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Notes -
Yesterday a man named Marcellus Williams was executed via lethal injection in Missouri. He was convicted of the murder of a local journalist. The main points of the case are that
a) no forensic evidence at the scene (the victim's house) connected him to the crime; DNA fragments on the murder weapon (a butcher's knife from the kitchen) were not his; a bloody footprint was not the same shoe size he wore.
b) He sold a laptop taken from the house to someone else;
c) Two people, a former jailmate and ex girlfriend, both told police that he had confessed to the murder. However, they had a financial incentive for doing so.
On balance it seems fairly likely that he did it; being a career criminal, having two unrelated people tell the cops you did it, and having possession of an item from the crime scene is pretty damning. It also can't be that hard to avoid leaving behind forensic evidence - use gloves, shave your head or wear a balaclava, even deliberately wear differently sized shoes. But when talking about the death penalty, we must take the 'reasonable doubt' thing extra seriously. So what do you think mottizens?
The thing that pisses me off the most about this case are that so many people are like, "I think we should kill murderers, but executions of innocent people like this is why I oppose the death penalty".
They're the same, terrible, revenge-driven idiots as the pro-death-penalty people, they're just less slavishly subservient to the state apparatus. Whether this guy was innocent or not is totally immaterial-- what matters is the incredible investment of resources we spent as a society raising children to adulthood and how best we might make that investment back. "Hard Labor" is an infinitely better punishment, both for its renumerative and deterrent properties. A life in a reasonably comfortable prison followed by lots of media attention and then a relatively peaceful death is, at best, not very scary. And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
... And also killing a helpless person is morally wrong, but I suspect anyone willing to be convinced by morall arguments against the death penalty already has been.
It seems like you started with the moral presupposition from your last paragraph, and then reverse-engineered a convenient argument that you can attempt to use on people who don’t share that moral presupposition. In other words, you would still oppose the death penalty even if it was cheap and we could demonstrate to you that it is a net economic benefit. Your stated concern is not your actual concern; therefore, you are concern trolling.
If your concern is that we spend too much money raising children to adulthood, how would you feel about a regime in which we attempt to identify, as early as possible, juveniles who will turn out not to be worth the investment, and begin a quickly-escalating regime of corrective punishment on them once they first start misbehaving, such that if they fail to shape up we stop devoting said resources to them? Most of the guys on death row started their life of crime in their early teens. It was pretty clear from an early age what sort of adults they would amount to. Why let them stick around long enough to escalate their level of criminality into full-blown murder? Start flogging them in the public square, denying them access to the internet and other services, cut off pinky fingers and move up from there - see if that’s enough to get them back on course to a productive life. If it’s not, end it before it gets too bad for the rest of us.
Yes. And? I want something from you. Does it make more sense for me to offer something I want, or something you want in return for it?
Are you seriously pissed off that I'm not assuming you should share my values and arguing from them?
If so, here's your argument: "Pope said so, Q.E.D."
He’s upset because he thinks you’re wearing his values like a skin suit. You were honest about it, but he still finds the practice disturbing.
That said, y’all are starting to get heated. I’m going to recommend dropping the subject for now.
I don’t think I am “upset”, nor do I think things are getting “heated”. I would hope I haven’t said anything yet that will get me a mod warning. I think I’ve been very civil, or at least as civil as one can be while accusing an interlocutor of being dishonest.
Sorry. By “upset” I meant “objecting.” You are not being warned, and I appreciate that you’ve remained civil.
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