Nobel Prize vs Proof that the Death Penalty MUST kill innocents

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Again, I am baffled at why my opponents on this wish to use such hyperbolic commentary. No, actually the systems which would be in place would not be "perfect" in the sense that you just used it. As you suggest, nothing is perfect.

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A "perfect" criminal justice system which includes the death penalty is one in which we can know, with 100% accuracy, that we will never put an innocent person to death.

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A perfect system which included a death penalty would not only not execute any innocent people,it would always convict the absolutely guilty.

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How would it be guaranteed to do this 100% of the time?

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In devising rules to protect innocents from ever possibly being executed, one will naturally increase the probability that some absolutely guilty people may not be eligible for the death penalty.

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Yes.

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This is really a spectrum. At one end we can have a system where absolutely no one is executed and so no innocents could be, yet people that ought to be are not. At the other end is where executions are routine and we kill all those that ought to be, but also all those who are innocent.

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We can move to a point on that spectrum, building necessary criteria for imposition of the death penalty using types/levels of evidence, such that while we are still likely to not kill all those that ought to be killed, we are wholly unable to kill anyone that is innocent.

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If your "spectrum" metaphor is to be taken literally, there is no such stopping point.If one end is black, and the other is white, there is nothing but gray in between.

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Subjectivity is a problem as well as fallibility. Thus any case which hinges on circumstantial evidence, eye witness testimony (without other physical means of corroboration and/or challenged by the accused), and lines of physical evidence which are not conclusive (such as simple blood type match), would not be available for application of the death penalty.

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We can certainly create a system that can figure out in certain cases if a person is in no way innocent.

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In certain cases, yes.That has nothing to do with the application of a system.You still haven't shown me the 100% foolproof criterion which would always protect an innocent person from being killed by the state.For instance, how do you protect innocent people from political pressure being put on the DA and the cops to convict them? How do you protect them from racism or bias in juries?

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That will not be true in all cases, for which the death penalty cannot apply. But there can be stringent rules based on types/level of evidence such that absolute guilt of the party is assured.

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Such as?Remember, there is no room for error. The system and criterion must be such that it is impossible for an innocent person to be wrongly found guilty. Each person along the chain must never make a mistake or be susceptible to bias or bribe.

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I also care about a system that would possibly put an innocent person to death. That is why it is a continued insult to hear people tell me I must be for innocent people dying as they assert an adequate system cannot be achieved. That is simply the argument from ignorance, and in this case quite willful ignorance.

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I am willfully ignorant of a criminal justice system which inclides the death penalty, yet is 100% guaranteed to never execute an innocent person?Well, I've been asking you to lay out the details of this system, but I haven't really seen it. All I've heard is that we "could" do it.Well, OK, maybe we can, but until such a perfect system exists and can be demonstrated to be 100% reliable in every case, I don't think we should risk any innocent lives.

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A person opens fire in a crowd killing scores of people. His actions are caught on video tape and backed up by several survivors of the incident. The person was eventually caught at, or near, the scene of the crime with the murder weapon on his person as well as evidence from the crime scene (blood from the victims). And on top of that the person willingly confesses to the crime.

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Can we be 100% sure of this persons guilt or not? Honestly.

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That's not a system.

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If we had a system that demanded at least three non related witnesses (thus no friends or family)

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Witnesses are notoriously unreliable, especially in high-stress situations. They can lie or be mistaken.

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corroborating physical evidence of an unquestionably untampered nature

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Since multiple people would be handling this evidence, how can we know for 100% sure in every single case that the evidence hasn't been tampered with?

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and clear identification (video plus weapons and video match) and having caught the suspect in the act or fleeing from the act, plus a confession

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Confessions can be coerced, someone "catching them in the act" is a witness, and witnesses are generally unreliable.

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... would that be good enough to remove any possibility of innocents being killed?

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Not unless the dozens, possibly hundreds of people involved in every single case in which the death penalty would be applied can be guaranteed to be 100% accurate and flawless in every single thing they see and do.

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Indeed, necessitating confession alone (one which is not disputed by the defendant), would tend to remove all but "innocent" suicides.

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Confessions can be coerced. There are many clear documented examples of this.

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Heheheh... in a way I was using the 100% certainty as a trap, thankfully handed to me by someone else. Life is not able to be calculated like that.

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Right. And that's why we should realize that, because we cannot be sure that every single element of every single death penalty case is accurate and flawless, the state should not be putting people to death. I don't think you have demonstrated that my scenarios are highly improbable or illogical.The point is, many, many innocent people have been executed simply because individual people made mistakes, for example, or we didn't have the forensic technology or the understanding of psychology that we do today.We used to place huge importance upon eyewitness testimony, but now we know that it is generally not very accurate. We used to not have DNA analysis available to us, but now we do, and people who have been identified by victims as their attacker have been exonerated by that DNA evidence.How you think that somehow human error can be eliminated from a human run system I just do not understand.

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For a person as hard on creos regarding plausibility versus possibility as I am, you sure are dipping your hand into the bottom of their barrel as freely and as often as they do. No, it really isn't "plausible" that Dahmer was innocent. How could it be?

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The only physically possible scenario is if he and the police and the media and some of the victims (including the one who escaped to alert police) were all in on a plot (and remember which Dahmer wanted) to frame him for the murders of all those missing people.

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But we aren't talking about Dahmer.We aren't talking about individual cases.We are talking about a system which is to be applied to all cases.

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That's funny. I thought it was your bold claim that humans cannot make anything that is capable of doing what it is designed to do, with failsafes designed to trade off absolute functionality for absolute security.

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Well, clearly any criminal justice system in existence today which includes the death penalty has, in fact, executed innocent people.

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Other than an argument from ignorance, equivocation, ad hominem, and guilt by association, I have yet to see any argument at all, least of all a logically sound argument why use of the death penalty inherently means innocent people will be executed.

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The current systems in place execute innocent people.Show me one which makes it impossible, and I'll change my mind.

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But don't worry, I'll slowly help everyone figure out some plausible systems. After all I don't want to be greedy and hog the Nobel Prize all to myself.

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Can't wait to see it.

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If so, if we created a system of evidentiary rules excluding the death penalty outside of cases with all of this evidence together, would we not have a system capable of executing only guilty parties?

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The system needs to be able to apply to all cases, not just your scenario.Anyway, go ahead, show us the system.

This man (who was a police officer) was convicted and served 20 years in prison for something he was wholly innocent of. He confessed after being basically brainwashed by interrogation tactics. By the time he realized what had happened, it was too late to reverse his plea.There were probably hundreds of people involved in this case. Good people who wanted to do the right thing, yet all of them were completely wrong. Even after it was clear that the entire story was a fabrication that came out of the daughter's "recovered memory of abuse" therapy and his own delusion, he was not released from prison.There was never any physical evidence.What if he had been sentenced to death?This is the kind of thing people do. This is what human run systems end up doing to people sometimes. It's in extreme case, but it did actually happen.The This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-12-2005 10:07 AM

Holmes, I'd like to get back to my parallel between the application of the death penalty and tentativity in science.To me, it's so clear.The reason we do not say that science can give us perfect knowledge is because humans are not perfect or omnicient, therefore we can never have 100% certain, absolute proof that any scientific theory is correct.Likewise, the criminal justice system cannot provide us with perfect knowledge because humans are not perfect or omnicient, therefore we can never have 100% certain, absolute proof that any conviction is deserved and correct.Science is able to correct past errors by changing it's theories to reflect new evidence. No matter how correct we think we are now, new evidence could come to light which shows us to have been mistaken.The criminal justice system is able to correct past errors by releasing prisoners wrongly convicted if new evidence comes to light which shows that the conviction was wrong. No matter how right we thought we were about some people's guilt, there could be some evidence(like when DNA analysis first came along) which shows us to have been mistaken.However, if we kill people as a punishment, we have no chance at all to correct the error in any way other than "for the record". We cannot really "correct" the error, because the error was in killing them for something they didn't do.Why do you believe that we should do away with tentativity in the criminal justice system at any point?Don't you want to be able to give yourself as much ability to get it right as possible?

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A man at a public event begins shooting people. There is live national coverage of the massacre in progress. The police capture him on camera and take off his mask. He yells his name and that he wants to kill everyone there.

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Are those your specific criteria for the entire system, or is this a specific, single scenario?You can list all of the scenarios you want, but what you originally claimed was that a system could be developed which could be applied to all scenarios.

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To fake all of the above, plan it out beforehand, and then play it out in real time so that on top of the physical evidence discovered on scene, one can have multiple witness testimony (not just statements), and a confession that the accused agrees with, is ludicrous.

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But one, or several of the above can be tained or false.How will you be assured that all of them, in all cases not just this one, will be accurate and reliable?

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Your position is that something is IMPOSSIBLE because of the existence of human error.

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Is perfect, error free knowledge by humans possible?

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Unfortunately it is NOT IMPOSSIBLE, indeed it is PATENTLY NOT IMPOSSIBLE because you can make claims to knowledge in specific cases.

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Perfect knowledge is not possible.That's why we must be tentative regarding the death penalty, because we cannot correct it if we put someone to death by mistake.

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Therefore you can devise rules based on criteria which must be met for that knowledge and thus remove any possibility that a person being executed might have been innocent.

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Go ahead, start listing the criteria which we can be certian will be applied without bias or error every single time.

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And no I am not going to simply set out one system, as there may be more than one. What I want to do is show you that you can do it if you think about it honestly.

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But I don't think that an error-free system is possible.It's you who thinks that it is.So show me an error-free system and I'll change my mind.Hell, I would settle for single case which you are 99.9% sure that the hundreds of people involved were error free.

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I am not going to change this, especially for a person who only asserts and does not offer an actual argument why it must be impossible.

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Humans make errors.That's why it isn't possible.

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No, you apparently did not understand the analogy. It was not a spectrum of innocent people not being killed to all innocent people being killed. It was a spectrum of the trade offs. There will be a point where you still have no innocents killed, yet not all guilty people executed.

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OK, well, what point on the spectrum is that, exactly?Actually, how do you even know that such a point exists?

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I am discussing the creation of a system. You must start with specific certain cases, in order to create rules. That is what I tried to do and you have treated it rather badly. You didn't even try.

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Why is it my job to come up with the rules for your system?You have done nothing but bring up specific hypothetical cases that have been rather outlandish, unlikely scenarios. Furthermore, you have yet to show that any link in the chain of people involved in the case couldn't be biased or bribed, or incompetent, or in error, or sloppy, etc.

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Should I take this as an admission you agree with me? I already said systems need to be reformed, and that I am totally for suspending executions until reformation takes place. Neither have you ever seen me claim an adequate system has been in place.

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What reforms could possibly be made which would completely and in all cases eliminate all human error and bias?

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Yes, you can create an adequate system. It is not just theoretically possible, but practically possible. It may not end up being applied very often, but I did not argue that it had to be.

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The system must be implemented in every single case in order to decide if someone deserves the death penalty or not, correct? Did you insead mean that the death penalty, if these as-yet-unknown strict criteria are applied, will seldom be implemented?

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We are discussing the level of evidence to prove a causative connection. That is did A cause B? Outside of the molecular level or at great distances (time or space) we can accept evidence of causation pretty commonly.

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"Causal relationships".You mean, "theories"?Are you saying that the principle of tentativity does not apply to non-quantum cases?

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At this point you and contra are arguing we cannot in any way prove that the sun set at night, because it might have been a set up.

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Well, in science, we can't prove it.We can be quite sure, but we also have to be open to new evidence that shows us to be wrong, however unlikely it is.That's the principle of tentativity.I would like us to apply this tenet of tentativity to the criminal justice system, and especially WRT the death penalty.Once you've put someone to death, you cannot correct any error. Any new evidence that comes to light is completely moot once you have killed someone.Show me a criminal justice system that is and will always be free of human error and bias, and I'll change my mind on the death penalty.

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You are arguing to me that humans cannot devise a system which has failsafes, while at the same time pointing to one.

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Tentativity is a failsafe within science. Assigning "guilt" (which is the establishment of causation) can be tentative, but just as there are some things which move beyond tentative even in science, so goes it for the courts.

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No, nothing in science moves beyond tentativity, absolutely nothing.If it did, it would become dogma.There is nothing in science that we are not allowed to test, therefore it is all tentative. We don't hold any scientific theory as unassailable.

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How we achieved the "rules" of science is by looking at specific cases (usually hypotheticalsso we can exaggerate our knowledge) and asking questions to derive failsafe methods of assigning "knowledge".

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The only failsafe in science is tentativity.When new evidence comes forward which contradicts established theory, the theory changes to reflect the new evidence.If we didn't have tentativity, theories would become dogma, unable to be affected by new contradictory evidence.What you are suggesting is that at some point we allow the criminal justice system to say that we don't need to be tentative in cases where someone will lose their life as a punishment.

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This is where we continue the journey of developing criteria. Only the first point has to be accepted. In any of the cases do you accept them as cases of knowledge of guilt? Please let me know which one so we can proceed.

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Yes, we can have knowledge, but we can't have perfect knowledge. The principle of tentativity is our only failsafe against error, and putting someone to death based upon imperfect knowledge is not acceptable because we cannot go back and correct our error after they are already dead.

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Even if you could find that, it would still not be sufficient IMHO. Your reference to DNA evidence is a perfect example. In amny of those cases there was no human error, no bias but there was still a wrong decision.

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Well, actually, the DNA evidence corrects the human error.Obviously there was huge error, or bias, because an innocent person was accused and sent to jail.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-12-2005 12:18 PM

But the wrong person went to jail, or was put to death.A witness got it wrong, the cops got it wrong, the jurors got it wrong.Lots of people made errors which were corrected by the DNA evidence.They were probably honest mistakes, but they were still mistakes.

I love you, Crashfrog, with all my heart, for your magnificent participation in this thread.When I say, "I love you", it's in the platonic sense, as Zhimbo is standing behind me as I write this.

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For him it was that on top of all the evidence the "suspect" not only readily confesses, but actively wishes to have the death sentence imposed.

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Is that a level of evidence you are willing to accept?

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No.If we later find out all of that evidence was wrong, we can't take back the death penalty.Nothing is 100% proven, holmes, not even in science, and that is the sticking point we seem to have in this converstaion. As Gould says, even what we consider "facts" in science are accepted only provisionally, and I agree with that definition, while you, apparently, do not.When someone's life is on the line, I don't think we should have mere "provisional acceptance". I believe we need much more, which I don't think is possible, since humans are not omnicient.Show me how we can move beyond "provisional acceptance" of something as basic as a fact, as you seem to think that we can.Now, you may be comfortable with this level of uncertainty. I am not.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-14-2005 08:40 AM

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You cannot tell if Dahmer killed anyone? You cannot tell if Gould published papers on PE in support of ToE? You cannot theorize a hypothetical situation where you actually have knowledge of a murder?

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Sure, we can tell.But not with enough certainty to advocate a system that we would need to apply to every situation which uses tentative, provisional acceptance of facts and evidence as a means to determine if we are going to kill people or not.You, apparently, are comfortable with that level, however small, of uncertainty.I am not.Not when someone's life is on the line.

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Can you tell the difference between whether PE is how nature works, and whether Gould wrote papers on PE?

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Do you have a husband or boyfriend?

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I might bet my life on having the correct answers to those questions, but I wouldn't bet anyone else's life.Especially the second one. It just might be the case that through some strange technicality, my marriage license might not be valid and I don't know it. I could live my whole life like that and not realize it, but it wouldn't make it not true.Now, if someone's life was dependent upon my knowing The True Answer to the question "Do you have a husband?", and I answered "Yes", and we found out that I wasn't really married even though I thought that I was, that person would die.I'm not willing to take that risk with another person's life.Are you?

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Seems to me that the instances where it, the death penalty, would even be an option would be far and few between...good, and even then it would be finalized by maybe a panel of judges?

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But the judges could make a mistake, or be heavily biased, or able to be bribed, or racist, or whatever.