system where the good guys can't change the passwords, but the bad guys can. It's among the dumbest ideas ever.
Calling out the government for violations of the US Constitution is not illegal, regardless of what laws are passed. The US Constitution is the highest law in the land; bar none. No mere law passed by Congress nor order issued by the President nor opinion handed down by the Supreme Court can supersede it. The only thing that matters in this case are the facts. If the facts demonstrate that the government has been violating our rights and that Snowden was left with no legal avenue but the one afforded by the US Constitution due to a lack of whistleblower protections or other oversight failure, then a jury of his peers must - necessarily - find him not guilty.
There's a common misconception that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the Constitution's true meaning. The fact is that the people of the United States have that distinction. The SCOTUS is merely the government's final arbiter. They can't get a conviction against Snowden without stacking the jury thanks to nullification.
The problem with your argument is that there's no actual true definition for what's proper and improper. Religious people may think there is but they are wrong.
I think the proper use of capital punishment should be defined as certain massive crimes (like murder, defined by the society as a whole) where we simply have drawn the line as the crime being too terrible (in essence, where we - as a society - have decided that those who do it are inherently beyond redemption) and those cases where rehabilitation (within a system - and we don't have this today in the US - where rehabilitation is available and generally effective) is impossible.
Just because you set children on fire once doesn't have to mean you'll do it again.
Oh that's alright, anyone who's that broken should be first in line for execution. They don't need to set children on fire twice to convince me of that.
Say it were your own children or parent. How is that a danger to someone else?
Perhaps there is some circumstance in which lighting children on fire wouldn't automatically qualify someone for execution, but I don't care to explore all the different circumstances we'd have to in order to find such a case. Suffice it to say that - as a general rule - things like murder and setting children on fire ought to be automatic.
Like say for me here in Sweden. We don't have capital punishment. You consider it proper to kill murders. So say someone had murdered. That set things out for someone to "properly" murder that person. Except it's not allowed by the law. Should that too require the hesitation part BTW? I mean. It was "proper murder"?..
Read your last part, in the above I mean to kill by will in general. But yeah, I know there's a difference in "mord" and "dråp" here.
There was something more I wanted to say before I read that part. I think it was about differences.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. I consider it a proper use of the state's authority to execute convicted criminals when they execute a convicted murderer. When I'm talking about this, I don't mean an angry father who walks in on his child's molester and beats him to death, nor do I mean someone who falls asleep at the wheel and strikes and kills a pedestrian. I mean someone who knowingly, consciously, willfully makes an effort to maliciously kill another human being without some major mitigating circumstances present. What else are we to do with such a person? A person who robs a liquor store is making a poor choice and hopefully can be rehabilitated such that they won't make similarly poor choices in the future. Someone who has no difficulty taking human life is fundamentally broken in a way we can't comprehend and should simply be removed from society. Prisons are still a part of society inasmuch as members of our society live and worth there.
No it doesn't, unless you believe that prison guards, prison staff, and other prisoners who are in the process of being rehabilitated are not part of our society. The expectation with converting all death penalty cases to life in prison is that we're going to take the most violent, dangerous, destructive people in the world, put them all in one place, and expect a segment of society to wait on them hand and foot for the rest of their lives. Anyone wishing to make that happen should sign up for guard duty with those prisoners. Otherwise, hypocrisy.
They aren't "permanently removed from society" just because you, personally, don't have to interact with them on a daily basis. Someone else still does and you're putting their life (in fact, thousands of lives) at risk because of it.
Ethics of death penalty aside, pretending the choice is it or letting murderers walk free is dishonest.
Life in prison without parole is a death sentence; merely by different means. If we can't ever execute anyone because we can't be 100% certain of their guilt, then why is it morally or ethically sound to allow potentially innocent people to rot in prison for the rest of their lives? Or even just for a few decades? There's almost certainly more innocent people who've been rotting in prison for decades than innocent people who've been sent to Death Row. Not just nominally, but due to the higher burden of proof (and endless appeals system) for Death Row prisoners, I would suggest it's a virtual certainty that the rates of innocent people rotting in prison for the rest of their lives is also much higher. Why is that more acceptable than executions?
Does this mean that contract killers should get leniency because, after all, they're not killing people for revenge but as mere business? Especially if they use a clean method - which, as the summary noted, is what "humane" really means in this context?
They're committing murder. The state is not (by the very definition of murder). I would submit that all murderers should qualify for the death penalty. I would extend that out to any other individual who cannot be rehabilitated (assuming an effective means of rehabilitation is in place - which is admittedly not our current prison system).
And keep in mind, this is all merely a thought exercise as it's all predicated upon major, fundamental reforms from the police investigations to the courtroom trials to the prison system. I'm not defending the criminal justice system we have today as it's vastly more flawed than need be and I'm not even defending the use of the death penalty within that system. I seek merely to demonstrate that there is nothing inherently wrong or unjust about the state executing guilty individuals who are truly beyond rehabilitation.
Does it matter how many? One is already too many, for you killed an innocent man.
One is too many to have die in a prison cell after years or decades of rotting there. The effect is still the same; an innocent man dies at the hands of the state. Based on this, we should release all prisoners because we can't ever be 100% certain any one of them is guilty, yes?
(if this ever happens, I'll be on an airplane beforehand going somewhere far away while the rest of you sort out the consequences)
Essentially that should qualify the governor in question for his own frying chair for he killed someone (by proxy) who had done nothing to deserve this.
That's absurd. The very, very worst case you could make against a governor would be conspiracy to commit involuntary manslaughter, which isn't even defined as a crime anywhere that I'm aware. You could possibly make a case for involuntary manslaughter against the police, prosecutor, and jury, but that's also asinine at best. Further, I don't know of anyone who would support the death penalty for involuntary manslaughter. Finally, the premise itself is absurd. Outside of fraud or negligence, there's no reasonable case to be made at all. Now if the prosecutor withheld critical evidence, I would fully support going after them with the full force of the law. Same for the police and anyone else involved.
The first case costs the state (taxpayers) significantly more money because of legal bills.
There's more time for the error to be discovered in the second case, which means the wrongfully convicted may not die in a cell.
The blood of innocent isn't on society's collected hands because they didn't deliberately murder an innocent man.
The first is only the case because we have an inefficient system and because we recognize how easily we get convictions wrong (thus a nearly endless appeals process in an attempt to avoid executing an innocent person). Fix the system, streamline the outcomes. The second case is essentially the same as the first. We understand our current system to be less effective at distinguishing guilt from innocence and we understand at least part of that to be due to biases built into the system based on race, money, family, fame, etc.
Executions are never really "fair, equitable, efficient [or] effective". Legals costs make them expensive and inefficient, in America they are predominantly performed on black prisoners which makes them more racist than fair or equitable, and since they are more expensive and have a lower deterrence value than life in prison they are not terribly effective.
None of this an inherent quality to executions; you're merely describing the issues with the system we have today. I don't take issue with that and in fact outlined some of how I would suggest we go about resolving that. Fair, equitable, efficient, effective justice is the goal; not a description of what we have today.
Frankly, all it does is satisfy a very primal urge to see a simplistic punishment applied to the person who we believe has done wrong. There's a conservative part in all of us that wants to see death dealt to those who have wronged us, but unfortunately, that's neither practical, reasonable nor moral.
Now here you're incorrect; not about the primal urges, but about how they apply to state executions. The idea behind the existing system of executions is supposed to be that all emotion is removed and an objective standard is implemented by a society wishing to rid itself of individuals deemed beyond redemption. I would agree that we often fail to meet the ideals of that idea, but that does not mean it need always be that way. With a reformed system that has incorporated all the knowledge of how and why we get arrests and convictions wrong and a reformed prison system that successfully rehabilitates people instead of turning them into more vicious and efficient criminals, we're inevitably left with a group of people who are beyond rehabilitation. They're so fundamentally broken, so destructive to our society, that the best outcome for society as a whole is to remove those individuals permanently from our society (which includes prison guards and prisoners who actually can be rehabilitated). The only way to do so effectively and humanely is execution.
This is all simply an intellectual exercise at this point. I don't expect these reforms to be made in any widespread sense anywhere in the US any time soon (if ever). I'm not defending the existing system's problems. I'm not claiming those problems don't exist. I'm simply demonstrating that there is nothing inherently savage, primal, or unjust about the death penalty itself. Its implementation in our existing system is as flawed as the rest of our existing system, but there is nothing intrinsically flawed in the concept of executing those who are guilty beyond reasonable doubt and beyond rehabilitation.
As I stated, we need significant improvements in our system starting with an overhaul from the police investigations to the courtrooms and everything in between. We should learn from cases where we know we got it wrong so we can avoid making those mistakes again. Once all systemic problems are resolved and actual rehabilitation with measurably positive outcomes are established in the prison system, determine who can be rehabilitated and do so, who is not and execute them.
I'm not expecting these changes to happen today, tomorrow, or in ten years. I'm describing an ideal wherein we would apply evidence and outcome based approaches to doing a righteous justice system where the most expedient and efficient means of meeting the goals of society are employed.
There is no difference in the end result to the individual dying. There is certainly a difference to the guards exposed to a violent predator for potentially decades on end and there is certainly a difference in the overall risk of recidivism while that individual is alive. The point was simply that a sentence of life in prison is effectively the same as a sentence of death in prison from the perspective of the individual who's dying in prison.
Being wrongly convicted and dying in a gas chamber due to organ failure is different from being wrongly convicted and dying in a cell due to organ failure how, exactly?
We should make every effort to ensure no innocent person is wrongfully convicted. We need a lot of reforms throughout our criminal justice systems to make that happen. We should be taking lessons for groups like the Innocence Project to better understand where we're going wrong and improve. We should look at the rules of evidence and how juries deliberate to determine what works well and what has poor outcomes. We should do things like this throughout the process and on a regular basis.
But at the end of the day, we aren't throwing every cell open to let everyone roam free on the off chance that somebody innocent slipped through the cracks. The system should be fair, equitable, efficient, and effective. We should rehabilitate those who can be rehabilitated and execute those who cannot. Keep it simple, efficient, and constantly improving. It will never be perfect. We, as any society, must accept that fact. And whether someone dies in a box of old age or dies in a box by execution, where that person is innocent, we have all failed them. We must make every reasonable effort to avoid that possibility, accept our mistakes, learn from them, and constantly improve. And yes, we're a long way away from any of that today. I welcome an overhaul of our system.
Wait, doesn't the family also object to their loved one being returned to them deceased? Seems like we really aren't taking their objections too seriously already.
Why on Earth do we need observers? Make the chamber windowless, run it for several hours with a heart monitor that turns on after say a couple hours, and then come by and collect the corpse. How hard is that? You can use any gas that can replace oxygen slowly enough to not cause pain and suffering. Plenty of research on that one.
Just another argument for using simpler methods for execution. Take a gas chamber and replace the oxygen slowly enough that the individual loses consciousness, then eventually dies peacefully. Why we've come up with all these extraordinarily complex methods of carrying out what ought to be an absurdly simple sentence is beyond me. Put the person in a chair, play some classical music, drop the O2 levels, and let the life of a violent and destructive individual end so the rest of society may be spared.
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Sure, why not? There comes a point where an individual is so dangerous and destructive that a society cannot contain the violence they unleash at every opportunity. Life in prison merely changes the population exposed to that individual. Prison guards, staff, and other prisoners deserve protection from such uncontrollably violent people just as much as anyone else. Capital punishment reduces recidivism rates to zero. No one who has been executed has ever been found to continue committing crimes.
Probably because of the psychological damage to the individual(s) pulling the trigger.
It's only cheaper because our capital punishment process is so badly broken. It should not take decades to complete the process; that's just dumb. On the other hand, there are flaw in how it's applied currently (moving to the second part of your issue with it), so those also need to be fixed. I support the death penalty, but with some pretty major reforms. And as a strong advocate of it, I would be open to suspending it until said reform has changed the process to one which is much faster, cheaper, more humane, more fair, more evidence-based, and more regulated. For starters, take all the stuff the Innocence Project is doing and integrate it directly into the process and provide wide open access to all information going into the process to any third-party groups wishing to provide sunshine/oversight.
Some individuals are so dangerous and destructive that all members of society (including prison guards, staff, and other prisoners) deserve permanent protection from them. I have no issue with extinguishing the existence of those who are so fundamentally broken that we can't contain their violence. However, we need to bend over backwards to ensure the process to do that is applied fairly, reasonably, and is designed to make it as close to impossible to execute an innocent person as we can reasonably make it.
Capital punishment certainly can be "revenge killing", but it is not necessarily so. Personally, I think that if it's fairly applied and handled reasonably, it can be as simple as a society determining that an individual is simply too dangerous and destructive to be allowed to continue existing. I have no problem with that. Prison guards, staff, and indeed other prisoners are people too and they have a right to be protected from particularly destructive and dangerous individuals. At some point, it's fair to admit that you cannot adequately control the violence unleashed at every opportunity by someone who is fundamentally broken in a way we cannot fix.
The US Constitution doesn't give a damn about the rest of the world. Frankly, the rest of the world has such a sordid history (and present) that we should be thankful for that.
Capital punishment is long-established in the US. Taking the "cruel and unusual" approach won't get anywhere. Now if someone comes up with a particular method that's different enough (e.g. giant catapult, throwing people out of an airplane, letting alligators eat them, etc), you can attack the methods.
Oh please; they just realized how the drugs were being used? Decades of repeated, public use and some executive finally picked up a newspaper? Give me a break. What actually happened is that they periodically reevaluated the amount of money they made off sales versus the PR hit they took for making those sales and eventually the numbers tipped in a new direction.
Murder is against the law; killing absent unlawful motive or negligence is not. Hence, the state can lawfully kill someone once their guilt is determined, their due process rights respected, and the penalty determined to be reasonable given the crimes committed. An individual whose life is at risk by the actions of another individual can also kill, legally. Justifiable homicides happen all the time. If I break into your home to try and murder you, you can kill me and the state has no interest in prosecuting your causing my death.
Capital punishment doesn't bring anyone back to life and if we're honest with ourselves, it likely has little deterrence effect on other criminals. However, the benefit is that it stops an individual who is so dangerous and destructive that society cannot afford to risk their continued existence. Locking them in prison subjects other prisoners, guards, staff, and even other members of society to varying levels of risk from that individual. When an individual is found to exhibit a certain level of danger and destructiveness, society's best option may just be to end that individual's existence in a fair and lawful process.
Even being above average means you're surrounded by (relative) idiots. Hell, just stay informed about world events, history, literature, and then stand there in disgust as all people can talk about is the latest episode of "Naked and Afraid". This is by no means a recent thing either; every generation throughout history has repeated the same sorry story.
Run Windows VMs and keep adding them until the boxes are under some level of resource contention (3:1, 4:1 vCPU:pCPU). If you don't see a difference, I'd be highly curious of your workloads and configuration.
This is exactly correct. I myself replaced a SQL Server cluster that was using boxes with dual 12-core AMD procs with one using dual 4-core Xeons a couple years ago. Performance and responsiveness went way up while the bill to Microsoft dropped massively.
I was a solid AMD enthusiast from the original Athlons all the way up until about 5 years ago. They went from huge underdog to reigning champion for a long time while the marketing guys ran Intel's product offering into the ground with everything from Northwood to Prescott and all the stuff in between. But the landscape has shifted for AMD. They've simply gone downhill. As of the last couple of years, I can no longer justify buying AMD procs at work and I'd already switched at home. That AMD could boast significantly more cores was the last leg they had to stand on in the server market; now they're a has-been.
I sincerely hope they recover and blow past Intel as they've done in the past. I think that's healthier for the market and I think we all win when that competition heats up. But at this point, there's little to justify their existence in the server space and the market share numbers reflect that (dropping from >25% share to ~3%).
Because it sounds like you're placing nearly absolute confidence in a solution where a back-end server storing biometric template data is one compromise away from being used to make all your efforts completely useless. Gone are the days when someone intent on espionage needed a wig and fake mustache; now they can compromise your back-end server, overwrite some template data, and become a whole other person that you firmly believe should be trusted and provided all kinds of privileged access.
What you've done is come up with a system where the good guys can't change the passwords, but the bad guys can. It's among the dumbest ideas ever.
Calling out the government for violations of the US Constitution is not illegal, regardless of what laws are passed. The US Constitution is the highest law in the land; bar none. No mere law passed by Congress nor order issued by the President nor opinion handed down by the Supreme Court can supersede it. The only thing that matters in this case are the facts. If the facts demonstrate that the government has been violating our rights and that Snowden was left with no legal avenue but the one afforded by the US Constitution due to a lack of whistleblower protections or other oversight failure, then a jury of his peers must - necessarily - find him not guilty.
There's a common misconception that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the Constitution's true meaning. The fact is that the people of the United States have that distinction. The SCOTUS is merely the government's final arbiter. They can't get a conviction against Snowden without stacking the jury thanks to nullification.
The problem with your argument is that there's no actual true definition for what's proper and improper. Religious people may think there is but they are wrong.
I think the proper use of capital punishment should be defined as certain massive crimes (like murder, defined by the society as a whole) where we simply have drawn the line as the crime being too terrible (in essence, where we - as a society - have decided that those who do it are inherently beyond redemption) and those cases where rehabilitation (within a system - and we don't have this today in the US - where rehabilitation is available and generally effective) is impossible.
Just because you set children on fire once doesn't have to mean you'll do it again.
Oh that's alright, anyone who's that broken should be first in line for execution. They don't need to set children on fire twice to convince me of that.
Say it were your own children or parent. How is that a danger to someone else?
Perhaps there is some circumstance in which lighting children on fire wouldn't automatically qualify someone for execution, but I don't care to explore all the different circumstances we'd have to in order to find such a case. Suffice it to say that - as a general rule - things like murder and setting children on fire ought to be automatic.
Like say for me here in Sweden. We don't have capital punishment. You consider it proper to kill murders. So say someone had murdered. That set things out for someone to "properly" murder that person. Except it's not allowed by the law. Should that too require the hesitation part BTW? I mean. It was "proper murder"? ..
Read your last part, in the above I mean to kill by will in general. But yeah, I know there's a difference in "mord" and "dråp" here.
There was something more I wanted to say before I read that part. I think it was about differences.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. I consider it a proper use of the state's authority to execute convicted criminals when they execute a convicted murderer. When I'm talking about this, I don't mean an angry father who walks in on his child's molester and beats him to death, nor do I mean someone who falls asleep at the wheel and strikes and kills a pedestrian. I mean someone who knowingly, consciously, willfully makes an effort to maliciously kill another human being without some major mitigating circumstances present. What else are we to do with such a person? A person who robs a liquor store is making a poor choice and hopefully can be rehabilitated such that they won't make similarly poor choices in the future. Someone who has no difficulty taking human life is fundamentally broken in a way we can't comprehend and should simply be removed from society. Prisons are still a part of society inasmuch as members of our society live and worth there.
Which incarceration already accomplishes.
No it doesn't, unless you believe that prison guards, prison staff, and other prisoners who are in the process of being rehabilitated are not part of our society. The expectation with converting all death penalty cases to life in prison is that we're going to take the most violent, dangerous, destructive people in the world, put them all in one place, and expect a segment of society to wait on them hand and foot for the rest of their lives. Anyone wishing to make that happen should sign up for guard duty with those prisoners. Otherwise, hypocrisy.
They aren't "permanently removed from society" just because you, personally, don't have to interact with them on a daily basis. Someone else still does and you're putting their life (in fact, thousands of lives) at risk because of it.
Ethics of death penalty aside, pretending the choice is it or letting murderers walk free is dishonest.
Life in prison without parole is a death sentence; merely by different means. If we can't ever execute anyone because we can't be 100% certain of their guilt, then why is it morally or ethically sound to allow potentially innocent people to rot in prison for the rest of their lives? Or even just for a few decades? There's almost certainly more innocent people who've been rotting in prison for decades than innocent people who've been sent to Death Row. Not just nominally, but due to the higher burden of proof (and endless appeals system) for Death Row prisoners, I would suggest it's a virtual certainty that the rates of innocent people rotting in prison for the rest of their lives is also much higher. Why is that more acceptable than executions?
Does this mean that contract killers should get leniency because, after all, they're not killing people for revenge but as mere business? Especially if they use a clean method - which, as the summary noted, is what "humane" really means in this context?
They're committing murder. The state is not (by the very definition of murder). I would submit that all murderers should qualify for the death penalty. I would extend that out to any other individual who cannot be rehabilitated (assuming an effective means of rehabilitation is in place - which is admittedly not our current prison system).
And keep in mind, this is all merely a thought exercise as it's all predicated upon major, fundamental reforms from the police investigations to the courtroom trials to the prison system. I'm not defending the criminal justice system we have today as it's vastly more flawed than need be and I'm not even defending the use of the death penalty within that system. I seek merely to demonstrate that there is nothing inherently wrong or unjust about the state executing guilty individuals who are truly beyond rehabilitation.
Does it matter how many? One is already too many, for you killed an innocent man.
One is too many to have die in a prison cell after years or decades of rotting there. The effect is still the same; an innocent man dies at the hands of the state. Based on this, we should release all prisoners because we can't ever be 100% certain any one of them is guilty, yes?
(if this ever happens, I'll be on an airplane beforehand going somewhere far away while the rest of you sort out the consequences)
Essentially that should qualify the governor in question for his own frying chair for he killed someone (by proxy) who had done nothing to deserve this.
That's absurd. The very, very worst case you could make against a governor would be conspiracy to commit involuntary manslaughter, which isn't even defined as a crime anywhere that I'm aware. You could possibly make a case for involuntary manslaughter against the police, prosecutor, and jury, but that's also asinine at best. Further, I don't know of anyone who would support the death penalty for involuntary manslaughter. Finally, the premise itself is absurd. Outside of fraud or negligence, there's no reasonable case to be made at all. Now if the prosecutor withheld critical evidence, I would fully support going after them with the full force of the law. Same for the police and anyone else involved.
Well, I can think of a few differences:
The first is only the case because we have an inefficient system and because we recognize how easily we get convictions wrong (thus a nearly endless appeals process in an attempt to avoid executing an innocent person). Fix the system, streamline the outcomes. The second case is essentially the same as the first. We understand our current system to be less effective at distinguishing guilt from innocence and we understand at least part of that to be due to biases built into the system based on race, money, family, fame, etc.
Executions are never really "fair, equitable, efficient [or] effective". Legals costs make them expensive and inefficient, in America they are predominantly performed on black prisoners which makes them more racist than fair or equitable, and since they are more expensive and have a lower deterrence value than life in prison they are not terribly effective.
None of this an inherent quality to executions; you're merely describing the issues with the system we have today. I don't take issue with that and in fact outlined some of how I would suggest we go about resolving that. Fair, equitable, efficient, effective justice is the goal; not a description of what we have today.
Frankly, all it does is satisfy a very primal urge to see a simplistic punishment applied to the person who we believe has done wrong. There's a conservative part in all of us that wants to see death dealt to those who have wronged us, but unfortunately, that's neither practical, reasonable nor moral.
Now here you're incorrect; not about the primal urges, but about how they apply to state executions. The idea behind the existing system of executions is supposed to be that all emotion is removed and an objective standard is implemented by a society wishing to rid itself of individuals deemed beyond redemption. I would agree that we often fail to meet the ideals of that idea, but that does not mean it need always be that way. With a reformed system that has incorporated all the knowledge of how and why we get arrests and convictions wrong and a reformed prison system that successfully rehabilitates people instead of turning them into more vicious and efficient criminals, we're inevitably left with a group of people who are beyond rehabilitation. They're so fundamentally broken, so destructive to our society, that the best outcome for society as a whole is to remove those individuals permanently from our society (which includes prison guards and prisoners who actually can be rehabilitated). The only way to do so effectively and humanely is execution.
This is all simply an intellectual exercise at this point. I don't expect these reforms to be made in any widespread sense anywhere in the US any time soon (if ever). I'm not defending the existing system's problems. I'm not claiming those problems don't exist. I'm simply demonstrating that there is nothing inherently savage, primal, or unjust about the death penalty itself. Its implementation in our existing system is as flawed as the rest of our existing system, but there is nothing intrinsically flawed in the concept of executing those who are guilty beyond reasonable doubt and beyond rehabilitation.
As I stated, we need significant improvements in our system starting with an overhaul from the police investigations to the courtrooms and everything in between. We should learn from cases where we know we got it wrong so we can avoid making those mistakes again. Once all systemic problems are resolved and actual rehabilitation with measurably positive outcomes are established in the prison system, determine who can be rehabilitated and do so, who is not and execute them.
I'm not expecting these changes to happen today, tomorrow, or in ten years. I'm describing an ideal wherein we would apply evidence and outcome based approaches to doing a righteous justice system where the most expedient and efficient means of meeting the goals of society are employed.
There is no difference in the end result to the individual dying. There is certainly a difference to the guards exposed to a violent predator for potentially decades on end and there is certainly a difference in the overall risk of recidivism while that individual is alive. The point was simply that a sentence of life in prison is effectively the same as a sentence of death in prison from the perspective of the individual who's dying in prison.
Being wrongly convicted and dying in a gas chamber due to organ failure is different from being wrongly convicted and dying in a cell due to organ failure how, exactly?
We should make every effort to ensure no innocent person is wrongfully convicted. We need a lot of reforms throughout our criminal justice systems to make that happen. We should be taking lessons for groups like the Innocence Project to better understand where we're going wrong and improve. We should look at the rules of evidence and how juries deliberate to determine what works well and what has poor outcomes. We should do things like this throughout the process and on a regular basis.
But at the end of the day, we aren't throwing every cell open to let everyone roam free on the off chance that somebody innocent slipped through the cracks. The system should be fair, equitable, efficient, and effective. We should rehabilitate those who can be rehabilitated and execute those who cannot. Keep it simple, efficient, and constantly improving. It will never be perfect. We, as any society, must accept that fact. And whether someone dies in a box of old age or dies in a box by execution, where that person is innocent, we have all failed them. We must make every reasonable effort to avoid that possibility, accept our mistakes, learn from them, and constantly improve. And yes, we're a long way away from any of that today. I welcome an overhaul of our system.
Wait, doesn't the family also object to their loved one being returned to them deceased? Seems like we really aren't taking their objections too seriously already.
Fine, we'll ship all our worst child raping, torturing, completely batshit crazy murderers to the EU and they can deal with them.
I struggled against suggesting helium, for obvious reasons.
Why on Earth do we need observers? Make the chamber windowless, run it for several hours with a heart monitor that turns on after say a couple hours, and then come by and collect the corpse. How hard is that? You can use any gas that can replace oxygen slowly enough to not cause pain and suffering. Plenty of research on that one.
Just another argument for using simpler methods for execution. Take a gas chamber and replace the oxygen slowly enough that the individual loses consciousness, then eventually dies peacefully. Why we've come up with all these extraordinarily complex methods of carrying out what ought to be an absurdly simple sentence is beyond me. Put the person in a chair, play some classical music, drop the O2 levels, and let the life of a violent and destructive individual end so the rest of society may be spared.
To say nothing of the logistical headaches of range qualifications during jury selection.