7 ms·

> Tan, who hired the original hitman, was jailed for five years, while Xi, the first hitman, was sentenced to three years and six months. Yang Kangsheng and Yan

by whack 7y ago

> Tan, who hired the original hitman, was jailed for five years, while Xi, the first hitman, was sentenced to three years and six months. Yang Kangsheng and Yang Guangsheng were sentenced to three years and three months, Mo was sentenced to three years 5 years seems grossly insufficient for premeditated attempted murder. If the man was actually killed, I'm assuming the sentence would have been far more severe, such as 20 years. It seems ridiculous that someone can get a 75% reduction in their sentence, just because they were incompetent in their execution.

SquishyPanda23 7y ago
Nice pun on execution :) But I'm not sure being an incompetent hitman is a scam that really pays when you factor in the risks...
- kijin 7y ago
  I read an article somewhere that said most "hitmen" who are available for hire (i.e. those who are not exclusively at the service of a drug cartel or something) have no intention of actually killing the target. The client can't sue a hitman to get their money back if the target turns out to be alive. So the crime might be more akin to fraud than attempted murder.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    Tan wasn't the hitman. He was the original guy that ordered the hit. All the other guys, too (except the last), were acting as middlemen, ordering the hit and skimming some off the top. They were all requesting the murder of someone else by paying a 3rd party to do it.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      Uber for Uber for hitmen...
comboy 7y ago
Then you're on a slippery slope of judging the intentions (which is what we are doing nowadays, but I don't think we should be). Intentions are muddy. Decisions and actions just come to us and it's later that we invent a story about how they came to be (at least that's AFAIK our current understanding of how consciousness works)
- daveFNbuck 7y ago
  Why would your understanding of consciousness change whether we should judge intentions? Either way we have a person who is acting on a decision to murder. If we discovered that a robot had been programmed to murder after it tried to kill someone, we wouldn't let it back into society sooner if it failed in its attempt. We'd do our best to make sure it wouldn't murder anyone when released first.
  - sysbin 7y ago
    There is a difference between programming a robot to kill, compared to a human that had events happen (without will over them) and where the events almost led to a murder. The human isn't programmed to kill by those events but they almost led to the act. You have to acknowledge absolute vs uncertainty in the problem.
    - daveFNbuck 7y ago
      We're talking about people performing actions with the goal of causing another person's death, not someone who's completely at the mercy of fate and has nothing to do with murder. If it helps, you can think of the robot as having a bug that leads to try to kill people sometimes if the right events happen around it. Should we only fix the bug in robots that have carried out successful attempts?
      - sysbin 7y ago
        > We're talking about people performing actions with the goal of causing another person's death, not someone who's completely at the mercy of fate and has nothing to do with murder. That's an assumption and it very well can be the outcome of fate alone. It's not like there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that people have control over their actions. Neuroscience exhibits people are just cause & effect. Imagining a robot that has a bug is similar to the outcome of fate. Outside the realm of blame being on the robot but the universe that made the bug possible & happen.
gumby 7y ago
It gives you an incentive to change your mind. If the delta between attempted and performed murder is small, if you have doubts at the end you might as well go ahead and perform it, as at least one witness is now gone. This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness. Though the effect of the crime on the victim can last a lifetime, at least they will be alive.
- throwaway69173 7y ago
  > This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness. FWIW this probably doesn’t make any sense in practice. Most rapes are done by people who think they will get away with it either because it’s very hard to catch or because they have sufficient social power. Now, these people are clearly huge pieces of shit, but they’re probably not going to decide to murder the victim to minimize legal risk just because the potential penalties if convicted are closer. Murder is much harder to get away with and social power is much less likely to save you. Also, people don’t like committing murder generally, even if they’re apathetic enough to commit rape. The proposed logic feels like it describes the world in which rapes are committed by scary men who randomly break into your house because they’re just criminals. Not to trivialize the unfortunate fact that the latter does happen and it’s very sad, but it’s relatively rare.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    "but they’re probably not going to decide to murder the victim to minimize legal risk" If someone "has sufficient social power" as you put it, to get away with such a crime, then why do you think they wouldn't be able to make a person "disappear"? Say, we were talkingn about basically an organized crime figure who ended up running a corrupt state. If you were a victim, would you bet that nothing would happen to you if you made a criminal complaint, filed a lawsuit, or went to the media? This scenario is not a "scary man who randomly breaks into your house" - that doesn't seem at all implicit in the parent comment.
  - MiroF 7y ago
glofish 7y ago
there are other interesting variations to this. Someone hires a hitman - the hitman kills a different person by accident. Is the contract giver guilty? They never intended any harm to the person that got killed. etc. law is a funny business
ip26 7y ago
Our legal system seems to be like that a lot. Someone can nearly run you over, or nearly shoot you, and you survive only because you manage to escape or dodge- you're going to have a hard time sticking them with anything. (Unless you are an officer) As a bicycle commuter it's on my mind a lot.
dghughes 7y ago
Not only that but China is notorious for its brutal laws. A Canadian was executed on rumors of drug trafficking. You often see people accused of financial crimes executed. China's court system has something like a 99.9% conviction rate.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  It should go without saying, but without context, a high conviction rate could be from convicting people who are not clearly guilty, or it could be because only people who are clearly guilty are prosecuted.
gjm11 7y ago
There's a nice paper by the philosopher David Lewis (http://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Punishment_Chance.pdf http://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Punishment_Chance.pdf is a copy of it; I don't know whether it's in any sense a legal copy) that offers (though it doesn't exactly endorse) the following justification for this: 1. Imagine a system where the punishment for murder is exactly the same as the punishment for attempted murder, but that punishment has an element of chance: you might get a longer or a shorter sentence. This doesn't seem particularly unreasonable. Now we're going to make successive modifications to the system, which (Lewis claims) don't obviously make it worse. 2. Now suppose that we attempt to make the punishment for more wholehearted attempts at murder greater. It's hard to tell what was in the criminal's heart, so as a reasonable proxy we try to evaluate, somehow, how likely the murder attempt was to succceed, and we punish more-likely-to-succeed attempts more harshly. 3. Now suppose, more specifically, that the way in which we punish more-likely-to-succeed attempts more harshly is by increasing the probability of getting the longer sentence. In fact, we'll say that the probability of getting the longer sentence is to be the same as our estimate of how likely the attempt at murder was to succeed. 4. How to estimate that probability? One effective but obviously impractical way would be to run some sort of reenactment or simulation of the crime, and give the longer sentence if and only if the victim dies. Aha! But we can simplify and improve this by using the original crime as the reenactment, and give the longer sentence if and only if the actual victim died. And now we've arrived at pretty much our present practice!
- TwoBit 7y ago
  huh? Surely there's a better way to describe it.
- throwaway69173 7y ago
  These feel... dumb? Specifically step 2 sounds like it’s skipping the important bit that people disagree with on the original problem. Again, compare hiring the cheapest hit man vs the most expensive.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  Doesn't seem compelling. After all, the root of the argument is about probabilities, but the argument then goes on to propose that we base our decisions on a single simulation of a result drawn from a weighted random distribution.

by whack 7y ago

SquishyPanda23 7y ago

Nice pun on execution :) But I'm not sure being an incompetent hitman is a scam that really pays when you factor in the risks...

kijin 7y ago
I read an article somewhere that said most "hitmen" who are available for hire (i.e. those who are not exclusively at the service of a drug cartel or something) have no intention of actually killing the target. The client can't sue a hitman to get their money back if the target turns out to be alive. So the crime might be more akin to fraud than attempted murder.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  Tan wasn't the hitman. He was the original guy that ordered the hit. All the other guys, too (except the last), were acting as middlemen, ordering the hit and skimming some off the top. They were all requesting the murder of someone else by paying a 3rd party to do it.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Uber for Uber for hitmen...

comboy 7y ago

Then you're on a slippery slope of judging the intentions (which is what we are doing nowadays, but I don't think we should be). Intentions are muddy. Decisions and actions just come to us and it's later that we invent a story about how they came to be (at least that's AFAIK our current understanding of how consciousness works)

daveFNbuck 7y ago
Why would your understanding of consciousness change whether we should judge intentions? Either way we have a person who is acting on a decision to murder. If we discovered that a robot had been programmed to murder after it tried to kill someone, we wouldn't let it back into society sooner if it failed in its attempt. We'd do our best to make sure it wouldn't murder anyone when released first.
- sysbin 7y ago
  There is a difference between programming a robot to kill, compared to a human that had events happen (without will over them) and where the events almost led to a murder. The human isn't programmed to kill by those events but they almost led to the act. You have to acknowledge absolute vs uncertainty in the problem.
  - daveFNbuck 7y ago
    We're talking about people performing actions with the goal of causing another person's death, not someone who's completely at the mercy of fate and has nothing to do with murder. If it helps, you can think of the robot as having a bug that leads to try to kill people sometimes if the right events happen around it. Should we only fix the bug in robots that have carried out successful attempts?
    - sysbin 7y ago
      > We're talking about people performing actions with the goal of causing another person's death, not someone who's completely at the mercy of fate and has nothing to do with murder. That's an assumption and it very well can be the outcome of fate alone. It's not like there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that people have control over their actions. Neuroscience exhibits people are just cause & effect. Imagining a robot that has a bug is similar to the outcome of fate. Outside the realm of blame being on the robot but the universe that made the bug possible & happen.

gumby 7y ago

It gives you an incentive to change your mind. If the delta between attempted and performed murder is small, if you have doubts at the end you might as well go ahead and perform it, as at least one witness is now gone. This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness. Though the effect of the crime on the victim can last a lifetime, at least they will be alive.

throwaway69173 7y ago
> This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness. FWIW this probably doesn’t make any sense in practice. Most rapes are done by people who think they will get away with it either because it’s very hard to catch or because they have sufficient social power. Now, these people are clearly huge pieces of shit, but they’re probably not going to decide to murder the victim to minimize legal risk just because the potential penalties if convicted are closer. Murder is much harder to get away with and social power is much less likely to save you. Also, people don’t like committing murder generally, even if they’re apathetic enough to commit rape. The proposed logic feels like it describes the world in which rapes are committed by scary men who randomly break into your house because they’re just criminals. Not to trivialize the unfortunate fact that the latter does happen and it’s very sad, but it’s relatively rare.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "but they’re probably not going to decide to murder the victim to minimize legal risk" If someone "has sufficient social power" as you put it, to get away with such a crime, then why do you think they wouldn't be able to make a person "disappear"? Say, we were talkingn about basically an organized crime figure who ended up running a corrupt state. If you were a victim, would you bet that nothing would happen to you if you made a criminal complaint, filed a lawsuit, or went to the media? This scenario is not a "scary man who randomly breaks into your house" - that doesn't seem at all implicit in the parent comment.
- MiroF 7y ago

glofish 7y ago

there are other interesting variations to this. Someone hires a hitman - the hitman kills a different person by accident. Is the contract giver guilty? They never intended any harm to the person that got killed. etc. law is a funny business

ip26 7y ago

Our legal system seems to be like that a lot. Someone can nearly run you over, or nearly shoot you, and you survive only because you manage to escape or dodge- you're going to have a hard time sticking them with anything. (Unless you are an officer) As a bicycle commuter it's on my mind a lot.

dghughes 7y ago

Not only that but China is notorious for its brutal laws. A Canadian was executed on rumors of drug trafficking. You often see people accused of financial crimes executed. China's court system has something like a 99.9% conviction rate.

perl4ever 7y ago
It should go without saying, but without context, a high conviction rate could be from convicting people who are not clearly guilty, or it could be because only people who are clearly guilty are prosecuted.

gjm11 7y ago

There's a nice paper by the philosopher David Lewis (http://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Punishment_Chance.pdf http://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Punishment_Chance.pdf is a copy of it; I don't know whether it's in any sense a legal copy) that offers (though it doesn't exactly endorse) the following justification for this: 1. Imagine a system where the punishment for murder is exactly the same as the punishment for attempted murder, but that punishment has an element of chance: you might get a longer or a shorter sentence. This doesn't seem particularly unreasonable. Now we're going to make successive modifications to the system, which (Lewis claims) don't obviously make it worse. 2. Now suppose that we attempt to make the punishment for more wholehearted attempts at murder greater. It's hard to tell what was in the criminal's heart, so as a reasonable proxy we try to evaluate, somehow, how likely the murder attempt was to succceed, and we punish more-likely-to-succeed attempts more harshly. 3. Now suppose, more specifically, that the way in which we punish more-likely-to-succeed attempts more harshly is by increasing the probability of getting the longer sentence. In fact, we'll say that the probability of getting the longer sentence is to be the same as our estimate of how likely the attempt at murder was to succeed. 4. How to estimate that probability? One effective but obviously impractical way would be to run some sort of reenactment or simulation of the crime, and give the longer sentence if and only if the victim dies. Aha! But we can simplify and improve this by using the original crime as the reenactment, and give the longer sentence if and only if the actual victim died. And now we've arrived at pretty much our present practice!

TwoBit 7y ago
huh? Surely there's a better way to describe it.
throwaway69173 7y ago
These feel... dumb? Specifically step 2 sounds like it’s skipping the important bit that people disagree with on the original problem. Again, compare hiring the cheapest hit man vs the most expensive.
dodobirdlord 7y ago
Doesn't seem compelling. After all, the root of the argument is about probabilities, but the argument then goes on to propose that we base our decisions on a single simulation of a result drawn from a weighted random distribution.