7 ms·

RE: How people are and the death penalty The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are. It was 33 years coming but here's what h

by johnnyg 11y ago

RE: How people are and the death penalty The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are. It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences. See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win? If you want a burger, a high, an orgasm or a conviction, you generally will get it at some price that's ultimately...above market. How much more prone to excess is someone in the heat of a moment? How unlike the event does its moment by moment reconstruction during a trial appear? The mismatch has always struck me as unjust. As people judging an event whose experience they haven't had and haven't attempted to recreate. Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform. An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation. Any shade of grey zooming out from that seems too hard for any government system to decide well. I hear people say things in passing like "he only got 20 years". 20 years is a huge and devastating amount of time, as is one year. As we've ramped up the time on these sentences and made it an all or nothing proposition. Unfortunately, I don't think 20 years will do it if 1 year hasn't and I don't think death will do it if 20 years hasn't. Regarding Richard Glossip. I don't know him or his case. I don't know the victim and while they won't return, there's a debt owed that I don't know how to pay. I want Richard Glossip to live. I don't think taking another life will pay the debt of the first. What I want most of all is for someone to tell me how to pay that debt.

verbin217 11y ago
"If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation." Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children. They're usually in situations people would rather ignore. They're desperate. They want attention and they get it at some price that's ultimately... above market.
- eric_the_read 11y ago
  According to http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-m... the average age of mass shooters in general is 35.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - verbin217 11y ago
    I was only talking about school shootings but I still didn't expect it to be that high. Too bad it didn't have the median.
- omginternets 11y ago
  >Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children. eric_the_read's comment notwithstanding, people subjected to extreme circumstances in their childhood years are less likely to be rehabilitated, not more. The argument is that someone willing to shoot up a school for attention is beyond rehabilitation. His age is irrelevant to someone making that claim, and possibly argues in his favor.
  - verbin217 11y ago
    The attention we're talking about here isn't narcissistic supply. It's basic interpersonal human concern. Shooting up a school because you're being systematically starved of your basic human needs isn't nearly as bad as you just made is sound. Otherwise I never contended with anything else you said. I do think they deserve a chance at rehabilitation but also that they're less likely to attain it.
    - omginternets 11y ago
      I'm just pointing out that your argument isn't very effective. I actually agree with you, but someone taking the position that school shooters aren't rehabilitable isn't going to care whether or not they're minors. Their argument supersedes notions of maturity.
wtvanhest 11y ago
Your point about 20 years vs 1 is really important. Sentences have gotten so long for relatively harmless crimes that benchmarking becomes distorted. If anyone thinks about all the tings they will do in the next 3 years, then compare that to losing 20 years it can help show how long of a sentence that is.
- rhizome 11y ago
  Criminal sentences have their own flavor of inflation that seems rarely studied.
  - tajen 11y ago
    * in USA. The average jail time in France is less than 2 years. French people are often surprised of the length of the penalties in countries which seem similarly western, such as Luxembourg.
    - omginternets 11y ago
      Oh boy... I would not use France as a counter-example. Jail time is low in France because our jails are full. Any sentence below two years is automatically deferred to probation, which means that a large number of crimes are de facto not punished. A quick google search will reveal a disturbing trend of violent crimes that don't result in jail time for this reason. France has the opposite problem, and it's no better.
      - tajen 11y ago
        > our jails are full I find it good. So magistrates are constrained by capacity. Of course I'd prefer they don't fill up French prisons at 125%. If we build more prisons, we'll fill them up. US is now famously known for having more people in jail than Stalin's gulags [1]. I quite appreciate France's leniency with penalties, because I'm not sure 3 months or 3 years is really different, apart from further distorting the social network of the inmate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
lisa_henderson 11y ago
About this: "Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform." How do you justify the statement that a jury is the best idea that we have? Germany has the concept of Schöffe, and some believe this offers results that stick closer to the law than the jury system: http://www.britannica.com/topic/Schoffe http://www.britannica.com/topic/Schoffe While any government of mortal human flesh must inevitably have some flaws, the jury system seems especially bad at overcoming popular prejudice. In the USA, "a jury of one's peers" has often meant a mostly white (or all white) jury judging a black person, a circumstance that has given the USA many hundreds of famous miscarriages of justice. The system that grew out of English Common Law, and which dominates England, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, is not the only system known to liberal Western societies. The English system is unique in the authority it gives to juries. Most of the Continental judicial systems either lack juries or have juries whose goal is constrained relative to the English system. A review of the legal traditions in liberal Western nations reveals a lot of good ideas, many of which are probably superior to the jury system.
- johnnyg 11y ago
  Yeah, I can't say that. I'm not sure Schöffe is a silver bullet solution but that a jury is "the best we've got" is unlikely. Valid point.
- philwelch 11y ago
  The purpose of a jury isn't necessarily to make the best, most legally correct decision. The purpose of a jury is to put the people in control of the state. One could argue, perhaps from the experience of China, that elections aren't the most effective means of choosing political leaders. But this misses the point of elections.
- kriro 11y ago
  The bigger issue is that these things are hard to test and noone is willing to run the tests. In theory the US has a good setup for a state to decide to do some testing but politics make it impossible (and there's a decent ethical argument for either side that is far from simple). I mean think about the reactions if some politician would say "we need to see if our courts are as good as they can be, I propose we get rid of the jury system and replace it with X to see if X is superior" 1) That's UNAMERICAN. Courts and jury is the way god intended it to be. 2) Lol crackpot. 3) What if X turns out to be worse, sucks for the people who got trials like this during that time. 4) Lol crackpot. Experimentation for political systems, judiciary infrastructure and the like is a really hard problem and I think de facto impossible. I applaud everyone who tries no matter how crazy it seems (seasteading) but at the end of the day I think there is no such thing as radical political entrepreneurship. I think it's unfortunate but I also can't envision how (rapid) experimentation cycles could be transfered to such systems.
peteretep 11y ago
"We build jails for people we're afraid of, and fill them with people we're mad at
- derefr 11y ago
  We put the people we're genuinely afraid of in extralegal holding facilities instead. (Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.)
  - justin_vanw 11y ago
    Oh my, that is quite scary, but I'm sure you have no examples.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      He was talking about Guantanamo, presumably ("extralegal holding facility")
      - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        Also involuntary commitment facilities. While there is some truly deranged people out there, psychology has a long history of being abused to remove individuals by giving them false labels of mental disorders (or otherwise vastly overstating any disorders the person does have).
      - hobs 11y ago
        I honestly question if GP is being sarcastic because this is a thing acknowledged by the US government, they wont even release some prisoners from gitmo that they acknowledge are innocent of crimes. And dont forget CIA blacksites! http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-poland-cia-blacksite-20150510-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-poland-cia-blacksi... Bush admits to secret prisons(wikipedia sources are your friend): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5321606.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5321606.stm http://web.archive.org/web/20060906193917/http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/06/bush.speech/index.html http://web.archive.org/web/20060906193917/http://www.cnn.com...
gus_massa 11y ago
> An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation. I think that you here implicitly assume that there is overwhelming evidence of who is the author of the crime. For example, all of these: Many survivors testimonies (be careful, they are not so reliable in practice), many videos of the massacre were the face of the attacked is clearly visible, a perfect matching of the ADN in few blood spots, fingerprint in the weapons, gunpowder marks in the hands, he/she is detained in situ while trying to kill more people, ... Does this case has overwhelming evidence?
- oskarth 11y ago
  > Regarding Richard Glossip. I don't know him or his case. Please read the rest of the post before commenting. It's possible to believe all of these things at once: (i) An eye for an eye is useful and works. (ii) Glossip should not be in jail, and even less so, killed. (ii) pg is correct in his reasoning for why US should not have the death penalty.
bhickey 11y ago
An eye for an eye creates bad incentives. If the state is going to kill as punishment for some crime, rationally a criminal should go for broke once that line is crossed. In the worst case, they'll be killed by police. Trapping someone just dissuades them from surrender.
- knodi123 11y ago
  That same logic goes for anybody who has already earned the maximum possible punishment for their crime. If there was no death penalty, and kidnapping+rape earned you life without parole, why not kill the victim too? That way you have a better chance of getting away with it.
selfsimilar 11y ago
Re: an eye for an eye. My uncle who's a pastor gave me an interesting perspective on this phrase. Before Solomon it was common practice to escalate a transgression. So a theft begets a retaliatory murder, begets a retaliatory massacre. This adage is not as much about seeking equality in punishment, as much as a brake to limit escalation. "An eye for an eye and no more."
- astazangasta 11y ago
  This is not Solomon's phrase, it's Hammurabi's - it originated a thousand years before Solomon in Babylonian law. It also exists in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (i.e. the books of Moses), which preceded Solomon. Pastor needs to study his Bible better...
gadders 11y ago
Yeah, I'm kind of undecided. I can imagine the death penalty being appropriate for the really egregious crimes. However, I just don't trust governments to carry it out correctly.

by johnnyg 11y ago

verbin217 11y ago

"If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation." Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children. They're usually in situations people would rather ignore. They're desperate. They want attention and they get it at some price that's ultimately... above market.

eric_the_read 11y ago
According to http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-m... the average age of mass shooters in general is 35.
- deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- verbin217 11y ago
  I was only talking about school shootings but I still didn't expect it to be that high. Too bad it didn't have the median.
omginternets 11y ago
>Unfortunately most of the people who do this are children. eric_the_read's comment notwithstanding, people subjected to extreme circumstances in their childhood years are less likely to be rehabilitated, not more. The argument is that someone willing to shoot up a school for attention is beyond rehabilitation. His age is irrelevant to someone making that claim, and possibly argues in his favor.
- verbin217 11y ago
  The attention we're talking about here isn't narcissistic supply. It's basic interpersonal human concern. Shooting up a school because you're being systematically starved of your basic human needs isn't nearly as bad as you just made is sound. Otherwise I never contended with anything else you said. I do think they deserve a chance at rehabilitation but also that they're less likely to attain it.
  - omginternets 11y ago
    I'm just pointing out that your argument isn't very effective. I actually agree with you, but someone taking the position that school shooters aren't rehabilitable isn't going to care whether or not they're minors. Their argument supersedes notions of maturity.

wtvanhest 11y ago

Your point about 20 years vs 1 is really important. Sentences have gotten so long for relatively harmless crimes that benchmarking becomes distorted. If anyone thinks about all the tings they will do in the next 3 years, then compare that to losing 20 years it can help show how long of a sentence that is.

rhizome 11y ago
Criminal sentences have their own flavor of inflation that seems rarely studied.
- tajen 11y ago
  * in USA. The average jail time in France is less than 2 years. French people are often surprised of the length of the penalties in countries which seem similarly western, such as Luxembourg.
  - omginternets 11y ago
    Oh boy... I would not use France as a counter-example. Jail time is low in France because our jails are full. Any sentence below two years is automatically deferred to probation, which means that a large number of crimes are de facto not punished. A quick google search will reveal a disturbing trend of violent crimes that don't result in jail time for this reason. France has the opposite problem, and it's no better.
    - tajen 11y ago
      > our jails are full I find it good. So magistrates are constrained by capacity. Of course I'd prefer they don't fill up French prisons at 125%. If we build more prisons, we'll fill them up. US is now famously known for having more people in jail than Stalin's gulags [1]. I quite appreciate France's leniency with penalties, because I'm not sure 3 months or 3 years is really different, apart from further distorting the social network of the inmate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

lisa_henderson 11y ago

About this: "Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform." How do you justify the statement that a jury is the best idea that we have? Germany has the concept of Schöffe, and some believe this offers results that stick closer to the law than the jury system: http://www.britannica.com/topic/Schoffe http://www.britannica.com/topic/Schoffe While any government of mortal human flesh must inevitably have some flaws, the jury system seems especially bad at overcoming popular prejudice. In the USA, "a jury of one's peers" has often meant a mostly white (or all white) jury judging a black person, a circumstance that has given the USA many hundreds of famous miscarriages of justice. The system that grew out of English Common Law, and which dominates England, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, is not the only system known to liberal Western societies. The English system is unique in the authority it gives to juries. Most of the Continental judicial systems either lack juries or have juries whose goal is constrained relative to the English system. A review of the legal traditions in liberal Western nations reveals a lot of good ideas, many of which are probably superior to the jury system.

johnnyg 11y ago
Yeah, I can't say that. I'm not sure Schöffe is a silver bullet solution but that a jury is "the best we've got" is unlikely. Valid point.
philwelch 11y ago
The purpose of a jury isn't necessarily to make the best, most legally correct decision. The purpose of a jury is to put the people in control of the state. One could argue, perhaps from the experience of China, that elections aren't the most effective means of choosing political leaders. But this misses the point of elections.
kriro 11y ago
The bigger issue is that these things are hard to test and noone is willing to run the tests. In theory the US has a good setup for a state to decide to do some testing but politics make it impossible (and there's a decent ethical argument for either side that is far from simple). I mean think about the reactions if some politician would say "we need to see if our courts are as good as they can be, I propose we get rid of the jury system and replace it with X to see if X is superior" 1) That's UNAMERICAN. Courts and jury is the way god intended it to be. 2) Lol crackpot. 3) What if X turns out to be worse, sucks for the people who got trials like this during that time. 4) Lol crackpot. Experimentation for political systems, judiciary infrastructure and the like is a really hard problem and I think de facto impossible. I applaud everyone who tries no matter how crazy it seems (seasteading) but at the end of the day I think there is no such thing as radical political entrepreneurship. I think it's unfortunate but I also can't envision how (rapid) experimentation cycles could be transfered to such systems.

peteretep 11y ago

"We build jails for people we're afraid of, and fill them with people we're mad at

derefr 11y ago
We put the people we're genuinely afraid of in extralegal holding facilities instead. (Though we're not scared of what they'd do, mind you; usually it's what they'd say that's the problem. Non-allied parties who know classified information they shouldn't are effectively infohazards from a government's perspective.)
- justin_vanw 11y ago
  Oh my, that is quite scary, but I'm sure you have no examples.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    He was talking about Guantanamo, presumably ("extralegal holding facility")
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      Also involuntary commitment facilities. While there is some truly deranged people out there, psychology has a long history of being abused to remove individuals by giving them false labels of mental disorders (or otherwise vastly overstating any disorders the person does have).
    - hobs 11y ago
      I honestly question if GP is being sarcastic because this is a thing acknowledged by the US government, they wont even release some prisoners from gitmo that they acknowledge are innocent of crimes. And dont forget CIA blacksites! http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-poland-cia-blacksite-20150510-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-poland-cia-blacksi... Bush admits to secret prisons(wikipedia sources are your friend): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5321606.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5321606.stm http://web.archive.org/web/20060906193917/http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/06/bush.speech/index.html http://web.archive.org/web/20060906193917/http://www.cnn.com...

gus_massa 11y ago

> An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation. I think that you here implicitly assume that there is overwhelming evidence of who is the author of the crime. For example, all of these: Many survivors testimonies (be careful, they are not so reliable in practice), many videos of the massacre were the face of the attacked is clearly visible, a perfect matching of the ADN in few blood spots, fingerprint in the weapons, gunpowder marks in the hands, he/she is detained in situ while trying to kill more people, ... Does this case has overwhelming evidence?

oskarth 11y ago
> Regarding Richard Glossip. I don't know him or his case. Please read the rest of the post before commenting. It's possible to believe all of these things at once: (i) An eye for an eye is useful and works. (ii) Glossip should not be in jail, and even less so, killed. (ii) pg is correct in his reasoning for why US should not have the death penalty.

bhickey 11y ago

An eye for an eye creates bad incentives. If the state is going to kill as punishment for some crime, rationally a criminal should go for broke once that line is crossed. In the worst case, they'll be killed by police. Trapping someone just dissuades them from surrender.

knodi123 11y ago
That same logic goes for anybody who has already earned the maximum possible punishment for their crime. If there was no death penalty, and kidnapping+rape earned you life without parole, why not kill the victim too? That way you have a better chance of getting away with it.

selfsimilar 11y ago

Re: an eye for an eye. My uncle who's a pastor gave me an interesting perspective on this phrase. Before Solomon it was common practice to escalate a transgression. So a theft begets a retaliatory murder, begets a retaliatory massacre. This adage is not as much about seeking equality in punishment, as much as a brake to limit escalation. "An eye for an eye and no more."

astazangasta 11y ago
This is not Solomon's phrase, it's Hammurabi's - it originated a thousand years before Solomon in Babylonian law. It also exists in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (i.e. the books of Moses), which preceded Solomon. Pastor needs to study his Bible better...

gadders 11y ago

Yeah, I'm kind of undecided. I can imagine the death penalty being appropriate for the really egregious crimes. However, I just don't trust governments to carry it out correctly.