If the person goes to prison for the rest of their lives, it will keep society safe from them either way. The death penalty is not making society safer.

[+] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org -6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is a deterrent. For instance, we wouldn't have insurrectionists working in the highest levels of government if we actually had effective laws and enforcement.

[–] lenz@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It has been found that the greatest deterrent is “likelihood of getting caught”, and not the actual penalty. Think of the war on drugs. No matter how harsh they made the consequences, the drug trade continued. It’s like this: how likely are you to return a wallet you found to a lost and found if a cop was watching you, versus if you were out in the middle of the woods when you found the wallet?

It doesn’t matter if the penalty for not returning the wallet is death. If the likelihood of you getting caught is tiny enough, you will feel less terrified of playing those odds. Or at least, the average person will.

The death penalty isn’t a deterrent if you’re certain it will never apply to you.

[–] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think your logic is flawed. Obviously the death penalty is a serious deterrent. It's not going to stop everybody, but it will most certainly stop many people.

[–] lenz@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I disagree that the deterrence would be significant enough to justify the death penalty. But I don’t think our disagreement matters. Even assuming what you say is true, it’s not worth the lives of the innocent people who will be found guilty and executed, in my opinion. I also think it’s a bad idea to give the government the power to kill its own citizens. So even if you are correct, I have other objections that outweigh the potential deterrence factor.

[–] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm just talking about deterrence, it was obvious that you were reaching tenuous conclusions based on your dislike of the death penalty.

[–] lenz@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

What about what I said was tenuous? Did you think I said the death penalty held no power to deter? I made no claims about that. I suggest you reread what I said, if that’s what you think.

I merely pointed out that the greatest deterrence comes from the likelihood of being caught, not from the severity of the punishment itself. This is the popular view. Here’s an article from the National Institute of Justice about it, with sources cited at the bottom: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence (Points 1, 4, and 5 may be of particular interest to you.)

This Wikipedia article may also interest you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)

The reason I make no claims (and disagree with you) about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent is because there is no body of evidence supporting either view. You seem convinced that the death penalty is an effective deterrent on your instinct alone. I am uncertain how I am the one reaching tenuous conclusions here, lol.

[–] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Wow

[+] HelixDab2@lemm.ee -10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

People in maximum security prisons can, and do, escape. Sometimes the commit more violent crimes once they escape. A malicious governor can, in most states, pardon any person they want, and there's no legal recourse. (In my state, the governor does not have the legal power to pardon a person until they've served at least 6 (?) years, and have been recommended by the parole board.)

On the other hand, people don't get raised from the dead, no one gets resurrected, and there's no reincarnation. Dead is dead, and is as safe to society as is possible.

The death penalty is certainly over-used, and applied in cases where it's not likely necessary, but I absolutely, 100% believe that people like e.g., Gary Ridgeway should be executed as quickly as is possible.

[–] MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Point about escaping/pardon. I acknowledge that society is ever so slightly safer when exceptionally dangerous criminals are executed.

About the risk of being pardoned by a malicious state, it's true... But the other way could also be true that a malicious state can execute people who don't deserve to be executed, like Snowden... Perhaps a compromise is to make particularly heinous crimes unpardonable? That would be a decent alternative to the death penalty, and it would be very difficult to repeal such a law.

As for escaping prison, it's already rare that someone escapes from it. The solution is making better high security prisons for the most violent and dangerous criminals. I think it's definitely possible to make escaping so difficult and dangerous that it wouldn't be a problem. Make a prison on an island or an old oil rig, implants to track the prisoner's location (a fancier version of the anti-theft tags in clothing stores), random X-rays to check they don't have anything hidden in their bodies. All of these are definitely better than executing someone, though personally I think that maximum security prison breaks are already so rare it wouldn't be worth it.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Remember that people did escape from Alcatraz. And Devil's Island, IIRC. Never underestimate the ingenuity of prisoners that really, really don't want to be prisoners.

I think that the death penalty should be used in extremely limited cases, cases where there's not even a shadow of a doubt about guilt, and where the person has committed multiple heinous crimes spanning a period of time (say, >1 year). So a simple mass murderer wouldn't be eligible, but a serial child rapist would be. You'd also need to have forensic evidence that at a minimum cleared the Daubert standard, and you'd have to exclude forensic evidence that relied on standards that hadn't been published and peer-reviewed. So DNA and fingerprints would be in, but forensic bite impression analysis would be very definitely out.

I think the evidentiary bar should be extremely high for death penalty cases. I think that it's currently mostly applied to people that don't have enough money to get better legal counsel.

I would also say that convicted people should be able to request the death penalty rather than life without parole. I can't speak for anyone else, but if I had the choice between decades in prison, or being summarily executed, I'd take execution.

[–] MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Yes, people do escape, but it's extremely rare. I'm far more worried about the state having the legal power to execute someone than an individual escaping from prison.

Also, giving the prisoner the choice to either be executed or imprisoned for life would give an incentive for the operators of the prisons to treat their prisoners even worse so prisoners would choose to be executed.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The risk of me getting wrongfully convicted of something and getting a death sentence is higher than the chance of some dangerous murder escaping prison and hurting me.

Unfortunately being absolutely 100% certain is not a luxury we have in the majority of cases. People are framed, new evidence comes up, things like lie detectors and blood splatter analysis turn out to be junk science. Life in prison can get overturned and corrected if mistakes were made, death can't.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee -5 points 1 year ago

I think that you can make it much, much more difficult to get a wrongful conviction in a case that's eligible for the death penalty though. I think that, for starters, all interactions with police should require video and audio, so that suspects can't be coercively questioned for 16 hours without an attorney before signing a "confession". I think any claimed evidence should have to have standards that were published, peer-reviewed, and repeatable before they could use it. And I think that crimes eligible for an imposed death penalty should have to take place over a period of time, rather than a single event. E.g., a robbery/murder shouldn't get the death penalty, but (per an earlier comment I made) a serial child rapist should. I would even say that you should be absolutely required to have forensic evidence in order to get a death penalty conviction; I believe that most exonerations were for convictions that relied on witness testimony, official misconduct, and coerced confessions, usually combined with an overworked and ineffective defense attorney.

I dunno; even the possibility of someone like Ed Kemper ever getting out--like if he ever tells the parole board that he thinks he's finally safe--is terrifying.