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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: >Comman

by 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.

jacquesm 10y ago
No, it doesn't. They won't escape death, they'll be dead sooner or later anyway. It is just that society will not have lowered itself to their level in response and will have an opportunity to figure out which of those people was in fact innocent. It's all fun and games until you are that innocent person.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  Don't be pedantic, you know I meant "escape the death penalty". Are you arguing for n=infinity?
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Well, it all depends on how many people you intend to kill, it's all about the ratio npeopleinnocent/npeopleguilty after all. The problem is that no matter how small the ratio gets in absolute terms there is only the possibility of killing an innocent person or not killing an innocent person. Even if you assume that everybody is guilty I'd still make the argument that people can genuinely change and that no matter what you do you will not be bringing anybody back that's already dead. Think of still having the death penalty as a black mark on a civilization. As a nice example have a look at the Philippines and try to work out for yourself if you feel that even if society will be better afterwards it is worth it to kill this many people, many of them in serious trouble already. The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it?
    - ikeboy 10y ago
      >Even if you assume that everybody is guilty I'd still make the argument that people can genuinely change and that no matter what you do you will not be bringing anybody back that's already dead. That may be (and I agree with it), but I'm critiquing PG's argument (in particular his assertion that it's obvious), not his conclusion. >The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it? You need different punishments for different crimes, or someone who commits a small crime has no more deterrence against big crimes. I'm not sure what point you're making with this.
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        The justice system is - in principle - not about revenge but about balance, a balance between running a safe society and one where people that misbehave are placed in a spot where they can be re-habilitated and then can re-enter society. That path is closed in an extreme way by killing someone, there is no rehabilitation from that no matter what. Deterrence and punishment have very little to do with each other (but deterrence and the chance of being caught do have a lot to do with each other). So fundamentally the justice system is not about punishment at all, though from the victims perspective that might seem to be the case.
mturmon 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. No. PG's piece leaves open the option for punishment by other means, even if they do turn out to be innocent. For instance, to take the extreme case, nothing in PG's article says he would have a problem with punishing everyone accused of murder with one year imprisonment, with probability one. I get that you want to tie PG's piece to the Volokh article, but PG's piece is about this particular form of punishment. [edited to add: since we're going in circles, I'll stop now]
- ikeboy 10y ago
  I think you misunderstood me. "we shouldn't punish anyone with the death penalty" means we shouldn't kill anyone, it allows for other methods of punishment. The Volokh article allows for multiple levels of punishment as well. The quote from Maimonides doesn't mean we simply let them go free if we aren't absolutely sure that they are guilty, instead we would lock them up.

by ikeboy 10y ago

jacquesm 10y ago

No, it doesn't. They won't escape death, they'll be dead sooner or later anyway. It is just that society will not have lowered itself to their level in response and will have an opportunity to figure out which of those people was in fact innocent. It's all fun and games until you are that innocent person.

ikeboy 10y ago
Don't be pedantic, you know I meant "escape the death penalty". Are you arguing for n=infinity?
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Well, it all depends on how many people you intend to kill, it's all about the ratio npeopleinnocent/npeopleguilty after all. The problem is that no matter how small the ratio gets in absolute terms there is only the possibility of killing an innocent person or not killing an innocent person. Even if you assume that everybody is guilty I'd still make the argument that people can genuinely change and that no matter what you do you will not be bringing anybody back that's already dead. Think of still having the death penalty as a black mark on a civilization. As a nice example have a look at the Philippines and try to work out for yourself if you feel that even if society will be better afterwards it is worth it to kill this many people, many of them in serious trouble already. The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it?
  - ikeboy 10y ago
    >Even if you assume that everybody is guilty I'd still make the argument that people can genuinely change and that no matter what you do you will not be bringing anybody back that's already dead. That may be (and I agree with it), but I'm critiquing PG's argument (in particular his assertion that it's obvious), not his conclusion. >The extreme example of that is a society that simply kills everybody that is convicted of a crime, after all, why not, it makes society better, right? Or does it? You need different punishments for different crimes, or someone who commits a small crime has no more deterrence against big crimes. I'm not sure what point you're making with this.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      The justice system is - in principle - not about revenge but about balance, a balance between running a safe society and one where people that misbehave are placed in a spot where they can be re-habilitated and then can re-enter society. That path is closed in an extreme way by killing someone, there is no rehabilitation from that no matter what. Deterrence and punishment have very little to do with each other (but deterrence and the chance of being caught do have a lot to do with each other). So fundamentally the justice system is not about punishment at all, though from the victims perspective that might seem to be the case.

mturmon 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. No. PG's piece leaves open the option for punishment by other means, even if they do turn out to be innocent. For instance, to take the extreme case, nothing in PG's article says he would have a problem with punishing everyone accused of murder with one year imprisonment, with probability one. I get that you want to tie PG's piece to the Volokh article, but PG's piece is about this particular form of punishment. [edited to add: since we're going in circles, I'll stop now]

ikeboy 10y ago
I think you misunderstood me. "we shouldn't punish anyone with the death penalty" means we shouldn't kill anyone, it allows for other methods of punishment. The Volokh article allows for multiple levels of punishment as well. The quote from Maimonides doesn't mean we simply let them go free if we aren't absolutely sure that they are guilty, instead we would lock them up.