Lethal Injection Under Fire Again

[Occhidiangela]

  The primary reason for crime is due to poverty and uneducation.

Nonsense. The primary reason for crime is behavior. It is a combination of selfishness, greed, emotion, and lack of internal moral limits, and in some crimes, a lack of integerity. (Enron) And pride.

Putting the money we would have used to execute people into education and poverty-assistance programs would help to curb crime.

Standard platitude, and of dubious veracity. Throwing money at a problem won't change human nature. It may sometimes alleviate some of the stressors on a person. The War on Poverty didn't end poverty, did it? You will always run into the problem: how much is enough?

Thus, there's less people in correctional facilities and who would have been on death row. Then there's more money for education and poverty-assistance programs... etc. Let's break the cycle of killing and start a better cycle up.

Bogus correlation. Murders and other capital crimes, which put criminals on death row, make up a fairly small percentage of the imprisoned population. Take them all off of death row and you change the prison population by a small amount.

Granted, a factor in that ratio is plea bargaining to lesser offenses, like manslaughter, which preclude the death penalty. The system is curiously merciful by administrative procedure.

By basing your point on the death row issue, you shoot yourself in the foot. The much discussed lack of deterrent power is not reflected when plea bargaining, due to a heavy case load, changes the correspondence between murder, conviction, and sentencing.

The presumption that the money "spent elsewhere" will be well spent, and that a positive correlation will exist between the money spent and a desired outcome, is an enormous leap of faith. I have less trust in the system until the myths are rooted out, and until the double standards are taken out of the equation. Why is Andrea Yates still breathing air?

Given my experiences with the way attorneys and angry people (with one another) use CPS, to cite a social work tool in the system, as a weapon against one another, I'd say that throwing more money at social workers is of little value.

If you want results based on your poverty model of crime causation, which I find bogus but we'll grant you its possibility, a massive campaign to actively promote birth control among the indigent would, if successful, at least take that pressure off of the people who have the least margin for handling fiscal upset. Babies aren't cheap.

I fail to see how murdering other human beings helps people be more courteous and agree wth each other more. The. Death. Penalty. Does. Not. Deter. Crime.  What's the point of keeping him alive? Possibility of rehabilitation and less cost for the state.

The word is execute. Interesting attempt to redefine terms in a discussion. Do you distribute propaganda much?

The death penalty punishes.
Interesting Stats on murder and execution rates.
Beyond that, the death penalty is a matter of justice, which is subjective. A long prison sentence punishes. That satisfies a balance on the emotional level. It is also costly. The observations earlier on the efficacy of rehabilitation are germane. All of it is money thrown down a rat hole, any cent spent on rehabilitating someone who will never leave prison. I feel it is far crueler to put someone in jail with no hope of parole than to execute him, but that is amittedly a subjective assessment.

Your 123 is a number without scale.

Last year 60 people were executed in the entire nation. Let's presume that is an average since 1973, roughly 30 per year. The order of magnitude is close enough for illustration.

Out of 1800 people to be executed, plus the spared 123, (1923,) 6.4% (123/1923) were shown to be in the wrong box. 6.4%, which means a 93.6% rate of success. So, in grosser terms, nine times out of 10 the sytem gets it right, in those rare cases where the death penalty applies and is sought. More fun with numbers follows.

A national murder rate of 22 per 100,000 in 2004 (from the above link) tells us that out of roughly 300,000,000 people we get 66,000 murders per year. Needless to say, not all murders are solved.

You are getting all indignant about 4 people per year possibly wrongly executed? I find your sense of justice lacking proportion, and please don't chime in with a slippery slope. Since justice is subjective, no big deal that we disagree.

Put another way, 4 people per year, out of a prison population of 3 million.

What kind of a zero defects standard do you hold your fellow man to, Mith?

What kind of tax burden are you willing to put on the taxpayers to achieve zero defects? The laws of marginal returns suggest that you'll never get to zero defects, no matter how much money we throw at it. I think we are at a "good enough" standard. Why? Let's look at some more numbers.

About 60,000 were murdered in 2004. Were they justly treated? No. Did they get an appeal? No. Does DNA evidence help them? No. Where is the balance, where is that ever elusive justice?

The murder convictions in 1997, (easiest to get to chart, we'll assume order of magnitude has remained similar) numbered about 15,000. 4 (from annualizing your 123) out of 15,000. That performance is well within the boundary of outstanding system performance. Even if only 10 % were assigned the death penalty, 4 out of 1500 is still a superb performance metric for a bounded system. Over 99% correct on an annual basis. I'll suggest that with wider use of DNA, that number over the next 30 years will be considerably less that 123. (Hopefully to approach zero) in cases where DNA can be used effectively as a criterion base.

I'll turn the question around... what's the point of killing him? Killing him does not bring the little girl back.

That's not the point. That line of thought lends itself to shrugging off the murder victim, since we can't bring her back, but only if we play slippery slope, which I won't.

It hurts us all as an opportunity cost -- those tax dollars can't be spent on anything else. Perhaps the dollars and cents, in the larger sense, are accomodated by economies of scale when considering the population we have in prison. (Again. booo.) That may be a wash.

Execution satisfies what justice is fundamentally about: a balance. It is as much emotional as it is rational. Since one is dealing with the human element in attempting to "Establish Justice, Ensure the Domestic Tranquility," and so on, the implementation of justice will stay in the variable, human realm. Applying reason to it as a safeguard is a good idea. But justice, other than God's justice, won't ever reach zero defects. (That shortcoming is somewhat mitigated by the appeals process, by the way.) (Addendum: for those who hold that there is no God, there is NO zero defects justice to be had anywhere. )

Justice is like beauty: in the eye of the beholder, and SUBJECTIVE. I find there to be enough checks in the system if it can meet a considerably better than 99% standard of performance.

To digress for a moment: One Arab legal custom that I find worthy of copying is the general appeal, once someone is judged guilty, to the family or wronged person to show mercy. I don't know if that is codified in our laws, or in some states' laws, but I have heard of cases where victims or families of victims were reported to have pleaded for forgiveness on behalf of convicted criminals.

I do however feel that correctional facilities should be giving inmates the skills and education that they need to return to society and make a contribution. Some individuals - i.e. Kevin Underwood - have performed acts so heinous that they certainly deserve life without the possibility of parole. Contributions to society can still be made form behind bars however (see: Tookie).

You have to reshape someone's world view, and particularly their view of themselves, to rehabilitate them. Ask any recovering alcoholic. Prison does a poor job of that. How do you measure what someone is really thinking? How do you know you have "changed them?" You don't, and you can't. How do you get that kind of control over people's behavior, and withstand the legal challenges that prisoners have rights too? I don't think you can.

You cannot possibly make this statement. Is it 1,000 to 1 that he'll be rehabilitated? Yep. Maybe worse. But killing him just sucks money that could be used to help other people and maybe prevent more crime in the future. And in the off chance that he's rehabilitated, he will have to opportunity to add to society once again (from behind bars of course).

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Killing him zeroes out the expense line as of that afternoon. Society's machinery is funded by finite resources. There are not infinite resources to expend on "rehab" just as there are finite resources to expend on health care.

All prisoners with terminal life senteces are pure cost. They are Zero Value Added, and have demonstrated by their actions their disdain for the rules of society, and are indeed resource sinks: the money spent on them should and could be spent elsewhere, be it on better rehab sytems, on a few better teachers, better public defenders, or even on your postulated social workers.

Until we reinstitute the chain gang, which means putting to work the felons who are doing hard time, and getting useful work out of them that benefits the greater whole at the state or national level, the "add to society myth" you propose is an unrealizable fantasy. Prisoners who are in forever will remain a money sink. A disposable item that keeps showing up on your VISA bill.

Occhi

EDIT for an addendum and some spelling goof ups.