5 ms·

Death-penalty analysis reveals extent of wrongful convictions

13 points by gautamnarula 12y ago

gautamnarula 12y ago
From the article: "At least one in 25 people on death row in the United States would be exonerated if given enough time...That number still underestimates the rate of false convictions, Gross says, because many innocent people never manage to prove their innocence." Abstract of the study available here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111 Edit: Full paper here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111.full...
papasmrf 12y ago
My own particular belief is that the death penalty as it is currently implemented is an abomination. But I also believe that there are just some crimes committed that must be punished by death. I have often wondered why the death penalty shouldn't only be imposed in cases where there is a 100% moral certainty that the accused committed the crime, ie, caught at the scene of the crime, captured on videotape, etc. Other than these types of cases, we really should be thinking about not allowing the death penalty anymore.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  Exactly It's one thing to put someone in death row for one conviction (with a possible error rate), another, would be to put someone for multiple convictions (and not from the same event) Unless there's a direct evidence (filming, or something similar) no evidence (testimony, DNA, etc) should be enough to put someone in death row.
mathattack 12y ago
My 2 cents... The death penalty is wrong on both moral reasons. The moral reason is clear - you can never be 100% sure that you got the right person, and you don't have the opportunity to back out of a bad decision afterwards. The economic reason is that it's just too expensive anyway. You wind up having to do a tremendous amount of extra work to get the conviction (which may not have been correct) and then have to deal with years (decades?) of appeals and imprisonment. Just toss them in jail.
- apta 12y ago
  It's not always wrong. Never being 100% certain is incorrect. There are cases where you are sure; and in such cases, it should be a viable punishment. Otherwise, you're right, it is not something you can back out of.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    Are we ever 100% sure though, when the possibility exists that the prosecution is corrupt and the confession could be coming from someone that is mentally ill? And stepping aside from morality, if it costs 10X[0] the cost of a life prison sentence to kill someone, isn't it really better to just put them away for life with no chance of parole? [0] 10X is a made up #, but it's certainly a large multiple of non-capital punishment cases.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Well, never being 100% certain - about anything involving the world and not a pure tautology - is always correct. As they say on Less Wrong, "zero and one are not probabilities". When you say you're 90% certain, you mean if you answered 10 independent questions of that difficulty, you'd tend to get about one of them wrong. When you say you're 99% certain, you raise that to 100 independent questions. When you say you're 100% certain, that's not just a few more questions, or a lot more questions; if your assessment is well calibrated, you're claiming you could answer infinite such questions and never be wrong. Can you do that? Even stepping (infinitely far) back to 99.999% certain, that's a lot of questions (100,000) to get only one wrong. Consider the following anecdote (by way of illustration and to drive intuitions, not as any sort of proof of course): http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=27 http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=27 Having said that, we do not in any sense need to be 100% confident and it's kind of a weird distraction here. Yes, with life-in-prison we have the ability to "fix a mistake" in a sense, but 1) people don't get back the time they already spent in jail obviously, and 2) we often don't do that: remember that the death penalty is so much more expensive in large part because we allow appeals that we don't allow with life-in-prison; in any case where one of those appeals would have demonstrated innocense, we're foregoing fixing our mistake so the hypothetical ability means nothing. Having said all of that, I oppose the death penalty. It's a needless shift of power toward the already powerful government, without really any gain. Studies repeatedly show it has little deterrent effect over life (or even just a significant chunk of time) in prison. Another study suggests it may do bad things to juries and make them more likely to wrongfully convict when the death penalty is an option. It's super expensive compared with just keeping people incarcerated (which is expensive compared to sending them to college, but that's another matter...). And it doesn't do good things to us - forgiveness is much better than vengeance once we've already dealt with deterrance. And from a Utilitarian perspective (again, once we've already factored in deterrance) harm is still harm and is - first order - bad, even when it's to "bad people".
dang 12y ago
This was covered yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663845
protomyth 12y ago
When you look at government and see how many things they do wrong, it seems to be consistent to not allow the death penalty and instead have true life-without-parole. I have no moral issue with the thought of giving a child rapist-murder the death penalty[1], but I think the risk of being wrong is just too high to support a death penalty. Plus, it seems to be a lot cheaper just to skip it and keep the person in prison for the rest of their life. So, cheaper and allows for an apology in error. 1) I feel bad for feral dogs that need to be put down, monsters not so much.
gabriel34 12y ago
The interesting thing about death and imprisonment for life sentences is that legally society is basically saying these people are beyond recovery and not worth having among us. In practice, though, society is demanding punishment and exerting vengeance. Where I live there are (in theory, of course) three sides to every penal sentence: Punishment Example Rehabilitation Sentencing to death is admitting the convicted is beyond rehabilitation or that he will do more good to the society as an example than as a productive, rehabilitated member. The punishment part I can't see as anything but thirst for vengeance from the society and, perhaps, atonement for the convicted. P.S.: This thirst for vengeance, our collective need to have someone pay is, rationally , the source of these false convictions
trendoid 12y ago
Lack of free will invalidates any form of extreme torture or death penalty. People think that the perpetrator should have known better and hence "deserves" the punishment. This is nonsense since we now know from neuroscience that "we" are not authors of our own thoughts. There is no hard evidence that shows that capital punishment acts as a deterrent for future crimes, there is some contradictory data though[1][2]. Interesting study which found out that instead of acting as a deterrent, pickpockets were picking pockets during the hanging of a pickpocket![3] [1]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/studies-fbi-preliminary-crime-report-2012 http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/studies-fbi-preliminary-crim... [2]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-... [3]http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/content/4/2/295.short http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/content/4/2/295.short

13 points by gautamnarula 12y ago

From the article: "At least one in 25 people on death row in the United States would be exonerated if given enough time...That number still underestimates the rate of false convictions, Gross says, because many innocent people never manage to prove their innocence." Abstract of the study available here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111 Edit: Full paper here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111.full...

papasmrf 12y ago

My own particular belief is that the death penalty as it is currently implemented is an abomination. But I also believe that there are just some crimes committed that must be punished by death. I have often wondered why the death penalty shouldn't only be imposed in cases where there is a 100% moral certainty that the accused committed the crime, ie, caught at the scene of the crime, captured on videotape, etc. Other than these types of cases, we really should be thinking about not allowing the death penalty anymore.

raverbashing 12y ago
Exactly It's one thing to put someone in death row for one conviction (with a possible error rate), another, would be to put someone for multiple convictions (and not from the same event) Unless there's a direct evidence (filming, or something similar) no evidence (testimony, DNA, etc) should be enough to put someone in death row.

mathattack 12y ago

My 2 cents... The death penalty is wrong on both moral reasons. The moral reason is clear - you can never be 100% sure that you got the right person, and you don't have the opportunity to back out of a bad decision afterwards. The economic reason is that it's just too expensive anyway. You wind up having to do a tremendous amount of extra work to get the conviction (which may not have been correct) and then have to deal with years (decades?) of appeals and imprisonment. Just toss them in jail.

apta 12y ago
It's not always wrong. Never being 100% certain is incorrect. There are cases where you are sure; and in such cases, it should be a viable punishment. Otherwise, you're right, it is not something you can back out of.
- mathattack 12y ago
  Are we ever 100% sure though, when the possibility exists that the prosecution is corrupt and the confession could be coming from someone that is mentally ill? And stepping aside from morality, if it costs 10X[0] the cost of a life prison sentence to kill someone, isn't it really better to just put them away for life with no chance of parole? [0] 10X is a made up #, but it's certainly a large multiple of non-capital punishment cases.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Well, never being 100% certain - about anything involving the world and not a pure tautology - is always correct. As they say on Less Wrong, "zero and one are not probabilities". When you say you're 90% certain, you mean if you answered 10 independent questions of that difficulty, you'd tend to get about one of them wrong. When you say you're 99% certain, you raise that to 100 independent questions. When you say you're 100% certain, that's not just a few more questions, or a lot more questions; if your assessment is well calibrated, you're claiming you could answer infinite such questions and never be wrong. Can you do that? Even stepping (infinitely far) back to 99.999% certain, that's a lot of questions (100,000) to get only one wrong. Consider the following anecdote (by way of illustration and to drive intuitions, not as any sort of proof of course): http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=27 http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=27 Having said that, we do not in any sense need to be 100% confident and it's kind of a weird distraction here. Yes, with life-in-prison we have the ability to "fix a mistake" in a sense, but 1) people don't get back the time they already spent in jail obviously, and 2) we often don't do that: remember that the death penalty is so much more expensive in large part because we allow appeals that we don't allow with life-in-prison; in any case where one of those appeals would have demonstrated innocense, we're foregoing fixing our mistake so the hypothetical ability means nothing. Having said all of that, I oppose the death penalty. It's a needless shift of power toward the already powerful government, without really any gain. Studies repeatedly show it has little deterrent effect over life (or even just a significant chunk of time) in prison. Another study suggests it may do bad things to juries and make them more likely to wrongfully convict when the death penalty is an option. It's super expensive compared with just keeping people incarcerated (which is expensive compared to sending them to college, but that's another matter...). And it doesn't do good things to us - forgiveness is much better than vengeance once we've already dealt with deterrance. And from a Utilitarian perspective (again, once we've already factored in deterrance) harm is still harm and is - first order - bad, even when it's to "bad people".

dang 12y ago

This was covered yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663845

protomyth 12y ago

When you look at government and see how many things they do wrong, it seems to be consistent to not allow the death penalty and instead have true life-without-parole. I have no moral issue with the thought of giving a child rapist-murder the death penalty[1], but I think the risk of being wrong is just too high to support a death penalty. Plus, it seems to be a lot cheaper just to skip it and keep the person in prison for the rest of their life. So, cheaper and allows for an apology in error. 1) I feel bad for feral dogs that need to be put down, monsters not so much.

gabriel34 12y ago

The interesting thing about death and imprisonment for life sentences is that legally society is basically saying these people are beyond recovery and not worth having among us. In practice, though, society is demanding punishment and exerting vengeance. Where I live there are (in theory, of course) three sides to every penal sentence: Punishment Example Rehabilitation Sentencing to death is admitting the convicted is beyond rehabilitation or that he will do more good to the society as an example than as a productive, rehabilitated member. The punishment part I can't see as anything but thirst for vengeance from the society and, perhaps, atonement for the convicted. P.S.: This thirst for vengeance, our collective need to have someone pay is, rationally , the source of these false convictions

trendoid 12y ago

Lack of free will invalidates any form of extreme torture or death penalty. People think that the perpetrator should have known better and hence "deserves" the punishment. This is nonsense since we now know from neuroscience that "we" are not authors of our own thoughts. There is no hard evidence that shows that capital punishment acts as a deterrent for future crimes, there is some contradictory data though[1][2]. Interesting study which found out that instead of acting as a deterrent, pickpockets were picking pockets during the hanging of a pickpocket![3] [1]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/studies-fbi-preliminary-crime-report-2012 http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/studies-fbi-preliminary-crim... [2]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-... [3]http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/content/4/2/295.short http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/content/4/2/295.short