No one serves time for the imprisonment of and innocent man either. You are correct that there is some measure of injustice within our justice system, which rewards convictions and not necessarily justice.
I agree. Naturally, though, I'd be nervous about punishing prosecutors for overzealous prosecution, for fear of sending a chilling effect. Moreover the role of the prosecutor is not to make official findings of facts, but to bring indictments where they feel they are justified. Fact-finding is a role of the courts. If an innocent man goes to jail, it was the fault of the jury, not the prosecutor.
What would you think about the idea of expert juries?
There are errors within the facts and the logic.
There are not. I dismissed your "arguments" because they're
prima fascie ridiculous, and contradicted by fact. I've given you the framework I use to determine which outcome is the greatest moral outrage; you may value outrages differently than I do, which is your perogative. But the idea that there could be a "flaw" in what is essentially a simple comparison of outrages is risible on the face of it.
One outcome is a greater outrage to me than another. To suggest then that there's a "flaw" in reasoning that we should adopt the outcome that leads to the smaller of the two outrages is simply nonsense.
I think you may be equivocating between imprisoning and punishing. Being fined is still a punishment... or how about simple house arrest?
I'm not equivocating. The outrage is not that the criminal was not punished at all, it's that he was punished to a lesser degree than his crime justly deserves.
I'm fully aware that alternatives to imprisonment exist. Like a reasonable person I see these alternatives on a continuum of severity, like so:
1) execution by torture
2) painless execution
3) maiming
4) imprisonment
5) house arrest
6) seizure of property
Obviously, there are other things that could go on this list; it's not an exhaustive example.
It doesn't seem to me that "the outrage of a lesser sentence than is deserved is much less then the outrage of imprisonment when it is not deserved" is inconsistent with the logic you are using... unless you are going to be arbitrary.
It doesn't seem to me that it's inconsistent, either. I'm glad we agree.
Yeah, even killers asking to be killed exists.
Sure. But even innocent people who wish to commit suicide exist. And people who confess to crimes they did not commit, and never recanted, exist. And people who are willing, even eager, to die in the place of another exist.
What's your point? You responded to a claim that "we can never have the elimination of all doubt" with a situation of "but what if we had a situation of no doubt, plus a confession?" It's kind of a strawman, but we'll go with it. Yes, in such a situation, the death penalty could be justly administered. But such a situation, by definition, will never be present, so you've come over to my side - a practical ban on the administration of the death penalty.
People stopped arguing with you because you, obliquely, came over to their side.
We can set a boundary on implausibility of explanation such that it is only possible in an absurdly theoretical world that a person is innocent.
How do we test our boundary? How do we know that the universe we live in doesn't occasionally allow for things to occur that we consider "absurd"? The boundary is arbitrary, of course; thus, absolute certainty of any kind cannot be achieved.
If the evidentiary rules exclude mere circumstantial evidence, you cannot simply have an unlucky person who happens to be suicidal falling into a guilty verdict. It would require a suicidal person actually setting themselves up to be killed by the system.
This is only true if you define "circumstantial" as "forgable", in which case it's circularly true. What makes you think a ban on circumstantial evidence is going to prevent forged or tampered evidence?
You did not show evidence of absence.
The evidence is a tradition of scientific philosophy that directly asserts that no technique of empiricism can eliminate the doubt you hope to eliminate. As a self-avowed philosopher, you should be aware of this evidence already.
Honestly, as a prosecutor in post war germany you'd tell hundreds of survivors of a concentration camp, that they might possibly be wrong about whether the guard soldiers caught at the camp and on records as being a guard at the camp, killed or was responsible for killings at the camp, evidenced by bodies found at that camp?
Yeah, they might possibly be wrong. Why would I have a problem telling someone that? The likelyhood is, of course, that they're not wrong about significant details of the Holocaust, but I can absolutely guarantee you that any single survivor or account is going to be in error about some aspect.
I mean, we could all be brains in jars, with false memories, in which case
everybody is wrong about the Holocaust. Solipcism itself provides a level of doubt that you cannot eliminate.
Are serial killers that much different than a rabid animal, such that they should not be treated in the same way?
I don't know. It depends on what you consider a "serial killler." Consistent M.O.? If a cop shoots a perp in a convinience store holdup one year, and then, ten years later, shoots another perp in the same situation, did he just become a serial killer? Sure, serial killers deserve execution. Murderous psychopaths deserve execution. How do we tell, beyond doubt, who those people are? One psychologist proposes that one in six people are psychopaths, they just haven't killed anyone.
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