24 ms·

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

33 points by justinchen 17y ago

jhancock 17y ago
Just based on the title, I'd have to say "more probable than any other state". I should probably have flagged this article, but 'eh.
rms 17y ago
Yes, they did. It is time for a national death penalty moratorium. This is not the first time. This is a more straightforward read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Willingham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Willingham
- JimmyL 17y ago
  And it certainly wasn't the first time, either.
- amichail 17y ago
  How is this any worse than the collateral damage of war?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - Rod 17y ago
    By definition, collateral damage is unintended killing, whereas capital punishment is doubtlessly intended killing.
    - sho 17y ago
      Ah, but this is (retroactively) unintended killing. Imagine a car being hit from the air by a Predator drone because analysis wrongly believes it's full of terrorists. Intended killing. They later realise they made a mistake a killed some family. Now it's unintended killing. Not much of a difference there by my reckoning.
      - Rod 17y ago
        Except that the scenario you've described is not collateral damage. According to the U.S. Air Force: "Broadly defined, collateral damage is unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities." Source: http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part20.htm#page180 http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part20.htm#pa... If a Predator blows up a car and the family traveling inside it because some intelligence analyst believes it's full of terrorists, that is killing, pure and simple. There's no "collateral" here. If during the same strike, another car with another family is accidently destroyed by the blast, that is, indeed, collateral damage. To summarize, if you destroy what you're targeting, there's no collateral damage. If you destroy something other than what you're targeting, then there's collateral damage. Collateral damage is unintended killing, but not all unintended killing is collateral damage. Hence, your argument is fallacious.
        sho 17y ago
        collateral damage — Unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time. DoD manual: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf Civilian families aren't lawful military targets.
  - bkudria 17y ago
    Woah - have you stopped beating your wife yet? To play Devil's Advocate: this man was a citizen. A State has fundamentally failed when it has executed one of its citizens.
    - jp_sc 17y ago
      So... it only count as human if it is a citizen?
      - natrius 17y ago
        That's clearly not what was said. The most basic function of government is to protect its citizens. If a government executes one of its own citizens, it has fundamentally failed. You and I may consider many other actions to be failures of governments, but the citizen distinction matters here.
  - slyn 17y ago
    The death penalty is far to permanent of a punishment to be wielded by organizations with such high false positive rates. We wouldn't put up with it with an anti-virus program or a SMART-esque hardware monitoring program, why do we put up with it when the price is not a few easily replicated digital files or some computer hardware, but rather an innocent persons _life_. Capital punishment in it's current form is not a deterrence to crime, it doesn't fix the problems caused by the crimes it is punishing for (it doesn't bring back the murdered, etc), it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole, and innocents have died at the hands of overzealous police, judges, politicians, and public opinion. So the question then becomes, why do it?
    - sant0sk1 17y ago
      > it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole Do you have a source to back that up?
      - btilly 17y ago
        5 seconds with Google would have given you http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty which links to multiple sources that have looked into the issue and found that the additional cost of prosecuting the death penalty is significantly more than life without parole. The amount of difference varies with jurisdiction and the methodology of the study, but the differences support the claim.
        sant0sk1 17y ago
        Fair enough. I was on my iPhone and about to go to bed. It was an interesting claim and I wanted to know if it was founded or not.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      - bullseye 17y ago
        You could try reading the article. Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson ... was personally opposed to capital punishment... He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas - about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years.
  - sho 17y ago
    Why is the parent being voted down? It's a sound point. This guy was collateral damage of the legal system, a (retroactively) unintended killing while we all heartily support the intended ones. The only thing different is the "retroactively" and even then the analogy holds, if the army bombs the wrong people then realises its mistake later.
- Legion 17y ago
  Focusing on the death penalty is completely missing the point. If you're writing code and something keeps throwing nasty exceptions, you don't remove the exception handling - you fix the code. Death penalty isn't the problem (leaving aside the traditional death penalty debate for a moment). Innocent people being found guilty, often by highly (and unnecessarily) faulty process, is the problem. Cutting out the death penalty just hides the problem. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to avoid putting these people to death, but the actual problem needs to be identified and dealt with. Cases of such magnitude need rigorous scientific oversight, not just the say-so of whatever self-proclaimed "expert" was on hand to drag into court that day.
  - jerf 17y ago
    While I still agree with your main points, it should be pointed out that any process that can be actually executed by real humans will throw up false positives. For that matter, any process actually executable by a benevolent AI will throw up a certain number of false positives, too. We need to be ready to deal with that. So, both faulty process and the death penalty is the problem.
    - Eliezer 17y ago
      Well then you need a benevolent AI and universal surveillance nanotechnology.
      - jerf 17y ago
        At that point, it'd probably be more economical to just have the universal nanotechnology modify humans to be unable to commit crimes, indeed, unable to think them. That can't possibly go wrong.
      - JulianMorrison 17y ago
        Better, both of the above and the AI is bright enough to contrive that a crime fails when it isn't targeting a willing victim or a sockpuppet.
  - Rod 17y ago
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
steiger 17y ago
That's the most outrageous, devilish thing that can and eventually had happened or will happen with death penalty. Someday, we will know we killed an innocent man, and in that day we will ALL be murderers. We all being murderers, we should all be sentenced to death (the Death Penalty Paradox).
- alextp 17y ago
  Technically we would all be accomplices to murder (after all it is quite hard to find a not-Orient-Express scenario in which more than a couple of people kill another one), which does not usually get the death penalty, so paradox is avoided. I do agree with you, though :-)
- adrianwaj 17y ago
  When there is a miscarriage of justice, those responsible for it must be brought to justice.
Eliezer 17y ago
"I used to support the death penalty until I realized the government can't even run the Post Office." - my father, Moshe Yudkowsky
covercash 17y ago
All of the people that contributed to his execution with their b.s. science and swayed testimony need to be severely punished IMO. Maybe a prison sentence will deter these "experts" from claiming their findings are 100% correct without some sort of scientific proof. This reminds me of a similar story I read recently about bite mark experts being used in murder investigations... just like these arson experts, they had no scientific proof of anything they concluded. People were still convicted of rape and murder based on their "expert" testimony.
- thaumaturgy 17y ago
  I thought the quote near the beginning of the article about how the death penalty proves the sanctity of life gave a pretty good solution to the "problem" of the death penalty: Anyone who, either knowingly or negligently, contributes to the execution of any person later found innocent, is guilty of murder punishable by death. Now, who wants to be the first to help put someone on death row?
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
adrianwaj 17y ago
"Me and Stacy’s been together for four years, but off and on we get into a fight and split up for a while and I think those babies is what brought us so close together . . . neither one of us . . . could live without them kids." Did Stacy have jealous boyfriend or secret admirer? She did work at a bar. Murdering Stacy's partner Willingham and their kids could bring them a step closer. Maybe someone was targeting Stacy. Who knows? The system went for the dad because he was an easy target, and so the system could then move on.

33 points by justinchen 17y ago

Just based on the title, I'd have to say "more probable than any other state". I should probably have flagged this article, but 'eh.

rms 17y ago

Yes, they did. It is time for a national death penalty moratorium. This is not the first time. This is a more straightforward read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Willingham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Willingham

JimmyL 17y ago
And it certainly wasn't the first time, either.
amichail 17y ago
How is this any worse than the collateral damage of war?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Rod 17y ago
  By definition, collateral damage is unintended killing, whereas capital punishment is doubtlessly intended killing.
  - sho 17y ago
    Ah, but this is (retroactively) unintended killing. Imagine a car being hit from the air by a Predator drone because analysis wrongly believes it's full of terrorists. Intended killing. They later realise they made a mistake a killed some family. Now it's unintended killing. Not much of a difference there by my reckoning.
    - Rod 17y ago
      Except that the scenario you've described is not collateral damage. According to the U.S. Air Force: "Broadly defined, collateral damage is unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities." Source: http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part20.htm#page180 http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part20.htm#pa... If a Predator blows up a car and the family traveling inside it because some intelligence analyst believes it's full of terrorists, that is killing, pure and simple. There's no "collateral" here. If during the same strike, another car with another family is accidently destroyed by the blast, that is, indeed, collateral damage. To summarize, if you destroy what you're targeting, there's no collateral damage. If you destroy something other than what you're targeting, then there's collateral damage. Collateral damage is unintended killing, but not all unintended killing is collateral damage. Hence, your argument is fallacious.
      - sho 17y ago
        collateral damage — Unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time. DoD manual: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf Civilian families aren't lawful military targets.
- bkudria 17y ago
  Woah - have you stopped beating your wife yet? To play Devil's Advocate: this man was a citizen. A State has fundamentally failed when it has executed one of its citizens.
  - jp_sc 17y ago
    So... it only count as human if it is a citizen?
    - natrius 17y ago
      That's clearly not what was said. The most basic function of government is to protect its citizens. If a government executes one of its own citizens, it has fundamentally failed. You and I may consider many other actions to be failures of governments, but the citizen distinction matters here.
- slyn 17y ago
  The death penalty is far to permanent of a punishment to be wielded by organizations with such high false positive rates. We wouldn't put up with it with an anti-virus program or a SMART-esque hardware monitoring program, why do we put up with it when the price is not a few easily replicated digital files or some computer hardware, but rather an innocent persons _life_. Capital punishment in it's current form is not a deterrence to crime, it doesn't fix the problems caused by the crimes it is punishing for (it doesn't bring back the murdered, etc), it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole, and innocents have died at the hands of overzealous police, judges, politicians, and public opinion. So the question then becomes, why do it?
  - sant0sk1 17y ago
    > it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole Do you have a source to back that up?
    - btilly 17y ago
      5 seconds with Google would have given you http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty which links to multiple sources that have looked into the issue and found that the additional cost of prosecuting the death penalty is significantly more than life without parole. The amount of difference varies with jurisdiction and the methodology of the study, but the differences support the claim.
      - sant0sk1 17y ago
        Fair enough. I was on my iPhone and about to go to bed. It was an interesting claim and I wanted to know if it was founded or not.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - bullseye 17y ago
      You could try reading the article. Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson ... was personally opposed to capital punishment... He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas - about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years.
- sho 17y ago
  Why is the parent being voted down? It's a sound point. This guy was collateral damage of the legal system, a (retroactively) unintended killing while we all heartily support the intended ones. The only thing different is the "retroactively" and even then the analogy holds, if the army bombs the wrong people then realises its mistake later.
Legion 17y ago
Focusing on the death penalty is completely missing the point. If you're writing code and something keeps throwing nasty exceptions, you don't remove the exception handling - you fix the code. Death penalty isn't the problem (leaving aside the traditional death penalty debate for a moment). Innocent people being found guilty, often by highly (and unnecessarily) faulty process, is the problem. Cutting out the death penalty just hides the problem. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to avoid putting these people to death, but the actual problem needs to be identified and dealt with. Cases of such magnitude need rigorous scientific oversight, not just the say-so of whatever self-proclaimed "expert" was on hand to drag into court that day.
- jerf 17y ago
  While I still agree with your main points, it should be pointed out that any process that can be actually executed by real humans will throw up false positives. For that matter, any process actually executable by a benevolent AI will throw up a certain number of false positives, too. We need to be ready to deal with that. So, both faulty process and the death penalty is the problem.
  - Eliezer 17y ago
    Well then you need a benevolent AI and universal surveillance nanotechnology.
    - jerf 17y ago
      At that point, it'd probably be more economical to just have the universal nanotechnology modify humans to be unable to commit crimes, indeed, unable to think them. That can't possibly go wrong.
    - JulianMorrison 17y ago
      Better, both of the above and the AI is bright enough to contrive that a crime fails when it isn't targeting a willing victim or a sockpuppet.
- Rod 17y ago
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

steiger 17y ago

That's the most outrageous, devilish thing that can and eventually had happened or will happen with death penalty. Someday, we will know we killed an innocent man, and in that day we will ALL be murderers. We all being murderers, we should all be sentenced to death (the Death Penalty Paradox).

alextp 17y ago
Technically we would all be accomplices to murder (after all it is quite hard to find a not-Orient-Express scenario in which more than a couple of people kill another one), which does not usually get the death penalty, so paradox is avoided. I do agree with you, though :-)
adrianwaj 17y ago
When there is a miscarriage of justice, those responsible for it must be brought to justice.

Eliezer 17y ago

"I used to support the death penalty until I realized the government can't even run the Post Office." - my father, Moshe Yudkowsky

covercash 17y ago

All of the people that contributed to his execution with their b.s. science and swayed testimony need to be severely punished IMO. Maybe a prison sentence will deter these "experts" from claiming their findings are 100% correct without some sort of scientific proof. This reminds me of a similar story I read recently about bite mark experts being used in murder investigations... just like these arson experts, they had no scientific proof of anything they concluded. People were still convicted of rape and murder based on their "expert" testimony.

thaumaturgy 17y ago
I thought the quote near the beginning of the article about how the death penalty proves the sanctity of life gave a pretty good solution to the "problem" of the death penalty: Anyone who, either knowingly or negligently, contributes to the execution of any person later found innocent, is guilty of murder punishable by death. Now, who wants to be the first to help put someone on death row?

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

adrianwaj 17y ago

"Me and Stacy’s been together for four years, but off and on we get into a fight and split up for a while and I think those babies is what brought us so close together . . . neither one of us . . . could live without them kids." Did Stacy have jealous boyfriend or secret admirer? She did work at a bar. Murdering Stacy's partner Willingham and their kids could bring them a step closer. Maybe someone was targeting Stacy. Who knows? The system went for the dad because he was an easy target, and so the system could then move on.