This is why I'm opposed to capital punishment

[pecunium]

It's not that per se, I have a fundamental problem with killing people.

It's that it can't be imposed fairly, and it can't be applied impartially, and it will never be decided without error. Add that, once the condemned has been killed the state has a negative incentive to pursue new information which might point to the innocence of the dead and a travesty is bound to happen.

Ponder this case for which the 5th Circuit granted a reprieve.

Larry Swearingen is scheduled to be executed in Texas on Tuesday for a murder that four pathologists say he could not have committed. He was in jail at the time of the murder for which he was convicted

The prosecutor, of course, avers no error could possibly have been committed.

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

My opinion is that we need to completely revamp the way we apply capital punishment. I don't ever want to see it imposed on the basis of a single case, for exactly the reasons you set out here. But when it has been demonstrated that someone either makes their living or gets their jollies from violent crime, I think it's an acceptable option. IOW, look at the overall record rather than any specific incident; that makes it much harder to railroad someone unfairly.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

There's something strange about the legal arguments the prosecution seem to have been throwing around. They're trying to dismiss the four pathologists' evidence as "opinion based", and coming from examining records and photographs. But one of them did the original autopsy.

And that also makes me wonder about the quality of the defence, particularly cross-examination.

I don't know how the timing evidence has changed, and what the margins are. I doubt it's headline-certain. But it doesn't sound good enough to take a life.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Part of the original case was based on some misunderstanding on the part of the coroner, and some was based on the coroner not having all the evidence.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I just saw the TV show about this guy, who pretty clearly didn't do it, and whose confession was forced (and included a confession to three other murders he couldn't possibly have done and for which he was never charged). He's merely in prison for life and has had all his requests for release or clemency denied.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

pecunium and I can probably both speak in theory about how easy it is---if you've got the, er, right sort of wrong person---to induce a false confession. There was a case of a fourteen-year-old boy who was seized upon by the police for the murder of his younger sister; turns out a neighborhood man had killed the girl instead. Her blood was on his shirt. No kid should ever be questioned without their parents. Sadly, some adults are just as vulnerable.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I read about that case, too. After hours of unsuccessful grilling, the cops asked the boy whether it was at least theoretically possible that he might have been harboring some unconscious resentment against his sister and had attacked her either sleepwalking or otherwise without having any memory of it. He allowed as how he couldn't be absolutely sure that didn't happen - and, given the premise, how could he? - and they had him. Good as a confession.

Something similar happened in the Barry Beach case. This time the cops framed it as a hypothetical: if he had killed the victim, how would he have done it? Just to get out of there, he obligingly made up a story, getting all the actual details wrong, but it counted as a confession.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've been meaning to do a post about it. YOu heard about Larry Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas? Cops fed 'em details of murders and they confessed to them, and wow! All sorts of murders got cleared from the books---and killers died of old age. That was a bit different from the Beach and the other case.

Most people have this protective blindness when it come to something like being interrogated. Then when it happens to them they're too in awe of the police. I know lots of good cops, just like I know lots of good soldiers. It's just that the bad ones do so much damage.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

"Gets their jollies?" How do you define that?

And why is the life of someone who died when someone was killed by someone who 'made a living off of it' more valuable than someone who does not meet your interesting criteria for capital punishment?

Or why is something like a stalker excused from death, because they didn't make money off of it?

It seems like a peculiar way to decide who deserves to be murdered by the government.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Although it wasn't as serious, TWICE my husband plead guilty to things he didn't do, just to make them go away. After one time when he didn't, he was found not guilty, but it took years, lots of money, lots of emotional pain, and put a strain on our relationship. They were tiny misdemeanors, and he didn't think it was worth the lawyer fees, the loss of salary for every time he had to go to court, and the emotional stress.

Seriously. Arrested for being at a BBQ where they had fireworks. Every single person there got picked up. Ug. Even children.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

That's lovely. If you don't 'dress' right and 'act' right and 'behave' like a certain stereotype, chances are you'll find yourself busted. I'm just so boring that I haven't tripped over this till now. If you're a woman, you just can't win, so it's a glimpse of what other people commonly go through.

I swear, today is not helping my cynicism at all.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

The one he did fight, because it was serious (an assault charge) they picked up everyone in jeans and tshirts at the bar where the fight occurred. Two suits got into a bar fight with one of the guys he worked with, so they rounded all the blue collar guys up (four or five of them). One of the suits was the son of some real estate guy in NYC (not Trump but I forget the name off the top of my head).

Worse, it was Christmas Eve, my husband had presents with him, and those presents never made it home. The cops claimed he had nothing. Witnesses said otherwise.

Ah well.

He won, and for that, I'm glad. Took forever, though.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I think (and I disagree, which I'll try to get back to) her point is that only when one can be certaain the person in question 1: really did it, and 2: is (in some way) irredeemable, and an ongoing threat, does exercising the power of the state to kill them justified.

Since I can probably get anyone to confess to pretty much anything (given world enough and time), this isn't a persuasive position to me. Cops are people. Some some cops are bad, some cops are lazy, all cops are human, and capable of error.

Then we have the problem of "the system" where prosecutors aren't rewarded for pursuing justice, but getting convictions. Where the power of the state is (relative to most of us) functionally possessed of infinite resource, and possessed of the advantage of reputation (people want to trust the cops to not make mistakes, which means they are more likely to be believed).

If we accept, arguendo, the right of the state to kill it's citizens for harms they have done each other, we have the right to insist they never make a mistake in doing so.

That's a level of proof they can't meet, and so capital punishment must be taken off the table.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I think there are at least two different things going on in different cases. One is actual police corruption. The other is when the investigating cops follow a hunch as to the perp, and concentrate their efforts on squeezing a confession out of that person. This can be understandable; resources to follow up other leads that don't go anywhere can be limited. And often enough they've picked right. The problem occurs when they're wrong, and would rather keep squeezing than admit it.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

That last part is what gets innocent people executed, and leaves killers free. For the hundreds of murders that Toole and Lucas confessed to, killers roam free.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

That's the orbit my brain travels in regarding the capital punishment debate. There are people who can never be rehabilitated into society; up here in the Great White North, the serial child murderer Clifford Olsen is the canonical example of a candidate for capital punishment. It's not hard to see the argument in favour of ensuring that someone so dangerous can never exercise their terrible power again.

But of course the problem is restricting that punishment only to the "certainly guilty", and that perfect certainty isn't something us human beings are good at producing. (Faking, yes, in ton-lots, but not the real thing.) And it's damned hard to make restitution for false conviction to a corpse.

So I end up being opposed to capital punishment after following that logic. Better, by far, the life sentence without parole.

-- Steve wishes 'twere otherwise, frankly, but the risk of injustice is much too high.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yep. To be just means that error can be corrected. Make a mistake in something like this, and nothing can be done.

Further, because nothing can be done, the incentive to see to correcting it isn't present, and those who took part have a perverse incentive to see to it that such investigation is never done.

This is as true for the grieving families, as it is for the cops, prosecutors and jurors who made the decisions.

[songblaze.livejournal.com]

I have often said that we can only use an absolute solution when we have absolute certainty of guilt.

The other thing about capital punishment - putting aside issues of whether it is just or not - is its expense. If I recall correctly, it costs some 10 times as much to put someone to death as it does to keep them in prison for life with no parole.

If it is not just and it is not economical, why do it?

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

"Gets their jollies?" How do you define that?

Serial rapists, serial killers, torture-murderers, child molesters. Could be stretched to include terrorists, particularly the home-grown variety. Stalkers definitely qualify; I am convinced that there is no cure for that short of death.

What I'm saying is that we need to be looking at patterns of behavior when deciding who is enough of a menace to society to be permanently removed from it. I don't buy the "deterrent" argument except as it applies to the individual in question.

People talk about "life without parole" as though it would solve the problem. I don't buy that either, for basically the inverse of pecunium's argument: as long as the person is alive, there's a chance that some bureaucratic slip-up or ill-thought-out change of the rules can let them back out on the street again. But I do agree that we need to be very sure before invoking this.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

There are family stories--I had a couple of great-uncles who were police officers--and some people will confess to murder just to get noticed.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

For me, one of the most disturbing parts of this story was that the Texas courts dismissed Swearingen's claims solely on procedural grounds. We've reached the point that procedure trumps actual considerations of guilt and innocence -- not the first time that this has happened.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

We reached it some years ago, when Scalia (IIRC) wrote an opinion which said merely proving that someone else committed a crime (and locking them up) wasn't grounds to release the person now proven to have been not guilty (in fact completely innocent) of the crime for which they had been given huge (perhaps life) sentence.

Nope, 12 citizens, good and true, had been presented a case, and they ruled him guilty, and that trumped all. No error was committed, so the convicted were to remain convicted, and imprisoned.

Which is a major source of my deep, and abiding, loathing of the man. He is an utterly reprehensible excuse for a human being and a miserable excuse for a jurist.

[calcinations.livejournal.com]

That actually made me shiver in horror. What a despicable person, more suited to the 13th or 16th or 17th century. He would have fitted in fine in Scotland at the time they killed a student for blasphemy.