Bob Barr has an op-ed in the NY Times:
THERE is no abuse of government power more egregious than executing an innocent man. But that is exactly what may happen if the United States Supreme Court fails to intervene on behalf of Troy Davis.
Mr. Davis is facing execution for the 1989 murder of an off-duty police officer in Savannah, Ga., even though seven of the nine witnesses have recanted their testimony against him. Many of these witnesses now say they were pressured into testifying falsely against him by police officers who were understandably eager to convict someone for killing a comrade. No court has ever heard the evidence of Mr. Davis’s innocence.
***I am a firm believer in the death penalty, but I am an equally firm believer in the rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution. To execute Troy Davis without having a court hear the evidence of his innocence would be unconscionable and unconstitutional.
I really don’t understand Bob Barr, and I guess I am a little confused about the status of the “libertarian” position on the death penalty (and I am being sort of facetious, because I’m sure all 8,000 varieties of libertarian have their own uniquely individual position on the death penalty). I guess I just sort of naturally assumed that the default libertarian position on the death penalty would be to oppose it. As Barr notes, there is no abuse greater than executing an innocent man. Since there is no way to verify that all the men we execute are in fact guilty, it would seem to me you would not support the death penalty.
And maybe I am right, and that is the libertarian position most of the time, because otherwise it just wouldn’t make sense in the context of other libertarian positions. If you are going to freak out over taxes and government positions on porn and pot and guns, it seems to me you would oppose the death penalty.
Death By Mosquito Truck
Isn’t Barr from somewhere around there? Prolly knows the family or something. File this one under “Conservative Empathetic Because Impacted Personally” until we find out differently.
Edit: Never mind, missed yer point the first time around.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
I’d think you were right, John. A consistent Libertarian position would be to oppose the ultimate government power, that of power over life and death.
But most of the self-styled Libertarians I’ve talked to support the death penalty, and oppose abortion, 110%. Their position seems to be “no government if it affects my wallet or my lifestyle, but government’s good for other people; and if they get executed, or have to raise an unwanted child that’s just their personal responsibility for their actions catching up to them.” I suppose we’re all hypocrites to some extent, but some of us are much more flagrant than others.
chuck
The Libertarian position on the death penalty is that we should encourage competition in our justice system by removing the government monopoly on police and the courts, thus allowing the market to decide in which jurisdiction they should be be accused of a crime.
I understand they’ve already made a pretty good start on prisons.
Incertus
There are plenty of libertarians who are all about the government staying out of your private life until it comes to abortion, the death penalty and teh gay. That’s why it’s so easy to mock them as Republicans who want to smoke weed legally.
Tom65
As with most things Libertarian, they’re opposed to it until it affects them.
MobiusKlein
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: I’ve known various anti-death penalty libertarians, based on the premise of “do you REALLY trust the government that much? Didn’t think so.”
Incertus
@MobiusKlein: And that’s a perfectly logical position, one I share myself to some extent. I just don’t trust anyone, government or otherwise, to get it right every single time.
KidA
From Wiki:
“Libertarians are split over the use of the death penalty and the Libertarian Party does not take a position on this issue. The more conservative libertarians believe that the death penalty is an important tool for the protection of life, preventing a murderer from comitting other crimes and serving as a deterrent.
“Other libertarians criticize the death penalty as not serving the principle of restitution and being a dangerous tool in the hands of the state. They are concerned that the death penalty may be applied unfairly or to enforce victimless crimes such as drug smuggling.”
BombIranForChrist
I have known a few libertarians, usually of the academic variety, who oppose the death penalty as it is currently practiced. I am not sure how they consider it philosophically, though.
Jon H
I figure the death penalty should be reserved for well-nigh undisputable cases like the Petit case from Connecticut, where the perps were caught by police, while fleeing the burning home of the victims, and the father of the victimized family survived and could identify the perps.
Xanthippas
The death penalty is yet another in a long list of positions that libertarians are completely un-serious about.
El Cid
But what if the designated Executioner feels that his skills are being parasitized by the losers and he chooses to Go Galt?
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@MobiusKlein:
I wish I knew more of those kinds of libertarians, and fewer of the flagrantly-hypocritical-asshole kind that I do have the misfortune to know.
someguy
The libertarian position on the death penalty?
Based on what I’ve read in Reason, It’s totally wrong. Unacceptable.
Unless you’re one of the fuckers who wants to charge money for music downloads, in which case it’s perfectly meritorious.
Bernie
I think the question that needs to be asked is are they are real liberterians like Barry Goldwater or Ron Paul or faux liberterians like Glenn Reynolds and Megan McCardle. A real liberterian would oppose the death penalty because in order to support it you would have to assume that the State and the Justice System are infallible. A true libertarian would find that type of reasoning morally repellant. A faux libertarian hates government when it comes to taxes and services for the “lesser” (I believe the Randian term is parasitic) citizens but have a child-like belief in the infallibility of law enforcement, prosecuters, and the military. Because, hey, if your innocent you wouldn’t be on death row now would you?
NonyNony
Yeah, well, if you expect consistency from self-labeled “libertarians”, you’ll drive yourself mad. Utterly bonkers. It’s not a single ideology – it’s a collection of various ideologies that have banded together under a single label in the hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll have the critical mass to be taken seriously if they all band together.
I’ve known some pro-choice, anti-death penalty libertarians in my life, but as they have gotten older they have invariably drifted to being pro-gun liberals. Real-life experience with our actual economic system shows people pretty damn quick that libertarian economic philosophy is a sham, and that with the exception of the gun issue the rest of their beliefs put them firmly into the liberal camp. (As one of my formerly libertarian buddies puts it, If a conservative is a liberal who got mugged, a liberal is a libertarian who has had to deal with an insurance company for an expensive but necessary medical treatment.)
Comrade Dread
If you think of the libertarian party as a herd of cats with a few wranglers trying desperately to get them to all go in a single direction, then it makes a lot more sense.
For me, as a libertarian, I lean more right on this than others, but I think the death penalty is appropriate for the most heinous crimes, however, I no longer have enough faith in the legal system to trust it’s verdicts enough to bet a man’s life on.
So, in principle, I’m for it. In practice, hell no.
EconWatcher
A very smart anti-death penalty lawyer named David Bruck once explained the seeming paradox that “anti-government” people often favor the death penalty, even though it would seem to be the ultimate exercise of state power: Some anti-government people, Bruck said, view the death penalty as actually a limitation on government power–that is, a limitation on the ability of bleeding heart judges, bureaucrats and social workers on parole boards, or incompetent prison officials to let predators loose in our midst. The death penalty gives ordinary people–the jury–the power to make sure the government can never do that.
Of course, Bruck did not agree with that perspective, and neither do I. But it kinda sorta makes sense in a way.
b-psycho
It is. The death penalty is based on an irrational emotional need for petty revenge. Bob Barr is a political opportunist, & the Libertarian Party is a fraud.
Brachiator
But absolute and total certainty of guilt or innocence is not the legal standard. It’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
I’m troubled by the death penalty, but I am also troubled by the sometimes heinous crimes that people commit and are proved to have done.
On the other hand, I’ve never found libertarian positions to be particularly philosophically consistent or intellectually sound, although many of them magically believe that they have a deeper understanding than the rest of us.
In this regard, the only people more obnoxious than libertarians are Objectivists, who are the closest that you can come to being insane and still be a fully functional human being.
All this said, I am pleased that Barr is not holding for some brainless, mechanical application of the law, as would someone like Justice Scalia.
Winston Smith
Libertarians need not take any particular position on the death penalty. Libertarianism largely has to do with the rights of innocent people, and, so far as I know, has nothing in particular to say about what to do with, say, murderers.
Although I consider myself a liberal–and not a libertarian–I’m with Barr in that I acknowledge that some crimes are so heinous as to demand death as a punishment. But nothing about holding that position entails that you think it’s permissible to execute innocent people, nor to be cavalier about whom you do execute. You can, in fact, acknowledge (as every sane person does) that executing an innocent person would be the worst kind of error…and yet that does not entail that no one ever deserves execution, nor that the state should never execute. One can (and, I think, ought to) hold that execution is only permissible in cases in which the evidence is extraordinarily clear. Death penalty opponents try to pretend that there’s something incoherent about this position, but there is not.
The death penalty need not be merely some kind of emotional outburst. Rather, if you hold that people sometimes deserve things, and you hold that e.g. murder is a heinous crime, and you hold that the punishment should be proportionate to the crime, then you must recognize that the death penalty is at least a plausible type of punishment. (There are problems in this area, but blog comments are not the place for nuance…)
LD50
I think nowadays, most of the time, “I’m a libertarian” really just means “I agree with the Republicans about everything except this *one* thing that I feel really strongly about…”
LD50
@Winston Smith:
The problem lies in defining this:
I’m afraid the government thinks it already does this.
TenguPhule
The Death penalty needs to only be reliably applied to defendants who make more then $250,000.
And fundamentalist assassins.
Woody
In the main, and for exactly the reasons mentioned here above, I oppose the death penalty.
However, the Cons and faux-Libertarians do make one claim that I think should be experimented with: that capital punishment acts as a deterrent. We could, for example, strap Bernie Madoff, or a couple of the thieves who ran the derivatives scams to the gurney and give ’em the heaven-bound cocktail, and see if that prevented future abuses by their peers (cuz it would certainly prevent recidivism)…
b-psycho
@NonyNony: I get the feeling this question isn’t going to shock you: which “libertarian economic philosophy”?
There’s some that realize that economic intervention, historically and today, has been overwhelmingly for the benefit of concentrated wealth, contrary to the assertions of the Catoites & other corporate sympathizers. “left-libertarian”, look it up sometime.
JL
Bob Barr became a libertarian out of necessity. He lost his district. Barr was a former federal prosecutor who went after both republican and democratic politicians on the take. Up until the time he was elected to office, he seemed reasonable to me.
Zifnab
Well, that’s the game. You’ve got your 8000 varieties of Libertarian, and most of them view the system in the “how likely is this to fuck me over” scope.
So if you’re a libertarian in the mold of Mike McDeere from John Grisham’s The Firm (obligator “I saw that on TV last night” reference), then you probably oppose the idea on the grounds that the government will really just use the power of life and death to strong arm people into getting what it wants from you.
If you’re a Nixon/Reagen/Bush/Bush libertarian, you might recognize the valuable political nature of the death penalty when playing the “Tough on Crime” card and not want to give that up.
If you’re a libertarian from a deep blue state like Vermont or New York, I imagine you think the government is conspiring against you and needs to be stopped at all costs. If you’re a libertarian from Florida or Texas, you’ll probably sleep a lot better knowing that only darkies get the chair.
ET
Bob bar may be libertarian but he is also southern – and many southerners love their death penalty.
David Hunt
This reminds me of John Rogers’ rule of thumb to political parties:
Liberals have a child-like faith in government.
Conservatives have a child-like faith in corporations.
Libertarians have a child-like hatred of both.
It’s never a bad time quote John Rogers.
Jager
I saw a Libertarian friend of mine driving on the 101 last week, I called him on the cell and told him to “get the fuck off my road!”
LorenzoStDuBois
John, relatively new fan of BJ here (that stands for “Balloon Juice”). Can you link to an entry where you discussed your position on the death penalty? I’m kind of fascinated that you’re for it, because I’ve literally agreed with your POV on everything up to this point.
But you trust a government to accurately kill its bad citizens?
Old Gringo
I think the question that needs to be asked is are they are real liberterians like Barry Goldwater or Ron Paul…
Barry Goldwater would think Ron Paul is a religious wacko, because he is. Ron Paul, the anti-abortion nutbar who thinks the Constitution is the Revealed Word of God but still can’t understand a word of it – a libertarian? He’s more in line with The Constitution Party and Christian Reconsctructionist wackos than the GOP or The ALP and he is probably not too broken up about Tiller being shot. Or maybe he’s just another fool who panders well to the ill-informed wingnut masses.
“I am running for president to restore the rule of law and to stand up for our divinely inspired Constitution.
Ron Paul”
http://www.covenantnews.com/ronpaul070721.htm
Xanthippas
The problem of course is that we are talking about the death of an innocent person at the hands of the government, a subject that libertarians in general should be extraordinarily concerned about, but are not. I am opposed to the death penalty because I suspect that a great many innocent men and women have put to death by our government throughout the long period in which our nation has employed the death penalty, not because I don’t believe that there are some men and women who are deserving of death. Many liberals feel the same way as I do. Libertarians seem quite troubled by the fact that the government may accidentally raid an innocent person’s house and shoot that person’s dog, or the homeowner. How is what is essentially an arbitrary execution any different from a man or women who is convicted to die for something they didn’t do? These are the questions that, in general, libertarians don’t ask.
John Cole
@LorenzoStDuBois: I’m not for the death penalty. Here is a post in which I explained why I am opposed to it.
LorenzoStDuBois
Oh God… you aren’t a supporter of the death penalty. So we’re still 100% in agreeance on everything.
Still, this brings me to another point: for whatever reason, when I read you on my RSS (google), when you indent an excerpt, only the first graph is indented, and the rest is on normal indent so I can’t tell which words are yours… It’s a glitch.
Hugh Jass
I’m not knowledgeable enough to define exactly what positions a “libertarian” is supposed to take in all instances. I also don’t have the insight to determine who is a “real” libertarian.
I don’t know what people on this site have against libertarians, although I would agree that many libertarians appear to be both contrarian and smug about their beliefs. The philosophy also does tend to attract more than its share of nuts.
I do know that I consider myself a libertarian, in the sense that I think that an individual’s liberty/freedom is the starting point for analyzing various social/political issues.
With respect to the death penalty, it probably makes sense that a libertarian would be against it, based on the argument that one shouldn’t trust the government with that much power. However, that’s only part of the analysis, since just because something is “wrong” doesn’t make it illegal or unconstitutional. I think that the Constitution pretty clearly acknowledges the death penalty.
So, my position would be that the death penalty should be either very rare or, perhaps outlawed, but to get there you need to either pass a law or amend the Constitution. You can’t simply have the Supreme Court declare that it’s “cruel and unusual.”
LD50
Yeesh. Get a room, you two.
John Cole
@Hugh Jass: I know that there is a direct positive correlation to my disdain for libertarians and how much exposure I have to them (with, of course a few exceptions).
I generally agree with them on any number of things, but they are often times so insufferable it makes it tough.
b-psycho
@Hugh Jass: In practice, the death penalty is one or the other. Currently, we take up clinical absurdities to distance ourselves from the gravity of the act (lethal injection). The alternative is to go yee-haw old-school & just fucking hang people in public squares so as to embrace the violence.
LD50
Actually, I think many of the posters here have quite happily explained what they have against libertarians.
Comrade Dread
Hell, I’m one of them and dislike a lot of them.
But then again, since I think some form of government is necessary and there should be some sort of safety net for the needy that doesn’t involve work houses and debtor’s prison, they’d probably disagree that I’m a libertarian.
Old Gringo
And let’s be fair to the Libertarian Party here – you have to take pity on them – most of them weren’t too pleased with Barr’s candidacy in the first place. There was a split at the convention because of Ron Paul. For both of these guys, adopting the well worn mantle of “libertarianism” is just a matter of political expediency. Barr is just a wingnut who only joined the LP as a matter of convenience and there is some currency to the notion that even Goldwater may have endorsed Democrats, if not switched parties, had he lived longer. But even today’s Democrats have moved that much to the right since Barry’s day to have made him happy. Barry and Pete McCloskey had a lot in common.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_McCloskey
McCloskey finally switched parties in 2007. Too moderate and sane to run as a Republican in California.
Lee
For those of you that want a sane libertarian that is typically consistent in his views, I point to the excellent blog The Agitator
You’ll also find it on the blog roll to the right.
I disgree with him on a few issues, but his reasoning is always sound.
JC
Why the death penalty makes no sense period
Not only am I against the death penalty, but I can’t find one honest argument in favor of it. It’s ludicrous on all levels.
Bill E Pilgrim
In French the phrase for the death penalty has roots making it similar to “the pain of death” basically, which somehow makes it sound even more barbaric and dated, e.g in discussions about how we still have it in the USA.
A puzzle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in bacon, that’s how many people in the world see the whole country, not just Bob Barr. Such a weird mix of cutting edge modern and medieval, thrillingly unbound by tradition in many ways and yet swept by the most amazing religous dogma in others.
Death By Mosquito Truck
No one would have any problems with libertarians if they’d simply be the change they want to see in others. But, no, they suck up government services and public goods as fast as the next guy. I’ve got two libertarian friends, one mooches off his teacher wife’s bennies, health care, etc., the other works for the motherfucking DEA in DC.
Libertarianism for thee but not for me should be their motto.
MikeJ
I’m much less annoyed by libertarians that actually vote for the libertarian party candidates. This is a minute portion of them. Most libertarians simply want to say they dislike both parties but always, without fail, vote for the republican. These people are cowards, afraid to take responsibility for their actions and those of the people they support.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
It’s the same as the “libertarian” position on everything else:
JL
@JL: Maybe Barr had a come to Jesus moment and said maybe I really am a Libertarian but I doubt it.
He has had problems with the repubs in GA because he is not an evangelical but I think it disingenous to keep talking about him as though he has been a lifelong libertarian.
Since he was a former prosecutor, he probably just wrote the oped piece because he knows the trial was not fair.
(I’m a tad pissy cause Roddick just lost)
John S.
The only thing consistent about the libertarian position is that they consistently make it up as they go along.
bago
@Death By Mosquito Truck: Now THAT’s a handle.
The Grand Panjandrum
@JC:
I’ve got at least three: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
With that said I am not philosophically opposed to the death penalty as you can well imagine from my reply above. However, until we can be absolutely guaranteed that we are excuting someone who has committed a capital crime, AND we remove all racial and economic factors from the ajudication of said crimes I oppose its application. It is my personal opinion based on what I know of our justice system that you only get the justice you can afford to pay for. Hence, John Delorean gets acquitted because he was wealthy enough to pay for top notch attorneys and the other poorer mugs caught up in similar Federal drug stings set up around the country got hard time in the Federal penitentiary.
Tony Alva
I’m from the area and I’m of the belief that this case has been thoroughly vetted through the appeals process and having read the rulings up to this point, the guy “recant” case is VERY weak and that’s why it’s not gained any traction and he’s got a date. I wish I could grab the links but I’m working from a mobile device. They’re out there though. Try the AJC. Perhaps you may think otherwise…
Love the dog and Tunch vids!
srv
@John Cole:
Which is why they’re all here. Don’t you remember that politics test you posted a couple years ago? Everybody was a libertarian.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
gex
Are these people producers or takers? My guess is libertarians think of people facing the death penalty as takers, and really aren’t that concerned about government interference on their behalf. It’s not like it’s a market or anything.
Maus
He’s a neocon opportunist that found a libertopian angle, just like all the rest of the fairweather friends of the constitution out there.
gex
If people are unwilling to examine why the Governor of Illinois (or was it Indiana?) put a moratorium on executions a few years ago, even though he was pro-death penalty, they should not be allowed to voice an opinion. The reason for that moratorium was that DNA tests had exonerated about 12 people who were waiting on death row.
gex
@Winston Smith: So you just know, by looking, who deserves it or not right? Because if you look at a point I made just a minute ago, about a state that had to stop executions because DNA testing had exonerated about a dozen people on death row, you would realize your certainty about who deserves it and who doesn’t is misplaced.
Moreover, if murder is a death penalty offense, and we conceded that at least one innocent person has been put to death, we then become murderers who deserve the death penalty.
BenA
Most people that identify as Libertarians are all about personal freedom and don’t want anyone to tell them what to do… but have absolutely no problem infringing on OTHER people’s personal freedoms.
Most people I know who are hardcore Libertarians basically are Republicans who like weed…
Bill E Pilgrim
@Lee:
So I followed the link to the Agitator and found an article bashing Sotomayor (almost in the way I had predicted earlier today, i.e. that the right will look at the ruling in favor of a white racist and say “see, she’s in favor of racism!”)
Then an article called “Is George W Bush the classiest ex-President ever”?,then another pretty much carrying the right wing line against Sotomayor.Edit: Oops, my bad, I guess the Agitator was making fun of that post, not celebrating it.
That’s as far as I got.
For me it did nothing but confirm the majority view in this thread that Libertarians are basically Republicans who won’t say so.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Zifnab:
Fixt.
Jager
Isn’t that Libertarian test like the “You may be an alcoholic test” with questions like: Have you ever gotten in trouble with your spouse or family because of drinking?
Lets see; I don’t believe the govt should interfere in my private life and once when I was drunk, home late, my wife asked where I’d been, I couldn’t remember so I told her it wasn’t any of her business.
Everyone is an alcoholic-libertarian or libertarian-alcoholic
R. Porrofatto
For the truly modern glibertarian, government should not be able to execute people, but only because such a right is reserved exclusively for employers and creditors, and the government would therefore be assuming powers belonging to the free market and its practitioners and [4000 words later]… oooh… widgets!
Bill Jones
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss
to get a good view of what pretty much pure libertarianism looks like try Lewrockwell.com . A fair number of people who describe themselves as Libertarian- the Bill Maher’s, some of the Reason crowd, etc. are really libertine socialists.
From a libertarian perspective, The State can only legitimately exercise powers powers delegated by the people i.e. can not legitimately perform acts that individuals can’t. As killing someone is only moral in self defense from a mortal threat- at the time of the threat- the death penalty is nothing short of premeditated murder.
noncarborundum
@Bill E Pilgrim:
This deserves some qualification. It doesn’t sound like that in French, where the peine in la peine de mort means merely “penalty” or “punishment”. For the type of pain implied by the English phrase “the pain of death”, as used for example in the Yoo torture memo, the French would use the word douleur, not peine.
LD50
Or, as the old joke goes, Republicans who don’t believe in God.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Always remember that libertarians are blissfully clueless that Libertarianism is just great as long as it doesn’t actually involve real live humans.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Or, to steal another quote from another blog:
Libertarians are all for legalized drugs and prostitution but probably wouldn’t want their kids blowing strangers for crack.
gex
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: Or have any preceding history.
DarrenG
I stopped self-identifying as a libertarian many years ago after being exposed to the unsavory connections American libertarianism has with stillborn ideas like Objectivism, white supremacy, and the “sovereign citizen” crazies.
Just as the wingnuts drove the few remaining intellectually coherent conservatives out of the GOP, the Paultards, goldbugs, militia fetishists, and neo-KKKers have drowned out any remaining principled voices of libertarianism in this country, so the only mainstream representatives left are schmucks and opportunists like Reynolds and McArdle who are, indeed, “Republicans who smoke weed” or people who got tired of being laughed at for believing in Randian fairy tales.
ironranger
Trying to pinpoint what libertarians agree are their core beliefs is like trying hold on to a greased pig. I agree with John S and John Cole. Libertarians make it up as they go along & are insufferable.
Mike G
The several libertarians I know are pro-death penalty and anti-abortion, on the grounds of the “individual rights” of the crime victim and the fetus (too bad about the mother, I guess).
It doesn’t seem to occur to them a government given the right to judicially kill people might not be restrained when it comes to lesser intrusions into citizens’ lives. But then, they think a few percentage points in tax increases is the worst crime a government can commit. And corporate oppression bothers them not a whit.
JR
I’ll say this for Barr (and I say it as one who has worked for the Congressman that Barr unseated in ’94): when asked the question, “do you honestly believe the Executive Branch of the federal government should have the power to unilaterally detain, imprison, and torture to death people it has declared without any oversight or judicial process to be enemies of the state?” he gives the right answer.
That might not be a very high bar to set for someone who, once upon a time, wrote the freaking laws (and, before that, prosecuted people under them), but for someone who’s served as a Republican congressman in the last 20 years, it’s actually quite an accomplishment.
jk
Given the state of human nature, it’s impossible to carry out the death penalty with 100% accuracy. It’s inevitable that people will sometimes provide an incorrect identification of a perpetrator. It’s also inevitable that people will sometimes lie in their testimony concerning a defendant.
It’s much safer to simply replace the death penalty with life with no possiblity of parole.
DarrenG
As opposed to other political movements whose principles are eternal, unchanging and maintain policy positions that are 100% philosophically coherent?
John Rogers and commenters above correctly nail down a lot of the nonsense promulgated by modern libertarianism(s), as does John Holbo in his famous “and a pony” post, but let’s not get carried away with trying to hold libertarians to a standard that’s never been met in the history of mammalian politics.
KG
As one of the resident libertarians in the crowd, I’ll just say there is a split on the death penalty. Some say, “well, the constitution says that the government can deprive someone of life with the due process of law” (actually, it says it twice) and are ok with it, so long as there’s adequate protection. Some say that there is no process so fair as to allow for the government taking a life. Others, like me, say “sure, it’s constitutional, but that doesn’t mean it’s not stupid policy.”
I’m guessing Barr is in the first category. Which is all well and good, until you’re brought up on capital charges.
Bill E Pilgrim
@noncarborundum:
“This deserves some qualification. It doesn’t sound like that in French, where the peine in la peine de mort means merely “penalty” or “punishment”. For the type of pain implied by the English phrase “the pain of death”, as used for example in the Yoo torture memo, the French would use the word douleur, not peine.”
I should have been more clear perhaps, I was talking about how it sounds when you learn French as a non-native speaker, so to someone used to English it always smacks of the English phrase “pain of death”, giving it a more sinister feel whenever I say it.
The words do have similar roots as I mentioned. And actually a qualification in return: the English phrase “under pain of death” didn’t really refer to pain in the way we use it as you’re implying but was much closer to “penalty” also.
And the overall point I guess was just how strange and out of step it all looks from outside the country, and not mostly because of language.
eyelessgame
Well, y’know, there’s libertarians and then there are archconservatives who like pot and porn. The latter, who comprise most of the Libertarian movement, have no problem with the death penalty, mostly because it disproportionately offs dark-skinned people.
TenguPhule
So we torture the prisoners instead of killing them?
Uh no.
TenguPhule
Because a slow death of an innocent man “in a cage with horrible conditions” is somehow more merciful then a quick death?
KG
@81: no, because in the event that the system got it wrong (new evidence later) it’s much easier to release an imprisoned man and pay him restitution for his wrongful conviction than it is to raise the dead. Unless you’re Jesus… in which case, I’ve got some water that I’d like turned into wine.
mvr
@Hugh Jass:
Why can’t the SCOTUS declare it cruel and unusual, if (just to speculate) it is? The Bill of Rights requires the court to make up its mind about what falls within its prohibitions. If there is a good argument that it is cruel and unusual (and at one point a majority of justices thought there was, though they then waffled) shouldn’t they enforce the provisions of the eighth amendment?
RSA
Huh. I’d have expected libertarians to be outraged at the State’s infringement of an individual’s right to blow away whatever looter laid hands on his person or property.
TenguPhule
So we chuck $1,000,000 for 40 years wrongful imprisonment and say “Our bad”? And if they die in prison? Then what?
ironranger
@DarrenG:
I don’t recall saying any other political creed was 100% consistent or coherent. No such animal exists.
In my experience, all the self proclaimed libertarians I’ve met had such widely (or wildly) divergent views that when two or more were together at the same time, the conversations soon got very loud & heated.
Anne Laurie
Gex is right. I’ve actually had a couple of serious, registered, lifelong Libertarian “friends” explain that Some People are just unsalvageable. They objected to wasting their stolen-by-the-government tax dollars on “society’s garbage”, when the “pestilence in human form” could much more efficiently be disposed of with a quick, efficient needle. (Although one fella held out for the firing squad, because he thought us non-Libertarians needed regular reminders of how useful & important & generally cool guns are.)
And if by Human Garbage we were discussing Bernie Madoff or Darth Voldemort, I could totally understand their viewpoint. But in the world as it actually exists, today, too often death-penalty convictions fall somewhere on the anthropological scale between “hanging a starving peasant for poaching in the king’s forest” and “throwing a living victim into the volcano to placate the angry gods”.
Old Gringo
@Bill Jones
Lord, I hope not. With regular contributors like Gary North? I doubt it. They are mostly a weiird collection of paleocons, secessionists and “Austrians” that even Von Mises wouldn’t recognize. otherwise known as “kooks”.
In point of fact, the original libertarians had far more in common with the left.
And we don’t mind it if you call us socialists. Noam Chomsky has identified himself as a libertarian socialist for years and he’s a linguist, among other things. And in one of the few instances when I agree with Russell Kirk, ( paraphrasing T.S. Eliot), he called libertarians “chirping sectaries,” and “an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating.”
You should read his 1988 essay/lecture:
gbear
YIKES! (and apologies for the OT)
Randall Terry was at the National Press Club today. C&L has video.
edit: YIKES is the link to the C&L posting.
Comrade Kevin
I think a lot of self-styled “libertarians” use the term not because of any actually held convictions, but because terms like “conservative” or “Republican” make them think of people who look like Barry Goldwater driving around in their Lincoln Town Cars, and they’re far too edgy for that.
dbrown
@Anne Laurie: The death penalty should only be used for real criminals like cheney or bushwhack and their political cronies. Everyone else convicted of murder should get life.
gex
@TenguPhule: Yup. Better just to kill the innocent man, lest you get embarrassed about the mistake you made or that it cost taxpayers any money.
Zifnab25
Tengu, I don’t think anyone is arguing the system is perfect sans death penalty. Just that – given the system – it is better to throw an innocent man in jail and figure it out later, than to kill a guy and find out after the fact.
Treatment of prisoners is another discussion entirely. Frankly, I don’t know how the better part of the prison system does qualify as the cruel part of cruel and unusual.
Frank Wilhoit
I (who am nobody) would also support capital punishment, PROVIDED that it were administered in the context of a incorrupt system. As the system IS corrupt, it is not ethically possible to support any punishment whatever.
TenguPhule
If, after all the years of reviews and appeals are done, you haven’t been able to challenge the conviction, you’re pretty much dead in the system either way. You have choice between a slow death or a quick one, knowing you will die an innocent man either way.
Mona
1. I am a left-leaning libertarian. (Didn’t used to be until “right-leaning” came to be defined by such as Instaf*ck.)
2. I oppose the death penalty, even tho I find it hard to summon opposition for it in the case of those condemned in the Nuremberg trials. But hard cases, as they say, make bad law.
3. I thoroughly endorse the Innocence Project, and tend to hate prosecutors. (Not always, sometimes they go after the right suspect for the right reasons.)
TenguPhule
No, it’s not. Treatment of prisoners is precisely the point.
One of the arguments thrown around for “life without parole” is that the prisoners will be raped, savaged and/or murdered by other prisoners (thus saving the state the expense) in addition to poor facilities and abuse by the jailers which is somehow a “worse/better” punishment then a death penalty..
omen
bob barr has also joined with gore on other issues. one, agreement on global warming crisis. the other, to protest the iraq war, loss of civil liberties and torture.
i suspect he’s had a road-to-damascus moment he’s not telling us about. this certainly isn’t the same bob barr who went on a jihad to impeach clinton.
Brachiator
@Hugh Jass:
In a nutshell. Every libertarian I have ever spoken with is either ignorant of history, or distorts history to suit their philosophy. They are equally ignorant of science, economics, and often common sense. And yet they pretend that they are hard-nosed realists.
Libertarians imagine themselves to be the Jesuists of the conservative movement, their intellectual shock troops. In reality, they are often emotionally-stunted anti-authoritarians.
Quick example. One libertarian radio talk show host likes to argue that the Civil War was about states rights and economic issues. They ignore the fact that every state explicitly mentioned slavery as their chief cause for separating from the Union. You can easily read this now online in the Southern newspapers of the period.
And as I have noted before, the only thing that makes libertarians less than despicable is that Objectivists are worse.
Nonsense. There are far, far more death row inmates trying to stay alive than there are death row inmates asking for the needle.
And there is no God. And even if there were, it really doesn’t matter. It is up to us to render justice, in this world, as best we can.
Zifnab
@TenguPhule:
Right. But then you’re arguing about the state’s responsibility in housing a prisoner, and that delves more deeply into liability concerns and the cost/benefit analysis of money spent to keep prisoners off each other and the ethics of a state given people into its care. Ultimately, however, no one argues that the state has the right to take and hold prisoners.
The death penalty is something completely different. You can argue that a prison sentence is better/worse than a death sentence, but you’re not really addressing the fundamental concern of whether the state should legally be allowed to execute you. All the better/worse crap is just a dodge on the real question of death penalty legality.
jk
@TenguPhule:
As every commenter to this thread knows, there isn’t a perfect answer that will satisfy everyone.
I never claimed that life in prison is a bed of roses.
You can’t provide compensation to a wrongfully convicted person who has been executed. Consequently, I don’t favor sentencing anyone to death.
Hypothetically speaking, how would you feel if you learned that the US had executed 100 innocent people in 2008? If the death penalty were banned decades ago, at least these 100 innocent people would be able to live out their lives in freedom.
LD50
@Comrade Kevin:
Superb. I’ve tried to make that exact point several times and never phrased it nearly as well.
Brachiator
@jk:
Good point, and one of the reasons I wrestle with the death penalty.
There is a good possibility that innocent people have been executed. We know of horrible examples where people came close to execution, but were saved thanks to the Innocence Project and other programs.
On the other hand, here is my problem. Increasingly, I see self-styled liberals who apparently do not believe in much punishment for murder at all, and even reject life without parole.
In cases where a person is clearly guilty, and has acknowledged guilt, these people still argue for parole since… the victim is dead and you cannot bring that person back to life.
These people will swoon over the living prisoner, and over the hard life that this person has had to live. The murder victim, on the other hand, is erased from consciousness just as his or her life was erased from the world.
When California convicted criminal Stanley Tookie Williams was headed toward execution, Jesse Jackson flat out refused an offer to meet with the family of Williams’ victims. I do not understand this at all (and don’t confuse this as a general swipe at Jackson). And consistently, death penalty opponents simply swept away the pain and concern of the victims and their families, as though the only thing they wanted was “revenge,” which was “primitive” and so not even worthy of consideration.
So my question for staunch death penalty opponents is — what level of punishment do you think is appropriate for someone convicted of first degree murder?
A character on the great NBC show Homicide once described the reason for his diligence in this way: “We speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves.”
What punishment, if any, speaks on behalf of a murder victim?
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@TenguPhule:
No, because an imprisoned man always has hope. Hope is the one thing people on death row can’t sanely expect. Or, as Camus put it:
“An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@TenguPhule:
Prisoners should be treated better, but abysmal prison conditions are no excuse for allowing government the even greater injustice of executing people. That’s like arguing that a rapist should murder his victims rather than force them to endure life as rape victims.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Brachiator:
So there’s no God, but the State should assume God-like powers and an assumed infallibility over life and death. And “justice” involves a government, comprised of humans, which takes the decision to exile select humans from its midst for crimes against that government.
This reasoning is unacceptable.
gex
@omen: In other words, he is trying to get the people of Georgia to elect him to undo all the work the people of Georgia elected him to do.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Brachiator:
Life without parole is perfectly acceptable to me. Perhaps, with several decades to consider what they did, the killer can achieve some kind of enlightenment. Even in prison, a person can still be of some use to others, to the human race. A person can atone for their crimes.
Even if the person is unwilling or unable to obtain that self-awareness and self-advancement, we still have to give them the chance. While there’s life, there’s hope. If we don’t assume that even murderers, even up to the last day of their lives, have the chance to figure out why what they did was wrong, and to make some small effort to atone for it, then I don’t see any hope for humanity whatsoever. And I don’t see the death penalty as anything other than the exercise of blind power and hypocrisy by the many over the few, or the one.
ThymeZoneThePlumber
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
That’s just wrong.
Only a blog should have God-like powers.
ThymeZoneThePlumber
Really? You “wrestle” with it?
So, the possibility that the government might execute an innocent person doesn’t decide the matter for you?
Are you willing to be that innocent person, to die for your willingness to support the death penalty?
Because unless you are willing to be the sacrifice, AFAIC you have no right to speak on the matter.
I’m not willing to be that sacrifice, and I am not willing to ask anyone else to be either. The state is fallible, and therefore cannot be given the power to execute citizens under any pretext.
Period, end of story.
If I misread what you said, then this post is not aimed at you.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@ThymeZoneThePlumber:
If John had a “smite” button at his disposal, I think we’d all be a lot more respectful around here.
colleeniem
Just a little anecdote about the ridiculous hypocrisy of a libertarian-
I walked past a car on my way into work Friday morning. It had two bumper stickers attached, one saying “Right-wing extremist-certified by the DHS” and another saying “Vote libertarian.”
The irony? I work in an DOD intelligence building, a secure facility. That parking lot can only be used by people who have the highest level clearances provided by the federal government.
The mind-it reels.
TenguPhule
Are you willing to die in prison as an innocent person in your willingness to oppose the death penalty?
TenguPhule
Ted Bundy.
TenguPhule
Fixed.
Josh Hueco
@colleeniem:
I can actually understand and appreciate an intelligent streak of libertarianism in those who work for the federal government. Something along the lines of ‘If you knew what I see at work every day you’d be skeptical of the practical ability or moral authority of the government to do the things it does.’
TenguPhule
If we’re going into Hypotheticals then hypothetically all 100 people would either already be dead in prison or will die in prison after suffering years of torment for a crime they did not commit.
Because a ban on the death penalty would not mean they “live their lives in freedom” and I must respectfully call bullshit on your trying to claim so.
InflatableCommenter
@TenguPhule:
WTF does that mean? If anything.
TenguPhule
If the state can legally lock you up until you die, it can legally execute you.
InflatableCommenter
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
Why should we be respectful? Maybe more cat threads and favorite wine threads are what you desire?
I personally think that BJ is way too congeniaL. Frank discussion of thorny topics is rough verbal trade on the intertubenets, and always has been, and that’s the way it should be.
TenguPhule
Exactly what it says.
Are you willing to be the innocent person imprisoned for life, with no possibility of parole, to oppose the death penalty?
InflatableCommenter
@TenguPhule:
The two things are hardly comparable. Dead is more or less an irreversible condition, so being executed by the state is not just the short version of life imprisonment.
Some things are so fucking obvious that it actually hurts to have to type them for the benefit of the people who can’t seem to get them.
If you are going to argue the asinine view that life sentence is the equivalent of death penalty, just longer, then we should immediately execute all the people under life sentence both for humane reasons and to save money.
Right? Or are you just doing another round of Funny But Not Ha Ha Hawaiian Justice today?
Come on, two verses of My Little Grass Shack, whaddya say?
InflatableCommenter
@TenguPhule:
Fuck you, man. You are a fucking idiot.
I can’t lower myself to that level of deliberate stupidity.
It’s not that late in Hawaii, are you drunk already at this hour?
Seriously.
Don K
I consider myself pretty libertarianish, and I oppose the death penalty precisely because I don’t trust the government to get it right in every instance, and getting it wrong, even once, is unacceptable to me.
There are too many cops who just want to find a perp, any perp, and too many prosecutors who want another notch on their belts so they can run for AG with a tough on crime record, and too many judges who view themselves as an arm of the prosecution. Witnesses can be pressured, and evidence can be hidden, to railroad an innocent man.
I’m proud that my state of residence, Michigan, was the first English-speaking jurisdiction in the world to abolish the death penalty, in 1847, and that there has been no serious effort, even in the anti-crime frenzy of the 70’s and 80’s, to re-establish it here. It only takes 380,000 valid signatures to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot, and death penalty advocates have never reached even that threshold.
lee
@MikeJ
Actually in this last election there was a significant move to the Democratic party by libertarians (me being one).
@Bill E Pilgrim
You should keep reading what he has written about Sotom. He is posting stories as he comes across them. Some he agrees with, some he does not.
If you think you are going to agree with every decision she has made in the 15+ years on the bench, you are not being intellectually honest.
Laura W
@InflatableCommenter:
Why are you always hating on the cats and the wine?
Why don’t you start bitching about dogs and cruciferous vegetables just to spread the love around a little.
HUH?
noncarborundum
@Bill E Pilgrim:
You’re right about everything in this paragraph except your suggestion that I was implying that “under pain of death” refers to pain in the sense of suffering. Of course it doesn’t, but I didn’t imply that it does. My phrase was not “under pain of death”, but rather “the pain of death”, shorthand for John Yoo’s “the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”. I imagined that your comment about how the French phrase sounds was based on this literal-sense interpretation of “pain of death”, not the legalese one.
TenguPhule
Exactly.
Brachiator
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
So, are you against prisons? Would you just want to give a murderer a time-out?
We, as a people, as a state, give the police the power to kill, if necessary, to protect themselves and to protect us. That’s pretty godlike. Are you against this?
Or do we say that we realize that we sometimes must unleash death, but try to make these decisions as wisely as we can.
OK. But my point here is that some people, in the name of mercy or something, are willing to ignore a previously imposed life sentence. There is a newly developing consensus that the possibility of parole should apply to all crimes, including murder.
Unless they can bring a murder victim back to life, atonement is cold comfort. While enlightenment might have some self-esteem value, I don’t see it as relevant to issues of justice. I find this as empty as the claim that if a murderer finds Jesus, then this somehow nullifies the crime that was committed.
JR
@Brachiator: Couple of things.
To be fair, if someone really believes our prison system should at least try to rehabilitate everyone, it makes sense to preserve the ultimate (secular) reward as a carrot. It’s like the rehabilitative antipode to the punitive idea that we should keep the death penalty on the books so prosecutors have it as a bargaining chip in plea negotiations (“If you ‘fess up now, Vinnie, we’ll take the Chair off the table.”).
I won’t speak for someone else, but I read the point to be that whether or not we give the government the power to kill those of us it deems through its own processes to be condemnable, or to use exile to a gulag as a substitute for incarceration in a monitored prison with Constitutional protections. Incarcerating someone isn’t God-like: banishment and smiting both are.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@TenguPhule:
Not everyone who kills is Ted Bundy. But your misanthropy is duly noted.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@TenguPhule:
If by “Fixed” you mean “Trolled,” then yes. Are you serious, or are you just fucking around here? Do you know anything about Supermax prisons?
Nevermind. On reading the rest of your comments, you’re trolling. “Life in prison = death penalty” is the trolliest thing ever. Well, I guess you could go even more extreme, and say “90 days in prison = death penalty,” but that would blow whatever cover you have left.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Brachiator:
Essentially, that’s what prison is. A time-out. For the rest of your life.
The police are only allowed to kill in self-defense or in defense of others. There’s no assumed infallibility, and there’s no due process to give it the illusion of justice. Same with soldiers in wartime- they’re allowed to make mistakes and dump white phosphorus on the occasional Iraqi baby. It’s got nothing to do with a system of justice.
Deadly force in the context of the legal system has nothing to do with your examples. It presumes an infallibility of which a perusal of the Innocence Project website would quickly disabuse you.
Well, it depends on the murder. Obviously, I don’t support life without parole in ALL cases of murder, that would be ridiculous. But the most extreme cases deserve that. Name one person who thinks Ted Bundy should’ve gotten parole.
Well, legal lynching is cold comfort, too. And just doesn’t consist of using the courts as the private vengeance machine of the victims. A duty is owed to society at large. The death penalty is an usurpation of a power the government should not have.
I don’t care about their self-esteem. I care about their capacity to be decent people, even in some forgotten dungeon where the rest of the world has left them to rot. There’s still capacity to be a good person, even if the only people who will ever know about it are a couple of guards and a few fellow lifers.
Well, if you’d stop constructing strawmen and open your mind to the possibility that human life is worth redeeming and saving for purposes of benefitting the rest of us in whatever small, unremarkable capacity, you’d see where I’m coming from. Or, we could just execute everybody, in which case I don’t see much point in not executing more people than just murderers. We can go back to hanging 9-year-old pickpockets in the public square, if life’s not worth enough for its redemption to have any value.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@InflatableCommenter:
I just don’t want John to kill me, is all.
Shamash
I’m not really sure how the following statement:
“Since there is no way to verify that all the men we execute are in fact guilty, it would seem to me you would not support the death penalty.”
is conceptually any different than:
“Since there is no way to verify that all the men we lock up for life are in fact guilty, it would seem to me you would not support life imprisonment.”
The only difference is that if vindicated later, you are only stealing part of their life instead of all of it. If there is a anti-death penalty argument to be made here (and there is), that quoted statement does not do anything to advance it.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Shamash:
Well, you just stole 2 minutes of my life. I’d gladly lose that over the rest of it, though.
If you can’t see the difference between losing part of your life versus all of it, there’s no reasoning with you.