6 ms·

For someone supposedly concerned about human life, you seem awfully eager to end one.

by thenmar 13y ago

msandford 13y ago
Superficially I have to agree with you that I look like a hypocrite. The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own hands. One class of those disputes is the government vs citizens who have violated the government's rules or the laws. When those kinds of cases are going through the courts the government should be extra careful to be impartial because everyone can tell that it's potentially a situation ripe for corruption. The government is adjudicating a case between the government (the DA or prosecutor) and someone not in the government ("normal people"). Given the choice you wouldn't choose your wife's parents to settle a dispute between you and your wife; but this can be a very real fear when being prosecuted. The problem here is even though you can name the different parts of the government and call them separate (courts, prosecutor, forensics, etc) ultimately we find out that forensics and the prosecutor are both "on the same team" and that when the courts get involved again to try and fix the mess, that the forensics person is still "on the same team" as the prosecutors and maybe everyone else. If you're in the class of people called "the government" you have to be extra right, extra careful, and extra following-the-rules so that ordinary people get a fair shake when dealing with an entity that has virtually limitless funds to prosecute versus their usually meager funds to defend (unless you're in the top 1% to 0.1% or so, then it's just "lots more" rather than "infinitely more"). Here's a case where not only was the forensics person not extra careful, right and proper, not even sloppy and foolish but malicious. And not just a little bit either, she didn't tamper with one case that involved a cheating ex or something. She did it systematically over thousands of cases depriving people of their liberty wrongly. You could build a strong case that she perverted justice in a very horrific manner. If you add up all the person-years of people's lives that she conspired to help imprison and divide by 100 year in a life (round numbers) you'd get to the point where she's effectively "taken" tens if not hundreds of lives. That makes her in a roundabout way something akin to a very impressive mass murderer. In that case I'm not sure that the death penalty is an over-reactionary knee-jerk kind of punishment.
- trekky1700 13y ago
  By god, is the human race so savage that we resort to killing so quickly. This is a life, something some people would consider priceless. Not something you can view arithmetically, calculating the hours in damage caused versus somebody's time left.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Do we actually think that a human life is priceless, or is that just something that we say that we think to make ourselves feel good about ourselves? We regularly put a price on human life in civil cases, and that price always seems to be finite and fairly low.
    - trekky1700 13y ago
      Which is a truly disparaging fact, while a human life may not be priceless, putting a value on it draws a very interesting ethical line in the sand. I agree with you, but I would say the life of any human should be worth a hell of a lot and the idea of taking one should be met with the utmost seriousness and avoided at all costs. The last thing this planet needs is more death and killing.
      - Crito 13y ago
        I can't disagree with any of that.
    - barbs 13y ago
      Related blog post: http://squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html By the way, very insightful discussion here!
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - Crito 13y ago
      I don't think that attempting to maximize suffering is a good idea. If you go down that path, then finding creative ways to lawyer our way around "cruel and unusual" will become the name of the game (say for example, claiming that a plainly cruel punishment is acceptable so long as we do it a lot, making it not unusual. This has been argued before on HN...[0]) I honestly find the suggestion that we should use life imprisonment instead of execution because it is more cruel to be far more disturbing than suggestions that we should just use execution. You are proposing that we do something that you consider more cruel then execution... I'm not good with that. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5951315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5951315
lolnope 13y ago
There's a distinction made between individuals that follow society's rules and those that break them on a massive scale for financial gain (or other reasons).
conjecTech 13y ago
Your argument is one of semantics. He is a defender of those who have not deprived others of their right to life. This is the reason why both the word murder and the word kill exist. There is a fundamental difference that you don't appreciate.
- trekky1700 13y ago
  Unless there was a death penalty administered due to this, she has not deprived anyone of "life" in the sense suggested. She denied their freedom, and this is a grave injustice, but not one fit for a death penalty. How savage and petty that would be.
  - msandford 13y ago
    What is worth more, 50 years of a single person's life or 10,000 years of many people's lives? If it's really hard to comprehend 50 years of a single person's life how impossible is it to truly understand what 10,000 years of human life is? If you have 40,000 cases and only say 1/4 of them get falsified and that results in on average one year of wrongful imprisonment you're at 10,000 years.

For someone supposedly concerned about human life, you seem awfully eager to end one.

by thenmar 13y ago

For someone supposedly concerned about human life, you seem awfully eager to end one.

Superficially I have to agree with you that I look like a hypocrite. The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own hands. One class of those disputes is the government vs citizens who have violated the government's rules or the laws. When those kinds of cases are going through the courts the government should be extra careful to be impartial because everyone can tell that it's potentially a situation ripe for corruption. The government is adjudicating a case between the government (the DA or prosecutor) and someone not in the government ("normal people"). Given the choice you wouldn't choose your wife's parents to settle a dispute between you and your wife; but this can be a very real fear when being prosecuted. The problem here is even though you can name the different parts of the government and call them separate (courts, prosecutor, forensics, etc) ultimately we find out that forensics and the prosecutor are both "on the same team" and that when the courts get involved again to try and fix the mess, that the forensics person is still "on the same team" as the prosecutors and maybe everyone else. If you're in the class of people called "the government" you have to be extra right, extra careful, and extra following-the-rules so that ordinary people get a fair shake when dealing with an entity that has virtually limitless funds to prosecute versus their usually meager funds to defend (unless you're in the top 1% to 0.1% or so, then it's just "lots more" rather than "infinitely more"). Here's a case where not only was the forensics person not extra careful, right and proper, not even sloppy and foolish but malicious. And not just a little bit either, she didn't tamper with one case that involved a cheating ex or something. She did it systematically over thousands of cases depriving people of their liberty wrongly. You could build a strong case that she perverted justice in a very horrific manner. If you add up all the person-years of people's lives that she conspired to help imprison and divide by 100 year in a life (round numbers) you'd get to the point where she's effectively "taken" tens if not hundreds of lives. That makes her in a roundabout way something akin to a very impressive mass murderer. In that case I'm not sure that the death penalty is an over-reactionary knee-jerk kind of punishment.

trekky1700 13y ago
By god, is the human race so savage that we resort to killing so quickly. This is a life, something some people would consider priceless. Not something you can view arithmetically, calculating the hours in damage caused versus somebody's time left.
- Crito 13y ago
  Do we actually think that a human life is priceless, or is that just something that we say that we think to make ourselves feel good about ourselves? We regularly put a price on human life in civil cases, and that price always seems to be finite and fairly low.
  - trekky1700 13y ago
    Which is a truly disparaging fact, while a human life may not be priceless, putting a value on it draws a very interesting ethical line in the sand. I agree with you, but I would say the life of any human should be worth a hell of a lot and the idea of taking one should be met with the utmost seriousness and avoided at all costs. The last thing this planet needs is more death and killing.
    - Crito 13y ago
      I can't disagree with any of that.
  - barbs 13y ago
    Related blog post: http://squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html By the way, very insightful discussion here!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - Crito 13y ago
    I don't think that attempting to maximize suffering is a good idea. If you go down that path, then finding creative ways to lawyer our way around "cruel and unusual" will become the name of the game (say for example, claiming that a plainly cruel punishment is acceptable so long as we do it a lot, making it not unusual. This has been argued before on HN...[0]) I honestly find the suggestion that we should use life imprisonment instead of execution because it is more cruel to be far more disturbing than suggestions that we should just use execution. You are proposing that we do something that you consider more cruel then execution... I'm not good with that. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5951315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5951315

lolnope 13y ago

There's a distinction made between individuals that follow society's rules and those that break them on a massive scale for financial gain (or other reasons).

conjecTech 13y ago

Your argument is one of semantics. He is a defender of those who have not deprived others of their right to life. This is the reason why both the word murder and the word kill exist. There is a fundamental difference that you don't appreciate.

trekky1700 13y ago
Unless there was a death penalty administered due to this, she has not deprived anyone of "life" in the sense suggested. She denied their freedom, and this is a grave injustice, but not one fit for a death penalty. How savage and petty that would be.
- msandford 13y ago
  What is worth more, 50 years of a single person's life or 10,000 years of many people's lives? If it's really hard to comprehend 50 years of a single person's life how impossible is it to truly understand what 10,000 years of human life is? If you have 40,000 cases and only say 1/4 of them get falsified and that results in on average one year of wrongful imprisonment you're at 10,000 years.