Return Capital Punishment - ReCaP

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For example, how can you be certain that violent crime is as low as you say if your source if information is the media?

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Because my source for that information isn't the media.I look at government law enforcement statistics and various other soures.

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Are you and others aware of what is happening in Guantanamo?

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As much as I can be. I cannot speak for others.

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Are you aware of the damage the Bush administration has done to our nation's reputation abroad?

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As much as I can be.

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The media usually obtain their crime statistic information from the federal government.

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This may be true, but you certainly do not see the media reporting that violent crime is at a 30 year low every other day, do you?In fact, I don't think that most local and national network news worries about national trends that much; they just report as many arsons, sensational murders, shootings, and kidnappings as possible because it keeps people watching.This gives the impression of crime being high.

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This may be true, but you certainly do not see the media reporting that violent crime is at a 30 year low every other day, do you?

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In my experience, it's usually once a year, when the annual statistics come out.

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In fact, I don't think that most local and national network news worries about national trends that much; they just report as many arsons, sensational murders, shootings, and kidnappings as possible because it keeps people watching.

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This gives the impression of crime being high.

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Which in turn, provides fuel for draconian anti-crime measures, including the death penalty.Since you asked directly in response to my post, I felt compelled to answer. However, IMO if you want me to disagree with you, you're going to have to post something substantially worse than the last several hundred I have read.

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Since you asked directly in response to my post, I felt compelled to answer. However, IMO if you want me to disagree with you, you're going to have to post something substantially worse than the last several hundred I have read.

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XXOO

Hi Omni,Let me start off by clarifying the purpose and perspective from which I'm discussing this topic. I'm trying to understand the types of policies and moral convictions under which capital punishment can make sense. I want to find out what systems are consistent with capital punishment and it's implementational details, and what systems are not consistent with capital punishment and it's implementational details. I'm not talking about my own morals, the current American judicial system, etc. You're right, but for your argument to work, you have to be right 100% of the time. Let's cut through the philosophical difference we have, and get straight to physical death. if a single man kills himself due to despair of being put in jail for life for a crime he did not commit, then life-terms have the same flaw as the death penalty--they kill innocent people. If our goal is to avoid killing innocent people with 100% accuracy, then I'd submit you can't ever be wrong--because doing so might directly lead to somebody to kill due to the despair.I just think this "100% accuracy" criterion is so short-sighted. Another example I had brought up previously is driving--we should get rid of driving, because innocent people die during driving. Since when was it an important criterion for ANYTHING that we guarantee 100% of innocent people do not die before doing it? You know somebody died (again) at Disney just a week or two ago... I agree wholeheartedly. I don't want to dismiss you or you experiences, but the problem is not that there aren't some people who CAN enjoy their lives after such experiences. It's that there EXISTS A SINGLE PERSON who was not able to. That's the criterion being layed out here for acceptance of capital punishment. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I am just trying to carry out the argument of "100% accuracy" to it's end. I don't think it's a reasonable criterion for anything. I wasn't suggesting that compensation replace a justice system--after all, you can't properly compensate without some method of agreeing upon the truth of the matter. And a failed justice system would be just as poor at doing that as it would at doling out justice in the first place.Mistakes occur. They occur in everything that we do. I believe we have a responsibility to compensate those who have suffered due to mistakes--not just to say that mistakes happen, so it's too bad you're unlucky. The only compensation that makes sense to me is monetary compensation. America doesn't deal in any shared spiritual, religious, or cultural currency besides money as far as I can tell. So I don't know what another option would be. I agree. To judge after-the-fact is not meaningful to me in this case; their perspective from their previous life has already been lost due to their jail term. The point is to judge from NOW.If I lost all my current goals in order to fight against a system that wronged me, I judge that as being used. My personal goals were taken away forceably, and they were replaced by something I could not really choose--to fight against a system that wronged me. It wasn't chosen--what other options really exist in the mind of a person in such a situation?And who benefits from the effort? The society as a whole, not the person who got screwed. They get no compensation, they work for us, and they don't get any real choice about it. It screams "used" to me. That is not what I meant to suggest. I meant to suggest that if one innocent killing is unacceptable in one situation, it should be so in all situations. We don't live by that criterion in our lives, and to impose it here seems completely artificial and unwarranted to me. I need somebody to tell me why the criterion is critical for the death penalty, but not for any other policy that we create. It was completely pulled out of my ass as a place to start conversation. But of course, you know that I agree that this is a problem, and I would say that for any system to suppor capital punishment, it MUST have a way to measure success and failure, and people MUST be willing to judge one another.And I agree with your point that the American judicial system fails on all counts. I would then agree that the America should not implement captial punishment in conjunction with the current policies and state of affairs.And just to finish things up, I would say that morality is not what we think, but what we do. We live in a system that I think is described in the three ways you listed. By NOT dropping everything and fighting the system, we're a part of it. And I believe that is our true morality. Not what we say or think, but what changes we've made to the system we say is "wrong".Thanks!
BenP.S. Please feel free to pick and choose what to respond to--this post is almost untenable in it's length.

Hi nwr,For some reason, you always seem to be able to catch my meaning. I think this was a good summary of my diluted words. [qs]I largely agree with Ben on this[qs] I'd be interested to here any point of contention, big or small.

I can't think of one.In particular, I agree with you that a long prison term ruins an innocent person's life just as surely as does the death penalty. We both see to be swimming against the current on that one.

Hi, Ben. My apologies again for the slow responses. I'm preparing for a surgical hospitalization in the near future, and there is a great deal of prep (and angst ) involved. My energies are not what they might be. As I'm sure you've noticed, that is not my project. I am constitutionally skeptical of placing life-and-death powers in the hands of the State. I have replied in previous posts as a partisan--which I am. I have no interest in elaborating structures, policy or rhetorical, that enable executions. But I will attempt to engage your points.Let me start by agreeing that "100% certainty" is a bit of a red herring: I object to the death penalty not because it makes rare errors, but because it is rife with error and abuse. A few posts back, I asked, rhetorically, what else you were absolutely sure of in order to dramatize the high level of moral certainty one would (presumably) require before executing another, but my critique and rejection of capital punishment does not stand or fall on the 100% doctrine. I recall the driving analogy from an earlier thread in which I did not participate. In my opinion, it does not hold up to logical or moral scrutiny.Drivers and passengers accept the risks involved in vehicular transport. While we do know a certain percentage of us will die as a result, we do not delegate a process to determine who those victims should be. Skill or its lack, weather, mechanical failures--all these factors determine the result: it is the lottery of possible death contained within all human activity. It is analogous to the ski slope, not to the court.The analogy would work only if we determined that some people MUST die for the driving system to function, AND devised a system to determine who those people should be--despite the fact that the traffic police both make errors and act corruptly, despite our knowledge that confessions are coerced, despite the evidence that prosecutors game the system in myriad ways, despite the unsafe vehicles produced by some manufacturers, and despite the research that has demonstrated eyewitness accounts to be unreliable.People will die while engaged in every human activity, but only the justice system claims the ability to determine who should die, based on an appraisal of guilt or innocence supported by a determination of what happened. I believe the appraisal and determination is too flawed to bear that weight.I agree that no human endeavor can be carried out will 100% accuracy, and for the most part I agree that that should be no bar to a specific endeavor. But taking a human life is not just any endeavor--it is not driving or pricing insurance or formulating undergraduate grades. It is a unique act, and I believe the standards of certainty should be uniquely high. While we may meet those high standards some day, we do not meet them now.I have observed a number of these debates. One maneuver on the pro-cap side in response to concerns about errors is to suggest that, in cases of absolute certainty--with a combination of eyewitnesses, strong forensic evidence, confessions--we should be able to proceed. The difficulty, of course, is that all these elements have been often falsely met: eyewitnesses lie or err, forensic evidence is planted or fabricated by police labs, confessions are coerced. We each, driver or passenger, hop into the risk pool of our own accord, and we do not mandate a flawed process to determine who should die. We do not apply the criterion of "no innocent deaths" in our daily activites because paralysis would result. We accept the possibility of fatal drug reactions when they are relatively rare, and the balancing good considerable. We permit seafood restaurants and peanut butter sandwiches even though some few individuals will suffer fatal food allergies as a result. We applaud risk-taking recreations--mountain climbing, skiing, scuba diving, hang gliding, etc.--even though they exact their toll. In each of these instances there is some benefit of liberty, economy, or well-being that balances the known price.For capital punishment to meet this standard, the benefit would need to be potent and clear, and not achievable by other, nonlethal means. The efficacy of capital punishment as an inhibition to other crimes is a debate all its own; suffice it to say that I do not think the case can be made that the effect is potent, clear, or unachievable by nonlethal means. Yup. Like I said, I'm a partisan. Good. It is tempting to obey Thoreau's mandate and throw one's body into the Machine--I did much of that decades ago and learned some hard lessons, among them that the struggle to change any system is long and difficult.From attempting to stop individual executions to overthrowing the entire machinery of State-sanctioned death, from ameliorating the social conditions that produce broken people to protecting the rest of us from them...these are all important battles and require partisans who are fully engaged."Dropping everything and fighting the system," unfortunately, is a romantic fancy that is no longer effective, if it ever was: only those engaged with the broader community on many fronts--political, economic, personal, social--can hope to make sustained effort and have real impact. One-issue obsessives are all too readily dismissed and defeated. We are, indeed, all parts of the system, not because we don't drop everything and fight, but because we cannot help but be, whatever we do. We are moral actors within the system not because of our failure to charge the trenches, but because we are human beings.Thanks for your patience, Ben, and your thoughtful replies. Edited by Omnivorous, : typo and double negative

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I'd agree that a life, innocent or not, is damaged by a long prison term--especially in the context of opposing long prison terms. But a life can still be much, despite that "ruin": think Mandela.

Mandela is a remarkable man. Few would be able to do as well as he did in such circumstances.

True. But few would be able to do so under any circumstances.