5 ms·

This is one of the big reasons why there shouldn't be a death penalty.

by badsock 11y ago

_yosefk 11y ago
I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers, and my trouble is I don't know how to get those numbers. Regarding just the second number - deterrence - here's a claim that the death penalty deters, saving between 3 and 18 lives per execution depending on the study you choose (quite the spread, BTW...): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/11/AR2007061100406.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06... ...But here's a claim that the death penalty doesn't deter (though they cite, not direct statistical evidence, but the opinion of criminologists and the fact that some places without a death penalty have lower murder rates than places with it; but maybe if I dug deeper I'd find something more direct): http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-death-penalty http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-d... Perhaps someone who've looked into it more deeply can weigh in; all I'm saying is that it matters what the answer is. (My own intuition would be that people aren't deterred by the death penalty very much, because they count on not getting caught, instead of multiplying the penalty by the probability or some such. But I could be wrong. Also I'm open to the opinion that you shouldn't do some things to people regardless of potential benefits to society, for instance I'm pretty sure torture would deter more than the death penalty because it's a very vivid picture a potential criminal would have in their mind, but it's great that nobody thinks we should go there. I just don't think that the capital punishment is "cruel and unusual" that way.)
- weaksauce 11y ago
  I think the real reason that the death penalty is not effective as a deterrent is that the people that murder in general don't think things through. Very reactionary. Obviously there are plenty of cold blooded killers out there too but I doubt penalties have a ton of bearing on things. Most people just don't murder other people. I could be completely off base though and would love to see some evidence either way.
  - ljf 11y ago
    Also, I believe many people don't consider the punishment just the chance of being caught. If you are going to commit a planned murder then you are likely to plan on getting away with it. If it is spur of the moment then again you won't be thinking about being caught or about the punishment...
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    But you could choose to only apply capital punishment in cases where there was substantial premeditation.
- zaidf 11y ago
  I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers, and my trouble is I don't know how to get those numbers. I could not disagree with you more! It should not matter how much total good it does if even one person is wrongly killed via the death penalty. It sounds like a logically sound thing until you find yourself being the one person society has decided to kill for the better good of the society.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    You find yourself no worse off than the victim of an undeterred murder. That said, I understand the deterrent effect to be often assumed to be far greater than reality bears out, and I think the death penalty is quite a poor practice on balance for a host of reasons.
    - codeddesign 11y ago
      Or you just put the blood on the prosecutors hands. If they wrongfully execute someone, then they are the ones to be executed. I guarantee there will be a lot less death penalty cases ;)
      - dllthomas 11y ago
        "Or you just..." as opposed to what? I'm not sure how your comment is meant to relate to mine. It's certainly true that threatening prosecutors with execution in the event of a wrongful execution would stop them from pursuing the death penalty in almost any case. The same is true of a threat of life in prison, and probably also true of substantially lesser sentences.
      - vidarh 11y ago
        Franquin's Idées Noires is one of my all time favourite comics, and one of the one pagers dealt with the death penalty (France still had the death penalty at the time it was first published in Spirou in the last 70's), expressing a similarly effective approach to making it unpalatable.. [1]. A rough translation (my French is rusty - been a decade or two): "The law is clear: Anyone who intentionally kills another will lose their head. Let the executioner do his duty." "This way, my friend" "And so, a good deed done" "I'm sorry, but anyone who intentionally kills another..." (Idées Noires is fantastic and macabre. Franquin kept "letting" people who causes suffering for other people - or animals - die horrible deaths in his panels, often with a solid dose of poetic justice in between other things, and coupled with rather caustic political commentary. Unfortunately, AFAIK I don't think there is an English translation (one was in the works), but even with quite modest French they're relatively easy to understand (many of them don't have much or any text)) [1] http://www.franquin.com/in/album3_in.php http://www.franquin.com/in/album3_in.php - rightmost panel on the top.
- ImTalking 11y ago
  Wow. Unless, of course, YOU are the innocent person being executed. Then the comparison doesn't matter at all, doesn't it?
  - grahamburger 11y ago
    What if you are the innocent person being murdered by someone who would have been deterred by the possibility of capital punishment?
    - ImTalking 11y ago
      That's not the scenario. I'm saying what happens if you are the innocent one being falsely executed.
      - msellout 11y ago
        Why should we think about one scenario but not the other?
        ImTalking 11y ago
        Because saying "an innocent person being murdered by someone who..." doesn't make sense. What are they innocent of?
    - tehwebguy 11y ago
      Yeah good point. I'll be sure to write, "if only the person that stabbed me in this dark alley had the deterrent of possibly being convicted and executed maybe I would still be alive" in blood before I lose consciousness or run out of blood.
- crag 11y ago
  //how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers The death penalty isn't about deterrence. It's about vengeance. At least to the family and friends of the victim. Many in the US, for religious reasons, consider death to be the ultimate punishment. You know - "hell is that way". But what if you don't believe in hell, or a judgement? Then death is an easy way out. Personally, I'd rather die than be thrown into a hole for 40 years. So allow me to rephase: //I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many people believe the criminal will suffer in hell. Either way, i agree.
  - developer2 11y ago
    That makes no sense. If hell is for eternity, why would any religious nut care whether the criminal is executed sooner rather than let to rot and die in prison later? The end result would be the same.
    - crag 11y ago
      //That makes no sense. If hell is for eternity, why would any religious nut care whether the criminal is executed sooner rather than let to rot and die in prison later Because they believe hell is more of a punishment. They'd rather see the criminal dead in hell, then sitting in a jail cell alive.
      - alphydan 11y ago
        I think he/she meant it as a mathematical argument. Infinity + 20 = Infinity. So if Hell is eternal, it doesn't matter if you get there today or in 20 years.
        ZeroGravitas 11y ago
        I think that there's some basis for reading the Bible as saying that the dead don't arrive in heaven/hell until after the second coming occurs. I just googled this and discovered there's a Christianity Stack Exchange site. Seems to be no strong consensus on exactly when you get to heaven.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  Lies, damn lies and statistics. The Emory study cited by that first article (http://cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DezRubShepDeterFinal.pdf http://cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DezRubShepDeterFinal.pdf) doesn't inspire me much. Show me an observational study which the researchers claim "eliminates the bias arising from unobserved heterogeneity", and I'll show you a study that was conducted by overconfident researchers who're overselling the strength of their evidence. And no, after reading the paper I'm not personally convinced that they did deal with unobserved heterogeneity. I'm not even convinced that the authors fully understand what the unobserved heterogeneity problem's really about. They seem to think that it's something you can whisk away by just throwing a bunch of covariates at your data, which is not how it works. If they mentioned their conditional independence assumption, let alone attempted to defend it, I missed it.
- alextgordon 11y ago
  The error in your attempt at utilitarianism is to only count deaths of innocent people as meaningful. It doesn't actually matter whether someone is guilty or innocent when executed, the effect on their family will be precisely the same.
  - _yosefk 11y ago
    Perhaps it would have been an error in my attempt at utilitarianism, if indeed it were an attempt at utilitarianism; to me however it does matter whether someone is guilty or innocent when executed, and I think it also matters to most people (attempting Rawlsianism?) objecting to my comment on the grounds of any execution of an innocent person being unacceptable. (Can I say that the error in their attempt at Rawlsianism is that they don't also oppose cars which regularly cause deaths of innocent people? I guess I can say it except for the part where I attribute opposition to cars to a philosophy that I never studied in depth.)
cm2187 11y ago
I agree but in my opinion the only one. I am not opposed to the principle but justice in pretty much every country has historically shown a remarkable incompetence and lack of rigor. It helps that in probably 80% of the cases there is no real doubt on the identity of the killer (not all cases are a suspense movie scenario). But I wonder if the reliability of courts is even higher that whatever that percentage is.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  "I agree but in my opinion the only one." "In practice, it's more expensive than life-in-prison" doesn't do it for ya?
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    I'd guess that the legal expense associated with endless appeals and delaying tactics is incurred for the same reason I believe capital punishment is immoral on a personal level -- namely, that "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" is nowhere near a strong enough criterion to justify taking a life. It's just too subjective. We wouldn't need to build so much fault tolerance into the process if it weren't so badly flawed to begin with. If the death penalty were reserved for use in cases that meet a higher standard -- say "guilty beyond any conceivable possibility of doubt" -- I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with it. To me, that's the difference between a Timothy McVeigh and a West Memphis Three. But I don't have any insight into how many cases would meet that criterion. It may be that the death penalty is simply not worth reserving as an option in those cases.

This is one of the big reasons why there shouldn't be a death penalty.

by badsock 11y ago

This is one of the big reasons why there shouldn't be a death penalty.

I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers, and my trouble is I don't know how to get those numbers. Regarding just the second number - deterrence - here's a claim that the death penalty deters, saving between 3 and 18 lives per execution depending on the study you choose (quite the spread, BTW...): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/11/AR2007061100406.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06... ...But here's a claim that the death penalty doesn't deter (though they cite, not direct statistical evidence, but the opinion of criminologists and the fact that some places without a death penalty have lower murder rates than places with it; but maybe if I dug deeper I'd find something more direct): http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-death-penalty http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-d... Perhaps someone who've looked into it more deeply can weigh in; all I'm saying is that it matters what the answer is. (My own intuition would be that people aren't deterred by the death penalty very much, because they count on not getting caught, instead of multiplying the penalty by the probability or some such. But I could be wrong. Also I'm open to the opinion that you shouldn't do some things to people regardless of potential benefits to society, for instance I'm pretty sure torture would deter more than the death penalty because it's a very vivid picture a potential criminal would have in their mind, but it's great that nobody thinks we should go there. I just don't think that the capital punishment is "cruel and unusual" that way.)

weaksauce 11y ago
I think the real reason that the death penalty is not effective as a deterrent is that the people that murder in general don't think things through. Very reactionary. Obviously there are plenty of cold blooded killers out there too but I doubt penalties have a ton of bearing on things. Most people just don't murder other people. I could be completely off base though and would love to see some evidence either way.
- ljf 11y ago
  Also, I believe many people don't consider the punishment just the chance of being caught. If you are going to commit a planned murder then you are likely to plan on getting away with it. If it is spur of the moment then again you won't be thinking about being caught or about the punishment...
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  But you could choose to only apply capital punishment in cases where there was substantial premeditation.
zaidf 11y ago
I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers, and my trouble is I don't know how to get those numbers. I could not disagree with you more! It should not matter how much total good it does if even one person is wrongly killed via the death penalty. It sounds like a logically sound thing until you find yourself being the one person society has decided to kill for the better good of the society.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  You find yourself no worse off than the victim of an undeterred murder. That said, I understand the deterrent effect to be often assumed to be far greater than reality bears out, and I think the death penalty is quite a poor practice on balance for a host of reasons.
  - codeddesign 11y ago
    Or you just put the blood on the prosecutors hands. If they wrongfully execute someone, then they are the ones to be executed. I guarantee there will be a lot less death penalty cases ;)
    - dllthomas 11y ago
      "Or you just..." as opposed to what? I'm not sure how your comment is meant to relate to mine. It's certainly true that threatening prosecutors with execution in the event of a wrongful execution would stop them from pursuing the death penalty in almost any case. The same is true of a threat of life in prison, and probably also true of substantially lesser sentences.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      Franquin's Idées Noires is one of my all time favourite comics, and one of the one pagers dealt with the death penalty (France still had the death penalty at the time it was first published in Spirou in the last 70's), expressing a similarly effective approach to making it unpalatable.. [1]. A rough translation (my French is rusty - been a decade or two): "The law is clear: Anyone who intentionally kills another will lose their head. Let the executioner do his duty." "This way, my friend" "And so, a good deed done" "I'm sorry, but anyone who intentionally kills another..." (Idées Noires is fantastic and macabre. Franquin kept "letting" people who causes suffering for other people - or animals - die horrible deaths in his panels, often with a solid dose of poetic justice in between other things, and coupled with rather caustic political commentary. Unfortunately, AFAIK I don't think there is an English translation (one was in the works), but even with quite modest French they're relatively easy to understand (many of them don't have much or any text)) [1] http://www.franquin.com/in/album3_in.php http://www.franquin.com/in/album3_in.php - rightmost panel on the top.
ImTalking 11y ago
Wow. Unless, of course, YOU are the innocent person being executed. Then the comparison doesn't matter at all, doesn't it?
- grahamburger 11y ago
  What if you are the innocent person being murdered by someone who would have been deterred by the possibility of capital punishment?
  - ImTalking 11y ago
    That's not the scenario. I'm saying what happens if you are the innocent one being falsely executed.
    - msellout 11y ago
      Why should we think about one scenario but not the other?
      - ImTalking 11y ago
        Because saying "an innocent person being murdered by someone who..." doesn't make sense. What are they innocent of?
  - tehwebguy 11y ago
    Yeah good point. I'll be sure to write, "if only the person that stabbed me in this dark alley had the deterrent of possibly being convicted and executed maybe I would still be alive" in blood before I lose consciousness or run out of blood.
crag 11y ago
//how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers The death penalty isn't about deterrence. It's about vengeance. At least to the family and friends of the victim. Many in the US, for religious reasons, consider death to be the ultimate punishment. You know - "hell is that way". But what if you don't believe in hell, or a judgement? Then death is an easy way out. Personally, I'd rather die than be thrown into a hole for 40 years. So allow me to rephase: //I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many people believe the criminal will suffer in hell. Either way, i agree.
- developer2 11y ago
  That makes no sense. If hell is for eternity, why would any religious nut care whether the criminal is executed sooner rather than let to rot and die in prison later? The end result would be the same.
  - crag 11y ago
    //That makes no sense. If hell is for eternity, why would any religious nut care whether the criminal is executed sooner rather than let to rot and die in prison later Because they believe hell is more of a punishment. They'd rather see the criminal dead in hell, then sitting in a jail cell alive.
    - alphydan 11y ago
      I think he/she meant it as a mathematical argument. Infinity + 20 = Infinity. So if Hell is eternal, it doesn't matter if you get there today or in 20 years.
      - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
        I think that there's some basis for reading the Bible as saying that the dead don't arrive in heaven/hell until after the second coming occurs. I just googled this and discovered there's a Christianity Stack Exchange site. Seems to be no strong consensus on exactly when you get to heaven.
bunderbunder 11y ago
Lies, damn lies and statistics. The Emory study cited by that first article (http://cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DezRubShepDeterFinal.pdf http://cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DezRubShepDeterFinal.pdf) doesn't inspire me much. Show me an observational study which the researchers claim "eliminates the bias arising from unobserved heterogeneity", and I'll show you a study that was conducted by overconfident researchers who're overselling the strength of their evidence. And no, after reading the paper I'm not personally convinced that they did deal with unobserved heterogeneity. I'm not even convinced that the authors fully understand what the unobserved heterogeneity problem's really about. They seem to think that it's something you can whisk away by just throwing a bunch of covariates at your data, which is not how it works. If they mentioned their conditional independence assumption, let alone attempted to defend it, I missed it.
alextgordon 11y ago
The error in your attempt at utilitarianism is to only count deaths of innocent people as meaningful. It doesn't actually matter whether someone is guilty or innocent when executed, the effect on their family will be precisely the same.
- _yosefk 11y ago
  Perhaps it would have been an error in my attempt at utilitarianism, if indeed it were an attempt at utilitarianism; to me however it does matter whether someone is guilty or innocent when executed, and I think it also matters to most people (attempting Rawlsianism?) objecting to my comment on the grounds of any execution of an innocent person being unacceptable. (Can I say that the error in their attempt at Rawlsianism is that they don't also oppose cars which regularly cause deaths of innocent people? I guess I can say it except for the part where I attribute opposition to cars to a philosophy that I never studied in depth.)

cm2187 11y ago

I agree but in my opinion the only one. I am not opposed to the principle but justice in pretty much every country has historically shown a remarkable incompetence and lack of rigor. It helps that in probably 80% of the cases there is no real doubt on the identity of the killer (not all cases are a suspense movie scenario). But I wonder if the reliability of courts is even higher that whatever that percentage is.

dllthomas 11y ago
"I agree but in my opinion the only one." "In practice, it's more expensive than life-in-prison" doesn't do it for ya?
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  I'd guess that the legal expense associated with endless appeals and delaying tactics is incurred for the same reason I believe capital punishment is immoral on a personal level -- namely, that "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" is nowhere near a strong enough criterion to justify taking a life. It's just too subjective. We wouldn't need to build so much fault tolerance into the process if it weren't so badly flawed to begin with. If the death penalty were reserved for use in cases that meet a higher standard -- say "guilty beyond any conceivable possibility of doubt" -- I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with it. To me, that's the difference between a Timothy McVeigh and a West Memphis Three. But I don't have any insight into how many cases would meet that criterion. It may be that the death penalty is simply not worth reserving as an option in those cases.