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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."
Who said I’m “pissed off”? What I’m saying is that you’ve outed yourself as a liar. You’re willing to cynically lie to your interlocutors about this issue because you have an axe to grind. Therefore, we can apply considerable skepticism to any “evidence” you bring to bear to try and trick us into supporting your position. You bring some statistics purported to demonstrate that executing prisoners instead of enslaving them is a net economic negative? Okay, why should we trust that your statistics aren’t doctored or misrepresented?
Again, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t actually care if that reason is true, because it’s not your actual reason for opposing the death penalty. It’s just something you latched onto because you thought we would care about it. So if it’s not true, it doesn’t move the needle for you at all. It’s not like you’re going to switch to supporting the death penalty if you discover that whatever study you’re citing isn’t accurate or replicable.
I can't wholly discount the possibility that my more fundamental beliefs about the sanctity of life have biased me towards believing evidence and arguments that present my anti-execution position as fulfilling both my values about utilitarian economic efficiency and my values about deontological behavior. And yes, since my deontological values are more fundamental than my utilitarian values, I would still be anti-death-penalty even if I thought it wasn't a utilitarian evil. But I was in no way being dishonest-- I genuinely believe everything I said about alternatives to the death penalty. I would prefer lifetime imprisonment over hard labor for everyone on track to receive the death penalty because of my utilitarian and deontological beliefs about slavery, but I would be happy to accept hard labor as an improvement to killing people.
As for your last accusation-- that I don’t actually care if that reason is true-- you are also completely wrong. It's true that I would ultimately be happy if you stopped supporting the death penalty regardless of why. (Though I'd privately think you were an idiot if you said something ridiculous, "lifetime imprisonment causes more net suffering" or alternatively the exact position I complained about in my original comment about people who are pro-execution but anti-government.) But I have practical objections against lying in arguments, and specifically in this case if you somehow managed to convince me that the death penalty was a utilitarian good versus alternative punishments I would reprioritize my time and emotional response. There's plenty of stuff that's a utilitarian evil but moral good, and plenty of stuff that's a utilitarian good but moral evil. Given that it's much harder to change peoples' minds on either of those categories, I prefer to focus my time on the slam-dunks that are both utilitarian and moral evils.
/u/Netstack if I haven't sufficiently toned down the heat of my rhetoric, please tell me and I'll stop responding to this subthread in general.
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