14 ms·

This year we can end the death penalty in California

• afarrell 10y ago
  Note that this would only end it for crimes that fall under the state's jurisdiction. For things like transporting people across state lines to kill them or using a weapon of mass destruction in a manner detrimental to interstate commerce, the death penalty could still apply on a federal level.
  • throw7 10y ago
    yah, Tsarnaev in massachusetts comes to mind most recently.
  • jedberg 10y ago
    This is true for now, but if enough states outlaw the death penalty, then it will be easier to get it outlawed federally.
  • sliverstorm 10y ago
    For things like transporting people across state lines to kill them... I know all the arguments against the death penalty, but I just can't manage to get myself upset that there is a death penalty for such things.
  • mdemare 10y ago
    So if somebody sets off a nuclear bomb, the feds are fine with it as long as it does not hurt interstate commerce? I know, constitution and all. But still, that sounds a bit mercantile.
    • detaro 10y ago
      Conventional explosives count as "weapons of mass destruction" as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Criminal_.28civilian.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Cri... . And I guess the "interstate commerce" example comes from criminal code about terrorism: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332a
• maerF0x0 10y ago
  IMO I cannot fathom being sure enough of anything to without doub deem someone unredeemable. To the extent that people are unredeemable is to the extent I think our rehabilitation system is failing.
• silencio 10y ago
  Don't forget to explicitly vote no on 66 if you are voting yes on 62. If both of them pass, the one with more 'yes' votes will supersede the other.
  • noobermin 10y ago
    States should not allow two propositions that contradict each other to be put up for vote simultaneously. They are generally confusing and almost always favor the status quo at the expense of most citizens who don't have time to understand the nuances of each prop/issue/initiative/ammendment.
    • exolymph 10y ago
      California's whole proposition system is stupid in general.
    • shalmanese 10y ago
      You should try and get that as a proposition on the next ballot.
• murtnowski 10y ago
  California already removed the death penalty in 1972 then later reinstated it. This resulted in killers like Charles Mason being relieved from execution and denying many victim's family member from obtaining a measure of justice they wanted. Since being reinstated only 13 people have been executed. And none in the past 10 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_California#Executions_after_1976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Californ...
  • DubiousPusher 10y ago
    I think one of the best takes on this issue was a quote from a death penalty critic in the documentary film "Deadline". He said, "We all agree that we should have a system that kills John Wayne Gacy but there is no way to create a system that kills only John Wayne Gacy." Meaning that, there are certain cases where we are 100% certain of a persons guilt and can mostly agree that that person should die but how do we ensure a death penalty is used exlusively in those cases?
    • MichaelBurge 10y ago
      I suppose one starting point would be to allow executions in the case where the defendant confesses under oath in a courtroom. Though it might be considered poor policy, since it would discourage people from accepting a plea bargain or confessing.
      • greglindahl 10y ago
        Not to mention all of the people who give false confessions. False confessions are a common cause of incorrect convictions. https://courses2.cit.cornell.edu/sociallaw/student_projects/FalseConfessions.html https://courses2.cit.cornell.edu/sociallaw/student_projects/...
        • deleted 10y ago
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        • 10y ago
• justinzollars 10y ago
  The death penalty never made sense to me. We teach our kids its wrong to kill by killing? I'd rather the person spend their life in jail to think about what they have done.
  • mikeash 10y ago
    I'm against the death penalty, but I don't think that argument holds up very well. We say it's wrong to kidnap people and hold them against their will, but we put people in prison as punishment. We say it's wrong to steal, but we use fines as punishment. Pretty much by definition, any effective punishment has to be something that's wrong to do to people in general.
    • wolfgke 10y ago
      > We say it's wrong to kidnap people and hold them against their will, but we put people in prison as punishment. This is rather an arguments against prisons to me. > We say it's wrong to steal, but we use fines as punishment. Objectivists would indeed argue this is an argument against taxes.
      • mikeash 10y ago
        Saying all of these things are wrong is indeed consistent, but I don't think many people would agree that it's a good idea to have no way to enforce laws.
  • DubiousPusher 10y ago
    I oppose the death penalty but by this logic we shouldn't have prison at all because it's wrong to kidnap and hold someone in 6'x10' room against their will.
    • abfan1127 10y ago
      prison is a place for people who can't be trusted in the general public. We add layers of protections in case we are wrong (juries, appeals). There is no CTRL-Z for the death penalty.
• jf 10y ago
  pg has put his "money where [his] month is" on this proposition: http://votersedge.org/en/ca/ballot/election/area/42/measures/measure/2025?id=statewide-42-ca#organizations-Yes http://votersedge.org/en/ca/ballot/election/area/42/measures...
  • amha 10y ago
    $500K! Thanks, pg! I wish I could donate that much.
• avelis 10y ago
  Does a death sentence make us a better society for justice? I don't have an answer to that question. However, it is a question I prefer to not have experimented on in our justice system. I recently watched the documentary 13th from Netflix. It really puts into perspective our pro-incarnation justice system. While capital punishment and death row is a section of our justice system, it has the highest stakes in outlining where our ethical limits reside as a society.
• jacquesm 10y ago
  The single best reason why the death penalty should be abolished is because it does not have an 'undo' button. It's bad enough if people get jailed for a long time when they are innocent, it is much worse when they're murdered by the state for crimes they did not commit. Other important work done: http://www.innocenceproject.org/ http://www.innocenceproject.org/ edit: sad to see this thread flagged off the homepage.
  • Alex3917 10y ago
    > The single best reason why the death penalty should be abolished is because it does not have an 'undo' button. Neither does killing people with drones...
    • jernfrost 10y ago
      Exactly. I am astonished that there is no debate around this. Drone killing ought to be regarded as a war crime. When you go around performing targeted killing of people in peace time, then that is unlawful execution.
      • jacquesm 10y ago
        > Drone killing ought to be regarded as a war crime. It is a war crime. That doesn't mean any drone wielders will ever be brought to justice, but the same goes for all those Blackwater (oh, sorry 'Xe', oh, sorry 'Academi', it's hard to keep track of these scumbags) contractors during the Iraq war. War crimes as a rule will only see their day in court if they are committed by relatively powerless people on the losing side of some conflict. Otherwise you're probably in worse shape shoplifting or stealing a car. Heck, America doesn't even subscribe to the international tribunal for warcrimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_International_Criminal_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Internat... And they're the main users of drones for killing people in countries they are not formally at war with.
        • pmoriarty 10y ago
• gxs 10y ago
  I like his message mainly because I agree with the death penalty in principle. If you want to be a shitty human being, with 7B people on the planet we don't really need you. But, in practice, we will never get it 100% right. Probability of killing an innocent person will always be >0. For that reason alone, we should get rid of it.
  • jernfrost 10y ago
    That was my perspective as well before, but what I never paid much attention to is the fact that every person is part of a network of relationships which gets affected by that person's death. The importance of that I think is clear with respect to the dynamics for terrorism and war. People who experience their loved ones dying easily get vengeful and radicalized. If I lost somebody dear to me, I don't think the execution of the killer that my increased satisfaction from this would likely pale compared to the sadness inflicted on those who cared about the killer. This is a fundamental thing in human psychology. We react more to losses than gains. If e.g. the boss takes money from you and gives to me as a bonus, then my joy from this will be significantly less, than the dissatisfaction you will feel from this loss. The sum is lesser than its parts so to speak ;-)
  • mibbiting 10y ago
    Nothing is 100% certain. If you perform a heart operation, there's a chance you'll kill the patient. Does that mean we should get rid of heart operations? If you put a serial killer to death, you can be 100% sure they won't kill any more people. If you put him in prison, you can't. He may escape, or he may get released early and kill again. Or as often happens, he'll kill other prisoners whilst in prison. It's a question of whether you value potential victims, or potential falsely convicted innocent people. IMHO the former is a far bigger problem.
    • scarmig 10y ago
      If there's a serial killer, even if you put a person accused of being that serial killer to death, you can't be sure that serial killer won't kill any more people. This isn't just an edge case: serial killers often claim credit for any and all crimes that might be attributed to them. Kill them off, attribute all the murders to them, and the actual serial killer is more likely to stay in the wild.
• rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Execution is cathartic but hardly effective. Clearly it does not deter murderers as they believe they will either get away with it or they simply don't care as long as they satisfy their need to kill. The wrong people can be executed and unlike a prison sentence, there's no going back. Appeals can last for decades and waste enormous amounts of time and money. End the death penalty. It's just not worth it.
  • jernfrost 10y ago
    I think research shows, that what people care about is the likeliness of getting caught. The length of the sentence doesn't really have that deterring effect. If it did then the US with each extremely long sentences should not be having magnitudes higher homocide rate than European countries with rather mild sentences.
  • Koshkin 10y ago
    > hardly effective Of course it is effective. If only because it reliably and permanently removes the dangerous person from the society.
• eikenberry 10y ago
  Is it better to kill an innocent or let them spend their life in jail? Given the states of our jails, I'm not sure but I think I'd prefer death.
  • Jtsummers 10y ago
    > Is it better to kill an innocent or let them spend their life in jail? Given the states of our jails, I'm not sure but I think I'd prefer death. We can't undo killing them. We can't give them back their years, either. But depriving someone of their life entirely is worse than depriving them of a portion of their life. At least in the latter case they have a chance to go out and do something, reconnect, however painfully, with loved ones, or make new connections.
  • carapace 10y ago
    Well, okay, when you are wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in prison you can request execution. For every other innocent person that's wrongly convicted let's not murder them against their will, eh? (Also, let's fix the jails and prisons!)
    • pm90 10y ago
      Its hard to fix the jails and prisons when widespread poverty still exists in society, for the simple reason that if the prisons offer a better lifestyle than living in the society, more people would choose to go to prison.
      • maxerickson 10y ago
        There are many changes that could be made to prison without making it a better option than living free but below the poverty line.
        • carapace 10y ago
          Inverting the logic: We must let or make the conditions in our prisons be harsh, harsh enough so that poor people don't commit crimes just to get "three hots and a cot" on the taxpayers' dime. Doesn't that sound insane? Let's fix the prisons, and let's have something like a basic standard of living, below which we only let people live if they want to. I.e. so-called Universal Basic Income, or something. I think we should literally give people housing, food, water, and health care, just because.
• rndmize 10y ago
  I don't find the fact that some people are found innocent to be a convincing reason to be against the death penalty. The replacement, which is life in prison, strikes me as even less appealing. How is sending someone to jail and leaving them there for 20 years only to figure out that people fucked up and the guy wasn't actually guilty - "Sorry chap, but it's only a third of your life we've ripped away from you, you've still got one third left!" - any better? I'd rather be dead.
  • brador 10y ago
    What if it was you? What if you were framed for a crime? Would you prefer the death penalty then or only if it's someone else's head on the line? State murder is an ugly business that has no part in any modern society.
    • rndmize 10y ago
      "What if it was me?" is exactly what I'm considering. Life doesn't have infinite value in and of itself. Consider - if you were in a coma or vegetative state, is that a life worth living, even if we have the technology to keep that person alive? If you had Alzheimer's and were gradually losing all mental faculties, would there be a point where you'd rather be dead? I'd consider being in long-term or life prison to be the next closest thing to those examples; a life without freedom, friends, family, with the potential for a wide variety of suffering beyond that - poor medical, poor food, guard abuse, fights, solitary, rape - what in this is worth living for? Prison is specifically meant to be a punishment, not a rehabilitation. And then maybe you get out a couple decades later, everything has changed, no one will hire you, everyone has moved on...
  • lukewink 10y ago
    Most people do not feel the same way. Also, the death penalty does not allow an inmate to choose death over life in prison; this decision is forced upon them.
• deleted 10y ago
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• AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Back in the day, there was a serial killer named Ted Bundy. He killed a number of women, was imprisoned, escaped (twice) and killed at least three more people. That kind of incident makes the problem much more complicated. The typical argument against the death penalty is that sometimes innocent people are executed. And it's true, and it's horrible. But if you don't execute them, then the alternative is that they should be in prison for the rest of their life. If they're innocent, that's still pretty horrible. The real objective is to keep innocent people from being convicted in the first place. But like many other situations, the false positive rate and the false negative rate are inversely correlated. How many guilty people should we free to avoid sending one innocent person to prison? The obvious answer is "as many as we have to" - it's not acceptable to have innocent people in prison. But if we're talking about serial killers, that question becomes "How many innocent people do we want to see dead on the streets to avoid sending one innocent person to prison?" Back to the death penalty. Sometimes guilty people escape, too, and sometimes they kill people after they escape. Executed people don't kill anyone ever again. So, how many innocent people are you willing to execute in order to prevent innocent people dying on the streets? This stuff is very difficult. But given less-than-perfect prisons, I can see a case for keeping the death penalty for serial killers.
  • abfan1127 10y ago
    4% of innocent put to death vs. Ted's 3? Don't forget the pressure on prosecutors to arrest a serial killer, the chances of pinning it on someone (say a relative) is nonzero. But the chance of undoing a wrongful death penalty is exactly zero.
    • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      True. But the chance of undoing a murder is also exactly zero. 4% innocents on death row is a higher number than those killed by escapees, I will agree. But where do you stop? That means at least 4% of those sentenced to life without parole are innocent. Now what? Is leaving them to rot in jail for the rest of their life really that much better than executing them?
• amha 10y ago
  Thank you, pg, for this essay, and for putting money towards Prop 62. This is such an important issue.
• justabee 10y ago
  .
  • jacquesm 10y ago
    Except that historically it wasn't exactly a perfect record and faking evidence is still quite possible. Killing someone as punishment is simply not fault-proof and the whole idea behind a justice system worthy of the name is that it tries very hard to protect the innocent even if that means some of the guilty will go free or will escape punishment. 'Perfect' evidence rarely is, and even confessions are not always true.
    • justabee 10y ago
      .
      • jacquesm 10y ago
        You actually believe that present cases have 'perfect evidence'? Preventable deaths are a step or two removed from state inflicted and sanctioned murder.
        • justabee 10y ago
          .
          • jacquesm 10y ago
            > We shouldn't be coddling those who commit violent acts against others. How is spending a lifetime in prison coddling? > The derrent of death alone would save far many more people. That isn't true, criminals as a rule have a hard time tying consequences to their actions, have a high incidence of mental issues. If deterrence would work at all it would be nice but it rarely does. http://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx http://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
            • 10y ago
• ikeboy 10y ago
  > In the real world, about 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent. So this is not about whether it's ok to kill killers. This is about whether it's ok to kill innocent people. >A child could answer that one for you. http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm N>25 [0] [0] Graham, 2016
  • mturmon 10y ago
    Cute, but fallacious. To unpack, you seem to be arguing that since 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent, then about 1 in 25 people are wrongly convicted, and PG is saying that ratio is unacceptable. I think your probabilistic reasoning is a bit off (by confusing P(I|DS) with P(DS|I)). But the actual issue is about the punishment, not the guilty/innocent determination. So in other words, PG doesn't seem to be making any claim about the size of the group of "n guilty men" -- but rather about the way they can be punished.
    • ikeboy 10y ago
      Saying we shouldn't punish anyone with the death penalty, because 1 in 25 of them will be innocent, is making a claim about n guilty men. From my link: >Commandments for man can be found in the book of Exodus, by the same Author(s), where God rejects the tradeoff between convicting the guilty and convicting the innocent, and simply commands, "the innocent and righteous slay thou not." 32 One can take this to imply an infinite value of n, at least in capital cases. The twelfth-century Judeo-Spanish legal theorist Moses Maimonides, however, interpreted the commandment of Exodus as implying a value of n = 1000 for execution. 33 He refers to it as the "290th Negative Commandment" and argues that executing an accused criminal on anything less than absolute certainty would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof, until we would be convicting merely "according to the judge's caprice. Hence the Exalted One has shut this door" 34 against the use of presumptive evidence, for "it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death once in a way." 35 There may be multiple ns required, one for conviction and one for punishment, but the underlying structure is the same. >To unpack, you seem to be arguing that since 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent, then about 1 in 25 people are wrongly convicted, and PG is saying that ratio is unacceptable. I think your probabilistic reasoning is a bit off (by confusing P(I|DS) with P(DS|I)). I'm not sure what you mean. If 25 people are sentenced to death, and one of them is innocent, then PG is arguing we should let 24 guilty men escape death rather than allowing 1 innocent man to be killed. I guess maybe I should have said n>24, then, but the overall point remains.
• jernfrost 10y ago
  The death penalty makes no logical sense. It only appeals to primitive emotions. Why have a penalty which 1) Can never be reversed if you kill an innocent 2) Cost a lot more than life in prison. Now why it might be argued that a killer has no right to life, what about those close to the killer? Killers might have a wife, husband, brother, sister, friends, mother and a a father. By killing the killer you inflict hardship on these people. To what purpose? In prison this person can't hurt anybody else, so why unnecessarily reduce the life quality of somebody else. I see it being argued that the victims families deserve this, but I think that has been learnt and conditioned in society. E.g. in my own country Norway, I hardly ever read about victims and relatives who desire a death penalty or any particularly harsh or painful punishment. I think the desire for revenge is something which is simply promoted by conservative christian groups.
  • a13n 10y ago
    The death penalty costs more than life in prison? Source?
    • cobalt 10y ago
      Plenty of articles if you google. Gist of it is that the repeals process and such take many years and often end up costing more. Most people are on death row for >10 years
    • 1024core 10y ago
      "It’s 10 times more expensive to kill them than to keep them alive," http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/05/01/considering-the-death-penalty-your-tax-dollars-at-work http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/05/01/cons...
    • Analemma_ 10y ago
      It's a pretty well-known fact that execution typically costs around 10 times more than life imprisonment. Here's a page with links to multiple peer-reviewed sources, covering multiple states: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty. The issue is that the appeals process is extremely expensive and time-consuming. You could conceivably simplify and streamline it (to the extent permitted by the Supreme Court, which has been mandating ever-stricter requirements for capital punishment cases), but that would make it even more unacceptably error-prone than it already is.
• tptacek 10y ago
  This kind of post isn't going to change anybody's mind, and isn't intended to (Paul Graham is a fine persuasive writer, and good persuasive writing tends not to include appeals like "a child could answer that one for you"). No, this is just an update, for Graham's California readers, most of whom can safely be assumed to agree with him, that they should take special care to vote this year. I'm glad California has a chance to end the death penalty this year. You'll catch up to Illinois soon enough, Silicon Valley! But this isn't the kind of post that finds a good home here on HN. This is the kind thing you want to post (repeatedly) to Twitter. Here, it's just more flame war stimulus. I flagged this post --- and, because it's a PG post, did so vocally this time. You should too!
  • jernfrost 10y ago
    So how do people ever change their mind on anything? I'd say that within any group with a certain conviction there will always be people at the fringes which are less convinced and who are willing to explore alternatives. I once believed in the death penalty. I once believe in God. I was once a libertarian. Of course a single person didn't change my mind on these points, but being exposed to alternatives by many people over time changed my perspective. Although I guess often simply seeking information is what eventually does most to change opinions.
    • tptacek 10y ago
      I'm not arguing against persuasive essays. Persuasive essays are great. I'm saying that this isn't a persuasive essay. It's a political bulletin. I agree with its politics, but not with its place on the HN front page.
      • jacquesm 10y ago
        Even if the essay isn't persuasive the discussion could be. I also think that your flag-marshalling is in pretty poor taste, flagging it yourself for whatever reasons you have is fine but to call on others to do so as well is really not good.
• raverbashing 10y ago
  " This is about whether it's ok to kill innocent people." So why is the discussion to eliminate the death penalty instead of ensuring more oversight or limitations? Something like: - Not applicable when only one murder committed - Bigger burden of proof for the DP to be applicable (not only relying on witnesses, for example)
  • Analemma_ 10y ago
    > So why is the discussion to eliminate the death penalty instead of ensuring more oversight or limitations? The Supreme Court has gradually been mandating more and more oversight and limitations on death penalty cases since 1976. It doesn't seem to have made a major dent in the false conviction rate or the arbitrariness of when capital punishment is used, especially with regards to race. And while I don't think cost should even be relevant to the discussion, it's worth noting that these limitations and oversight requirements- which still aren't good enough- are the main reason why it costs 10 times more to execute someone than to put them in prison for life. Combined with the death penalty's demonstrated lack of deterrent effect - simpler and better to just get rid of it.
    • raverbashing 10y ago
      Yes, I agree. Maybe it's not more oversight, but better oversight And of course, prosecutors that push dubious cases should be punished as well.
• kumarski 10y ago
  I suppose the best hting we can do is share this post and go vote.
• Unbeliever69 10y ago
  I always think of Star Trek and how some advanced civilization or a future version of ourselves will perceive the barbarism of our current society. I would not be surprised if the earth gets paved over for an intergalactic superhighway because frankly, we are not worth saving. Humans, have very little humanity. We have a LONG way to go. This is a small start.
• alphapapa 10y ago
  If the motivation for ending the death penalty is to avoid taking innocent lives, what about how abortion takes innocent lives? Regardless of where you stand on either issue, supporting one but not the other seems like hypocrisy.
• danieltillett 10y ago
  There is one good reason to keep the status quo (death penalty without any actual deaths) which is that anyone given a death sentence gets their case extensively reviewed and appealed by excellent lawyers working pro bono. The people who get life get no help at all. I have read of prisioners being upset when given a life sentence as they know that no one will help them appeal their conviction. If you are innocent you want to be given a death sentence since you will have so many more people helping you get your conviction overturned.
  • nothrabannosir 10y ago
    What's to say banning He death penalty entirely won't move that pro bono work to life sentences, even if only partially..?
    • danieltillett 10y ago
      Well it might, but given it doesn’t now in states without the death penalty there is no reason to think it will in the future. I know if I was innocent and poor and had been convicted of a crime that was either life in prison or death that I would want a death sentence.
• paulddraper 10y ago
  > about 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent. Be careful how you read this number. This is NOT the proportion of convicts wrongfully killed. This is the number that have wrongfully received a death sentence. A death sentence is nearly always appealed, and usually multiple times. The number of convicts sentenced to be executed that subsequently fail every single appeal is likely far, far smaller than that statistic.
• cypherpunks01 10y ago
  Relevant article from The Marshall Project (in my opinion a very respectable source), "Three States to Watch if You Care About the Death Penalty" referring to Nebraska, Oklahoma and California ballot measures: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/10/19/three-states-to-watch-if-you-care-about-the-death-penalty https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/10/19/three-states-t...
• AdamN 10y ago
  I agree, and smart of pg to stick to the most defensible reason not to have the death penalty. Even in a world where we know the killer is a killer though, it's unethical to do it.
• harryh 10y ago
  I, like pg, am against the death penalty but I don't agree with the reasoning in this essay. Of course there are error rates in our judicial system. It would be impossible to not have them. But these errors are not confined to death penalty cases. We surely wrongfully imprison some people, and wrongly fine others. That does not mean that we shouldn't have fines or prisons. I don't see a good justification to apply this reasoning to the death penalty but not other forms of punishment.
  • danhak 10y ago
    Other errors can be remedied. Death penalty not so much.
    • deleted 10y ago
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    • lr4444lr 10y ago
      But that's also one of the essential points of Kant's argument in favor of the death penalty: depriving another person of life is a uniquely irrestorable offense.
      • marricks 10y ago
        Arguing with the ghost of Kant seems like something one should avoid, but here I go... isn't that also an argument for why a state should not impose capital punishment? Mistakenly taking someone's life is something a state could never remedy.
        • lr4444lr 10y ago
          Kant did not appear to grapple with the fallibility of the judicial system in the way that we do now, and I neither intend to defend his views or put words into his mouth on that point (though I welcome someone more knowledgeable in his work than I to do otherwise and cite). My point is that there aren't easy answers to these questions, which is why I upvoted the OP comment, because it implies a mature understanding that fallibility is also a value judgment. (Edited for grammar. I hate typing on a smartphone.)
• danhak 10y ago
  Important note on Prop 66, which PG unfortunately glossed over: it will override 62 if it passes with more yes votes than the other measure. Therefore, if you're opposed to the death penalty and intend to vote yes on both measures--reasoning, for instance, that the reforms on 66 such as expedited appeals for death row inmates are an improvement regardless of whether 62 passes--you're undermining your own vote.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • sdml 10y ago
    > a yes vote on 66 overrides a yes vote on 62 That's not entirely true. In the event that both propositions pass, whichever proposition received more yes votes will supersede the other https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_66,_Death_Penalty_Procedures_(2016) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_66,_Death_Pen...
    • danhak 10y ago
      Good point, I should've been more precise. Edited the comment accordingly.
  • Maultasche 10y ago
    Generally, I imagine that anti-death-penalty voters will vote Yes on 66 and No on 62 and vice versa for pro-death-penalty voters. However, it's possible that a voter is simply motivated to clear death row by any means necessary because of all the extra costs it involves. Maintaining death row is expensive. In that case, voting Yes on both makes sense. Either death row will get cleared out by getting rid of the death penalty or it will get cleared out by killing them faster. Either way, it's a cost savings. I find that logic to be cold and impersonal, but I imagine there are plenty of people who think that way.
  • BlackjackCF 10y ago
    I find it annoying as a California voter that both of these made it onto the ballot at the same time. It seems to make more sense to me to FIRST vote on whether or not the death penalty should be repealed before voting on whether or not to expedite the process.
• breatheoften 10y ago
  When I was young, I was certain the death penalty is obviously, trivially an incorrect thing to do. Regardless of what was done, there was no cause for society to choose to take someone's life. Now that I'm older, I worry about the possibility that banning the death penalty is an implicit acceptance of the policy of locking people away for life. According to the article 4% of people who are sentenced to the death penalty on death row are innocent. He doesn't offer statistics for the number who actually receive the punishment however given that not all people on death row are executed, and the significant resources devoted to the appeal process, the percentage of innocents who are executed must be lower than the 4% who are sentenced. I must ask how many innocent people are sentenced to life in prison. I can't imagine anything worse than an innocent person sentenced to life in prison -- and eventually dying in prison. If we are to make decisions about punishment taking into account the possibility of an incorrect sentence, I believe we need to be more realistic with regard to the hierarchy of punishments that we are inflicting. A sentence of Life in Prison carried to term is a worse punishment than Execution.
  • zanny 10y ago
    > A sentence of Life in Prison carried to term is a worse punishment than Execution. This isn't an objective fact. Even some prisoners would certainly prefer to live their life behind bars than lose it completely.
    • thaumasiotes 10y ago
      It's also not objectively wrong. I don't think it's even particularly difficult to defend.
  • njharman 10y ago
    I also was/am certain death penalty is obviously incorrect thing to do. But not cause society has not cause for sanctioned murder (it does). But rather there are no "take backs" with death penalty. We make too many mistakes. Our punishments should take that fact into account
    • 10y ago
• ggonweb 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer",
  • bolocker 10y ago
    At 4% it would be "It is better that twenty five guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer."
• bolocker 10y ago
  Why can't we just get that 4% bad convictions down to 0% for the death penalty? There are many cases where no one disputes the guilt of the perpetrator, like mass shooters or murderers that film themselves in the act. Death penalties could have an even higher standard. I've noticed a strange pattern where wealthy elites like Paul Graham are obviously very disturbed by things like the death penalty, animal rights, and tragedies they see overseas but can hardly be bothered to care about the great suffering poor people face generally. The only issues that they care about are ones that directly affect their own conscience and mental well-being. "The death penalty is bad because it makes me feel bad" Whereas people who don't live such privileged lives can see so many worse problems in everyday life, like being hungry, suffering from bad/no medical care, to being victimized by street crime.
  • Karunamon 10y ago
    The only issues that they care about are ones that directly affect their own conscience Is it not a prerequisite that a wrong begin to effect your conscience before you want to do something about it?
    • bolocker 10y ago
      Yes but if you live in an elite life bubble you'll only care about things that make it through that bubble. Why are so many rich celebrities obsessed with animal rights, the death penalty, and climate change? Because those issues affect them personally in some way. They gnaw at their conscience in a way that the extreme suffering of hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens does not.
      • thaumasiotes 10y ago
        I don't think this is right. Climate change is not known for personally affecting anybody. It's more of an ineffable millenarian idea. Rather, I would say rich celebrities are obsessed with animal rights, the death penalty, and climate change because those ideas are fashionable among rich celebrities, not because they're relevant to rich celebrities for any fundamental (i.e. would still apply if no one knew what the celebrity believed) reason.
• njharman 10y ago
  Huh, surprised to learn CA has death penalty. In "good" company with thirty other states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...
• boterock 10y ago
  I find interesting that you in the US are thinking in banning the death penalty. Here in Colombia death penalty was banned about a century ago, unfortunately, it has done more harm than good, because criminals (even very bad ones, the kid rapists and stuff) are not scared of prison, prisons are so crowded that sentences are short (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Garavito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Garavito is a good example, I don't think a lifetime of prison would forgive all he did, he should be condemned for 1800 years) and this has led to crime rise. There is a common belief that politicians banned death penalty long ago to be able to be corrupt without any risk, in the long run if they're not dying, they could steal a lot of money and then use half of it to get out of prison early. I know US corruption is not as bad as Colombian corruption. Unfortunately we have to deal with our system, and the ban of death penalty has kept terrible people in our country for a long time. It may be unethical to kill someone, but in the end is the lesser evil, because it will never compare to the harm that this person does to the society. As a Colombian I feel that corruption and crime is going down now, and we are proud for it, but I also feel that if we took the 'evil' decision earlier, we would be much better now.
  • aoeuasdf1 10y ago
    There's two parts that I'm still not sure about here - a question of moral weight W: 1 * innocent prisoner executed == W * innocent victim of crime and two epistemic questions, how many innocents X are executed per guilty person, and how many victims Y are saved on average by the disincentive caused by executing one guilty prisoner? Per guilty person executed, we save Y lives and we are penalized W * X. Is Y > W * X? If so it seems reasonable to keep the death penalty, all things being equal (ignoring the cost of litigation vs. prison time, etc) Does anyone have sources for what the values of any of these numbers should be?
• grondilu 10y ago
  What is the acceptable rate of mistakes for the judiciary system? Death is an irreversible punishment, so I can understand that it seems incompatible with a wrong judge decision, but the alternative, that is for instance perpetual incarceration, is only reversible on a very theoretical basis (if an innocent is in prison, his case will be reviewed only if he's very lucky). So arguably, any sentencing is unfair when it's wrong. Death only makes it more obvious. Then, what's the acceptable error rate in a judiciary system? The author mentions 4% being unacceptable. What about 0.1%? 0.0001%? Crime can not be left unpunished, can it? And yet I doubt it is possible to always be absolutely sure of either guilt or innocence. After all, doesn't the Law talk about "reasonable doubt"? Doesn't that also mean by contraposition that below a certain threshold, it becomes unreasonable to consider unlikely circumstances or extraordinary events that would prove a defendant non-guilty?