The death penalty

[Unicron]

This comes up sometimes on TBBS, and it's interesting to read the discussions. Do you think the DP is a potentially valid punishment or not? I'm somewhat on the fence myself, but I do think there are certain severe crimes where it might be viable versus a lesser punishment. One of the most common arguments I see against the DP is that it gives the government too much power, and it's mainly an act of revenge. But I don't think this reflects the reality of how the penalty is normally applied, since life without parole is still a death sentence and revenge implies the government would choose the strongest penalty for a lesser crime, just because it can. And the right to imprison criminals could be criticized by the same standards.

Others have said the government shouldn't allow something like the DP because the wrong person might be convicted, and you cannot undo that person's death. There's some truth to that argument, as it's never a good thing when the system screws up. But it does screw up occasionally because we're human, and there may yet be many people in prison who are not truly guilty. Should the government just stop running prisons to avoid these mistakes? Is it any less harmful for an innocent person to be sentenced to LWP and wind up dying in prison?

[RJDiogenes]

Well, it's better to let an innocent person out of jail than to just say sorry to his family.

I'm generally against the death penalty on general principles. There are certain serious offenders that society would be better off without, certainly, but all of them suffer from extreme mental illness; their debt to society would be much better served by being studied, so that we can learn more about spotting, treating and preventing their conditions.

Also, there is the risk that the death penalty would be applied for economic reasons; it's cheaper to kill someone than it is to house them. That's not something we should be doing, either.

[Unicron]

Are they necessarily mentally ill, though, or do some of them just lack a conscience and don't care about the harm they do? I do think we should rehabilitate individuals when we can, and definitely when they are aware of the gravity of their offenses. Even if they can't be released, if they make some effort to atone for their crimes and mistakes, that's a good thing. But there are certainly those who cannot be rehabilitated. Generally, if I had to make one argument for the DP actually being a deterrant, I've used the Nuremburg trials as an example. We executed a number of Nazi leaders to make it clear that what they did will never be allowed to happen again, and because no lesser sentence would fit their crimes.

[RJDiogenes]

Well, if someone lacks an conscience and cares nothing for Human life, I would call that mental illness. There has to be a reason for it. Hopefully, that reason could be found and future cases spotted, prevented or treated.

[Gary]

Oh goody, my first (well second) post and a topic that proves very interesting and controversial.

First, I am from a somewhat Conservative background raised where I HAD to attend Church every Sunday. Taking those two facets into consideration, I was an ardent supporter of the Death Penalty. Key Word: WAS. In the last two years my stance has changed on the topic due to wisdom that has accumulated with age, completing an introductory course in Philosophy for my degree, and interaction with someone who had a relative wrongly imprisoned for 15 years for rape.

Reasons why I believe the Death Penalty is wrong:
There are no do overs. Once the convicted individual has been punished there can be no do over, no reset button -- nothing in the event he/she could be found innocent.

Americans are driven by revenge, and revenge is a very blinding emotion. All too often we believe that "Justice" is the equivalent of revenge. Someone *must pay* no matter the cost. We, as a society, demand that the DA, the police, and the Legal System find and punish the (more appropriately "a") guilty party. My co-worker's cousin was a victim of a blood-thirsty DA who sought to convict no matter the cost. Fortunately, it turned out that the expert chemist botched enough investigations that the FBI had the lab shut down and many people lost their jobs, while many more sentences and convictions were reviewed and/or thrown out.

Contrary to what many Death Penalty supporters want us to believe, it is not a deterrent. Most murders are committed by people who know their killer and are typically crimes of passion (not the romantic type, but I digress). Forensic evidence has come a long way in the last 20 years and we are now finding people who amazingly enough committed a murder years earlier, perhaps decades, who weren't considered suspect at the time of the crime. In some cases, another party was already tried, convicted, and put to death. See my earlier point on how this cannot be undone.

How can we, as a society, claim to value life while turning our heads to demand the lives of others be taken in the name of Justice? To me, that is very contradictory and reeks of playing God.

[RJDiogenes]

People can be very bloodthirsty (not just Americans). It freaks me out and depresses me to see how people hang around outside when there's an execution, as if it were a carnival.

You also touch upon another interesting point: Politics. There is a lot of pressure put on the cops, the DA, and whoever, to catch and convict, at least in high-profile cases-- for the sake of their jobs, they will catch and convict somebody, whether it's the right person or not.

[Lupine]

There's also massive public pressure, especially in the era of 24/7 news cycle when cases are essentially being tried on cable news shows. It's almost like a virtual lynch mob.

People can be very bloodthirsty (not just Americans). It freaks me out and depresses me to see how people hang around outside when there's an execution, as if it were a carnival.

Its been like that for quite a long time, the French Revolution being the most heinous example. But public hangings int he 1800s were pretty bad.

[RJDiogenes]

True. As bad as it can be now, it's still better than it used to be.

[gorzek]

I'm against the death penalty on the basis that it does not accomplish any of its purported goals.

It is not cheaper--it costs more to house death row inmates and execute them than it does to imprison them for life. It is not a deterrent--I've seen no compelling evidence that it reduces murder rates. It is also too error-prone, given the number of people on death row who get exonerated. One wonder just how many people didn't get exonerated that should've.

You can't bring a dead person back to life, obviously. If the person is exonerated, at least you can free them and pay them for the time they were locked up. It's not perfect, but it's better than trying to somehow make up for killing them.

I'm also of a mind that the state should not be in the business of killing its own people--ever. This is a power too great to leave to something as disorganized and depersonalized as the state.

[Unicron]

It is not cheaper--it costs more to house death row inmates and execute them than it does to imprison them for life. It is not a deterrent--I've seen no compelling evidence that it reduces murder rates. It is also too error-prone, given the number of people on death row who get exonerated. One wonder just how many people didn't get exonerated that should've.

It would seem to me, though I could be wrong, that a huge part of the expense issue comes from the system being managed poorly and not the actual cost of the execution itself. You have some people who, as you mention, should not be on death row to begin with, and others who have earned their place for crimes but run up a huge bill of appeals trying to get off on a lighter sentence. So I'd agree it is a valid issue.

I don't know enough about the situation to say exactly how well it works (or doesn't work) as a deterrent; one could argue that for some individuals, those who become career criminals and spend the better part of their lives in jail compared to out of it, they don't really care about being "punished." Life without parole is not necessarily a punishment for them.

You can't bring a dead person back to life, obviously. If the person is exonerated, at least you can free them and pay them for the time they were locked up. It's not perfect, but it's better than trying to somehow make up for killing them.

The question is, in a severe case of wrongful accusation (i.e. a person losing several decades for a wrong conviction), how does paying them undo the damage that's been done? If they lost the ability to watch their kids grow up, or if the last member of their family died while they were in prison and unavailable to support that person, can the state undo that harm? It's better than being dead clearly, but it's not like the person can just magically pick up where they left off either.

I'm also of a mind that the state should not be in the business of killing its own people--ever. This is a power too great to leave to something as disorganized and depersonalized as the state.

Then would you also say that the state should never have the power to wage war, since it has the authority to order troops to fight and die and it also manages all the intelligence services whose role is to determine threats? In short, because the state could theoretically launch a foreign war that gets its own side killed to further the ruler's goals, which may only be in their own self-interest? I'd be majorly concerned about that abuse of authority myself if I thought there was substantial evidence it were occurring, but I'm also not sure that any state could function without that degree of power to afford its citizens protection.

I'm mainly speculating on these things anyway.

[Gary]

Texas = FAIL. Wrong man was executed in Texas, probe says

Too bad this wasn't discovered sooner, so people could have thrown it in that idiot Rick Perry's face during the GOP debates, when he was so proud to brag that Texas has, and frequently carries out, the Death Penalty.

He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.

Even "all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them," and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.

Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is "emblematic" of legal system failure.

DeLuna, 27, was put to death after "a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure," Liebman said.

The report's authors found "numerous missteps, missed clues and missed opportunities that let authorities prosecute Carlos DeLuna for the crime of murder, despite evidence not only that he did not commit the crime but that another individual, Carlos Hernandez, did," the 780-page investigation found.

The report, entitled "Los Tocayos Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution," traces the facts surrounding the February 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez, a single mother who was stabbed in the gas station where she worked in a quiet corner of the Texas coastal city of Corpus Christi.

"Everything went wrong in this case," Liebman said.

That night Lopez called police for help twice to protect her from an individual with a switchblade.

"They could have saved her, they said 'we made this arrest immediately' to overcome the embarrassment," Liebman said.

Forty minutes after the crime Carlos DeLuna was arrested not far from the gas station.

He was identified by only one eyewitness who saw a Hispanic male running from the gas station. But DeLuna had just shaved and was wearing a white dress shirt -- unlike the killer, who an eyewitness said had a mustache and was wearing a grey flannel shirt.

Even though witnesses accounts were contradictory -- the killer was seen fleeing towards the north, while DeLuna was caught in the east -- DeLuna was arrested.

"I didn't do it, but I know who did," DeLuna said at the time, saying that he saw Carlos Hernandez entering the service station.

DeLuna said he ran from police because he was on parole and had been drinking.

Hernandez, known for using a blade in his attacks, was later jailed for murdering a woman with the same knife. But in the trial, the lead prosecutor told the jury that Hernandez was nothing but a "phantom" of DeLuna's imagination.

DeLuna's budget attorney even said that it was probable that Carlos Hernandez never existed.

However in 1986 a local newspaper published a photograph of Hernandez in an article on the DeLuna case, Liebman said.

Following hasty trial DeLuna was executed by lethal injection in 1989.

Up to the day he died in prison of cirrhosis of the liver, Hernandez repeatedly admitted to murdering Wanda Lopez, Liebman said.

"Unfortunately, the flaws in the system that wrongfully convicted and executed DeLuna -- faulty eyewitness testimony, shoddy legal representation and prosecutorial misconduct -- continue to send innocent men to their death today," read a statement that accompanies the report.

[Lupine]

I'm really surprised that this didn't come out under Appeal . But then again I'm surprised that the jury convicted under these circumstances.

[RJDiogenes]

A lot of things happen in Texas that boggle the mind. What kind of people brag about executions?

[Sean]

^Texans.

Personally I am in favor of the Death Penalty. Not because I believe in the concept of an eye for an eye perse, but because I believe that there are certain crimes worthy of a punishment beyond that of a life's incarceration in a supposedly "reformatory" prison. The level that is beyond not being able to live a free life up until your dying day, is, logically, not being able to live at all. And more importantly, living the remaining days of that life knowing that there is a set end to it. It's as much a psychological punishment as a physical one, at least for those mentally sound enough to grasp it.

That said I don't think it should be issued as liberally as it is in...well, Texas, but I do fully support its existence.

[Lupine]

^That's mostly my view. The death penalty should only be used in the most extreme cases.