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Comment by embedding-shape

2 hours ago

Hot take, but I feel like no humans should be killed as a punishment... But I'm also probably too European to understand the true value of death penalty.

11 comments

embedding-shape

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boredumb  41 minutes ago

If someone kills a family member and the court gives them 6 years and a parole officer, the remaining family will and has taken justice into their own hands and that has a much higher blast radius and margin of error than executing a guy convicted of the murder in a court of law and sat on death row making appeals for 10-15 years.

If dylan roof was allowed to live his full natural life in jail, there would be race riots in the US by the end of the press conference.

  • embedding-shape  39 minutes ago

    Cool, maybe rather than aiming to punish people, aim to rehabilitate them, and they don't need to spend their full natural life in jail. And if they're "unsalvageable" like many would claim, we (maybe not you, in the US, I dunno) have hospitals for those that are ill.

Sohcahtoa82  1 hour ago

I'm only against the death penalty for the simple fact that courts have convicted innocent people. Sometimes, that conviction happens when the court actively blocks exonerating evidence.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/284/

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/547/319/

  • OkayPhysicist  1 hour ago

    Anybody who is wrongfully executed was basically guaranteed to spend their entire life in prison. Death row inmates get dramatically more access to legal aid than anybody else rotting in a cell, so if they couldn't win their appeal, the guy doing life isn't, either.

    Generally, I'm against incarceration for that reason. I think the relatively muted violence of it is too easy to stomach for the public, which leads to people letting the system get sloppy. For public and infamous crimes, however, where the question is not "what act took place", but rather "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what is the punishment?"-type cases, I'm perfectly fine with capital punishment being on the table. We trust public officials with significant authority, and abuse of that authority is utterly irredeemable. Frankly, for elected officials I'd support a "two-thirds vote and you hang" policy. If you want power, and seek out power, you have an immense responsibility to live up to your constituent's expectations.

    • cortesoft  25 minutes ago

      That isn’t true. There have been death row inmates exonerated, both before and after their execution.

      The ones that were executed would have been alive for the exoneration if we they had been given life in prison instead.

    • embedding-shape  42 minutes ago

      > "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what is the punishment?"

      I guess that last part is the perspective I'd change, for a more compassionate world. I'd much rather ask "did this act constitute a crime, and if so, what made the person commit that crime, and how can we help them not do that in the future again?".

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CamperBob2  1 hour ago

It's a uniquely-American perspective: "Our government can't do anything right. But hey, I still trust it to kill the right people."