5 ms·

Let's not do this here. We're better than this.

Mizza 6y ago
I'm not joking. They're mass murderers as far as I'm concerned. I had a cat die of melamine-tainted Chinese cat food. The CEO of the company was executed. I've had multiple people I know die of the Oxy-to-Heroin pipeline. These CEOs are billionaires.
- kube-system 6y ago
  It doesn't matter how bad the crime may be, as long as criminal justice is carried out by fallible humans, capital punishment will result in innocent deaths. As nice as retribution might feel, it only adds to the problem.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    You’re not innocent if you’re convicted and the evidence is overwhelming. In this case, the evidence is overwhelming. I have no better example in recent US domestic affairs history for capital punishment being deserved. Of course, don’t execute people when the evidence is uncertain or unclear. The evidence in this case is irrefutable, and the magnitude comparable to genocide (~250k deaths caused).
    - kube-system 6y ago
      You don't think people haven't thought of that idea before? When innocent people are put to death, those involved almost always believed the evidence was absolutely certain. The problem is: they're still sometimes wrong. There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. They all guarantee non-zero rates of innocent death. How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? And for what benefit? A feeling of retribution?
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        > There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. This is a call to implement better systems around capital punishment, not to do away with capital punishment when the crime meets the criteria for it's implementation. As the old Texan proverb goes, “Some people need killin'”. This is not a pro-death, nor pro-revenge stance, this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform (and I believe there is enough criminal justice and behavioral science evidence that supports this thesis, but is beyond the scope of this comment). > How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. There is zero doubt in what the Sacklers did, so I see no point in us continuing to argue over whether the evidence is substantial enough. If you want to hold the position capital punishment is still not acceptable for them, I'm sure I could find enough families and loved ones of those 250k people killed by the Sacklers' actions to rebut such arguments.
        kube-system 6y ago
        > this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform Then they can spend their entire life in prison. Capital punishment adds no additional value. > As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. The bar for putting someone to death is already very high. But when you put someone to death, you may be unknowingly excluding evidence that you are not yet aware of. In most wrongful convictions, it is additional evidence discovered after the fact or a mistake found in the evidence previously used that indicates that the person was innocent. But at the moment of death, everyone was sure they were guilty. Whoops. For justice to be just, mistakes must be correctable when they are found.
  - genocidicbunny 6y ago
    I feel like the death penalty does need to be on the table in very egregious cases. If you are responsible for thousands of deaths, then it is extremely improbable that the evidence against you would be anything less than overwhelming. In such cases, yes, capital punishment should be on the table. Frankly, I am okay with having harsher penalties automatically applied to the extremely rich, including having the death penalty. Extremely rich should be defined fairly generously here, but it should be defined and treated as a separate class. Yes it creates a separate class of people, but lets be realistic -- the extremely rich already are in a separate class.
    - kiba 6y ago
      What does this actually accomplish?
    - sk0g 6y ago
      Username definitely checks out, but are you advocating for automatically harsher penalties, scaled by net worth? What problem would it solve, except for encouraging poor people to commit more crimes, since they'd now face relatively less severe? No offence, but this reads like Tumblr "communism" propoganda gone too far. The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against the actions committed, not against someone's skin colour, gender, religion, or indeed, net worth.
      - justinclift 6y ago
        > The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against ... net worth. That's clearly not working.
      - genocidicbunny 6y ago
        I'm advocating for a disjoint function in terms of penalties, disjoint on net worth. I am not saying we apply a scalar factor based on a person's net worth; but I do think we do need to acknowledge that people who hold hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in wealth operate in different worlds from the rest of us. The justice system is different for them, and unless you completely get rid of money and its influence, that won't change. As such, there needs to be _some_ cutoff where we can largely all agree someone holds a disproportionate amount of wealth and power, and thus should be held to a higher standard. I do take offense to this being called 'Tumblr communism'. Yes, Western justice systems should strive towards impartiality, but part and parcel of that is making punishments appropriate. If you fine someone making $35,000 a year $1000 dollars, you will do a lot of harm to them. If you fine someone making $35,000,000 a year $1000, they probably won't even notice. For a more practical example from my own backyard: carpool lane violators in the Bay Area. Before this pandemic, when traffic was still a thing, there would be a lot of BMWs, Audis and Mercedes violating the carpool lane. The common factor was that these were luxury cars and the owners were more likely to be able to slough off a carpool violation fine. They would rarely get ticketed, but for a lot of such drivers, even if they did, a ticket was just the price of business. On the other hand, if you were driving a '98 corolla that you could barely maintain and put the gas into, you would likely not risk a carpool violation just to save a couple of minutes, because if you did get the fine, it would be a serious impact on your finances. Because the law punished both these people the same, it made it financially viable for the wealthier people to ignore the rules, while poorer people had to follow them because they couldn't afford doing otherwise. If in this contrived scenario the punishment was scaled based on income, the fine would be sufficiently punitive for all strata of wealth, and thus no longer incentivize the more well off to break the rules. I was somewhat haughty with my earlier words, and I don't think we should judge people differently based on net worth. After all, if you murder 10,000 people, does it matter much if you live in a palace or a cardboard box? But I do think the punishment should fit not only the crime but the person, and that the very rich should be penalized more harshly than the average person, for the same crime. (As an aside, I'd also like to say that the username definitely does not check out. 'genocidic' is not a word, but it is meant to trip up people thinking it is and that it relates to 'genocide'. It's high school me being clever after watching Monty Python)
  - pabs3 6y ago
    Transformative justice seems like a potentially more useful useful form of justice than retributive justice. https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice/ https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice
  - ponker 6y ago
    That is not in scope for this case. The facts of what the Sacklers have done are not in question. You can make an argument against their execution but it can't be "they got the wrong guy."
    - kube-system 6y ago
      And this particular case is not in scope of the decision of whether a criminal justice system should allow capital punishment. If you do allow it, it applies to more cases than this one. If you don't, it doesn't apply to this one.
- xster 6y ago
  Do you have a link?
- ipsum2 6y ago
  > I had a cat die of melamine-tainted Chinese cat food. The CEO of the company was executed. This statement is downright wrong. The regulator was executed, not the CEO. The regulator also approved untested drugs, which killed people. The sentencing was probably not because of the cats. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11846089 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=118460...
happytoexplain 6y ago
The line becomes very blurry when the evil is fantastically enormous.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
causality0 6y ago
How many people do you have to kill before you deserve to get fed into a wood chipper? The Sacklers are at 250,000 and counting.
throwaway8941 6y ago
Former FBI agent John Douglas argues in one of his books (I forget which one) that if general public knew the whole scope and details of the crimes perpetrated by any of the serial killers he prosecuted, the level of support against death penalty would be close to nil.
- cm2012 6y ago
  Plenty of people deserve to die. Problem is we are awful at accurately knowing who those people are.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Always be wary of FBI assertions without evidence. They are fabulous liars with an agenda to make themselves more powerful and scary.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I mean, I hear all sorts of really heinous crimes…people who serially kidnap, rape, torture, kill victims in the most horrible ways possible. I am extremely doubtful that there is anything that is much worse than that, and yet I'm still against the death penalty. Perhaps he should explain what it is he sees instead of trying claim we're too ignorant to understand why the death penalty should be instituted?
- kiba 6y ago
  People doing horrifying things justify horrifying things be done to them?
polotics 6y ago
You are looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. You think the clearly responsible party should still be free and wealthy?
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  That is clearly not the only other option next to a death penalty.
ponker 6y ago
Why? Why is it fair to execute someone who murders 20 hitchhikers, or 3,000 Americans on 9/11, but not someone who knowingly takes actions that lead to the death of (i.e., murders) 500,000 people? It's not "better" to advocate for leniency (and anything less than capital punishment is leniency for these animals) -- for crimes of this magnitude it dishonors the victims. This is why societies always execute war criminals, and the Sacklers are definitely in the same category as a Saddam Hussein in the number of people killed. Hiding behind a corporation doesn't lessen the crime any more than hiding behind a government office or a military uniform. If a political party ran on the platform of rounding up the top 1000 corporate criminals and sticking a needle in their arms they'd have my vote from President down to sheriff.
- anchpop 6y ago
  It's not fair to execute anyone. Many countries have banned the death penalty and prominent US politicians oppose it (including Biden). It seems like you're noticing: "We execute people who murder 20 hitchhikers, but not billionaires responsible for the death of thousands." And proposing that instead of rectifying that inequality by banning the death penalty, we rectify it by doing the death penalty way more to avoid dishonoring victims? Let me know if I'm misreading you.
  - ponker 6y ago
    "It's not fair to execute anyone." That's just an opinion, and mine is different. I believe that with very few exceptions, every first-degree murderer should be executed. Note that "first-degree murderer" is NOT equivalent to "person convicted of first-degree murder" which is why I have a lot of objections to the death penalty as a matter of public policy.
    - metiscus 6y ago
      How do you propose to sort out the two classes that you have indicated exist? The inability to do so perfectly is largely behind my opposition to the death penalty in general. You can't be meaningfully exonerated if you are not alive. If punishment is what people desire, the American prison system is perfectly capable of satiation. A life in an American prison is significantly worse, in my opinion, than being dead as being dead ends it immediately and life in prison forces a person to deal with the consequences of their actions for a life-time.

I'm not joking. They're mass murderers as far as I'm concerned. I had a cat die of melamine-tainted Chinese cat food. The CEO of the company was executed. I've had multiple people I know die of the Oxy-to-Heroin pipeline. These CEOs are billionaires.

kube-system 6y ago
It doesn't matter how bad the crime may be, as long as criminal justice is carried out by fallible humans, capital punishment will result in innocent deaths. As nice as retribution might feel, it only adds to the problem.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  You’re not innocent if you’re convicted and the evidence is overwhelming. In this case, the evidence is overwhelming. I have no better example in recent US domestic affairs history for capital punishment being deserved. Of course, don’t execute people when the evidence is uncertain or unclear. The evidence in this case is irrefutable, and the magnitude comparable to genocide (~250k deaths caused).
  - kube-system 6y ago
    You don't think people haven't thought of that idea before? When innocent people are put to death, those involved almost always believed the evidence was absolutely certain. The problem is: they're still sometimes wrong. There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. They all guarantee non-zero rates of innocent death. How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? And for what benefit? A feeling of retribution?
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      > There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. This is a call to implement better systems around capital punishment, not to do away with capital punishment when the crime meets the criteria for it's implementation. As the old Texan proverb goes, “Some people need killin'”. This is not a pro-death, nor pro-revenge stance, this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform (and I believe there is enough criminal justice and behavioral science evidence that supports this thesis, but is beyond the scope of this comment). > How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. There is zero doubt in what the Sacklers did, so I see no point in us continuing to argue over whether the evidence is substantial enough. If you want to hold the position capital punishment is still not acceptable for them, I'm sure I could find enough families and loved ones of those 250k people killed by the Sacklers' actions to rebut such arguments.
      - kube-system 6y ago
        > this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform Then they can spend their entire life in prison. Capital punishment adds no additional value. > As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. The bar for putting someone to death is already very high. But when you put someone to death, you may be unknowingly excluding evidence that you are not yet aware of. In most wrongful convictions, it is additional evidence discovered after the fact or a mistake found in the evidence previously used that indicates that the person was innocent. But at the moment of death, everyone was sure they were guilty. Whoops. For justice to be just, mistakes must be correctable when they are found.
- genocidicbunny 6y ago
  I feel like the death penalty does need to be on the table in very egregious cases. If you are responsible for thousands of deaths, then it is extremely improbable that the evidence against you would be anything less than overwhelming. In such cases, yes, capital punishment should be on the table. Frankly, I am okay with having harsher penalties automatically applied to the extremely rich, including having the death penalty. Extremely rich should be defined fairly generously here, but it should be defined and treated as a separate class. Yes it creates a separate class of people, but lets be realistic -- the extremely rich already are in a separate class.
  - kiba 6y ago
    What does this actually accomplish?
  - sk0g 6y ago
    Username definitely checks out, but are you advocating for automatically harsher penalties, scaled by net worth? What problem would it solve, except for encouraging poor people to commit more crimes, since they'd now face relatively less severe? No offence, but this reads like Tumblr "communism" propoganda gone too far. The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against the actions committed, not against someone's skin colour, gender, religion, or indeed, net worth.
    - justinclift 6y ago
      > The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against ... net worth. That's clearly not working.
    - genocidicbunny 6y ago
      I'm advocating for a disjoint function in terms of penalties, disjoint on net worth. I am not saying we apply a scalar factor based on a person's net worth; but I do think we do need to acknowledge that people who hold hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in wealth operate in different worlds from the rest of us. The justice system is different for them, and unless you completely get rid of money and its influence, that won't change. As such, there needs to be _some_ cutoff where we can largely all agree someone holds a disproportionate amount of wealth and power, and thus should be held to a higher standard. I do take offense to this being called 'Tumblr communism'. Yes, Western justice systems should strive towards impartiality, but part and parcel of that is making punishments appropriate. If you fine someone making $35,000 a year $1000 dollars, you will do a lot of harm to them. If you fine someone making $35,000,000 a year $1000, they probably won't even notice. For a more practical example from my own backyard: carpool lane violators in the Bay Area. Before this pandemic, when traffic was still a thing, there would be a lot of BMWs, Audis and Mercedes violating the carpool lane. The common factor was that these were luxury cars and the owners were more likely to be able to slough off a carpool violation fine. They would rarely get ticketed, but for a lot of such drivers, even if they did, a ticket was just the price of business. On the other hand, if you were driving a '98 corolla that you could barely maintain and put the gas into, you would likely not risk a carpool violation just to save a couple of minutes, because if you did get the fine, it would be a serious impact on your finances. Because the law punished both these people the same, it made it financially viable for the wealthier people to ignore the rules, while poorer people had to follow them because they couldn't afford doing otherwise. If in this contrived scenario the punishment was scaled based on income, the fine would be sufficiently punitive for all strata of wealth, and thus no longer incentivize the more well off to break the rules. I was somewhat haughty with my earlier words, and I don't think we should judge people differently based on net worth. After all, if you murder 10,000 people, does it matter much if you live in a palace or a cardboard box? But I do think the punishment should fit not only the crime but the person, and that the very rich should be penalized more harshly than the average person, for the same crime. (As an aside, I'd also like to say that the username definitely does not check out. 'genocidic' is not a word, but it is meant to trip up people thinking it is and that it relates to 'genocide'. It's high school me being clever after watching Monty Python)
- pabs3 6y ago
  Transformative justice seems like a potentially more useful useful form of justice than retributive justice. https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice/ https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice
- ponker 6y ago
  That is not in scope for this case. The facts of what the Sacklers have done are not in question. You can make an argument against their execution but it can't be "they got the wrong guy."
  - kube-system 6y ago
    And this particular case is not in scope of the decision of whether a criminal justice system should allow capital punishment. If you do allow it, it applies to more cases than this one. If you don't, it doesn't apply to this one.
xster 6y ago
Do you have a link?
ipsum2 6y ago
> I had a cat die of melamine-tainted Chinese cat food. The CEO of the company was executed. This statement is downright wrong. The regulator was executed, not the CEO. The regulator also approved untested drugs, which killed people. The sentencing was probably not because of the cats. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11846089 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=118460...

happytoexplain 6y ago

The line becomes very blurry when the evil is fantastically enormous.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

causality0 6y ago

How many people do you have to kill before you deserve to get fed into a wood chipper? The Sacklers are at 250,000 and counting.

throwaway8941 6y ago

Former FBI agent John Douglas argues in one of his books (I forget which one) that if general public knew the whole scope and details of the crimes perpetrated by any of the serial killers he prosecuted, the level of support against death penalty would be close to nil.

cm2012 6y ago
Plenty of people deserve to die. Problem is we are awful at accurately knowing who those people are.
tehjoker 6y ago
Always be wary of FBI assertions without evidence. They are fabulous liars with an agenda to make themselves more powerful and scary.
saagarjha 6y ago
I mean, I hear all sorts of really heinous crimes…people who serially kidnap, rape, torture, kill victims in the most horrible ways possible. I am extremely doubtful that there is anything that is much worse than that, and yet I'm still against the death penalty. Perhaps he should explain what it is he sees instead of trying claim we're too ignorant to understand why the death penalty should be instituted?
kiba 6y ago
People doing horrifying things justify horrifying things be done to them?

polotics 6y ago

You are looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. You think the clearly responsible party should still be free and wealthy?

read_if_gay_ 6y ago
That is clearly not the only other option next to a death penalty.

ponker 6y ago

Why? Why is it fair to execute someone who murders 20 hitchhikers, or 3,000 Americans on 9/11, but not someone who knowingly takes actions that lead to the death of (i.e., murders) 500,000 people? It's not "better" to advocate for leniency (and anything less than capital punishment is leniency for these animals) -- for crimes of this magnitude it dishonors the victims. This is why societies always execute war criminals, and the Sacklers are definitely in the same category as a Saddam Hussein in the number of people killed. Hiding behind a corporation doesn't lessen the crime any more than hiding behind a government office or a military uniform. If a political party ran on the platform of rounding up the top 1000 corporate criminals and sticking a needle in their arms they'd have my vote from President down to sheriff.

anchpop 6y ago
It's not fair to execute anyone. Many countries have banned the death penalty and prominent US politicians oppose it (including Biden). It seems like you're noticing: "We execute people who murder 20 hitchhikers, but not billionaires responsible for the death of thousands." And proposing that instead of rectifying that inequality by banning the death penalty, we rectify it by doing the death penalty way more to avoid dishonoring victims? Let me know if I'm misreading you.
- ponker 6y ago
  "It's not fair to execute anyone." That's just an opinion, and mine is different. I believe that with very few exceptions, every first-degree murderer should be executed. Note that "first-degree murderer" is NOT equivalent to "person convicted of first-degree murder" which is why I have a lot of objections to the death penalty as a matter of public policy.
  - metiscus 6y ago
    How do you propose to sort out the two classes that you have indicated exist? The inability to do so perfectly is largely behind my opposition to the death penalty in general. You can't be meaningfully exonerated if you are not alive. If punishment is what people desire, the American prison system is perfectly capable of satiation. A life in an American prison is significantly worse, in my opinion, than being dead as being dead ends it immediately and life in prison forces a person to deal with the consequences of their actions for a life-time.