8 ms·

The death penalty should be abolished, end of discussion. If even a single innocent person is murdered, then an obscene and heinous crime has been committed by

• ta988 5y ago
  I wonder how this argument would be applied to police murders of innocents. How do we deal with that?
  • t0mas88 5y ago
    Train police to de-escalate and avoid police violence at all costs instead of the US approach where a traffic stop can involve pointing your gun at the suspect...
    • mschuster91 5y ago
      > instead of the US approach where a traffic stop can involve pointing your gun at the suspect... Realistically though, for that to work the US needs a sweeping reform of drug and gun laws. Right now, if I'm a drug mule with a ton of meth in my trunk and get stopped on some lonely road, I have the choice between shooting the cop and maybe get away or getting a life in jail for the drugs. Here in Germany, you usually get out after 5, 6 years as a simple mule, and our cops (unless you're on an international route where cops can claim Schengen border duty rights) can't simply demand to open your trunk unless they have reasonable suspicion - and it's really hard to get your hand on a gun. As a result, our cops don't have to be afraid for their life at a random traffic stop. There's a reason why cops are so trigger happy in the US, and it goes way beyond shoddy training.
    • ta988 5y ago
      I've seen part of police training in a big city and was impressed. They have a good portion of their training already on all the different methods of deescalation. With simulators (I tried them it is pretty impressive and immersive), role-play and so on. My guess is that the problem is after training.
      • bsanr2 5y ago
        I ran a simulator system for a couple of years for a military law course. The idea was to give those in the course first-hand experience with ROE/RUF concerns through the eyes of the people they'd be writing ROE/RUF for. The scenarios presented were laughable, badly-acted and completely unrealistic. Worse, every single one ended, by default, with the suspect pulling out a gun and shooting at the user. All of them. This is, of course, completely counter to reality. One could say that the issue is then the quality of these systems, but the fact that, apparently, it has been a viable business for going on a decade shows me that the issue isn't being taken seriously be their customers - that is, police departments and their trainers. The issue is, in fact, the institution as a whole. They're fundamentally incapable of reforming themselves.
        • ta988 5y ago
          No these were interactive scenarios, with a human behind the controls. So it really depends on the human of course. But you can select where the situation goes, raise the tone of voice or aggressiveness of the actor (real actor videos smoothly integrated) of course the operator can make it shoot and you also need to simulate that. The subject in the simulator has a prop taser and gun that work pretty realisticly (blank bullets and no voltage of course). I don't know how common this kind of training is across US probably not that much.
          • bsanr2 5y ago
            Right. The default (or, at least, the choice heavily weighted by system) was the shot ending. I could choose to allow the scenario to progress to a surrender, but there was no instance where a gun or knife could not possibly be produced. Ostensibly, these scenarios are meant to train police for realistic encounters; that is, there SHOULD be a number, if not a majority, that don't end in violence, even if the user fails to de-escalate properly.
  • Agingcoder 5y ago
    (I assume you mean that by op's argument, we should abolish police) You make them accountable/actually punishable if they kill someone ? As to the death penalty, it's a bit different : you need law enforcement, you don't need the death penalty.
  • vmception 5y ago
    Sanctions.
  • kingsuper20 5y ago
    > I wonder how this argument would be applied to police murders of innocents. How do we deal with that? Realistically I think you'd have to drastically lower the perceived risk of a public interaction to the police. As long as they think they are going to get hurt, they'll feel the need to get in front of the problem.
    • beerandt 5y ago
      This angle always amuses me, because while there's some truth to it, it means that raising "public awareness" of the issue is, in fact, making the issue worse. Which might be true, but that also lays at least some blame on the activists/ fear mongers. But also, it's just a different type of victim blaming. Anytime perception is allowed to be blamed, logic goes out the window. The same excuse was (is) used against minorites for years: if they don't want me to feel threatened by them, then they shouldn't be (perceived as being) so threatening. It's why any type of "thought crime" is so dangerous. It doesn't matter what you (the accused) actually think; it matters what someone else thinks/perceives what you thought. Which means that what someone else thinks of you can make you actually guilty of a crime.
      • kingsuper20 5y ago
        Or it could be as simple as improving physical security for police. Put an Ironman suit on a cop and he isn't going to much care if the potential perp is carrying a knife. It's a weird gig (street patrol) and it's hard to have a strong opinion on it without actually being a cop or going out on numerous ride-alongs. Naturally, it's easy to come up with 'solutions' behind the safety of a screen. One thing that brought that home to me is having several friends who are retired COs (Correctional Officers) from the California state system and several friends who are released felons. One thing their stories taught me is that people who are uninvolved in those systems don't know a thing about it and have nearly useless theories on the way things-oughta-be.
  • slumdev 5y ago
    Stop canonizing the criminals "murdered" by police. Easy fix. As soon as Ben Crump shows up on the scene, you know the person wasn't innocent.
• fridif 5y ago
  How much of your salary are you willing to pay to house violent criminals for the rest of their life? Let's not forget that someone else was also murdered too
  • xxs 5y ago
    The legal proceedings costs heavily outweigh the lifetime porridge
  • eecc 5y ago
    shut up, miser. Besides, it’s well known that the CYA process for state murder is more expensive than keeping someone locked up for a lifetime. You’re just lusting for revenge, not justice
  • mchusma 5y ago
    In our current system, death penalty is more expensive than life in prison due to legal costs. Random source, I believe this is well accepted though. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs
  • washadjeffmad 5y ago
    The idea that any person is immutably a "criminal" is as passe as the xenophobic belief that certain ethnic groups are innately violent, untrustworthy, or simpleminded. It's a failed ideology that justifies selective dehumanization. And conversely, how much value in contracted services performed by potentially wrongly incarcerated people performing un- or under-compensated labor are you willing to accept? If they're paying for the privilege of their own imprisonment, it should at least include rehabilitation.
    • eplanit 5y ago
      I don't want to rehabilitate someone who violently murders people. If they took life cruelly, then losing the effective use of their own life is just.
  • hedora 5y ago
• adolph 5y ago
  That just hides the problem. The existence of a death penalty brings a special salience to injustice but is orthogonal to the key injustice in this case.
• GuB-42 5y ago
  But what if a criminal kills an innocent after not being executed? By the same reasoning, should COVID-19 vaccines be banned because some doctors murdered people with them (even if they may have saved millions). It is the trolley problem, ut has no definitive answer, it is not "end of discussion".
• eplanit 5y ago
  It should be applied only when the evidence is physical and without doubts (eyewitnesses are insufficient).
  • jobigoud 5y ago
    Are there examples of infalsifiable evidence?
    • eplanit 5y ago
      DNA &| cameras, both with proper chain-of-custody would satisfy me.
• kingsuper20 5y ago
  The state is sure good at killing innocent people in other countries. I'm going to have to vote for the death penalty, of course with high standards of proof. If anything, the whole idea of bolting people into a small box for 50-60 years is a much more perverse idea. Only the US could invent something like a Supermax prison (although the Black Dolphin looks like no picnic, the Russian answer to abolishing the death penalty). edit: I'll add that the US justice system (and probably any other) appears quite arbitrary in it's punishment. The sentences people receive and actually serve can be all over the map.
  • gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Furthermore, consider the view of repentance. Let's say that you are at least willing to admit the possibility there is an afterlife with judgement. Having a defined date when you will die means you are more likely to repent than when you die of old age 60 years from now at some undefined time. Also, have you investigated how much it costs the US Taxpayer to house a prisoner in a Supermax prison? If it was income, that prisoner would be making money in the upper 5%. It's also perverse to make the taxpayer pay so much to house a prisoner, who committed atrocious crimes normally worthy of death, for so long.
• traloid 5y ago
  It is justice. Every murderer should be executed by the state IMO.
  • aaron-santos 5y ago
    Justice involves the victims not the state. The Kantian idea of justice should have died out centuries ago.
    • beerandt 5y ago
      Judicially sanctioned revenge killing as a civil remedy is an interesting thought exercise, though. ...if your argument is that the victim and not the State is entitled to justice.
      • aaron-santos 5y ago
        I'll leave it as a thought experiment in the same way that we ask, "How many people would eat meat if they had to do the killing?"
        • beerandt 5y ago
          Probably more than you're thinking, especially if the meat had just been convicted of killing a family member.
• tomatocracy 5y ago
  There's also the fact that a wrong person convicted usually means the guilty party going free and the investigation closed. This is bad enough normally but the death penalty creates even bigger incentives for people to claim the right person was convicted after the fact and not to look too closely at any new evidence which comes to light which could lead to the actually guilty party being found.
• sershe 5y ago
  So, if a single person is killed by a government-mandated airbag, we should throw away all the safety trade-offs (the numbers of people killed and saved by airbags) and remove the airbags? Emotional slogans should be abolished, end of discussion.
  • fossislife 5y ago
    The difference is you wrote "killed", LocalH wrote "murdered" (implies intentional killing, I believe). The death penalty's only intention is to end your life (and cynically speaking, save life long imprisonment costs).