5 ms·

In a sane, fair, and (crucially) long-term stable system, persons given privilege and authority over others are subject to a higher standard for their own behav

by Arubis 5mo ago

In a sane, fair, and (crucially) long-term stable system, persons given privilege and authority over others are subject to a higher standard for their own behavior. The long-running US trend of the inverse (additional legal protections for positions of authority) is incredibly destructive. This is a moral and values judgment, yes, but it's not just that -- it communicates to the population at large that they should find their own solutions rather than using the established system. More succinctly, down this path lie guillotines.

lokar 5mo ago
The death penalty should be reserved for people who violate a position of public trust and authority.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  Hot take, but I feel like no humans should be killed as a punishment... But I'm also probably too European to understand the true value of death penalty.
  - s5300 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - Sohcahtoa82 5mo ago
    I'm only against the death penalty for the simple fact that courts have convicted innocent people. Sometimes, that conviction happens when the court actively blocks exonerating evidence. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/284/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/284/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/547/319/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/547/319/
    - OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
      Anybody who is wrongfully executed was basically guaranteed to spend their entire life in prison. Death row inmates get dramatically more access to legal aid than anybody else rotting in a cell, so if they couldn't win their appeal, the guy doing life isn't, either. Generally, I'm against incarceration for that reason. I think the relatively muted violence of it is too easy to stomach for the public, which leads to people letting the system get sloppy. For public and infamous crimes, however, where the question is not "what act took place", but rather "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what is the punishment?"-type cases, I'm perfectly fine with capital punishment being on the table. We trust public officials with significant authority, and abuse of that authority is utterly irredeemable. Frankly, for elected officials I'd support a "two-thirds vote and you hang" policy. If you want power, and seek out power, you have an immense responsibility to live up to your constituent's expectations.
      - embedding-shape 5mo ago
        > "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what is the punishment?" I guess that last part is the perspective I'd change, for a more compassionate world. I'd much rather ask "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what made the person commit that crime, and how can we help them not do that in the future again?".
        OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
        For the kinds of "public and infamous" crimes I'm talking about, the answer is almost always greed, either for fortune, power, or fame. There's no need to ask "Why did Nestle decide to kill a bunch of African children by giving away just enough formula stop mothers from being able to breastfeed?" or "Why did tobacco companies stand in front of congress and lie through their teeth about how non-addictive nicotine is?" or "Why did Nixon decide to pursue the war on drugs in order to disproportionately target his political opponents and minorities?". The answer is that in order to end up in the C-suite or board of directors of a megacorp, or the White House, you have to be one of the most madly greedy, power-lusting parasites in the world. My compassion for my fellow man is why I suggest we wait for them to commit a crime before punishing such behavior.
    - eudamoniac 5mo ago
      So why aren't you against imprisonment for the simple fact that courts have imprisoned innocent people? We have to accept a certain amount of false positives in all things.
      - Sohcahtoa82 5mo ago
        The death penalty can't be undone, a prisoner can always be released. Sure, they'll never get that time back, but at least they can live.
  - CamperBob2 5mo ago
    It's a uniquely-American perspective: "Our government can't do anything right. But hey, I still trust it to kill the right people."
    - 1234letshaveatw 5mo ago
      so true, citizens of the dozens of other countries with the death penalty believe their governments to be infallible
      - happosai 5mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country Vast majority of death penalties happen in countries where citizens don't have much of a say what their government does...
  - boredumb 5mo ago
    If someone kills a family member and the court gives them 6 years and a parole officer, the remaining family will and has taken justice into their own hands and that has a much higher blast radius and margin of error than executing a guy convicted of the murder in a court of law and sat on death row making appeals for 10-15 years. If dylan roof was allowed to live his full natural life in jail, there would be race riots in the US by the end of the press conference.
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      Cool, maybe rather than aiming to punish people, aim to rehabilitate them, and they don't need to spend their full natural life in jail. And if they're "unsalvageable" like many would claim, we (maybe not you, in the US, I dunno) have hospitals for those that are ill.
      - hirvi74 5mo ago
        We also have state operated forensic psychiatric facilities for criminals deemed "unsalvageable." Many are not the same facilities that civilians seeking mental health would attend. Though, some facilities house both on separate units. While prisons in the USA are often more punitive and dangerous than a forensic psychiatric facility, that does mean forensic psychiatric facilities are not their own form of Hell rife with their own problems. Essentially, autonomy, dignity, and human rights are stripped from individuals in both facilities -- you do not want to go to either.
      - boredumb 5mo ago
        Cool, but I'm not sure the victims and the public are always thrilled when they see murderers get off by reason of insanity, despite it being a life sentence and essentially a medically induced solitary mental confinement. People were furious about Yates and Bobbitt despite not even living within a 1000 mile radius because they felt it was a miscarriage of justice and are aware that rehabilitating people who drowned their own children is naive at best or yet another grift to siphon public money into their own pet projects and feign moral superiority.
- cgriswald 5mo ago
  You want to give the government the legal ability to threaten the life of the entire civil service, judiciary, and all elected representatives. I’m sure that would never be abused.
  - actionfromafar 5mo ago
    The government already has that, since currently anyone (except the King) can get the death penalty.
    - cgriswald 5mo ago
      I am opposed to the death penalty in all cases, for a variety of reasons. However, currently the court has to at least find that a murder has occurred or in some cases child rape (sometimes with conditions like a second offense). These are categorically different offenses that are unlikely to occur during the normal course of a public servants job, except perhaps if police kill someone there may be a question whether it was murder. If “violation of trust” is given the death penalty than any normal act in the course of a public servant’s service history could potentially be used to hang him by questioning the legitimacy of the act.
      - actionfromafar 5mo ago
        For the record, I am also against the death penalty. I just thought it would be a funny Venn diagram to keep it for the existing crimes, but only if the perpetrator is also a public servant. But better abolish it completely.
- helterskelter 5mo ago
  Yeah that would never be weaponized with trumped-up charges against political opponents.
  - Teever 5mo ago
    But the same thing could happen right now with the existing death penalty -- has that been a trend in American politics?
    - autoexec 5mo ago
      There are some troubling signs that things are headed in that direction (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/20/sedition-death-trump-democrats/87379339007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/20/sediti...) The greater problem is that many innocent people have already been and certainly will be murdered because of the death penalty. That should be totally unacceptable.
    - helterskelter 5mo ago
      POTUS has been throwing around the "treason" label a lot this term, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he started pushing for executions of his political opponents or reporters he doesn't like.
- kube-system 5mo ago
  Because it is irreversible, the death penalty should be reserved for cases in which there is no possibility of mistake. Which, given the fallibility of humans, is never.
  - hilariously 5mo ago
    I think when you admit on public television and public comms that you will commit war crimes and then you do commit war crimes we should have a notable exception - there's no possibility Pete Hegeseth didn't know exactly what, how, and when his war crimes were going to be perpetuated.
    - cgriswald 5mo ago
      I don’t see how the death penalty adds anything here. There are already significant consequences. People who commit such crimes either do not expect to face the consequences or don’t consider the consequences at all.
      - hilariously 5mo ago
        Sure, and that might as well be said for any punishment at all for them. When you take mass human life you should not expect to stick around for your cronies to bust you out of jail in 10 years when the political winds have shifted for the worse again.
    - kube-system 5mo ago
      The death penalty was supposed to be for exceptional circumstances now, and look where we are. This country has put innocent people to death. If you make exceptions, you will make more exceptions, and you are eventually guaranteed to put an innocent person to death due to the law of large numbers. A justice system must have a way to reverse mistakes to deliver justice properly, period.
      - hilariously 5mo ago
        Bad people doing bad things doesn't invalidate good people doing the right thing. If we kill innocent people that is bad, and we should require an incredibly high bar for this type of thing. It becomes a slipper slope argument - well if we allow people to be jailed then inncocent people will be jailed and that's due to the law of large numbers, and there's no way to reverse our incredibly horrible prison system as it stands. So now its my job to build our restorative justice system or... take out a few more nazis.
- autoexec 5mo ago
  The death penalty should just be abolished. Where it exists there will always be innocent people who are murdered by the state.
TimTheTinker 5mo ago
One of the worst examples in the US is the consequence asymmetry for speech. Law enforcement and federal agents can lie as much as they like with impunity when dealing with citizens, but (a) it's a federal crime to lie to a federal officer (18 US Code § 1001, up to 8 years imprisonment), and (b) truly, anything you say to law enforcement when under any suspicion can and will be used against you in a court of law, even the act of pleading the 5th, regardless of (or perhaps especially because of) your innocence. "I want a lawyer", repeated ad-nauseam, is always the least harmful response, regardless of context[0]. Also, the body of federal law and regulations is so vast that smart people estimate the average person unknowingly breaks roughly 3 federal criminal laws per day[1], giving the federal government the legal ability to arbitrarily arrest anyone they want. [0] James Duane, You have the right to remain innocent, 2016 [1] Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, 2011.
- sidewndr46 5mo ago
  This distinction doesn't make sense. A police officer's job is to lie to you. Are we expecting jailtime for doing their job?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - MSFT_Edging 5mo ago
    Then it shouldn't be a crime to lie to the officer. I genuinely don't think certain charges relating to preserving one's freedom should even be a crime in of it self. Unless you endanger others in an extreme manner, things like "resisting arrest", running from police, or attempting to escape prison shouldn't be charges within themselves. People love the phrase "you can beat the rap, not the ride", but that essentially gives broad power to harass and damage one's life without recourse sans extremely expensive legal routes. In this example, a man lost his freedom for 37 days over a bogus charge and was paid by the taxpayers to essentially shut up.
    - breezybottom 5mo ago
echelon 5mo ago
> In a sane, fair, and (crucially) long-term stable system, persons given privilege and authority over others are subject to a higher standard for their own behavior. The US military is subject to a higher standard, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Penalties for US service members breaking the law or codes of conduct are much higher and much more severe than civilians. The US military makes routine example of law breakers and misconduct. The US police force, by contrast, is civilian. They are not licensed, commissioned, or subject to additional standards. Certainly not nationwide standards that would bar police removed from their post from finding similar work elsewhere. We should pay our police officers more, make them undergo nationally standardized training and licensing, and then hold them to a higher standard if and when they break the law. Police court-martial.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > Penalties for US service members breaking the law or codes of conduct are much higher and much more severe than civilians. The US military makes routine example of law breakers and misconduct Honest question, is this currently true?
  - ceejayoz 5mo ago
    No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL)
- AngryData 5mo ago
  I agree with most of that, but are cops around you paid low enough to get anything in exchange for giving higher wages? Ive lived in many poor places across the US and the cops are often among the highest paid workers in the area already despite currently needing a jokes worth of training and knowledge. The wages ive seen cops around me getting seemed to already be in the top 50% of skilled proffessionals with college degrees.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

by Arubis 5mo ago

lokar 5mo ago

The death penalty should be reserved for people who violate a position of public trust and authority.

embedding-shape 5mo ago
Hot take, but I feel like no humans should be killed as a punishment... But I'm also probably too European to understand the true value of death penalty.
- s5300 5mo ago
  [dead]
- Sohcahtoa82 5mo ago
  I'm only against the death penalty for the simple fact that courts have convicted innocent people. Sometimes, that conviction happens when the court actively blocks exonerating evidence. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/284/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/284/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/547/319/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/547/319/
  - OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
    Anybody who is wrongfully executed was basically guaranteed to spend their entire life in prison. Death row inmates get dramatically more access to legal aid than anybody else rotting in a cell, so if they couldn't win their appeal, the guy doing life isn't, either. Generally, I'm against incarceration for that reason. I think the relatively muted violence of it is too easy to stomach for the public, which leads to people letting the system get sloppy. For public and infamous crimes, however, where the question is not "what act took place", but rather "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what is the punishment?"-type cases, I'm perfectly fine with capital punishment being on the table. We trust public officials with significant authority, and abuse of that authority is utterly irredeemable. Frankly, for elected officials I'd support a "two-thirds vote and you hang" policy. If you want power, and seek out power, you have an immense responsibility to live up to your constituent's expectations.
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      > "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what is the punishment?" I guess that last part is the perspective I'd change, for a more compassionate world. I'd much rather ask "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what made the person commit that crime, and how can we help them not do that in the future again?".
      - OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
        For the kinds of "public and infamous" crimes I'm talking about, the answer is almost always greed, either for fortune, power, or fame. There's no need to ask "Why did Nestle decide to kill a bunch of African children by giving away just enough formula stop mothers from being able to breastfeed?" or "Why did tobacco companies stand in front of congress and lie through their teeth about how non-addictive nicotine is?" or "Why did Nixon decide to pursue the war on drugs in order to disproportionately target his political opponents and minorities?". The answer is that in order to end up in the C-suite or board of directors of a megacorp, or the White House, you have to be one of the most madly greedy, power-lusting parasites in the world. My compassion for my fellow man is why I suggest we wait for them to commit a crime before punishing such behavior.
  - eudamoniac 5mo ago
    So why aren't you against imprisonment for the simple fact that courts have imprisoned innocent people? We have to accept a certain amount of false positives in all things.
    - Sohcahtoa82 5mo ago
      The death penalty can't be undone, a prisoner can always be released. Sure, they'll never get that time back, but at least they can live.
- CamperBob2 5mo ago
  It's a uniquely-American perspective: "Our government can't do anything right. But hey, I still trust it to kill the right people."
  - 1234letshaveatw 5mo ago
    so true, citizens of the dozens of other countries with the death penalty believe their governments to be infallible
    - happosai 5mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country Vast majority of death penalties happen in countries where citizens don't have much of a say what their government does...
- boredumb 5mo ago
  If someone kills a family member and the court gives them 6 years and a parole officer, the remaining family will and has taken justice into their own hands and that has a much higher blast radius and margin of error than executing a guy convicted of the murder in a court of law and sat on death row making appeals for 10-15 years. If dylan roof was allowed to live his full natural life in jail, there would be race riots in the US by the end of the press conference.
  - embedding-shape 5mo ago
    Cool, maybe rather than aiming to punish people, aim to rehabilitate them, and they don't need to spend their full natural life in jail. And if they're "unsalvageable" like many would claim, we (maybe not you, in the US, I dunno) have hospitals for those that are ill.
    - hirvi74 5mo ago
      We also have state operated forensic psychiatric facilities for criminals deemed "unsalvageable." Many are not the same facilities that civilians seeking mental health would attend. Though, some facilities house both on separate units. While prisons in the USA are often more punitive and dangerous than a forensic psychiatric facility, that does mean forensic psychiatric facilities are not their own form of Hell rife with their own problems. Essentially, autonomy, dignity, and human rights are stripped from individuals in both facilities -- you do not want to go to either.
    - boredumb 5mo ago
      Cool, but I'm not sure the victims and the public are always thrilled when they see murderers get off by reason of insanity, despite it being a life sentence and essentially a medically induced solitary mental confinement. People were furious about Yates and Bobbitt despite not even living within a 1000 mile radius because they felt it was a miscarriage of justice and are aware that rehabilitating people who drowned their own children is naive at best or yet another grift to siphon public money into their own pet projects and feign moral superiority.
cgriswald 5mo ago
You want to give the government the legal ability to threaten the life of the entire civil service, judiciary, and all elected representatives. I’m sure that would never be abused.
- actionfromafar 5mo ago
  The government already has that, since currently anyone (except the King) can get the death penalty.
  - cgriswald 5mo ago
    I am opposed to the death penalty in all cases, for a variety of reasons. However, currently the court has to at least find that a murder has occurred or in some cases child rape (sometimes with conditions like a second offense). These are categorically different offenses that are unlikely to occur during the normal course of a public servants job, except perhaps if police kill someone there may be a question whether it was murder. If “violation of trust” is given the death penalty than any normal act in the course of a public servant’s service history could potentially be used to hang him by questioning the legitimacy of the act.
    - actionfromafar 5mo ago
      For the record, I am also against the death penalty. I just thought it would be a funny Venn diagram to keep it for the existing crimes, but only if the perpetrator is also a public servant. But better abolish it completely.
helterskelter 5mo ago
Yeah that would never be weaponized with trumped-up charges against political opponents.
- Teever 5mo ago
  But the same thing could happen right now with the existing death penalty -- has that been a trend in American politics?
  - autoexec 5mo ago
    There are some troubling signs that things are headed in that direction (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/20/sedition-death-trump-democrats/87379339007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/20/sediti...) The greater problem is that many innocent people have already been and certainly will be murdered because of the death penalty. That should be totally unacceptable.
  - helterskelter 5mo ago
    POTUS has been throwing around the "treason" label a lot this term, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he started pushing for executions of his political opponents or reporters he doesn't like.
kube-system 5mo ago
Because it is irreversible, the death penalty should be reserved for cases in which there is no possibility of mistake. Which, given the fallibility of humans, is never.
- hilariously 5mo ago
  I think when you admit on public television and public comms that you will commit war crimes and then you do commit war crimes we should have a notable exception - there's no possibility Pete Hegeseth didn't know exactly what, how, and when his war crimes were going to be perpetuated.
  - cgriswald 5mo ago
    I don’t see how the death penalty adds anything here. There are already significant consequences. People who commit such crimes either do not expect to face the consequences or don’t consider the consequences at all.
    - hilariously 5mo ago
      Sure, and that might as well be said for any punishment at all for them. When you take mass human life you should not expect to stick around for your cronies to bust you out of jail in 10 years when the political winds have shifted for the worse again.
  - kube-system 5mo ago
    The death penalty was supposed to be for exceptional circumstances now, and look where we are. This country has put innocent people to death. If you make exceptions, you will make more exceptions, and you are eventually guaranteed to put an innocent person to death due to the law of large numbers. A justice system must have a way to reverse mistakes to deliver justice properly, period.
    - hilariously 5mo ago
      Bad people doing bad things doesn't invalidate good people doing the right thing. If we kill innocent people that is bad, and we should require an incredibly high bar for this type of thing. It becomes a slipper slope argument - well if we allow people to be jailed then inncocent people will be jailed and that's due to the law of large numbers, and there's no way to reverse our incredibly horrible prison system as it stands. So now its my job to build our restorative justice system or... take out a few more nazis.
autoexec 5mo ago
The death penalty should just be abolished. Where it exists there will always be innocent people who are murdered by the state.

TimTheTinker 5mo ago

One of the worst examples in the US is the consequence asymmetry for speech. Law enforcement and federal agents can lie as much as they like with impunity when dealing with citizens, but (a) it's a federal crime to lie to a federal officer (18 US Code § 1001, up to 8 years imprisonment), and (b) truly, anything you say to law enforcement when under any suspicion can and will be used against you in a court of law, even the act of pleading the 5th, regardless of (or perhaps especially because of) your innocence. "I want a lawyer", repeated ad-nauseam, is always the least harmful response, regardless of context[0]. Also, the body of federal law and regulations is so vast that smart people estimate the average person unknowingly breaks roughly 3 federal criminal laws per day[1], giving the federal government the legal ability to arbitrarily arrest anyone they want. [0] James Duane, You have the right to remain innocent, 2016 [1] Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, 2011.

sidewndr46 5mo ago
This distinction doesn't make sense. A police officer's job is to lie to you. Are we expecting jailtime for doing their job?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- MSFT_Edging 5mo ago
  Then it shouldn't be a crime to lie to the officer. I genuinely don't think certain charges relating to preserving one's freedom should even be a crime in of it self. Unless you endanger others in an extreme manner, things like "resisting arrest", running from police, or attempting to escape prison shouldn't be charges within themselves. People love the phrase "you can beat the rap, not the ride", but that essentially gives broad power to harass and damage one's life without recourse sans extremely expensive legal routes. In this example, a man lost his freedom for 37 days over a bogus charge and was paid by the taxpayers to essentially shut up.
  - breezybottom 5mo ago

echelon 5mo ago

> In a sane, fair, and (crucially) long-term stable system, persons given privilege and authority over others are subject to a higher standard for their own behavior. The US military is subject to a higher standard, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Penalties for US service members breaking the law or codes of conduct are much higher and much more severe than civilians. The US military makes routine example of law breakers and misconduct. The US police force, by contrast, is civilian. They are not licensed, commissioned, or subject to additional standards. Certainly not nationwide standards that would bar police removed from their post from finding similar work elsewhere. We should pay our police officers more, make them undergo nationally standardized training and licensing, and then hold them to a higher standard if and when they break the law. Police court-martial.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> Penalties for US service members breaking the law or codes of conduct are much higher and much more severe than civilians. The US military makes routine example of law breakers and misconduct Honest question, is this currently true?
- ceejayoz 5mo ago
  No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL)
AngryData 5mo ago
I agree with most of that, but are cops around you paid low enough to get anything in exchange for giving higher wages? Ive lived in many poor places across the US and the cops are often among the highest paid workers in the area already despite currently needing a jokes worth of training and knowledge. The wages ive seen cops around me getting seemed to already be in the top 50% of skilled proffessionals with college degrees.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]