Bad – The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Exxon and has thrown out $2.5 billion dollars in damages.
Good – They’ve rejected the death penalty for raping children. I am surprise the court was so divided on this.
Don’t have a link for the second one yet. There’s also a gun decision to come.
4tehlulz
>>There’s also a gun decision to come.
Oh shi- Is that THE gun decision?
furrythug
No Gun decision today.
El Cid
Thank God one of our long-suffering oil companies has found a slight glimmer of hope in their financial situation.
Zifnab
Exxon then laughed and said, “Shit we’re not paying that either. Who are you kidding?”
The Moar You Know
I’m not. Four of the nine “justices” sitting on the court are looking to take us headlong into a future that bears all the hallmarks of the Puritan culture circa 1670. If they could, they’d expand the death penalty to such offenses as spitting on the sidewalk and speaking out of turn.
croatoan
Court rejects death penalty for raping children
JGabriel
OT, but funniest sentence I’ve read in weeks. Joe Klein:
But wait, it gets better:
A sentence that contains the phrases “David Brooks was right” and “Bush … made the correct choice”.
I’m just marvelling at it. It’s like an Escher print in words, but without the coherence.
.
SnarkyShark
We need to be joining the rest of the civilized world in rejecting the death penalty, not expanding it.
Google executions, and there we are right next to Iran. Tourism to the United States will suffer as the rest of the world equates us to all the other bloodthirsty theocracies in the world.
We are hanging on by a shoestring.
D. Mason
Um. I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court rejected this.
JGabriel
Whoops. On further reading, I discover that the Joe Klein I posted about above was already discussed by John Cole four posts ago.
My bad.
Still, that is one hell of a wankerific intro.
.
slag
I don’t think the Supreme Court’s decision was all that great. They talk about it in terms of “proportionality”. To me, this isn’t a proportionality issue. This is a “the death penalty is pretty dumb” issue. Personally, I can see circumstances in which rape would be worse than murder. So, the fact that the Supreme Court uses the “rape isn’t that bad” argument is kind of depressing.
Fwiffo
I just recently served on a jury in a child rape case. (Yes, being on that jury qualifies as a shitty job to have.)
What really struck me is how the only people who seemed to give any kind of shit about the case were the jury and the judge (the judge was actually as professional a person as I have ever met, which was heartening.) The prosecution was lazy, and the defense was even lazier. The cops involved were the laziest people EVER. It was disgusting.
Patrick
“Bad – The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Exxon and has thrown out $2.5 billion dollars in damages.”
Just in time to make us even more comfortable with off shore drilling.
SnarkyShark
I don’t. Rape can be recovered from, Death cannot. There is no equivalence.
scav
I guess they see it as consistency: they reduced the penalties for raping children and the environment. Hobgoblins of little minds.
slag
This is the same argument Republicans use for spying on us: the first job of government is to keep you alive, right? Some of us think there’s more to life than breathing. Such as feeling in control of your own body. I can imagine situations in which that feeling is not recoverable.
RSA
Similarly, I can see circumstances in which life in prison would be worse than the death penalty. So it’s a bit arbitrary, I think, matching punishments to crimes at a very detailed level.
D. Mason
Maybe, but to me the bottom line is this. If someone is a rapist who knows that his crime can already get him the death penalty then he has every incentive in the world to silence the witness. That alone makes death penalty for rapists a bad idea.
ET
The Gun case is Heller v. District of Columbia which will likely toss the current DC laws.
Joey Maloney
How about an argument from practicality, rather than proportionality? If the penalty for rape is no less severe than the penalty for murder, where’s the incentive not to eliminate the best witness?
RSA
I don’t disagree, but one problem with this argument is that it presumes rational judgment on the part of the rapist, something that’s not clearly the case. I think most criminals don’t expect to get caught.
slag
Personally, I think life in prison is always a worse punishment. But you made my point. I don’t think this is a proportionality issue. I think this is a “the death penalty is stupid” issue. Therefore, I’m not happy with the court’s ruling for the very reason that they couched it in terms of proportionality.
slag
As someone who doesn’t think the death penalty is a deterrent, I can’t assume that it would provide any sort of incentive either. I don’t think criminals think in such rational terms.
RSA
Sure; I may have not been clear that we agree, but re-reading what you wrote, I think we do.
AkaDad
If we send child rapists to prison, they’ll be greeted with candy and cigarettes.
Punchy
I’m pretty sure child rapists want execution, or at least the cell isolation that death row brings. I’ve heard urban legends that may not be inaccurate that prisoners that did crimes against women and children tend to be abused repeatedly. And I have little problem with this.
slag
Yeah. What RSA said.
4tehlulz
Kennedy brought this point up in his majority opinion.
mymassivecock2xu
and violent ass-fuckings.
4tehlulz
Fixed
Punchy
I kinda want to read the article, but I’m scared to death to open some article at work that has “child” and “rape” in the title. Can anyone excerpt in the comments any salient or interesting blurbs from the article? Gracias.
Keith
That may be the reality of it, but if that is the intent of putting someone behind bars, then it is effectively state-sanctioned torture as punishment. Even Scalia has implied that torture as punishment for a crime is a no-no (while saying that torture before conviction is OK if it’s used to extract info).
D. Mason
Ok, you’re stupid. Some criminals act without thinking first but plenty of them choose their crime and their victim quite carefully. Death penalty for rapists = more dead rape victims.
slag
Exactly. This presumes that the death penalty serves a purpose. As a deterrent. Seems to me that this argument gives the death penalty more credit than it deserves.
slag
OK, you’re a jerk.
(glad we got that taken care of)
RSA
Well, there’s a rational argument.
D. Mason
It’s every bit as rational as the idea that criminals don’t plan to avoid capture.
Zifnab
There were two major issues the decision turned on. First was the degree by which the victim can recover and second the degree by which execution helps with that recovery process.
In the first case, Kennedy acknowledged that rape was bad – really bad – but not an act that invokes such irreparable harm that only taking the life of the offender will balance the score. At this point, you’re weighing bad against worse, and its a hard call to make. I mean, how do you play this game? Is it worse to shot you in the foot or burn down your house? Is it worse to beat a man into mental retardation or just paralyze him from the waste down? Is killing someone comparable to putting him in a coma for ten years? Ugly questions, all. But I think we can agree that capital punishment doesn’t fit every crime, and Kennedy drew the line at a logical point in the sand.
In the second case, Kennedy addressed the far more pressing question of how capital punishment affected the victim. In this situation, Kennedy used far more sensible judgment and compassion than any of the justices to his right. His conclusion – that dragging a child through repeated appeals courts where she is forced to relive the rape over and over and over again – is hardly conducive to ameliorating the harm she’s suffered. Furthermore, the end result – the perpetrator’s execution – doesn’t undo the physical and mental harm inflicted on the child. So its a great deal of pain for very little gain, and it allows the state to drag a minor through a very painful process to achieve virtually nothing in return.
Read the brief in full, and you get an idea of where Kennedy is coming from. The death penalty for child rape was always a political stunt meant to paint liberals as weak or gullible. The method by which the prosecution was conducted exposed many of the cracks in what is already a very creaky death penalty system. This was never supposed to succeed. It was just a platform on which the GOP could act particularly bloodthirsty and stupid. But even if they’d gone forward with the best of intentions, its a bad idea from the get-go for more reasons than just “the death penalty is wrong”. The more crimes you apply the death penalty to, the more you see how vulgar and primitive a system it is. In this case, we just got to see a completely different angle on why the punishment method doesn’t work.
Martin
Well, it’s easy enough to measure, actually. Death penalty doesn’t have any effect on crime rates. It doesn’t go down when death penalty laws are passed and doesn’t go up when they are eliminated.
It exists simply so someone can claim: ‘I’m so tough on crime I’m willing to kill people to demonstrate how tough I am’. And yet it has no material impact on crime whatsoever.
And nice to see that Exxon is getting away with a fine of 4 days profit. That’s easily low enough that they won’t actually feel compelled to change their behavior. Mission Accomplished, free marketeers!
RSA
Thanks for the summary, Zifnab.
Martin
You don’t. It’s a foolish game.
Crimes such as rape and murder cannot be repaid. They cannot be balanced. We insist on treating everything in this country as though money is an equivalent, and then applying monetary rules.
The *only* standard should be the impact on the perpetrator. What will prevent them from repeating the crime and serve as an effective deterrent to those that would *plan* such a crime. (There is no deterrence to impulse crimes which is the distinction that slag and D Mason are arguing past).
If the compensation to the victim came from the state (for failure to protect, but who could pass that cost to the perpetrator), the state would have a much greater incentive to make laws effective rather than popular.
The question nobody seems to ask is why the US crime rate is so much higher than for most other countries, and especially those that lack capital punishment. We’ve got something massively wrong here. But I’m sure reducing Exxon’s fine will help solve it…
D. Mason
Thinking people don’t have to ask. If you criminalize mundane behavior then you have more criminals.
jake
Fixed.
ThymeZone
Hey, love the handle. Can you send a picture?
Dreggas
Actually all of them are housed seperate from gen-pop in their own cell-blocks in most cases precisely because of the risk of getting killed by the other inmates. They are held in segregated units at all times, they eat at different times and have “rec” at different times.
As for prison and the death penalty. Honestly I support the death penalty in some cases, just wish it was enforced without the years upon years of appeals. This is even more annoying in an age of DNA evidence etc. If the alternative is life in prison then reduce or remove prison time for all drug offenders ensuring the “worst of the worst” go to prison. Further I think anyone who is convicted of murder should have to see the face of their victim every day for the rest of their lives while in prison. They should have to hear testimonials from the victims family, and pretty much be forced to live with the guilt and know what they did. There are many people who end up in prison for their crimes and show no remorse because they aren’t made to feel any.
ThymeZone
I’m really surprised constantly at the idea that people who despise government would so uniformly support the idea of government being empowered to kill its own citizens.
Of course, these are people who think that the earth is 6000 years old and that man walked among the dinosaurs. With sandaled feet, even.
When I find myself pondering anything to do with the death penalty, I just remind myself of these facts and that the death penalty is incredibly stupid.
Cyrus
Croatoan gave one link, and here’s another. It seems like a complicated issue, which is no more than you’d expect for something involving two or three controversial topics at once, of course. But it’s funny and/or sad that, in the end, the “liberal” wing voted for the option that was more conservative in any meaningful sense of the word.
If any part of the government should be conservative, not necessarily in the modern sense of the word meaning crotch-sniffing proto-fascists but in the general, apolitical sense of being cautious and minimalist about changes, it should be the court system. Given a slow but well-established trend of being more and more careful about the death penalty, and given no executions for a crime other than murder in more than 40 years, this decision seems as close to a no-brainer as anything the court is asked to consider.
Dreggas
Considering they sit in a cell where they get TV, they have access to books, they can earn some money to buy stuff from a prison commisary, they are fed 3 meals a day and all of that on tax payer money, why should I want to see them, that is those convicted of murder, allowed to live out their lives while I pay for it? If they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt then how exactly are they paying for what they did by spending the rest of their natural lives, well, alive?
Of course I think the only way the death penalty would ever be a deterrent is if executions were public but then again I have little to no mercy for anyone who would take criminally take another persons life.
Zifnab
I don’t know about this for two reasons. Firstly, there’s only so much impulse in an impulse crime. If I lash out and kill a guy after catching him sexing up my girlfriend, I’m probably not thinking with a full deck. That said, if the punishment for 2nd degree murder is a week in the slammer and some anger management classes, I suspect the rate of 2nd degree murders would rise.
Secondly, punishments are – in many ways – a form of compensation to the victim. If a guy steals my car, its not enough that – when caught – he gives me the car back and pays for the gas, even if this would lead him to never steal a car again. Victims of crimes will often argue for or against release in a parole hearing. There is a very real “eye for an eye” element in the justice system, and I can’t honestly begrudge it.
That’s an interesting idea, and I’d like to see it in action. Still, it raises the question of where money is supposed to come from. If I have my house burglarized, why should all my neighbors be forced to shell out tax dollars because the police didn’t do their jobs?
On the flip side, this could function like some sort of automatic home owner’s insurance. Premiums stay low in safer areas. People have a more communitized incentive to discourage crime. And you become your neighbor’s keeper in a way that makes a great deal of sense.
Again, I’d love to see it put into practice.
TenguPhule
We need the Death Penalty for at least a little longer.
See Bush Admin, all of them.
Brachiator
Another 5-4 decision. Another majority opinion written by Anthony Kennedy. Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alioto in the minority.
Another message to the country: what kind of Supreme Court do you want?
Legal history and criminal practice is against you here. The NYT story notes the following:
The trend has been toward limiting the circumstances when the death penalty can be imposed, not increasing them.
Odd that actual killers disagree with you here. Convicted murderers who have acknowledged their crimes fight hard to avoid execution. I don’t recall anyone fighting hard to get the needle because they dreaded life in prison..
RSA
I didn’t say it they were common circumstances, just circumstances that I can think of. And Gary Gilmore, I suppose.
slag
I agree with your points Zifnab, except for the “logical point in the sand” part. And that’s really the crux for me. I think all the points Kennedy made could easily apply to the families of murder victims. And as for this ruling making liberals look weak, I say “mission accomplished”. Talking about proportionality in the context of child rape has that utterly predictable effect.
I’m with Martin on all points so far.
Cyrus
I’m sorry, since you mentioned DNA evidence yourself, I thought you were aware that lots of people have been pulled off death row after waiting there for years. People often aren’t guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
ThymeZone
There are two reasons why this argument fails every possible moral and intellectual test.
One, you are assuming that “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” is a reasonable basis for determining whether to kill someone. That assertion is demonstrably false. All you have to do is produce one example of a capital crime conviction that turned out to be wrong, and the argument is finished. There is no perfect way to ascertain guilt, and even if there theoretically were, which there IS NOT, there would be now way to create a system for administering it that was not flawed in some — literally – fatal way.
Two, you are asserting that the cost of keeping a prisoner alive is reason enough to kill him if you really don’t like him.
Sorry, but with all due respect, that’s a fucking sociopathic argument. I can’t agree with it or even respect it.
Scott H
The majority of the Court finds against the proportional punishment for child rape. The very serious minority finds for some proportion in child rape itself.
Are there considerations for the best child rapists, the so-so child rapists? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
We’re too pig ignorant in West Virginia for these rarefied distinctions; so, we just don’t have the death penalty at all. Admittedly, that is better for us than for the baby-rapers for whom execution would likely be a mercy.
Joe Beese
Now that, in the aftermath of Obama’s FISA betrayal, we’re all being hectored to be “pragmatic”: However you feel about the justice (or not) of executing irredeemably evil people, there isn’t an institution in the world run by humans that is infallible enough to be trusted with that ultimate power. Not even a war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Life without parole in state prison, among violent men who take a very dim view of child sexual abuse, represents one jumbo-sized helping of punishment. Let that suffice us.
ThymeZone
It’s not about mercy, it’s about empowering the government to decide who to kill and wrongly expecting them to get it right all the time. It cannot be done. End of story.
Until that fatal flaw is taken care of, no capital punishment scheme can be morally supported.
The government is not capable of administering any capital punishment in a way that is morally supportable.
ThymeZone
Corrected version of goddam uneditable post, see last line:
It’s not about mercy, it’s about empowering the government to decide who to kill and wrongly expecting them to get it right all the time. It cannot be done. End of story.
Until that fatal flaw is taken care of, no capital punishment scheme can be morally supported.
The government is not capable of administering any capital punishment scheme in a way that is morally supportable.
slag
I saw that. You could look at it as a positive–that the death penalty is diminishing in popularity. Or you can look at it as a negative–that we don’t take rape seriously enough. If we could make this argument more on the basis of the death penalty being bad practice and less on the basis of rape not being that serious, I’d be happy with that.
ThymeZone
Close, but no cigar. People can appear to be guilty beyond any particular level of doubt, but in fact, be innocent.
That is because the appearance of guilt is based on human judgment and is therefore fallible. Anecdotal evidence of absolute guilt (oh, let’s stipulate Tim McVeigh as an example) are exceptions that prove the rule, they are not the rule.
No scheme that can execute a single innocent person under any circumstances can be supported. Ask yourself just one question: Are you willing to be the innocent person who gets executed in order to have the scheme? If your answer is no, then the argument is over. If your answer is yes, then I hold you to be mentally incompetant to answer the question.
Dreggas
These were cases that came about as a result of the technology used in gathering actual DNA evidence for the most part. I am aware that DNA has been used to overturn convictions that occurred pre-DNA evidence, however going forward if the evidence shows that person X killed person Y and it was pre-meditated then, to me, why should that person be allowed to live?
Original Lee
I think one of the reasons for the death penalty for child rapists was the huge recidivism rate – essentially, child rapists are so broken that no punishment could keep them from raping children again. This is a pretty broad-brush argument, because we all know there are different kinds of child rape, but I believe research shows that there is a subset of child rapists who cannot be rehabilitated given current knowledge and methods. Apparently some child rapists would figure out how to rape children even after having had a complete gonadectomy. Now, I don’t happen to agree that executing somebody because we have no idea how else to keep him/her from repeating a horrible crime is a good idea, but I can see why it would be logical in some circles of legal thought.
Martin
Because the GOP has taught you the wrong accounting. You aren’t paying for them to stay alive. You are paying that fractional amount so that they aren’t doing those things *to you*. If you shift the argument to ‘kill them so they can’t do that to me’, then why shouldn’t we kill anyone who has committed an armed robbery? After all, if they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and have demonstrated they are willing to use the firearm in the commission of a crime, it’s only logical to assume that they were willing to kill someone with that firearm. Killing them is just prevention and fiscal responsibility, no?
That said, I strongly believe that anyone incarcerated should be performing labor for the state (on the reasoning that the state repays the debt to the victim for lack of protection, the perp repays to the state). It should be illegal to lease them out to companies (as we routinely do), but surely there are enough taxpayer funded, public works that could use the labor where it would be safe to put these individuals to work.
Because when this happens enough, people have a vested interest in making sure that your home isn’t burglarized. Which means that you have a vested interest in making sure that theirs isn’t either. People focus too much on what they get out of society personally, rather than collectively. (See Dreggas complaining about the $2.29 per year he pays to house murderers.)
Don
Because being imprisoned forever – no matter what the decor – is more miserable than being offed. Anyone who thinks that 3 meals a day and tv is sufficient to make up for being confined to the same place and living by an authoritative schedule has never been a little stir-crazy after 3 days stuck at home with the flu.
I’m always kind of amazed that the question of whether or not we should execute people gets so much play. I can only assume that the people in favor of it (a) have more faith in the infallibility of the justice system than I do and (2) are less mean and vicious than I am. I don’t want a short trip to the electric chair for these folks. I want them to wake up Every. Single. Morning. with full awareness that they’re never going to get to take a shit on their own timetable again.
Dreggas
If a person commits a crime that is so heinous and dispicable and is proven guilty with evidence including witnesses, DNA evidence, everything that makes the case airtight then why should the tax payer keep them alive in a prison?
Honestly I think the grounds for seeking the death penalty should be tightened but not nixing the penalty altogether. Their are some criminals who deserve it. Look at any of the worst serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy etc. they didn’t deserve to die for what they did?
I see your point in that the system is not infallible. I can even agree that that is an argument against the death penalty, like I said I would prefer they faced a clockwork orange type treatment where they are forced to relive their crime and see their victims face daily for the rest of their lives but that would be shot down as “cruel and unusual”.
jake
Since various societies have had public executions and people still did things (or were convicted of things) that got them hung, burned, beheaded, etc, etc, etc, we already know it doesn’t serve as a deterrent, it just provides a nice day out for the family.
ThymeZone
The crime of homicide covers a huge range of severities and classifications.
At least be clear that you are — I hope — talking only about those crimes which are classified as being within the scope of any capital punishment scheme, a very small percentage of all “murders.”
These criteria vary by state, so there is not even a uniform consensus on what that should be. Nor are there any uniform codes of conduct and practice for prosecution in general, another serious flaw in the schemes.
Prosecutorial abuse is a vast iceberg of hidden horrors in this country. Even when you see it, you are only looking at the tip of that iceberg.
ThymeZone
Already asked and answered.
Dreggas
Yet killers who have said they did what they did fight to not be executed through endless appeals. Like I said I would prefer they faced a clockwork orange type treatment where they are forced to relive their crime and see their victims face daily for the rest of their lives.
ThymeZone
I haven’t read the entire thread, has this amount been established?
If not, does anyone know what this amount actually is? Ballpark, even?
Dreggas
Having studied criminal justice, yes I understand there are many degrees of murder and different categories. No I don’t think a “crime of passion” or the robber who shot the clerk of the store they are robbing should face the death penalty.
Fern
I wonder about the effect of executions on the other people involved – prison staff, doctors etc. What does it do to the people who give the injections, flip the switch, monitor the event, or otherwise play their roles in these ritualized killings?
Dreggas
Then I guess we’ll have to disagree on that. I think that bundy and Gacy got what they deserved.
myiq2xu
There is also the issue of when the death penalty is applied or not even when guilt isn’t at issue.
The best example is OJ Simpson. Although he was acquitted, even if he had been convicted he would not have been sentenced to death because the prosecutors didn’t request a finding of “special circumstances”
Why not? The crime (a brutal multiple murder) cried out for the maximum penalty under the law.
It was exeptional in another aspect. Blacks who are convicted of killing whites face a far greater risk of being sentenced to death than whites convicted of killing blacks.
Life w/o parole serves the legitimate interest of protecting society, while preserving the possibility of later exonerating the innocent. We can free the wrongly convicted, but we can’t revive the wrongly executed.
LWOP is cheaper too.
Fern
Normally, I’m pretty opposed to the death penalty, though I do have second thoughts when it comes to serial murderers – and if this was the only way to keep people from Paul Bernardo from killing and/or raping again. But it’s not – Bernardo has been designated a dangerous offender and will never get out of jail.
myiq2xu
I don’t disagree. But it’s not the extreme cases, it’s the borderline cases that matter.
BTW – Charlie Manson will die of old age inside prison walls. Isn’t that justice?
Brachiator
Why draw the line at child rapists?
There was a recent story about a man who was a persistent sexual abuser (Alleged NYC subway groper could get life):
Clearly, nothing has deterred this man from his obnoxious behavior. Why not just execute him?
The problem is that “circumstances that you can think of” is not the same thing as actual cases in the real world.
And according to various news reports, Gilmore felt his execution would be retribution. He didn’t view the firing squad as a reprieve from life in prison.
slag
Many moons ago, I read that death sentences were more expensive than life-in-prison sentences.
And just now, from deathpenaltyinfo.org: “A New Jersey Policy Perspectives report concluded that the state’s death penalty has cost taxpayers $253 million since 1983, a figure that is over and above the costs that would have been incurred had the state utilized a sentence of life without parole instead of death.”
Apparently, what I read then is similar to what I read now…who knew?
Don’t know how much variation we have in the system.
Dreggas
Actually the GOP didn’t teach me crap, you’re assuming I am or was ever a republican. I am a Dem and have been one since I was able to vote. This is one area where I just tend to disagree.
You are saying I am paying to keep Joe from BFE from killing me when I am not living in BFE? Is there a chance Joe could come to where I live and end up killing me, of course there is but the risk is relatively remote. I have more of a chance of getting killed crossing the street than I would getting killed by Joe who is several hundred or even 60 miles away from me.
I bet I pay a lot more than 2.29 a year living here in California with our prison population. I also bet that with legal fees from not only the prosecution (public money), court time (more public money) and usually public defenders (more legal money) it adds up to more than that.
Then again prisons are an industry in this state.
ThymeZone
The argument is not about what anyone deserves. I am not sympathetic toward cold killers, there are several I would gladly dismember with my bare hands if that were possible and doable within some moral framework (which it is not, AFAIC).
The argument is about what government can be empowered to do, within a moral framework. It is my assertion that unless you yourself are willing to die for a capital punishment scheme that is flawed, which means, every such scheme that has been seen so far, then you are not morally able to justify it under any circumstances. I further argue that if you claim that you are willing to die for your chosen scheme, then you are mentally unfit to advise the rest of us.
That is the argument I am having, not an argument about how rotten any particular killers are. If you don’t want to have that argument, then fine, don’t have it, but don’t ask me to have the one you are advancing. I don’t care if you have Satan himself in a jail cell, I will not vote for any government-operated capital punishment scheme as long as I think government is fallible. Period.
ThymeZone
Sorry, I meant “Satan him or herself.”
My bad :)
Dreggas
Charlie Manson never pulled the trigger, he should have got life in prison as an accomplice or accessory the first time around, that doesn’t excuse what he incited.
Dreggas
They are given the endless appeals process in many cases.
slag
Also, FWIW, at that point, I was doing research to make an argument IN FAVOR OF the death penalty. The only argument I was able to make at the time was a sentimental one. I couldn’t find enough evidence to make a logical favorable argument.
myiq2xu
Here’s a case from California:
Two men convicted of murdering the same woman. There is no dispute that one committed the murder, but both disposed of ther body.
They were roommates, and the victim was the girlfriend of “A” When arrested, both claimed the other committed the murder but admitted helping to bury the body.
The men were tried separately. In the trial of “A” the prosecutor argued that “A” committed the murder and “B” helped bury the victim. In the trial of “B” the same prosecutor argued the reverse.
Both were convicted of the murder. “B” was executed, “A” was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
4tehlulz
It would be more just if he was just ignored as another prisoner, instead of popping up on TV from time to time.
myiq2xu
Charlie Manson was sentenced to death for directing the Tate and La Bianca murders.
His life was spared by the 1973 SCOTUS decision that invalidated all pending DP sentences.
Breschau
I think a fairly persuasive argument against the “why should I pay money to keep them alive in prison” question is that executing someone is actually more expensive than life imprisonment.
Granted, I do think that invoking economics when talking about someone’s life is fairly abhorrent. But still, there you go.
slag
Nonetheless, I think our time is better spent trying to find ways to make our prison system better/cheaper (see Martin’s work program thoughts) than trying to make the death penalty cheaper. This is true for a variety of reasons, our national identity as a first world country being a big one.
My sympathy for rapists and murderers is limited, but my appreciation of limits of state power and my desire to at least try to approximate a civilized society are infinite.
myiq2xu
Sorry, I menat to add:
Does that mean a mob boss who orders numerous murders shouldn’t face the death penalty?
myiq2xu
I believe it was Scalia or commented in one DP case that factual innocence was irrelevant if the defendant had a fair trial.
ThymeZone
You don’t listen very well, do you?
No death penalty scheme is morally supportable because you cannot invent an infallible one. That means (in case you don’t get it, which I have to consider is a possibility) that any such scheme will execute innocent people because you cannot prevent that from happening). That means that the scheme itself cannot be supported, and your question is moot.
Discuss. And keep my constraint in mind: Unless you are willing to be the innocent person who dies for the scheme, you can’t argue for it. And if you are, you can’t be considered capable of making the decision .. at least, not by me.
Back to you.
myiq2xu
I meant that in response to this:
I agree with you that the death penalty cannot be fairly and perfectly applied, no matter how carefully the government tries.
Unless and until there is a perfect system, the death penalty is wrong.
ThymeZone
OMG, we are agreeing?
Excuse me, I have to faint.
jk
Okay, I will shut up now. Seriously. I have to rest, this is a very verklempt moment for me.
myiq2xu
Don’t forget to clutch your pearls.
Seriously, one of the few things we disagree on is which candidate is the antichrist.
ThymeZone
They are my constant companion.
Zifnab
By that logic, you can’t conscionable condone LWOP either, because I’m in serious doubt over whether you’d be in good mental health if you were to accept such a fate knowing that the criminal justice system is just as flawed with or without the death penalty.
That only works in so far as the case didn’t result in exculpatory evidence – like “A” having prints on the gun or “B” having a violent criminal record or some third party witness not offering additional details.
Either way, the point is that rape – child or otherwise – doesn’t kill people. If we start evaluating quality of life after the crime is committed, we have to start talking about executing people for putting you in a coma or paralyzing you or raping you as a hate crime or causing you mental trauma despite surviving attempted murder or … blah blah blah.
There’s a very bright easy to distinguish line in the sand with the death penalty right now. I really don’t want to go back to the days of hanging horse thieves because the SCOTUS decided to let states get all trigger happy. When you allow something like child rape as a crime, you aren’t “evaluating” the merits of child rape, you’re kicking open the flood gates of what we can axe people for. It sets a very, very bad precedent.
SnarkyShark
Actually this is incorrect. I have read several studies that show recidivism is average and in some cases better than average.
Statistics also show that rape/molestation rate is less than in the carefree days of yesteryear when every incident wasn’t blared from the TV 24/7 thereby scaring parents into incoherence.
The rate that has skyrocketed is the instances where the victim is murdered.
In our need for vengeance, we tend to run up against the law of unintended consequences.
As I said before, rape can be recoverable but death is not.
I think this fear of the rapist/molester is having an adverse effect on a whole generations sociological development. Just like a pumped up overboard unreasonable fear of so called terrorists is basically destroying the fabric of this country. The threat is nowhere as big as the sensationalist media makes it out to be. Also, most of these cases involve family, not some lurking stranger in the playground. How are you going to solve that one? Do away with families? That sounds practical!
We have to start looking at things objectively instead of knee-jerk emotional reactions. I realize that this is a hard task in these kinds of cases. But I refer you to the McMann(I believe thats right) day care cases. Or Barstow. This kind of thing has all too often been the modern day witch hunt. Time to dial back the hysteria just a bit.
These cases must be looked at on a case by case basis, and the needs of the victim should be paramount in every case.
Our need for retribution needs to a lot lower on the priority list.
ThymeZone
It’s reversible and challengeable.
Death is not.
Please don’t be ridiculous.
ThymeZone
Not any more. It’s McCain.
Hillary is not a candidate now.
I guess we are done disagreeing.
Damn.
Scott H
Imprisoning a baby-raper for fifty years entails a small fraction of the cost of prosecuting a capital case in which a conviction isn’t even guaranteed. I don’t have the facts to hand, because I did the research and math for myself years ago, and I have no reason to repeat that uncomfortable exercise. Anyone interested has the Google, with luck an old envelope and a pencil, and the capacity to cypher.
Not that I ever considered fiscal resentments considerations an argument, I was curious.
HyperIon
sounds like a ticking bomb scenario to me.
ThymeZone
hey myiq, in case we needed more evidence that this election is a done deal …
This. Mister Magoo has his surge, we have Barack.
Sweet.
RSA
This is a bit peripheral, but I feel as if I’m being misunderstood with respect to my claim that under some circumstances, life in prison may be viewed as being worse than the death penalty:
Consider that the suicide rate in prisons is something on the order of two or three times what it is in the outside world. I think it’s reasonable to take this as evidence that for some people, death is preferable to prison.
Scott H
Okay. How does one get strikethrough to work here. I cannot possibly snark without strikethrough. This is intolerable. Do you people have no awareness of all the Internet traditions?
myiq2xu
The DA argued in both cases that one defendant, acting alone, committed the murder, then both of them disposed of the body.
So how can you convict two separate people of the same murder while “acting alone?”
The Cal Sup.Ct. didn’t have a problem.
myiq2xu
You have to be a union member in good standing.
ThymeZone
Expand the button bar at top of the editor. Highlight the strike text, press strike button.
Punchy
Say hi to the FBI for me.
myiq2xu
Don’t blaspheme
ThymeZone
Gesundheit.
Zifnab
It’s potentially reversible and challengeable. Assuming you have the evidence and the legal support to reverse and challenge it.
Yes, I agree that we can release the imprisoned more easily than we can raise the dead. But no, I don’t think your “if you wouldn’t mind it happening to you, it must be ok” litmus test works. A system that locks me up for a decade, then releases me with an apology, a wink, and a smile, isn’t significantly better than a legal system that locks me up for a decade, kills me, and then realizes it made a mistake. Either way they flush ten years of my life down the crapper because they fucked up.
The ultimate problem is the seriously flawed legal system that values convictions over actual justice and rewards Mike Nifongs for making headlines and Judge Judys for playing Judge Dread. That’s not going to change because you get rid of the death penalty.
Dreggas
Not even close. There’s more evidence, shown on the nightly news of people going and killing someone in one fashion or another, with the intent to kill them, than there is the “24” scenario.
Xenos
If molesting children is not worthy of the death penalty, then I guess buggering the Constitution is not, either. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld should be glad that the EU does not allow for executions, because it looks like the elements for a conviction have been admitted on their part – not much point in a trial.
And for many people, whether or not there is deterrence or proportionality is not relevant – they want to rid the world of evildoers. It then gets hard to distinguish between the death penalty and human sacrifice.
Scott H
Oh, buttons for the strikethrough, and the blockquote. In my day we had to hand code. In the snow. Barefoot. Uphill. Both ways.
Crazy kids. Thank you.
myiq2xu
You go both ways?
Chuck Butcher
Regarding the DNA proof argument, DNA is remarkable durable and easily transfered, its presence is not some absolute proof, its absence can easily be exculpatory. There is a difference.
Martin
I added up the homicide rate in the US, looked up the cost per day to incarcerate someone in a state prison, and divided by the number of people in the country and annualized the result. Now, it’d be something more given that we are adding murderers faster than they are dying off, but also something less since not all murderers are incarcerated. That’s also per citizen, not taxpayer, so put me down for $9 since I have to cover the wife and kids.
But order-of-magnitude the number looks about right – $700M per year. That’s just for people that commit murder, mind you, not every criminal.
The Other Steve
Considering we’re charging 17 year olds for child rape because they had sex with a 15 year old… I’m not sure this is an accurate measure.
Brachiator
No. It’s not. The fallacy here is that people often like to project what they would feel if they were in prison, but this does not necessarily have anything to do with how actual inmates who are criminals feel.
For example, some like to think that a murderer would be eaten up with remorse if he or she were faced with life in prison without parole, and that this would be worse than the death penalty.
But I wonder. It boggles my mind that, for example, Susan Smith would kill her children, boggles my mind that she would try to pin the murders on a phantom black man. But it astounds me even more that Smith, attractive and seductive to some, had affairs with two prison guards and at one time had placed an ad with an online service that matched prisoners with people who liked to communicate with them.
myiq2xu
The “Innocence Project” which is responsible for most of the DNA exonerations, has pretty much run it’s course because it is limited to cases where there is DNA evidence that was originally untestable that can now prove innocence.
In the wast majority of cases, there either was no DNA evidence or it wasn’t collected or preserved.
The “CSI” television shows are accurate as to the capabilities of crime labs, but they don’t accurately reflect typical cases.
If the evidence is never collected, it can never be retested.
RSA
I think we’re arguing past each other. My “circumstances” were intended to include the views of people who aren’t necessarily inmates, including of course myself. I’ll stop here, even though we still disagree.
Martin
Oops. Sorry, I did screw up the math there – can’t seem to concentrate today. We need to multiple the result by the life expectancy of a murderer and probably then should factor in the actual incarceration rate of murders (taking out those killed being apprehended, escape justice, etc), and reduce that by murders vs. murders (multiples). That should get an accurate number. Still, $700M seems about ballpark depending on how you want to factor in prison capital costs.
No I’m not. I’m assuming that the GOP is effective getting their message out into the mainstream, which I think is well established.
To shorten your argument: you don’t trust the government to use your tax dollars wisely but you do trust them to possibly end your life wisely.
Probably not much more. You pay a shitload more to incarcerate everyone who *didn’t* commit murder. Murderers are a minority of prisoners by a fair bit here thanks to 3 strikes and a bunch of other mandatory sentencing laws.
Since when does homicide and locality have a huge correlation? People have cars, you know. You live in CA. I live in the middle of OC and of the last 8 homicides that I know of in conjunction with my city, 3 were residents who committed their crimes in LA county and 5 were residents from outside the area that committed their crimes inside my city. I couldn’t tell you the last time there was a homicide in my area that was committed by a local resident.
Which is why we spend more money on traffic signals and the like than to keep murderers locked up. And guess what, you have a 0% greater chance of being victimized by someone life-in-prison vs. someone death row. So why run the risk of killing them only to possibly find out later that we got it wrong?
Martin
murderers vs. murders. Damn, I’m worthless today…
Xenos
Just like you can’t fight terrorism on the terrorists’ terms, you can’t decide what punishment to give them based on what you think will make them suffer more, or be better punishment based on what you think their psychology is.
The punishment needs to be based on what is in the interest of society as a whole – incarcerate them for a time that is proportionate to the offense, and make rehabilitative services available on the basis of what is good for society as a whole.
It does nothing for society as a whole to kill convicts, no matter the severity of the crime. You can’t point to any concrete, real benefit, and there are all manner of harms.
End of analysis.
Cyrus
If the death penalty is legal, it’s not up to you. I know slippery slope arguments are generally considered unfair or something, but it’s entirely valid here. Saying “I support the death penalty only on condition that it judges only give it to the really bad people” is about as intelligent as saying you want to stay in Iraq “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” It just doesn’t describe the real world, or any world we can get to in the near future.
myiq2xu
What about the robber whose partner is shot and killed by the store clerk?
Under California law, they could face the death penalty.
RSA
Maybe I’m just bitter in approaching middle age, but my impression is that talk of rehabilitation has almost disappeared over the last couple of decades, since the Reagan years. Has anyone else noticed this? It goes along with my perception that candidates seem to emphasize being tough on crime more than they used to. It seems to me that public discourse has changed on these topics over the years.
SnarkyShark
Ype. Tough-on-crime is crack for todays politicians.
Not that they have any intentions on that applying to themselves, their friends or their families.
Mostly they intend it to be tough for some vague “other”.
slippytoad
It’s easy to talk tough about meting out vengeance.
But, vengeance solves nothing and as the nation’s crime rate shows, prevents no one from committing a crime.
I have been of the opinion for several years now that the DP is for giving people their jollies. You can watch the bad guy get his comeuppance in movies, friend. Real life is a fuck of a lot messier.
TenguPhule
Not touching that one with a ten foot pole.
Michael D.
Well, there goes your argument for the death penalty. If it’s about money, then putting a prisoner to death is a lot more expensive than locking him up for the rest of his life.
The appeals process and review is outrageously expensive.
And, by the way, anyone in prison is (supposed to be) guilty beyind reasonable doubt.