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The US constitution (amendment 6) ostensibly provides the right to a speedy trial. Amendment 8 forbids "cruel and unusual" punishment. What I don't understand

The US constitution (amendment 6) ostensibly provides the right to a speedy trial. Amendment 8 forbids "cruel and unusual" punishment. What I don't understand is how people can be against the death penalty but yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives. I personally know someone who, if they live to be 75, will ultimately end up being in prison for over 5 decades. How is that not "cruel and unusual"?

tyingq 7y ago
Some of them are also in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day the whole time.
wavefunction 7y ago
I am one of those people who is opposed to the death penalty but in favor of life in prison without parole. In my thinking this punishment is/should be reserved for the worst and most heinous crimes against other people, whether that is murder of or violence against another individual or perhaps also white collar crimes of sufficient scale. I see nothing wrong with depriving a criminal of their own life and freedom if they consciously did the same to others. They also don't have a potentially limited period for exculpatory evidence to arise like with the death penalty.
gambiting 7y ago
>>What I don't understand is how people can be against the death penalty but yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives. So I'm one of those people. It's simple really - death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't. Yes it sucks that sometimes we might have to release someone who spent 30 years falsely imprisoned - but it's sure a hell lot better than finding out that there is no one to release because the person was executed a decade ago. And secondly, I just don't see any need to execute people, the risk vs reward is not worth it.
- gzu 7y ago
  Someone consciously chose to permanently end another’s life. There has to be decisions made.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    Well, if the legal system was completely infallible in deciding who is guilty then that might be an argument. But I'm not aware of any legal system in any country that can make that particular claim.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    The actual murderers chose. The people accidentally mistaken for murderers didn’t choose anything at all.
  - cobbzilla 7y ago
    In theory, if applied flawlessly, maybe nothing is wrong with the permanence of the death penalty. In practice, mistakes are made, regularly, and these mistakes are distributed unevenly, such that the poor and minorities suffer the most. The many wrongful deaths at the hands of the government is a good reason to be skeptical of arguments which assume the death penalty can be applied perfectly. It can’t.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    > In cases where it’s black and white with extreme evidence why even allow them to continue living on everyone’s dime. Because the cost of putting them to death using a system that has sufficient checks to (mostly) prevent innocent people from being executed (i.e. the current system, if you believe it works) is greater than the cost of imprisoning people for life.
    - umvi 7y ago
      Well that just means the current system needs some changes. Just because that's the way it currently is doesn't mean that's the way it always has to be or always was. Some laws and policies may need to change, but treating this like an immutable fact is like being content with a super inefficient piece of code that's bottlenecking your application.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Yes it sucks that sometimes we might have to release someone who spent 30 years falsely imprisoned - but it's sure a hell lot better than finding out that there is no one to release because the person was executed a decade ago. For society's conscience, certainly. For the prisoner, I'd say it depends. I suppose most will agree that a swift death would be preferable to 65 years of extreme torture with a "sorry, you're free to go" in the end. It comes down to whether long term imprisonment, especially solitary confinement, is close enough to torture. Some prisoners apparently prefer death, the suicide rate is much higher than that of the general population, and iirc, quite a few prisoners dropped their appeals and asked to be executed, likely because they prefer a horrible end to never ending horror.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    At least the prisoner still has a choice he can make.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    "Extreme torture"?
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
      Many death row prisoners spend years in solitary confinement, and are driven insane in the process.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      In a hypothetical scenario, imagine whatever torture you consider the absolute most cruel. Would you prefer somebody suffer that torture for 50 years or be killed tomorrow? If you choose the latter, we've established that death can be a preferable alternative to otherwise horrible circumstances. I'm not saying that imprisonment is the most extreme torture imaginable, but it's probably not the best thing ever either. It's somewhere in between, likely closer to the torture end of the scale. If and where you draw the line between "this is fine" and "no person shall suffer like that for decades, no matter what they may have done, ending their life is the humane thing to do" is up to you.
    - 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- umvi 7y ago
  > It's simple really - death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't. Death being permanent is a feature, not a bug. Is it possible that evil people can continue to negatively influence society from prison? Or even continue to commit heinous crimes in prison? I'd say this scenario happens much more often than killing an innocent. For example, organized crime. If you don't kill organized crime leaders, they continue to spread their secret oaths among other prisoners and continue to manage affairs even outside of prison via comm links. I agree that it's bad to kill innocents, but I think with the right policy and rigor, we could make the death penalty an efficient and painless process that has an extremely low false positive rate. In my mind it's like "yeah, we save the extremely rare false positive at the expense of allowing all the non-false positives to continue to spread and propagate evil for decades"
  - QuotedForTruth 7y ago
    What "false positive rate" is acceptable to you? And shouldn't we refer to it for what it is: a "innocent people murdered by the state rate"? For me personally, 0 is the only acceptable number. The only way to get that is to end the death penalty.
    - umvi 7y ago
      > For me personally, 0 is the only acceptable number. But why? Surely you must acknowledge that the "innocent people murdered by the state rate" is inversely proportional to the "innocent people murdered by criminals who should have been put to death but weren't rate"? This latter rate includes prison murders, calling/paying for hits from prison, influencing copycat killers, being released and then killing again, etc. So basically you are trading one form of innocent death for another (not to mention introducing a host of other negative effects to society by allowing truly evil people to interact with people in said society). For me, death penalty is acceptable as long as the "innocent people murdered by the state rate" is less than the "innocent people murdered by criminals who should have been put to death but weren't rate".
      - fzeroracer 7y ago
- __s 7y ago
  What if the prisoner states they'd prefer the death penalty? ie execution becomes assisted suicide for life sentenced prisoners
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    That's a choice that the prisoner has, rather than one that the legal system makes.
- lisper 7y ago
  > death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't I think the word you're looking for here is "irreversible", not "permanent." Life imprisonment is, by definition, permanent. And yes, you can "reverse" life in prison by setting the prisoner free. But what you can't so easily reverse is the psychological damage done by the false imprisonment.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    You can certainly mitigate and compensate in cases of false prosecution. This doesn't usually happen, but it could. And it's still less irreversible - to them, and to family and friends - than killing them.
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    You can give monetary compensation (like that's gonna fix it all, but that's another debate) to a living person.
    - lisper 7y ago
      Yes, of course. You can also give monetary compensation to a dead person's family. Whether either option actually makes things right is debatable.
      - ionised 7y ago
        It doesn't make things right. Nothing ever will, but it's better than the alternative.
        lisper 7y ago
        Depends on which alternative you're talking about. One alternative is not to execute people or lock them up in inhumane conditions at all (the Norwegians do this). It's not at all clear to me that writing checks when you get it wrong is better.
king_magic 7y ago
Life imprisonment is cruel? For the absolute worst possible crimes? I don’t think so. Life imprisonment is unusual? For the absolute worst possible crimes? Again, no, not really. It certainly must suck, but what is unusual about society wishing to protect itself from it’s worst offenders? Life imprisonment has the huge benefit of being undoable if new evidence exonerates someone. I am certainly opposed to “BS life imprisonment”, like US drug three strike laws leading to that outcome. But for murder, rape, etc? No, I personally am entirely on board with life imprisonment, provided the justice system can demonstrate the person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
- 86carr 7y ago
  The definitions of cruel and unusual are independent of crime severity.
  - burfog 7y ago
    I sure hope not. That would allow execution for first-time-offender jaywalking.
  - tomatocracy 7y ago
    I don’t think that’s true in the USA - the idea that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can make it cruel and unusual is the essence of the famous Furman v Georgia decision of the US Supreme Court in 1971 which led to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty until the late 1970s. What’s more eg in Coker v Georgia in 1977 the US Supreme Court ruled that rape of an adult woman was insufficient to qualify for the death penalty.
    - 86carr 7y ago
      Well like I said below I maybe hoping for something that doesn't exist. I assume enough legal action has taken place to figure this out but I wouldn't really know. However, I agree that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can be cruel and usual (depending on how the punishment is defined). I fail to see how the second case example relates if the first is true. What is cruel or unusual seems unrelated to the crime severity because cruel and unusual is a separate concept like the first example seems to show or so I thought. Crime severity and severity of the punishment should be related though. This is why, in my opinion, solitary confinement can be called might be cruel and unusual. It's categorically different from prison. I hope any of that makes sense.
ex-aws-now-goog 7y ago
It depends on what "locking up" means. If we are talking about US-style prisons then letting (possibly innocent and for that matter even guilty) people languish there _is_ cruel and unusual punishment. However, there are better "prisons" (see e.g. what Norway does) and it is possible to let (dangerous) people live lives that are dignified, fulfilling and productive (when they are able to work) under the constraints of captivity.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cjslep 7y ago
Its effect on people goes beyond those two amendments. In Roper vs. Simmons the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for crimes committed while a minor (under 18 years of age) is cruel and unusual punishment. One consequence is for the brothers Tilmon and Kevin Golphin. Tilmon was 18 and Kevin was 17 when the crime occurred. At the time, both were convicted of the death penalty for the same event. However, due to the US Supreme Court ruling, Kevin later had his sentence changed to life in prison. Tilmon is still on death row. Their situation presents a lot of moral questions about the death penalty, morality, fairness, and so on. Justice is never going to be fair, and it is always hard for a society to determine the correct balance.
craigsmansion 7y ago
> yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives There are countries where prisons are not exploitative hellholes, and locking people up for life is not a form of punishment but an acknowledgement that society has failed them, so there is no point in making the prisoner's incarceration as unpleasant as possible. If it's "cruel and unusual", it's your society that makes it cruel and unusual. It doesn't have to be that way.
- stirfrykitty 7y ago
  Society has not failed some people. A person for whom all mental and physical faculties are intact, yet is simply evil (these people do exist), who goes on to rape, murder, engage in paedophila... these people have failed society and should be removed by dint of a rope. There are cases where people have been overlooked, needed help, etc. But the evil among us should be purged. Locking up serial rapists, serial paedophiles, and serial murderers does nothing but waste taxpayer money. If someone who commits these crimes is found guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt, they should be removed from society. Norway, for all its goodness, needed to execute that moron who murdered all those kids in cold blood. Yet, he enjoys an expansive room, cooked meals, TV, games, conversation... all like it's no big deal. I think that is an example of society failing to deal with a problem. There is no closure for all of those families who lost innocent children. They exist knowing he exists, and is enjoying life as he's able.
  - LMYahooTFY 7y ago
    You seem fairly ruthlessly pragmatic on the issue. Yet, you take issue with a murderer being offered anything that could be considered a comfort. Assuming he's completely severed from society, what difference is it making? I'm genuinely curious. If we sent him out into space with a couch and a chess partner, is the "closure" of anyone victimized the responsibility of anyone other than the victims? It's harsh, but no one can "give them closure", and it's not clear that watching the perpetrator die is the one true form of final closure.
gnode 7y ago
> How is that not "cruel and unusual" Cruel refers to punishment which is torturous. Prison, in theory, should not be torture, despite often being so. Many aspects of incarceration in the US which are effectively torturous are commonly excused as being necessary for security and safety (e.g. solitary confinement) or medical reasons (e.g. force feeding), or being acts of other prisoners not under the control of the state (e.g. bullying). By contrast, many other countries' prison systems treat these factors as being within their responsibility. Unusual refers to the punishment being arbitrary or not appropriate for the crime. This doesn't set a standard for what punishment is reasonable, but only requires punishments be consistent (for similar crimes). Additionally, if the punishment could not have been expected, then it can't be considered useful for the purpose of deterrence. Crucially, the requirement that punishment not be cruel and unusual does not require the punishment to be reciprocal to the crime.
fmajid 7y ago
Apparently the Supreme Court is interpreting the prohibition as only applying to punishment that is both cruel and unusual. Cruel alone or unusual alone is A-OK.
- jMyles 7y ago
  To which case are you referring here?
happytoexplain 7y ago
I think the same people who are against the death penalty are probably largely the same people who want much more humane prisons.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I've definitely thought about both this and the cost and problems with keeping people on death row alive for decades. I think the answer is easy: Remove the death penalty but enable euthanasia options for those sentenced to life. 1. It removes the cruelty of life imprisonment. If we take away someone's freedom permanently and they will never have the option to regain their freedom, they can "take the easy way out". Those who are innocent and believe they will eventually be freed can stay the course, but those who know their life is over can choose to exit early. 2. It removes the added bureaucracy and delay to execution and death penalty cases. By removing the government's ability to kill someone, we no longer need additional hearings for death penalty cases or need to hold out a very long time for possible appeals many years later. It just becomes someone's choice. Now, there's other considerations, I think there'd still need to be a minimum time for euthanasia after being sentenced, you'd want maybe a periodic opt in period for people to elect for euthanasia, maybe every five years or so, and you'd want to have someone evaluate that the prisoner wasn't making a rash choice due to recent news from the outside or the like. But this allows death as an "escape" for a life of misery in jail and also removes bureaucratic overhead to the government electing to kill someone.
- TremendousJudge 7y ago
  That's insane. You're basically putting somebody in a cruel and miserable existence with the expectation that they commit suicide, for the sole purpose of keeping your hands clean. I find it worse than outright killing them.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    Well, I mean, ideally our prison system shouldn't aim to be cruel and miserable, but we can't exactly set the convicted serial killers free, now can we? Shouldn't we aim to give them the most freedom we can, though? The ability to ideally, in a restricted environment, continue to read and learn and grow, or if that won't satisfy them, to remove themselves from the situation?
ljf 7y ago
I am against the death penalty AND against needlessly long 'punishment' terms. I think the Danish model is the best - but that looks out for the person and the future, rather than pure punishment; https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3dabz/adopting-denmarks-unorthodox-prison-system-could-benefit-ex-offenders-in-america https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3dabz/adopting-denmarks-...

tyingq 7y ago

Some of them are also in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day the whole time.

wavefunction 7y ago

I am one of those people who is opposed to the death penalty but in favor of life in prison without parole. In my thinking this punishment is/should be reserved for the worst and most heinous crimes against other people, whether that is murder of or violence against another individual or perhaps also white collar crimes of sufficient scale. I see nothing wrong with depriving a criminal of their own life and freedom if they consciously did the same to others. They also don't have a potentially limited period for exculpatory evidence to arise like with the death penalty.

gambiting 7y ago

>>What I don't understand is how people can be against the death penalty but yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives. So I'm one of those people. It's simple really - death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't. Yes it sucks that sometimes we might have to release someone who spent 30 years falsely imprisoned - but it's sure a hell lot better than finding out that there is no one to release because the person was executed a decade ago. And secondly, I just don't see any need to execute people, the risk vs reward is not worth it.

gzu 7y ago
Someone consciously chose to permanently end another’s life. There has to be decisions made.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Well, if the legal system was completely infallible in deciding who is guilty then that might be an argument. But I'm not aware of any legal system in any country that can make that particular claim.
- mattkrause 7y ago
  The actual murderers chose. The people accidentally mistaken for murderers didn’t choose anything at all.
- cobbzilla 7y ago
  In theory, if applied flawlessly, maybe nothing is wrong with the permanence of the death penalty. In practice, mistakes are made, regularly, and these mistakes are distributed unevenly, such that the poor and minorities suffer the most. The many wrongful deaths at the hands of the government is a good reason to be skeptical of arguments which assume the death penalty can be applied perfectly. It can’t.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  > In cases where it’s black and white with extreme evidence why even allow them to continue living on everyone’s dime. Because the cost of putting them to death using a system that has sufficient checks to (mostly) prevent innocent people from being executed (i.e. the current system, if you believe it works) is greater than the cost of imprisoning people for life.
  - umvi 7y ago
    Well that just means the current system needs some changes. Just because that's the way it currently is doesn't mean that's the way it always has to be or always was. Some laws and policies may need to change, but treating this like an immutable fact is like being content with a super inefficient piece of code that's bottlenecking your application.
luckylion 7y ago
> Yes it sucks that sometimes we might have to release someone who spent 30 years falsely imprisoned - but it's sure a hell lot better than finding out that there is no one to release because the person was executed a decade ago. For society's conscience, certainly. For the prisoner, I'd say it depends. I suppose most will agree that a swift death would be preferable to 65 years of extreme torture with a "sorry, you're free to go" in the end. It comes down to whether long term imprisonment, especially solitary confinement, is close enough to torture. Some prisoners apparently prefer death, the suicide rate is much higher than that of the general population, and iirc, quite a few prisoners dropped their appeals and asked to be executed, likely because they prefer a horrible end to never ending horror.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  At least the prisoner still has a choice he can make.
- mcguire 7y ago
  "Extreme torture"?
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    Many death row prisoners spend years in solitary confinement, and are driven insane in the process.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    In a hypothetical scenario, imagine whatever torture you consider the absolute most cruel. Would you prefer somebody suffer that torture for 50 years or be killed tomorrow? If you choose the latter, we've established that death can be a preferable alternative to otherwise horrible circumstances. I'm not saying that imprisonment is the most extreme torture imaginable, but it's probably not the best thing ever either. It's somewhere in between, likely closer to the torture end of the scale. If and where you draw the line between "this is fine" and "no person shall suffer like that for decades, no matter what they may have done, ending their life is the humane thing to do" is up to you.
  - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
umvi 7y ago
> It's simple really - death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't. Death being permanent is a feature, not a bug. Is it possible that evil people can continue to negatively influence society from prison? Or even continue to commit heinous crimes in prison? I'd say this scenario happens much more often than killing an innocent. For example, organized crime. If you don't kill organized crime leaders, they continue to spread their secret oaths among other prisoners and continue to manage affairs even outside of prison via comm links. I agree that it's bad to kill innocents, but I think with the right policy and rigor, we could make the death penalty an efficient and painless process that has an extremely low false positive rate. In my mind it's like "yeah, we save the extremely rare false positive at the expense of allowing all the non-false positives to continue to spread and propagate evil for decades"
- QuotedForTruth 7y ago
  What "false positive rate" is acceptable to you? And shouldn't we refer to it for what it is: a "innocent people murdered by the state rate"? For me personally, 0 is the only acceptable number. The only way to get that is to end the death penalty.
  - umvi 7y ago
    > For me personally, 0 is the only acceptable number. But why? Surely you must acknowledge that the "innocent people murdered by the state rate" is inversely proportional to the "innocent people murdered by criminals who should have been put to death but weren't rate"? This latter rate includes prison murders, calling/paying for hits from prison, influencing copycat killers, being released and then killing again, etc. So basically you are trading one form of innocent death for another (not to mention introducing a host of other negative effects to society by allowing truly evil people to interact with people in said society). For me, death penalty is acceptable as long as the "innocent people murdered by the state rate" is less than the "innocent people murdered by criminals who should have been put to death but weren't rate".
    - fzeroracer 7y ago
__s 7y ago
What if the prisoner states they'd prefer the death penalty? ie execution becomes assisted suicide for life sentenced prisoners
- saagarjha 7y ago
  That's a choice that the prisoner has, rather than one that the legal system makes.
lisper 7y ago
> death penalty is permanent, while life imprisonment isn't I think the word you're looking for here is "irreversible", not "permanent." Life imprisonment is, by definition, permanent. And yes, you can "reverse" life in prison by setting the prisoner free. But what you can't so easily reverse is the psychological damage done by the false imprisonment.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  You can certainly mitigate and compensate in cases of false prosecution. This doesn't usually happen, but it could. And it's still less irreversible - to them, and to family and friends - than killing them.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  You can give monetary compensation (like that's gonna fix it all, but that's another debate) to a living person.
  - lisper 7y ago
    Yes, of course. You can also give monetary compensation to a dead person's family. Whether either option actually makes things right is debatable.
    - ionised 7y ago
      It doesn't make things right. Nothing ever will, but it's better than the alternative.
      - lisper 7y ago
        Depends on which alternative you're talking about. One alternative is not to execute people or lock them up in inhumane conditions at all (the Norwegians do this). It's not at all clear to me that writing checks when you get it wrong is better.

king_magic 7y ago

Life imprisonment is cruel? For the absolute worst possible crimes? I don’t think so. Life imprisonment is unusual? For the absolute worst possible crimes? Again, no, not really. It certainly must suck, but what is unusual about society wishing to protect itself from it’s worst offenders? Life imprisonment has the huge benefit of being undoable if new evidence exonerates someone. I am certainly opposed to “BS life imprisonment”, like US drug three strike laws leading to that outcome. But for murder, rape, etc? No, I personally am entirely on board with life imprisonment, provided the justice system can demonstrate the person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

86carr 7y ago
The definitions of cruel and unusual are independent of crime severity.
- burfog 7y ago
  I sure hope not. That would allow execution for first-time-offender jaywalking.
- tomatocracy 7y ago
  I don’t think that’s true in the USA - the idea that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can make it cruel and unusual is the essence of the famous Furman v Georgia decision of the US Supreme Court in 1971 which led to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty until the late 1970s. What’s more eg in Coker v Georgia in 1977 the US Supreme Court ruled that rape of an adult woman was insufficient to qualify for the death penalty.
  - 86carr 7y ago
    Well like I said below I maybe hoping for something that doesn't exist. I assume enough legal action has taken place to figure this out but I wouldn't really know. However, I agree that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can be cruel and usual (depending on how the punishment is defined). I fail to see how the second case example relates if the first is true. What is cruel or unusual seems unrelated to the crime severity because cruel and unusual is a separate concept like the first example seems to show or so I thought. Crime severity and severity of the punishment should be related though. This is why, in my opinion, solitary confinement can be called might be cruel and unusual. It's categorically different from prison. I hope any of that makes sense.

ex-aws-now-goog 7y ago

It depends on what "locking up" means. If we are talking about US-style prisons then letting (possibly innocent and for that matter even guilty) people languish there _is_ cruel and unusual punishment. However, there are better "prisons" (see e.g. what Norway does) and it is possible to let (dangerous) people live lives that are dignified, fulfilling and productive (when they are able to work) under the constraints of captivity.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cjslep 7y ago

Its effect on people goes beyond those two amendments. In Roper vs. Simmons the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for crimes committed while a minor (under 18 years of age) is cruel and unusual punishment. One consequence is for the brothers Tilmon and Kevin Golphin. Tilmon was 18 and Kevin was 17 when the crime occurred. At the time, both were convicted of the death penalty for the same event. However, due to the US Supreme Court ruling, Kevin later had his sentence changed to life in prison. Tilmon is still on death row. Their situation presents a lot of moral questions about the death penalty, morality, fairness, and so on. Justice is never going to be fair, and it is always hard for a society to determine the correct balance.

craigsmansion 7y ago

> yet be totally OK with locking people up for the rest of their lives There are countries where prisons are not exploitative hellholes, and locking people up for life is not a form of punishment but an acknowledgement that society has failed them, so there is no point in making the prisoner's incarceration as unpleasant as possible. If it's "cruel and unusual", it's your society that makes it cruel and unusual. It doesn't have to be that way.

stirfrykitty 7y ago
Society has not failed some people. A person for whom all mental and physical faculties are intact, yet is simply evil (these people do exist), who goes on to rape, murder, engage in paedophila... these people have failed society and should be removed by dint of a rope. There are cases where people have been overlooked, needed help, etc. But the evil among us should be purged. Locking up serial rapists, serial paedophiles, and serial murderers does nothing but waste taxpayer money. If someone who commits these crimes is found guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt, they should be removed from society. Norway, for all its goodness, needed to execute that moron who murdered all those kids in cold blood. Yet, he enjoys an expansive room, cooked meals, TV, games, conversation... all like it's no big deal. I think that is an example of society failing to deal with a problem. There is no closure for all of those families who lost innocent children. They exist knowing he exists, and is enjoying life as he's able.
- LMYahooTFY 7y ago
  You seem fairly ruthlessly pragmatic on the issue. Yet, you take issue with a murderer being offered anything that could be considered a comfort. Assuming he's completely severed from society, what difference is it making? I'm genuinely curious. If we sent him out into space with a couch and a chess partner, is the "closure" of anyone victimized the responsibility of anyone other than the victims? It's harsh, but no one can "give them closure", and it's not clear that watching the perpetrator die is the one true form of final closure.

gnode 7y ago

> How is that not "cruel and unusual" Cruel refers to punishment which is torturous. Prison, in theory, should not be torture, despite often being so. Many aspects of incarceration in the US which are effectively torturous are commonly excused as being necessary for security and safety (e.g. solitary confinement) or medical reasons (e.g. force feeding), or being acts of other prisoners not under the control of the state (e.g. bullying). By contrast, many other countries' prison systems treat these factors as being within their responsibility. Unusual refers to the punishment being arbitrary or not appropriate for the crime. This doesn't set a standard for what punishment is reasonable, but only requires punishments be consistent (for similar crimes). Additionally, if the punishment could not have been expected, then it can't be considered useful for the purpose of deterrence. Crucially, the requirement that punishment not be cruel and unusual does not require the punishment to be reciprocal to the crime.

fmajid 7y ago

Apparently the Supreme Court is interpreting the prohibition as only applying to punishment that is both cruel and unusual. Cruel alone or unusual alone is A-OK.

jMyles 7y ago
To which case are you referring here?

happytoexplain 7y ago

I think the same people who are against the death penalty are probably largely the same people who want much more humane prisons.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

I've definitely thought about both this and the cost and problems with keeping people on death row alive for decades. I think the answer is easy: Remove the death penalty but enable euthanasia options for those sentenced to life. 1. It removes the cruelty of life imprisonment. If we take away someone's freedom permanently and they will never have the option to regain their freedom, they can "take the easy way out". Those who are innocent and believe they will eventually be freed can stay the course, but those who know their life is over can choose to exit early. 2. It removes the added bureaucracy and delay to execution and death penalty cases. By removing the government's ability to kill someone, we no longer need additional hearings for death penalty cases or need to hold out a very long time for possible appeals many years later. It just becomes someone's choice. Now, there's other considerations, I think there'd still need to be a minimum time for euthanasia after being sentenced, you'd want maybe a periodic opt in period for people to elect for euthanasia, maybe every five years or so, and you'd want to have someone evaluate that the prisoner wasn't making a rash choice due to recent news from the outside or the like. But this allows death as an "escape" for a life of misery in jail and also removes bureaucratic overhead to the government electing to kill someone.

TremendousJudge 7y ago
That's insane. You're basically putting somebody in a cruel and miserable existence with the expectation that they commit suicide, for the sole purpose of keeping your hands clean. I find it worse than outright killing them.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Well, I mean, ideally our prison system shouldn't aim to be cruel and miserable, but we can't exactly set the convicted serial killers free, now can we? Shouldn't we aim to give them the most freedom we can, though? The ability to ideally, in a restricted environment, continue to read and learn and grow, or if that won't satisfy them, to remove themselves from the situation?

ljf 7y ago

I am against the death penalty AND against needlessly long 'punishment' terms. I think the Danish model is the best - but that looks out for the person and the future, rather than pure punishment; https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3dabz/adopting-denmarks-unorthodox-prison-system-could-benefit-ex-offenders-in-america https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3dabz/adopting-denmarks-...